(Re)membering the nation’s “forgotten” past: Portrayals of Gukurahundi in Zimbabwean literature

Abstract

In the early 1980s Zimbabwe witnessed an ethnic cleansing which has been ignored in official state discourses and rendered unspeakable. This “moment of madness” (Ellis, 2006: 40), as Robert Mugabe called it, has come to be referred to as Gukurahundi. The minority Ndebele tribe was persecuted by government-backed forces. This article draws on the theoretical reflections of El Nossery and Hubbell who argue that even though some traumatic experiences may be unspeakable, they are not necessarily unrepresentable. Through an analysis of Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002), Christopher Mlalazi’s novel Running with Mother (2012), several poems by John Eppel as well as Owen Maseko’s paintings , this paper contends that these works of art broach a subject which has been rendered quasi-taboo. It is argued that these works of literature fictionalize, against the grain of the official national narrative, Zimbabwe’s traumatic postcolonial violence in which the national army turned against the country’s citizens under the guise of weeding out “dissidents” in the immediate post-independence period. Moreover, this article contends that fictional and artistic works function in such a way as to keep the memory of civilian victims alive, to heal the national trauma through memorializing it, and to call perpetrators to account by pointing out their culpability.

The fight for Zimbabwe’s independence was led by two military wings which had different ideologies and were primarily composed of the two main ethnic groups in that country: the Ndebele and the Shona. The Shona were, and still are, the observable majority and the victory of ZANU-PF in the first elections after independence “was celebrated as not only a victory of a liberation movement over settler colonialism but also as a victory of Shona political elite over the Ndebele elites” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2011). In its endeavour to create a de facto one party state, the ruling ZANU-PF set out to crush PF-ZAPU as a viable political opposition. In this regard Shari Eppel points out that

[i]n October 1980, less than six months after assuming power, Mugabe entered into an agreement with the North Koreans to train a praetorian guard that would answer to him personally — this became the Fifth Brigade, given the name “Gukurahundi” by Mugabe himself. (2008: 10)

Eppel further suggests that in its modus operandi and rhetoric, the Fifth Brigade “conflated being a ‘ZAPU supporter’ with being ‘Ndebele’ with being a ‘dissident’” (2008: 12). An estimated 20,000 civilians lost their lives and many more were left maimed during the tumultuous period between 1982 and 1987. Although the term Gukurahundi — a Shona term that refers to “the storm of the summer that sweeps away the chaff” (Sithole and Makumbe, 1997: 133) — was initially used by Mugabe to name the praetorian Fifth Brigade, the term has now generally come to be used to describe the period in which the Fifth Brigade terrorized the provinces of Midlands and Matabeleland. Although dominant state narratives purport that Gukurahundi was instigated by the need to weed out dissidents who were threatening the stability of post-independent Zimbabwe, Jocelyn Alexander and colleagues argue that ethnic discourses were employed by the Fifth Brigade to justify its acts of atrocious violence (2000: 222).

In spite of the number of lives that were lost and the devastating trauma that this period entailed, the state has resisted any form of dialogue or engagement with citizens about Gukurahundi. Robert Mugabe and his government, which has ruled since independence, have never officially acknowledged Gukurahundi, with Mugabe only referring to the period as a “moment of madness” (Ellis, 2006: 40). After the release of “Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands 1980–1988” by the Catholic Commission for Peace and Justice in 1997, Mugabe refused to officially answer to claims of genocide that were graphically described in the report. Instead, he made it clear that any dialogue on or discussion of Gukurahundi was not only erroneous and ill-advised, but in essence went against the spirit of national unity and reconciliation: “If we dig up the country’s history in this way, we wreck the nation and tear up our people apart into factions” (cited in Weatherall, 1997: 21). On this point Oliver Nyambi explains that:

The tendency in the state’s account of the Gukurahundi to water down the humanitarian consequences as well as the ethnic and regional antagonism widened by the Gukurahundi atrocities best manifests in President Mugabe’s attempts to claim equality of impact of the massacres on both Shona and Ndebele ethnic groups. (2014: 2)

Moreover, artistic representations of Gukurahundi have been systematically stifled. For example, in 2011, an exhibition of art pieces by Owen Maseko was suppressed and shut down and thereafter, Owen Maseko was arrested and charged under the Censorship and Entertainment Control Act (Cinematography and Publications, Production of Pictures and Statues), which found that his work was obscene and had an ethnic bias. However, in spite of the censorship and stifling of the arts, several literary works have dared to broach Gukurahundi. Although the then Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai, attested that such artistic and cultural productions are indispensable given that they are integral elements in national healing, it cannot be denied that these cultural and artistic productions have been vilified, and at worst, criminalized. It is also worth pointing out that there has been harsh criticism of any politicians who have attempted to discuss publicly the atrocities of Gukurahundi. An example is the manner in which Andrew Mzila-Ndlovu, Minister of National Healing and Reconciliation, was arrested in 2011 after having attended a memorial service that was held for the victims of Gukurahundi. In light of this rampant criminalization of the discussion or evocation of Gukurahundi, a report released by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe highlighted that:

