Abstract
Post-2000 Zimbabwean literature in English demonstrates an unprecedented fascination with the child narrator. While there is some precedence for the use of child narrators or narratives that focus on child experiences to grapple with sociopolitical issues, the wide extent to which this style has been used post-2000 is unparalleled. The post-2000 socioeconomic crisis in Zimbabwe has clear victims; however, owing to the intensely polarized perspectives on its origins and nature, the identity of the victimizers is not so clear and is in fact hotly contested and politicized. As typical and “known” victims, their victimization can furtively reveal and reflect on their victimizers and in the process subtly expose them for knowing. This form of “knowing” transcends a mere discernment of the victimizers’ physical identities; it goes to the heart of their motives, apparent and subterranean political objectives, and means of attaining them. Victim child characters are often used symbolically to represent the weak and vulnerable members of society who are exploited as political fodder by the powerful. The symbolic children are seen to be caught in between the political goals and strategies of the powerful, and their victimization reveals overt and covert markings of their political abuse. This makes child-narrated or child-centred narratives possible sites to encounter the nexus between children’s victimization and the underhand methods of creating and sustaining political hegemony. This article explores this connection, particularly focusing on the aesthetic subtlety with which child-centred or child-focused narratives proffer a counter-discursive discourse which unsettles the dominant narratives presently given of victims and victimizers in a post-2000 Zimbabwean context.
Introduction
Children are, for obvious reasons, generally ranked among society’s most vulnerable members. It tends to follow that they are among the worst affected in times of crisis. It is not surprising therefore, that the Zimbabwean economic and political crises of the past decade and early independence, respectively, impacted on children’s lives in many profound ways. The post-2000 Zimbabwean literary oeuvre shows an ontological analysis of some of the major forms of (and forces behind) children’s crisis-induced vulnerability. The Zimbabwean economic crisis spanning the years 2000 to 2008 was characterized by world record inflation for countries not at war, incessant shortages of basic commodities, political instability, and a collapse of social amenities which resulted in many Zimbabweans seeking better fortunes in other countries (see Crush and Tevera, 2010). Politically, Zimbabwe is a polarized nation where, among other sites of political conflict, national identity and citizenship are contested on the basis of past defining events such as the Gukurahundi. Arguably the first national crisis, the Gukurahundi was a military operation (1983–1987) by the black majority government which was meant to suppress dissent but ended up claiming the lives of more than 20,000 people of mostly Ndebele descent (Tendi, 2011). Narrativizing these crises is not a politically disinterested act and representations of such crises in the media, film, theatre, and literary fiction are hotly contested. This is mainly because such representations have political implications; as Maria Pia Lara (1998) notes, narratives (especially fiction) are inherently affective and have the potential to influence the reader to question previous (especially state-circumscribed) narratives and versions of the past and present.
Children are mostly used in literature that grapples with crisis moments in Zimbabwean history as either narrative focal points, or objects under a thematic and aesthetic spotlight. A long list of literary texts centring child experiences to explore deep sociopolitical issues at the heart of the crisis include Christopher Mlalazi’s short story “Broken Wings” in the short story collection Dancing With Life: Tales from the Township (2008), and his novels such as They are Coming (2014) and Running with Mother (2012), as well as the tellingly entitled short story anthology No More Plastic Balls edited by Chihota and Muponde (2000). This list also includes Lawrence Hoba’s (2009) short story collection The Trek and Other Stories; and NoViolet Bulawayo’s (2013) multiple award-winning novel We Need New Names, plus many more.