Those who would rather the events of the 1980s remain shrouded in secrecy will claim that discussing them will reopen old wounds. However, it was clear during the interviewing procedure that, for thousands of people, these wounds have never healed: people still suffer today, physically, psychologically, and practically, as a result of what they experienced in the 1980s. Far from “reopening” old wounds, the victims’ being allowed to speak out and having their stories validated by a non-judgmental audience has begun what is hoped will be a healing process. (1997: 16)

Musiwaro Ndakaripa elucidates in this respect that “memorialisation also gives people the opportunity to think deeply about how to prevent a repetition of past atrocities and enables people to connect the past, present and future in a positive way” (2014: 38). Valid as this may be, Ndakaripa does not acknowledge the connection between the lack of memorialization and commemoration of Gukurahundi and the manner in which the state has sought to silence any discussion of what has simply been reduced to a “moment of madness” in which no one is accountable.

In spite of this bid to silence the public discussion of Gukurahundi, numerous literary and artistic works have attempted to break the silence on this period. Works in vernacular languages include Ezekiel Hleza’s Uyangisinda Lumhlaba (1991) in Ndebele and the Shona novel Mhandu Dzorusununguko (1991) by Edward Masundire. Other works have also been written in English, such as Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002) (arguably the earliest attempt by an established and reputed writer to confront Gukurahundi), Peter Godwin’s Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa (2004), James Kilgore’s We Are All Zimbabweans Now (2011), Christopher Mlalazi’s Running with Mother (2012), Crispen Ndlovu’s Guveya (2013), as well as several poems by John Eppel that appear in the anthology Together: Stories and Poems (2011). In addition to these literary works, artistic works such as the art exhibition by Owen Maseko, which was banned in 2010, have also engaged with Gukurahundi. Maseko’s exhibition, “Sibathontisele” ¹ has stood for years as a material text-under-erasure in Zimbabwe. The above-mentioned literary texts, artistic oeuvre, and a raft of reports and other kinds of testimony, while not allowed mainstream visibility in Zimbabwe, have nevertheless entered the national and international public consciousness.

In this article, we will analyse the works of Vera, Mlalazi, and Eppel as well as engage in a discussion of Maseko’s paintings. Such an examination that employs perspectives from authors and artists that are diversely situated as pertains to race, ethnic background, and points of critique enriches the emergent body of literary works that recuperates a socially repressed phenomenon. More importantly, the works of the three writers present subaltern voices (black women and children, Ndebeles, whites) whose points of view and agency have not readily been incorporated in Zimbabwe’s master/dominant narratives. As such, the perspectives offered by these literary works present themselves as counter-hegemonic discourses. As rightly postulated by Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo, such works “create a space for […] the otherwise forgotten or absent to be commemorated, documented, narrated and even felt” (2012: 117). We also argue that literary and artistic works do not only have the potential to disclose Gukurahundi but also play an important role in reclaiming censored narratives and histories. Yvonne Vera expounds in this light that, “as a writer, you don’t want to suppress history, you want to be one of the people liberating stories” (Bryce, 2002: 226). Elsewhere, she points out that “to write is to engage possibilities for triumphant and repeated exits, inversion and recuperations of identity […] Writing is resistance […] to write is to banish silence” (Vera, 1995: 93). Owen Maseko also alludes to the social responsibility of the artists positing that

art, justice and human rights are intimately linked, especially in an environment of persistent rights violations. And art has a role to play in bringing important issues to the surface, such as Gukurahundi, which has been buried by the authorities for the past 25 years, so that victims have an opportunity to speak openly, to reconcile and heal. (2011: 98)

In our examination of these artistic works, we depart from the perspectives of previous literary studies which have merely analysed the political and ethnic issues that catalysed Gukurahundi. We argue rather that there is more to the fictionalization and artistic representation of Gukurahundi presented by these writers and artists. Drawing on the reflections of El Nossery and Hubbell, who affirm that “traumatic experience may be unspeakable, but it is not necessarily unrepresentable” (2013: 1), this paper contends that Mlalazi’s (2012) novel boldly broaches a traumatic and traumatizing subject which has been silenced and ignored for more than two decades. This article argues that this silencing of an event that was traumatic, particularly for the victims, has caused what Caruth terms “the wound of the mind” and which she explains

is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor. (1995: 3–4)

Reading and writing of a traumatic experience which has been transformed into a “wound of the mind” becomes a process of dealing with trauma and potentially bringing about some sort of closure.