Studies of literary representations of Zimbabwean childhoods in the context of the post-2000 crises have clearly not matched the literature’s variety of themes, styles, aesthetics, and ideological underpinnings. Kizito Z. Muchemwa and Robert Muponde’s (2007) edited book Manning the Nation: Father Figures in Zimbabwean Literature and Society is among the early attempts to probe the impact of the emergent crises on representations of children. In this volume, Muchemwa’s and Muponde’s chapters enquire into the politics of the father/child relationship, so highlighting a commonly-identified problem regarding the masculinization of power in Zimbabwean politics. Muponde, in particular, grapples with evocations of “killing fathers” (2007: 17) and childhoods under siege. This study resonates with Muponde’s (2005) earlier work on “childhood, history and resistance”, which could easily be one of the most sustained and holistic studies of childhood in Zimbabwean English literature. However, as focal texts in both studies show, Muponde is predominantly inclined to the pre-2000 era, with its own unique set of epoch-specific pressures and challenges. A more recent study by Mangena (2011) focuses on how creative fiction can enhance our understanding of the state of children’s rights in contemporary Zimbabwe. Markedly, however, Mangena’s study is more focused on the sociology of child abuse, rather than understanding such human rights violations experiences as a window into the politics of the post-2000 crisis in Zimbabwe.
There is much to gain from a child-oriented analysis of Zimbabwean society in the crisis period, and once again fiction offers a fascinating platform for these enquiries (see also Nyambi 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016). This study then, explores some of the ways in which fictional evocations of children can illuminate the nature of childhoods in crisis. Focus is placed on how such fictional representations unsettle dominant narratives of the crisis, offering instead the possibility of reinterpreting its multilayered effects on children. The paper explores the various ways through which the children’s physical, emotional, and sexual abuse is depicted, and also on how it impacts on their psyches to produce symbolic post-traumatic effects and coping strategies. I read portrayals of such survivalist tropes as complex constructions of a subterranean counternarrative that offer an alternative understanding of the nature of the crises and violations of children. Such narratives are inherently revisionist and counterdiscursive, and especially not in line with the state’s reductionist portrayal of the crisis (for this hegemonic narrative strand, see Robert Mugabe’s 2001 book Inside the Third Chimurenga). Narratives of child abuse can thus be viewed as multifaceted, iconoclastic palimpsests which superimpose the official narrative of the crisis with an alternative one, in an attempt either at covertly recovering or renegotiating previously erased or distorted accounts of the experiences of some of the weakest members of society.
Conceptual framework: Affect and symbolic victims
It is important, at the onset, to justify my framing of the child characters in my focal texts as symbolic victims and not as “survivors”. This is in part because the word “victim”, especially in studies of violated women, has been widely burdened with negative “hegemonic implications” (Spry, 1995: 1) which construct the sufferer as a surrenderer. In her aptly titled book Knowing Victims (2014), Stringer remembers a protesting female sex worker’s banner which read “We are not victims! Stop trying to rescue us!” The banner influences Stringer to ponder over why it “still make[s] sense to reject the idea that they [sex workers] can be regarded, in any way, as ‘victims’”. Stringer’s concern makes sense especially in the context of her contention that “sex workers clearly suffer an array of forms of victimisation” (2014: 3). Thus, for Stringer, the contemporary “anxiety about victims” in “anti-victim talk” is informed inter alia by the celebration of the neoliberal citizen who “avoids the ‘victim mentality’: one who assumes personal responsibility for guarding against the risk of victimisation, instead of focusing on their right not to be victimized” (2014: 4). This construction of the victim as an acquiescent casualty echoes the “traditional” profiling of victims as essentially violated people who lack the agency to influence forces impacting on their victimization (see Weindling, 2015). In this logic, and in contradistinction to the victim’s passivity, the survivor is cast not only as a victim who has managed (or is at least trying) to heal, but also as a progressive victim who is inspired by her or his pain to actively participate in unsettling the structures and processes informing her or his victimization. By this logic, the child characters’ symbolic actions in my focal short stories, such as their tearing up oppressive ruling party’s posters and killing feckless elders, would qualify them to be labelled as “survivors”.