When Yvonne Vera passed on in 2004, she left behind a formidable body of literary works that has made her one of the most renowned writers to emerge, not just from Zimbabwe, but from Africa. Having authored five novels, Vera won numerous literary awards which included the Commonwealth Prize for best novel from Africa (1997) as well as the 2002 Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa. Vera herself was from Matabeleland and was aged around 20 when Gukurahundi began. The Stone Virgins (2002), her last novel, is the first to address Gukurahundi. Based mainly in Kezi, a rural district of Matabeleland, the story focuses on the lives of two sisters: Thenjiwe and Nonceba Gumede. Thenjiwe is initially presented as being in a relationship with a man called Cephas. This relationship is, however, unsatisfactory and eventually fails because Thenjiwe and Cephas are unable to verbalize what they need to say to each other. This lack or failure of communication foreshows only a dark and violent future which words alone might not be able to translate:

She takes the stranger home. She has a lot to forget, so this is all right. She has no idea now; or ever, that some of the harm she has to forget is in the future, not in the past, and that she would not have enough time in the future to forget any of the hurt. (2002: 36) ²

It is, however, the second part of the novel which is most important for the concerns of the present analysis, as it details and covers events that took place during Gukurahundi. While the rest of the country is celebrating the newly attained independence, Kezi (as in other parts of Matabeleland and Midlands provinces) is plunged into a new war:

The war begins. A curfew is declared. A state of emergency. No movement is allowed … Roadblocks. Bombs. Landmines. Hand grenades. Memory is lost. Independence ends. Guns rise. Rising anew. (59)

The use of the present tense in describing the start of Gukurahundi is pertinent as it captures the manner in which these events continue to be vivid in the memories of those who experience the atrocities. What ensues thereafter in the novel is extreme and graphic violence, which Vera delivers in a dense, detached, and sophisticated poetic form of prose. The Gumede sisters are violated at the hands of a former freedom fighter named Sibaso. Thenjiwe is decapitated and Nonceba is raped and then her lips, in a symbolic act of silencing her, are sliced off. In the passage below, Vera describes with extraordinary lyricism, Sibaso, as he tortures Nonceba:

He turns steadily, with the movements of a hunter who kills not because he is hungry but because his stomach is full, therefore, he can hunt with grace… He thinks of scars inflicted before dying, betrayals before a war, after a war, during a war. Him. Sibaso. He considers the woman in his arms. He sees her dancing heels, her hands chaste dead bone, porous thin, painted on a rock. Her neck is leaning upon a raised arrow, her mind pierced by the sun. She is a woman from very far, from long ago, from the naked caves in the hills of Gulati. She does not belong here. She bears the single solitude of a flame, the shape and form of a painted memory. He thrusts the body to the ground: a dead past. Nonceba falls. (71)

As in most of the novel, Vera makes use of the present tense to capture not only the vividness of the unfolding events but also to reconstitute their urgency. The violent decapitation of Thenjiwe and the gruesome raping of Nonceba can thus be read as metonyms of the atrocities that were perpetrated during Gukurahundi. The violence carried out by Sibaso against the Gumede sisters allows us to enter and appreciate the tormented psyches of both the victims and the perpetrators. Vera, interestingly, gives voice to both the victims and the perpetrator. It is not just the anguish of the victims that we read but also the hopeless mind of perpetrators like Sibaso, who had been numbed and desensitized by the war to the point of alienation from his humanity, as well as social realities. Sibaso explains that he has to beat his own thumb from time to time so that he feels human again: “I wanted to reach something, to restore feeling” (89). Although Vera’s work is pioneering in its portrayal of the macabre monstrosities that took place during Gukurahundi, we argue that her representation remains largely vague and ambiguous, particularly concerning the identity of the perpetrators who are embodied and represented by Sibaso. Even though we are made aware that he is a former liberation fighter, and hence aligned with the state repressive apparatus, Vera does not make sufficiently clear whether he belonged to the Fifth Brigade, which was responsible for the tortures and killings that were carried out during this period. Acknowledging this seeming weakness in the novel, David Deller suggests rather, that:

Perhaps that was intentional, and appropriate. Vera was trying, among other things, to communicate the violently disorienting trauma of the victims and the perpetrators of atrocities from the inside, in wholly subjective accounts of the experience of rape and murder. Much of this concerns how characters in the story experience and understand time, as a marker of the presence or absence of identity. (2009: n.p.)

If what concerns Vera the most is the poetic description of the human psyche and actions, what then can a reader take from this? In this respect, Eva Hunter clarifies that

[t]he point of the aesthetic force in the representation of a man such as Sibaso seems to be that, although severely damaged, he is still human and not a monster. The rhythmic repetitiveness of phrases, as Sibaso kills and rapes, conveys what the narrator elsewhere states, that soldiers like him enact their brutalities with purpose […]. Eventually incapable of achieving ecstasy through a blend of passion with tenderness and respect, they repeatedly seek to recapture the experience of transcendence through ritually, but profanely, inflicting death and pain. Horror is therefore one appropriate response to the passages in which Sibaso kills and rapes, but pity for the perpetrator as well as his victim is another. (2003: n.p.)

Christopher Mlalazi offers a somewhat different rendering of Gukurahundi in his novel Running with Mother (2012). Mlalazi is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer from Bulawayo, and has penned several novels that depict varied facets of life in Matabeleland. In 2008, he was the co-winner of the Oxfam Novin PEN Freedom of Expression Award and he has won several awards in Zimbabwe for his theatrical and literary works. Running with Mother is written from the perspective of a young girl named Rudo and it offers a tormenting depiction which certainly allows the reader to live and experience the very initial stages of Gukurahundi. Fourteen-year-old Rudo’s innocent childhood is irretrievably transformed when government forces arrive in her rural community to fish out Ndebele insurgents. Rudo is saved from the violent fate that faces her friends owing to her Shona name and the fact that her mother is Shona. The reader is taken through the horror that Rudo experiences and witnesses as she, her mother, and aunt flee their village to find safety in the bushes.

The novel, from its title, already frames the father as absent. The father is presented briefly at the beginning of the story as he is captured by the soldiers and made to torch his homestead. What is particularly fascinating is that he has been stripped naked before he is forced to burn down all the houses in his homestead. He is thereafter taken away by the soldiers, never to be seen again. The story is therefore of the escape of Rudo and her mother who survive because they speak Shona and they have Shona names. The fate of the Ndebele father and all his relatives is one of violent and shameful deaths. Kizito Muchemwa and Robert Muponde argue that “absence, literally and figuratively, is about the forced retreat of the male body from various sites of visuality and authority” (2007: xviii). The absence and demise of the Ndebele father is particularly telling of the manner in which Gukurahundi sought to remove Ndebeles from authority. The role of the father figure in Running with Mother is taken over by the Shona mother who has to fend for and protect Rudo. The exclusion and demise of the father parallels the exclusion and demise of the Ndebeles in general in post-independent Zimbabwe. Joshua Forrest points out that “after independence, it became clear that Zimbabwe’s political leadership would be dominated by Shona who embraced the explicitly Shona character of the Zimbabwean state, despite the rhetoric emphasizing a multi-ethnic Zimbabwean nation” (2004: 58). Such an allegorical reading of Mlalazi’s novel, and certainly the other texts in this article as well, fits in well with Frederic Jameson’s postulation that:

Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society. (1986: 69)

In Jameson’s reasoning, it is possible to find in many fictional texts allegorical subtexts in which the personal and private can ultimately be read as a story of the nation’s history.

In Jameson’s terms, Mlalazi ascribes authorial agency to a young girl, Rudo, in order to narrate and witness the atrocities of the harrowing period. Rudo’s voice is sincere, if not sincerely naïve at times, in the face of ghastly events. The voice of the young narrator is candid, unemotional, soberly honest, and blunt in the capturing and narration of what she sees and experiences during this fateful period. The child narrator is also important in giving the narration the unassuming and detached perspective that might be necessary if the ghastliness of Gukurahundi needs to be given an air of plausibility. From the first moment in which Rudo comes face to face with the brutality of the soldiers, she is almost numb to the violence of what is happening:

I looked at the soldier in the reading glasses. His eyes were on them. He was still smiling. Then he held his hand out in front of him, and a soldier placed a parcel in it, which was wrapped in silver foil, the action so fluid it had clearly been done many times before. The soldier unrolled the parcel, took an object from it and dangled it in front of us. I felt my heart lurch and I heard the girls behind me gasp in horror. It was a human hand. It had been chopped off at the wrist, which still glistened with blood. I noticed the flash of a silver ring on one finger. (2012: 13) ³

Although the narrator is palpably shocked, what is evidently more important is the capturing of the unfolding atrocities. It is easier to accept at face value the uncomfortable and shocking narration offered by the child narrator than if the narrator had been an adult. Be that as it may, it is still worth pointing out that Rudo’s childish narration “is the literary product of the adult researcher, organiser and arranger of this story, masterfully crafted so that readers will fall under the spell of the stream of consciousness immediacy of the […] narration” (Seraphinoff, 2007: 3). Mlalazi’s novel makes use of the child narrator to depict, in a detached and restrained manner, the atrocities experienced by the people of Matabeleland during the Gukurahundi period. As noted by Edgar Nabutanyi, “it can be plausibly argued that by deploying a child narrator/protagonist and subtly nuanced narrative textures, such texts can offer alternative interpretations of challenges afflicting particular African societies” (2013: 2). This is certainly the case with Mlalazi’s protagonist-narrator whose childish focus offers a different and often sober perspective on an issue which is highly emotive and often divisive.