However, although not entirely incapable or deprived of agency, the fact that the characters are children who are being victimized by a violent regime limits their agency and options to action it. It can therefore be argued that, unlike in the case of certain categories of victimized people such as sexually abused women, for whom the descriptor “victim” may acquire negative connotations of entrapment and inertia, the same may not be said of victimized children. This is not least because their childishness inhibits their capacity to understand the deep political structures underpinning their suffering, and the intricacies of their victimization and marginality. My analysis therefore treats the child characters as victims, and their victimhood and the various symbolic performances it informs as potential sites of affect and solidarity. I argue, therefore, that the child victim trope is essential to the short stories’ counterhegemonic effect. Let it also be said that the child victims are not always necessarily symbolic. Sometimes, and in many ways, their victimization and victimhood have well-pronounced perpetrators whose motives are clearly spelt out. The child characters can thus be viewed as “exceptional children” (Barker, 2011: 1), whose unfortunate circumstances inform their exceptionality — their ability to experience and interpret reality differently.
My reading of depictions of child victimhood is framed by Maria Pia Lara’s (1998) theorization of the relationship between affect and narrative; that is, the connection between specific evocations of victimhood and the particular emotion that they arouse in the reader. The overarching thesis is that the short stories’ aesthetical reconfiguration of narratives of the crisis and violated childhoods depends on the extent to which their deployment of the victim child figure is affectively “disclosive” (Lara, 1998: 6). Lara’s notion of narrative disclosure informs my interest in affective techniques used by the authors to depict particular forms of child abuses in ways that “envision in a critical way — better ways of being in a world of equality and distinction” (1998: 6). As Lara further posits, a story’s disclosive potential resides in its “illocutionary force”: that is, its “capacity to produce a powerful narrative that provides an account of the lack of justice created by situations about marginalisation, oppression and seclusion” (1998: 6). Thus, in this present case, disclosure connotes the various ways through which the focal short stories engender a deeper recognition of the child victims.
If, according to Lara (1998), stories of (or by) the suppressed thrive on affect and are inherently disclosive, perhaps the immediate question would be: what is the nature and role of emotions which heighten such stories’ disclosive potentialities and counterdiscursive effect? Sara Ahmed’s notion of affect and “postcolonial witnessing” (2012: 2) can help us to make sense of the connection between emotions and their potential influence on our perception of certain objects or phenomena. She argues that “to be emotional is to have one’s judgment affected: it is to be reactive rather than active, dependent rather than autonomous” (Ahmed, 2012: 5). In the context of my focal literary texts, this framing of emotions would suggest a cognitive process which involves the narrative chaperoning of perception and feeling towards the various disclosive aspects of the child characters’ victimization. In this light, Lara’s notion of disclosure can be connected to Ahmed’s (2012: 6) concept of “impression”, according to which she argues that creating an impression is contingent upon “how objects impress upon us” (2012: 6). For her, “an impression can be an effect on the subjects’ feeling” just as “the ‘press’ in an ‘impression’ […] allows us to associate the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace” (2012: 6). It can be argued along Ahmed’s lines that as readers, we are exposed to the “pressing” impact of disclosive representations of child victimization. In Ahmed’s words, “not only do [we] have an impression of others [the child characters], but they also leave [us] with an impression; they impress [us], and impress upon [us]” (2012: 6).
I begin the next part of my analysis with an overview of the twenty-first-century fascination with the victimized child in narratives of the crisis. I use Memory Chirere’s short stories in the collection No More Plastic Balls (2000) to map out current forms of literary intervention in discourses on children in a crisis setting. My analysis of Chirere’s representation of children generally focuses on the children’s evoked state of socioeconomic entanglement, and how it breeds culturally unforeseen behaviours, attitudes, and sensibilities which explode previous delineations of childhood. This is followed by an analysis of Gugu Ndlovu’s short story “Torn Posters” in the collection Writing Still (Staunton, 2003), which focuses on the child-centred post-traumatic experiences of the historic massacres of people of mostly Ndebele ethnic origin by government forces in the early 1980s. I examine Ndlovu’s foregrounding of children’s experiences of the Gukurahundi (a Shona term which means “the first rains that washes away chaff”) to critically engage with its implications for post-2000 ethnopolitical relations. The final section examines Christopher Mlalazi’s (2008) short story “Broken Wings” as a typical counter-narrative, which offers alternative renderings of the crisis. The analysis examines how the short story implicitly reflects on the connection between children’s abuses and political manipulation of the vulnerable.