Mlalazi effectively uses dramatic irony to portray both the absurdity and horror of the unfolding “genocide”. The literary characters are naïve in their reasoning and perception of what is happening. At the beginning of the story, Rudo, her mother, and aunt are convinced that the soldiers killing people in their village are simply soldiers who have gone rogue. They are convinced that if they alert the police and the authorities, these soldiers will be arrested and stopped from continuing their indiscriminate killing and maiming of the villagers. On the first day of the “genocide”, the three hide and listen to a transistor radio hoping they will hear something about what is happening in their village. To their dumbfounded amazement and dismay, there is a deafening silence concerning the mass killings that are occurring in their village. As Rudo and the two remaining members of her family run away from their village in search of safety in the surrounding bushes, the reader is taken on a journey of the awakening of the characters to the senselessness of the killings that are being perpetrated by the soldiers. It also slowly dawns on the characters that it is only the Ndebele villagers who are being killed and Rudo’s mother laments at one point: “The soldiers said they’re just killing all the Ndebele people, maiwee zvangu! What are people like us, who are married to Ndebele husbands, going to do?” (23). What is fascinating in this quotation is the manner in which the writer uses words in Shona at a moment in which it has been revealed that it is Shonas who are perpetrating the killings of the Ndebeles. This use of Shona, insignificant as it may seem, serves to destabilize the tribal tension that exists at this moment in time. The Shona fits in harmoniously with the rest of the sentence whereas in the real world Shona had been elevated to a level of supremacy.

After the initial horror and flight from the village, the story, like the mind of its young narrator, meanders. Rudo narrates different stories about her school, her friends, and her family. Although these sub-stories do not seem to have any connection with the main plot, this can be explained as a way of the young narrator trying to divert attention from the gruesome issues at hand as well as make sense of them. This is a sign of the trauma that the young protagonist-narrator experiences and Eva Hoffman describes such trauma as “suffering in excess of what the psyche can absorb, a suffering that twists the soul until it can no longer straighten itself out, and so piercingly sharp that it fragments the wholeness of the self” (2005: 54). The narratological diversions mirror the emotional and psychological fragmentation of the narrator in the face of the unravelling horror. Moreover, the fragmented diversions which present themselves in the form of childish stories contrast the sombre events that the narrator and the remaining members of her family are experiencing. This detour in the plot prepares the reader for the apogee of the violence perpetrated by the soldiers towards the end of the novel. It is also interesting that as they flee, Rudo and her family end up finding shelter in a cave at the top of a mountain. This location allows them to look back at their village and neighbouring villages which are slowly plundered and burnt down. They see from a distance as trucks and helicopters dump many corpses into disused mines. What is fascinating about this secure position in which the characters find themselves is that it paradoxically reduces them to hopeless and impotent observers and witnesses of the horrific events that befall their village.

One similar aspect that can be observed in the depiction of Gukurahundi in the novels The Stone Virgins and Running with Mother is the gendered implication of the portrayed violence. In both texts violence and suffering seem to be directly targeted at women. Although the father in Running with Mother is shown being tortured by the soldiers and thereafter ritualistically removed from the plot, it is the suffering of Rudo, her mother, and her aunt that forms the greatest part of the novel. One possible explanation could be that the women symbolize the nation (fertility and promises of bounty) and its hardships at the hands of hyper-masculinized nationalism. In Vera’s novel, Thenjiwe can be considered as the nation leading up to and soon after the attainment of independence. The hopes she had of a fulfilling relationship with Cephas can thus be read as the possible future which ZANU PF and PF-ZAPU, or Shonas, Ndebeles, and people of different ethnic and racial groups could have had, had they been able to communicate, integrate, and work in solidarity. However, all hopes of a future are dashed by the hyper-masculine figure of Sibaso who decapitates Thenjiwe in cold blood. The name Thenjiwe is itself important in this context. Thenjiwe means trust(ed) and the decapitation of this character can be read as the symbolic dismembering of any trust that might have previously existed between the two political parties. The raping and slicing off of Nonceba’s lips can be read as the imperishable silencing of ZAPU and the minority Ndebele, in themselves a shorthand for the subaltern of different forms in Zimbabwe. At the end of Mlalazi’s novel, we are unsure of what the future holds for these women. However, there has been a tearing of their being, where they have lost parts of themselves: Rudo — half Shona and half Ndebele — symbolizes this. All we know is that they are in a military truck headed for Bulawayo. This can certainly be seen as the future of post-independence Zimbabwe, which hangs in helpless limbo and is certainly at the mercy of male soldiers who have terrorized their village. Moreover, the running away and displacement of the female characters as they try to find safety is a significant allegory of the post-independence nation. The motif of the journey in this case attempts to capture the strenuous processes that post-independence Zimbabwe has had to undergo in the pursuit of finding infinite peace and prosperity for all its citizens, particularly the subaltern. Such an allegorical reading of the suffering and torment endured by the female characters in these two novels challenges the emancipatory assertions and discourses that suggest that independence had ushered in liberation for all. In fact, the suffering of the female characters reveals the revived suffering by Zimbabwe’s minorities and subaltern peoples.