Mapping out the dystopian sociopolitical landscape: Chirere’s militant children
Chirere’s short stories in No More Plastic Balls portray the loss of innocence of children in a crisis setting as symptomatic of the nation’s economic and social degeneration. The “plastic balls” in the title connote play and signify an idyllic or normal childhood. The words “no more” imply a prior existence of the balls, and by symbolic implication, a better life for the children. The current absence of the balls, then, suggests the opposite — a dystopian life characterized by deprivation and entanglement. The short story “Plastics and Cardboards” in Chirere’s collection, for instance, depicts a topsy-turvy lifeworld in which children are unexpectedly thrust into guardianship and breadwinning roles where they have to cater for themselves, their parents, and other incapacitated members of the extended family. The elderly dependants are afflicted by various symbolic diseases and conditions inscribed with political undertones; they are crippled, blind, addicted to sex, or too old to fend for themselves, let alone their children. Read in a context in which the ruling party fixes political legitimacy on political fatherhood based on participation in the liberation struggle (see Muchemwa and Muponde, 2007; Muchemwa, 2010; Vambe, 2010), the short story’s inversion of family power configurations assumes symbolic significance. For one thing, the replacement of incapacitated familial authorities in the short story can be read symbolically as a covert post-traumatic of reigning political “fathers”. In “Plastics and Cardboards”, child characters Eliza and Luka take care of their crippled mother, whose paralysis and weirdly libidinous disposition not only reflect her inability to take care of her children, but also reveal her insouciant attitude to this impotence. The children are forced to become their mother’s disciplinarians, and regularly beat her up as punishment for her misplaced priorities. The short story reveals a tragic corruption of childhood innocence, which gives way to a militant generation of children who ruthlessly dominate their feeble parents. Chihota and Muponde locate the bizarrely irregular behaviour of Chirere’s child characters in their “identifiable deprivation, poverty, hunger or history” (2000: 6). And as a short story, “Plastics and Cardboard” certainly unveils fresh insights about the role of these uniquely twenty-first-century Zimbabwean conditions in the making and unmaking of social yet political identities.
Another short story by Chirere, entitled “Keresenzia”, focuses on the girl Keresenzia who binds her struggling grandmother and carer in a dictatorial spell, eventually killing her in cold blood. The child inundates the grandmother with demands for food and other performances of guardianship, which are beyond the frail Matambudziko’s post-traumatic physical abilities. The grandmother’s name, Matambudziko, is Shona for “problems”, and it aptly mirrors her entanglement in a vicious web, caught between a cataclysmic economy and an equally brutal granddaughter. The girl’s discourse is characterized by imperative commands such as: “Fetch the lilies for me I want them […] Not enough […] get another bunch Matambudziko […] peanut butter, I want some milk”. The grandmother’s failure to meet Keresenzia’s demands leads the girl to beat up her grandmother, striking a fatal blow which instantly kills her. Chirere’s stories thus contradict Muponde’s (2007: 17) notion of “killing fathers” in Zimbabwean literature, reflecting instead on an uncanny reversal of power and authority from traditional sites through violence. This condition underlies what Chihota and Muponde (2000: 6) describe as “a haunting Aesopian tale of a child-wolf”, and it is also what Pattison (1978: 3) refers to as “the bestial condition of childhood”.
“Torn Posters”: A child-centred narrative resisting the Gukurahundi closure
History occupies an important place in discourses on the roots, evolution, and forms of the post-2000 crisis in Zimbabwe. Terrence Ranger’s (2004) seminal study “Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle Over the Past in Zimbabwe” reveals the hegemonic tendencies of what he calls “patriotic history”, which is practised by the state. For Ranger, patriotic history attempts to fix interpretations of the crisis by accentuating a narrow narrative of the nation’s recent history as punctuated by unyielding neoimperial impediments designed to reverse the country’s liberation. Patriotic history has also served as a political strategy which conveniently blurred aspects of the nation’s unreconciled history, projecting instead a nationalist image of a country that is unified in its diversity and at peace with its past. This is the essence of the commemorative Unity Day, celebrated every December in honour of the 1987 Unity Accord which merged the formerly antagonistic liberation war movements Zimbabwe African People’s Union Patriotic Front (ZAPU PF) and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) to form the Zimbabwe African Union National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF). The Unity Accord was essentially a peace agreement which ended the Gukurahundi. Thus for Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Willems, “ZANU PF’s evocation of ‘unity’ was intended, to some extent, to remind inhabitants of the provinces of the dangers of aligning themselves against ZANU PF” (2009: 960).