John Eppel has also attempted, through the medium of poetry, to recuperate the socio-politically repressed phenomenon that is Gukurahundi. In the book Together: Stories and Poems (2011), which he co-published with the late Julius Chingono, Eppel gives voice to the survivors of Gukurahundi. Eppel, alongside writers such as Peter Godwin and Cathy Buckle, stands as one of the leading white prose and poetry writers in post-independence Zimbabwe. His literary works pay particular attention to the Matabeleland region of Zimbabwe and capture the precarious condition of not just white Zimbabweans but also the inhabitants of Matabeleland. Drew Shaw, in his introduction to Together: Stories and Poems, explains Eppel’s engagement with Gukurahundi:

As part of his ambitious project to document all of Zimbabwe’s troubled recent history, and believing that “breaking the silence” can lead to national healing, John Eppel addresses the taboo subject of Gukurahundi. Drawing on testimonies from actual survivors, Eppel seeks through fiction to identify with the victims — to commemorate them as thinking, feeling people rather than mere casualties who have now become statistics. (2011: xix) ⁴

In the poem “Shards”, Eppel contrasts the atrocities of Gukurahundi to those committed by the “plunderers, from the Trekker” (119). He compares the “stains of imperial ink” to the horrors committed “in more recent times” (119). The second stanza of the poem is particularly telling of the gruesome killing of people during Gukurahundi:

Rare too are the human bits that in

more recent times, still adorned with skin,

in that low country of thorns and spines,

just clear of the hills, long worked-out mines

like Antelope, there discovered,

dropped down abandoned shafts and covered

with leafy branches, clumps of grass, stones –

because the police have moved the bones,

some muscle still attached to a groin,

and a 1980 five cent coin. (119)

In this stanza, Eppel shows the inhumanity of Gukurahundi by literally dismembering the human body and scattering it across the stanza. Skin, spines, bones, and muscles are stripped of all significance when they are detached from each other. The power of the stanza, however, resides in the last line, where there is an evocation of the year 1980. This year is supposed to represent the celebratory year of the attainment of independence and freedom. Nonetheless, independence and freedom as depicted, degenerate into violence in which people are ruthlessly and inhumanely butchered and maimed in post-independent Zimbabwe.

In another poem, “Bhalagwe Blues”, Eppel captures in an extraordinarily musical and lyrical manner the harrowing savagery. The title is evocative in reference to Bhalagwe, which is an area in the Matobo district of Matabeleland. Bhalagwe Concentration/Detention Camp was used by the Fifth Brigade as a base to carry out its torture, rape, and killing activities. The fact that the poem is called “Bhalagwe Blues” has a direct effect on the structure of the poem. Like classical blues music, the poem is composed of three-line verses in which the first two verses are identical (AAB). This blues structure plays a pivotal role in fortifying the ideas carried in the two initial lines of each stanza. Let us analyse the four stanzas below:

They laugh, call me dissident, spit in my face,

they laugh, call me dissident, spit in my face,

they force me to go to a terrible place.

We dig many graves every day in the sun,

we dig many graves every day in the sun,

they tease us then kill us, they do it for fun.

We cook for them sadza, we polish their boots,

we cook for them sadza, we polish their boots,

red beret, he laughs, then he shouts, then he shoots.

They tie rubber strips round my balls, and then beat,

they tie rubber strips round my balls, and then beat,

when they burst cannot pray, cannot sleep, cannot eat. (118)

What is evident in the above extract, as in the rest of the poem, is the spectral gap between the perpetrators and the victims of the violence. This separation between “they” and “we” accentuates the insufferable violence not just of the acts but also of the power that is possessed and exerted by the formidably forceful “they” over the evidently defenceless and helpless “we”. The lexical field, replete with vocabulary invoking brute violence (“force”, “kill”, “shout”, “beat”, etc.), contrasts sharply with the jovial psyche of the perpetrators who simply “laugh, shout and shoot”.

Eppel’s repetitive insistence on the savagery of the violence, quite like Vera’s description of Sibaso’s immoderate sadism, is deferred by images of seemingly mundane and harmless actions. For example, “they tease us” is immediately followed by “then they kill us” and “he laughs” is instantaneously trailed by the brutality of “then he shouts, then he shoots”. Eppel’s poetry, unlike Vera and Mlalazi’s prose, finds its power in the evocative potency that is cocooned in the economic yet lyrically musical expression.

What makes these literary works important is the manner in which the authors “write against blindness” (Veit-Wild, 2006: 194). Blindness in this regard refers to the deliberate omission of Gukurahundi “from the official historiography of the country” (Veit-Wild, 2006: 195). In addition to writing against blindness, these authors write against selective amnesia, which has made of Gukurahundi an event which almost never happened. Such writing against amnesia is necessary in order “to acknowledge, turn, bend towards the victims rather than away from them. There can be no other recompense, no other closure” (Hoffman, 2005: 233). These literary works present a counter narrative to the hegemonic national discourse which has sought to brush aside Gukurahundi from the memory of the nation. Through their diverse depictions and handling of Gukurahundi, the literary narratives that we have examined bring to the fore the ghastly events, which the hegemonic political narrative simply refers to as a “moment of madness”, adamantly refusing to accept that a significant historical event can be completely annihilated from the memory of the nation. In fact, these literary works are involved in what Preben Kaarsholm describes as the “de-silencing of the past” (2005: 14). Kaarsholm explains that such literary texts work towards “de-silencing, and thereby helping to remove the fears and mental distortions that continue to make people un-free” (2005: 14). In their different ways, these writers show bravery in broaching a subject which has left many artists in Zimbabwe arrested and imprisoned.