As Gibson Ncube and Gugulethu Siziba (2015) note, the Gukurahundi continues to influence ethnic and political events and discourses in Zimbabwe. Gugu Ndlovu’s short story “Torn Posters” is a subtle intervention in the post-2000 debate on the controversy of the Gukurahundi’s relationship with the elusive notion of national unity in contemporary Zimbabwe. The short story highlights the dangers attendant on the state’s narrative tendencies to downplay the significance of the post-traumatic experiences of the victims of the Gukurahundi. Ndlovu’s narrative deploys affective renderings of children’s experiences of the Gukurahundi to contest its dominant portrayal as a closed chapter in the history of the nation. This short story offers a radical re-telling which unveils the concealed and seemingly irreconcilable ethnic fault-lines in what Ian Phimister (2003) has called “Zimbabwe’s new old history”. 1 The short story thus markedly shifts away from the “hopeful tone” (Toivanen, 2010: 1) of Yvonne Vera’s 2002 novel The Stone Virgins. 2 It appeared a year after the publication of Vera’s reconciliatory novel and reveals a feisty ethnic intransigence in victims of the massacres which, in effect, disputes The Stone Virgins’ possibilities for conciliation and closure. “Torn Posters” revises the Gukurahundi by inscribing into its narrative of violence a deeper ethnic dimension and irreconcilable anger.
My analysis of the traumatizing experiences of children in “Torn Posters” focuses on this portrayal of ethnic anger and its implications for ethnic and political relations in Zimbabwe. Stef Craps (2012) argues that most dominant trauma theories use a western (European and North American) paradigm, and are therefore inadequate lenses through which we can read traumatic experiences of non-western sufferers. In his analysis of Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother (1998), which fictionally reimagines the murder by young black South African men of the American Fulbright Scholar, Amy Biehl, Craps contends that “a proper understanding of this spectacular event requires a full appreciation of the traumatizing impact of the ordinary structural violence inflicted on black South Africans by apartheid”. For Craps, a “decolonised” trauma theory can allow us privileged access to the uniquely South African spatiotemporal complexes underlying not only the act and circumstances of the murder, but also the context in which the murder becomes traumatizing for both the mother of one of the perpetrators and the mother of the victim. Craps’ (2012) approach to postcolonial trauma is important to my analysis of anger in “Torn Posters” particularly because it underlines the historical context of the children’s trauma. In this light, understanding the affective dimension and counterdiscursive function of the violated children’s anger, for instance, requires that I locate their victimization in a broader context of the historic Gukurahundi ethnophobic violence, and its impact on the country’s nationalist trajectory.
Unreconciled anger, which is engrained in the children’s family and passed on from one generation to another, manifests in children — which suggests that it is growing. The children strike the readers as highly sensitive to the ethnic factor in their victimization. This hypersensitivity can be traced back to the main narrator’s (Gugu’s) deep sense of ethnic pride, which we first encounter inscribed in her name — Gugu is the short form of the name Gugulethu, which means “our pride” in the Northern isiNdebele language spoken in the Matabeleland region of Zimbabwe. A combination of the narrative’s first person viewpoint and child focalization produces a deep sense of intimacy which powerfully persuades us as readers to align our perceptions with the narrator’s. The personal and family story of ethnic fear, violence, and incarceration characterizes a vivid narrative of brazen injustice which simultaneously discloses the immorality of the Gukurahundi and underscores the morality of defying any smokescreen reconciliations with its past perpetrators. Gugu’s story mostly involves her experiences as part of a family which is trying to come to terms with the reality of belonging to an ethnic group under siege. The reader is thus persuaded, and sometimes emotionally compelled, to perceive Gugu’s victimization as microcosmic of that of both the family and the entire Ndebele ethnic group. Similarly, Gugu’s anger is symbolic of the wider ethnic antagonism that exists between the Ndebele and the Shona. The importance of the family trope to the short story’s subversive revision of the Gukurahundi narrative can be better understood in the context of the scale of the actual Gukurahundi. Shari Eppel notes how widespread the violence in Matabeleland was: For more than a decade after the repression and massacres of the 1980s, most people nationally and internationally remained in ignorance of the true scale and devastating impact of these events on affected regions. In contrast, scarcely a family in Matabeleland escaped the violence of those years, and the people of that province were forced to live with their silenced memories of horror and fear. (2004: 46)
More than just articulating through fiction what Eppel is saying in a historical discourse, “Torn Posters” vividly tells the story of Gugu’s encounter with the Gukurahundi as a moving and intimate narrative which portrays the violence as deeply etched in personal, familial, and ethnic group memories as an enduring mark of its identity.
The portrayal of Gugu’s anger as intensely implacable and relentless contradicts preeminent trauma theories which stress the importance of remembering in order to forget. However, in “Torn Posters”, the victim-perspective narrative reflects what Zoe Norridge (2010:28) calls the “pain of violent causation”, constantly retrieving and refreshing the Gukurahundi trauma in a way which stimulates unrelenting hostility towards the Shona ethnic group to which the President and architect of the Gukurahundi belongs. At the heart of Gugu’s experiential narrative is her constant outrage at the victimization of her father George, and his symbolic incarceration 3 in a prison in Mashonaland — enemy territory. The omnipresent sense of loss and victimization creates in Gugu an overwhelming desire for vengeance, and a passionate resistance to political and ethnic acquiescence. Anger is thus not only “contagious” among the generations of affected family members, but also engrained in the Ndebele psyche. This invites us to read the short story as foregrounding the potential in unresolved ethnic antagonisms to persist over generations and destabilize the nationalist unity project. This is unlike Vera’s The Stone Virgins, which employs the metaphor of convalescence of a Gukurahundi victim to indicate the nation’s capacity to transcend ethnic differences and heal past wounds. Ndlovu’s short story, on the other hand, creates an overpowering impression that the Gukurahundi was genocidal and that, as long as the memory of undeserved victimization still runs in the Ndebele ethnic group as it does in Gugu and her family, the nation will remain irreparably divided along ethnic lines.
We first encounter the performance of ethnic anger in Gugu’s participation in the tearing down of ZANU PF posters written in the Shona language which is, of course, alien to Matabeleland. More than simply “defamiliarizing” the Gukurahundi, the first person schoolchild focus generates a sense of Gugu’s political innocence and purity which compels us to feel emotionally aligned to her. Her inherent vulnerability as a child enlists our sympathy and moves us into a state of affectionate solidarity with her and her feelings, insights, and perspective on the unfolding political violations. The compelling effect is to make her perspective appear both cogent and mesmerizing, and this can lead to a simultaneous “recognition” of the injustice of the Gukurahundi and the validity of her caustic anger. The child narrator is thus deployed as an aesthetic strategy which gives her views a plausible feel — what Lara (1998: 3) calls their “illocutionary force”. The narrative effects of this characterization and point of view can be seen early in the first paragraph of the short story: In 1984 I was too young to vote, yet that didn’t stop me from performing my patriotic duty with razor-like precision […] my small but fierce guerrilla squad would trudge through Sanki’s Lucerne field, the dew dampening our brogans as we closed in on our unsuspecting targets […] just seeing “PAMBERI NEZANU PF”
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emblazoned on their bloody posters, we were engulfed by a bitter rage. It rose like bile on our throats erupting as ear-splitting war-cries [which] roused us into action, and we ran screaming across the field with weapons raised to encounter the enemy. (2003: 179)
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Perhaps what is most striking about this paragraph is not the mere fact that a schoolgirl imagines herself as the leader of a band of child “soldiers” who commit themselves to resist ZANU PF, but the disclosure of her extraordinary ethnocentric “patriotism” — Gugu’s own word (179). Gugu’s statement of “patriotic duty” (179) to the Ndebele people is relayed in a feisty and emotional tone which betrays her deeply sensitive perception and detestation of ZANU PF politics, which is bound up with Shona leadership. The destruction of the Shona posters, then, symbolically signifies the intensity of ethnic antagonism manifest in Gugu’s anger. As the story unfolds, ZANU PF becomes a euphemism for the Shona people whose Mashonaland region is described by Gugu as “enemy territory” (185), not only because it is the citadel of a leadership responsible for the Gukurahundi, but also because that is where Gugu’s father is incarcerated as a political detainee.