The novels examined in this article, like numerous others which deal with Gukurahundi, have the potential to open up the public space on the discussion of this period of Zimbabwe’s history. Open discussion of Gukurahundi has hitherto not only been criminalized, but it has also been vilified. Maria Pia Lara in her work Moral Textures proposes an insightful analysis of the creation and reception of literary works within the public sphere. She contends that literary works are laced with an “illocutionary force” which allows the texts to create a discursive space that subsequently leads to the emergence of “emancipatory institutional transformations in which the boundaries of what should be considered public and private need to be redrawn” (1998: 7). Lara also posits that literary texts possess “disclosive potentialities” through which “contestatory discourses, or narratives, are necessarily tied to strategies of resistance vis-à-vis strategic power and ideological domination” (1998: 5). The literary texts we have analysed can thus be read against this theoretical framework because they, on several levels, redraw the boundaries of what should be said and what should remain unsaid. Moreover, they recalibrate the borders of what should be remembered and what should be forgotten. In this redrawing and reshifting of boundaries, there is indeed a questioning of the hegemonic discourses and structures which unilaterally decide what makes it into the collective memory and narrative of the nation. As such, the literary edifice becomes “a veritable site of overt discussion and contestation of issues” (Ncube, 2014: 478), which are of importance should a real unity be envisaged in Zimbabwe. Writing, and reading, these potentially transgressive narratives can thus be interpreted as an effort to fight and speak back to the stifling environment that does not allow any sort of discussion of events surrounding Gukurahundi. By daring to represent the unrepresentable and the under-represented, these fictional narratives can conceivably mould “the national consciousness, giving it forms and contours and flinging open before it new and boundless horizons” (Fanon, 1961/1980: 193).

The redrawing of lines between the said, unsaid, and unsayable would imply a reading of the aforementioned literary narratives as a process and act of remembering. This concept of remembering can be viewed from two standpoints. In the first instance, the process and act of remembering involves bringing to the fore that which dominant political and cultural discourses have pushed beyond even the margins. Remembering suggests a creation of “a space for the otherwise forgotten or absent to be commemorated, documented, narrated and even felt” (Dodgson-Katiyo, 2012: 117). Such remembering, by design or by chance, involves a challenging of state hegemony whose narrative of Zimbabwe is founded on egotistical and self-interested retelling of the history of the country. Secondly, remembering, or rather re-membering implies a reconstruction, reconstitution, and a bringing together of elements which had been fragmented. In our case, re-membering is the process of bringing together stories about Gukurahundi that had been scattered due to wilful omission and forced forgetting. The process of re-membering has the potential to critique the dominant discourses and thereby create and make possible alternative narratives of Zimbabwe’s history and national identity.

Read in light of trauma studies, this form of literary remembering and re-membering is an important step in bringing about some sort of closure, particularly for those who died, were maimed, or lost relatives. In an interview with Fungai Machirori, Mlalazi explains this function of his writing:

The experience was horrifying I must say, and we can never guess how it was for the victims during the actual blitz. I guess artists at some point must treat nightmares like these, because the intention is to lance a boil that is suppurating in the national psyche. In order for us to seek closure for situations like these, and ultimately reconciliation, an attempt has to be made to debate over them in the open, and not behind closed doors for fear something untoward might happen to you, for there are people out there still searching for answers to what happened to their wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, and children. (2013: n.p.)

Mlalazi uses an interesting metaphor of lancing a boil that is suppurating in the national psyche. By comparing Gukurahundi to a suppurating boil, Mlalazi suggests that these events surrounding Gukurahundi have caused a wound in the early history of Zimbabwe. What is also fascinating about this metaphor is the fact that the boil can only be treated by lancing it. Lancing a boil involves opening and expelling the puss inside in order to facilitate quicker healing. By opening up debate on a controversial period of Zimbabwe’s history, these fictional narratives attempt to deal with the wound in the psyche of the nation and compel those in Zimbabwe to discuss the issue rather than ignore and forget it. As such, the act of reading and dialoguing with the texts is transformed into a cathartic and therapeutic process which seeks to find closure on the traumatic past. El Nossery and Hubbell point out in this respect that: “whether as a kind of ‘consolation’ or a temporary suspension of the overwhelming reverberations, art can transform and render pain through images, shapes and even words” (2013: 2). Traumatic pasts can only be diffused and dealt with when there is an open acknowledgment of the traumatic or traumatizing experience and there is a willingness to engage in dialogue about it. Kathryn Robson acknowledges that “the narrativisation of trauma is curative not because it conveys ‘what happened’ but because it modifies it, because it represents the past in a less disturbing fashion” (2004: 21).

That said, we hasten to acknowledge the limits of literary works in challenging and destabilizing dominant national narratives about Gukurahundi. One only needs to look at the reaction of Zimbabwean authorities to other artistic forms to see that literature’s effect is obviously restrained. Owen Maseko’s art exhibition was closed down and banned a day after its opening at the National Art Gallery in Bulawayo. However, to date, none of the novels examined in this paper have been either censored or banned by Zimbabwean authorities. Could this imply that the authorities don’t find the written word as threatening and subversive as the visualized text? Despite these limits, the acts of closure and the state’s reaction dialectically attests to the force of these literary works, which often take a life of their own and destabilize any attempts to curtail them. They spawn other meanings and are encoded into other discourses after they are shut down by the state. A cursory analysis of two of Maseko’s paintings would suffice to show how visual art is able to go far beyond literature in subverting discourses of and on Gukurahundi. Maseko’s “Siyabathontisela” (We drip on them) exhibition was composed of a series of vignettes with paintings and other paintings with graffiti or simply graffiti on red backgrounds. The common feature of these vignettes is the colour red (an obvious allusion to the blood that was spilled during Gukurahundi) that accompanies often ghoulish faces.

This painting we refer to describes the Unity Accord which was signed between ZANU-PF and PF-ZAPU in 1987. Mugabe, on the left, is seated upright with Joshua Nkomo slumped over a table, carrying a piece of paper and with blood gushing out of his back. Behind the figures of Mugabe and Nkomo stand to the left shadowy figures donning large dark spectacles (evocative of the inescapable intelligence operatives) and to the right another group of inconspicuous figures wearing large red berets (these are obviously Fifth Brigade soldiers). Three main issues are made apparent by this painting. First, the Unity Accord which the slumped Nkomo is carrying in his hands was signed with Mugabe under duress given that it was a question of life or death of people in Matabeleland. Nkomo himself escaped attempts on his life as well. Second, the Unity Accord inadvertently signalled another Gukurahundi at a political level, which led to the metaphoric and real death of PF-ZAPU. Nkomo’s lifeless body collapsed over on the negotiating table captures this reality. Third, the security apparatus at the disposal of Mugabe which lurks in the background of the painting points to the omnipresence of Mugabe in various guises or figures connected to, and representing, violence. The intelligence operatives as well as the Fifth Brigade soldiers represent the ever present “machinery” that can be unleashed to protect and foster the continued rule of the figure of Mugabe who remains ramrod straight at the table.

In another painting, there are eight macabre faces which have mouths open. Above these faces are written the words: “They made us sing their songs while they tortured and killed our brothers and sisters”. The colour red, the faces with afflicted expressions, and the written word, all combine to create an inimitable narrative that is hard to ignore.

We argue that Maseko’s art exhibition was more subversive compared to the literary works of writers like Vera, Mlalazi, and Eppel. Two main reasons can be offered for why this is so. Initially, books in Zimbabwe are expensive and not that many people have a sufficient disposable income to indulge in the purchase of literary texts. Stanley Nyamfukudza comments in this regard that “it has been suggested that one of the best ways to hide information in Zimbabwe is to publish it in a book. Certainly, to judge by the sales of non-mandatory — that is, non-educational — books that Zimbabwean publishers achieve, it would appear to be so” (2005: 23). Nyamfukudza alludes in this instance to the dearth of “an ample culture of critical reading” (Ncube, 2014: 487) in Zimbabwe. Secondly, whilst literary works such as that of Vera appeal to the intellect, visual arts like Maseko’s exhibition charm and immediately solicit emotional reactions of the spectators. Literary works, through the use of metaphors, metonyms, and other stylistic devices, create self-protecting uncertainties. Maseko’s visual art on the other hand is bold even to the point of foolhardy recklessness.

As argued in the previous paragraphs, although art has more power than fiction, we contend that both forms have the potential to disrupt the culture of forgetting and ignoring a moment in Zimbabwe’s history, which was more than just a moment of madness but rather a moment in which many lost their lives or were maimed owing to political and tribal affiliation. Such works of artistic expression show the importance of not forgetting, especially the not-so-beautiful elements, of history. By opening up discussion on Gukurahundi, these works gesture towards not just an acknowledgement of Gukurahundi but also call for remembering (and re-membering) of the past and learning from its mistakes and errors. We conclude by quoting Wale Adebanwi, who elucidates why works of art remain important in the societies in which we live:

In observing the social process, both past and present, they reflect, and reflect on, extant perspectives in understanding reality by creating new maps of existence through ideas that not only generate, but also transcend existing possibilities and ways of apprehending those possibilities. In contributing to the common store of social, political and moral ideas in society, they also become wellsprings of new ideas and new ways of thinking. (2014: 407)