The agonistic texture of Gugu’s description of her and her friends’ feelings dissuades us from reading the poster-tearing act as a mere childish prank. By taking the longstanding ethnic hostilities into consideration, the tearing down of ZANU PF Shona posters amounts to an act of political and ethnic protest and self-preservation. Curiously remarkable is Gugu and her friends’ ethnic consciousness and political audacity, which compels them to form a group of child “liberation fighters” (185). The move not only reflects on the substance of the girls’ ethnic extremism, but also the kind of force they are fighting. The childness is still there, but it has been vividly visualized, aestheticized, and politicized to give the children’s otherwise playful thoughts and acts a serious face. This can be inferred from the following account of the poster-tearing act: We ripped into their flesh, stabbing and tearing it, slashing their principles, punching holes in their policy. Each blow killing HIM and his fat greedy ministers. We surveyed the scene with arrogance. Damage report: for me and my comrades, a few scratches, a splinter; scraped knees, an undone ribbon and some grass stains […] the enemy was another matter — they lay indifferent, confettied at our feet. (179)
Though a child, Gugu is peculiarly aware that this act of defiance is, to use her own word, “treasonous” (179). Not only are the decimated posters animated as flesh which is “ripped into” (179), but they are also personified as “HIM and his fat greedy ministers” (179; emphasis in original). This is a not-so-subtle allusion to the then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe, who is of Shona ethnic origin. The torn posters, now with multiple layers of symbolic significance as standing for Shona leaders in general and Mugabe in particular, are described as defeated and worthless victims deserving of violent destruction. They are therefore stuffed in an anthill, “a place where anything from aborted babies to bewitched panties […] disappeared forever. Swallowed whole by the earth” (179–80). Gugu’s pejorative correlation of ZANU PF, Mugabe, and Shona leaders to grossly condemned sites such as the anthill reveals a subtle Manichean double trope that weaves through the narrative. There is on the one hand, the inexorably aggrieved ZAPU/Ndebele subaltern “others” and on the other, ZANU PF/Shona victimizing “selves” led by “HIM”. Besides the children’s metaphorical killing of HIM in the poster, other constructions of a subversive Ndebele resistance manifest, for instance, in Gugu’s constant use of the third-person plural pronouns “they” and “them” in reference to the presumably Shona soldiers terrorizing Ndebele people. This point is confirmed by Gugu’s mother in her response to her child’s enquiry about the whereabouts of her father George before his eventual imprisonment. Mummy replies: “he’s outside talking to them” (182; emphasis in original). The emphasis ascribed to Mummy’s identification of the soldiers who arrest George as “them” gives the pronoun strong undertones of ethnic polarity.
The physical and psychological assault on George’s family leaves a trail of psychological disorders which manifest in various ways in every member of the family. The nature and impact of this trauma can be seen in each family member’s different forms of responses and attempts to negotiate their entanglement. As hinted above, although Gugu’s voice dominates the narrative, the short story is punctuated with a brief narrative relayed by her young brother Butho. Just like Gugu, Butho forges a victim identity and subjectivity which reveal his underlying psychological damage. Being the youngest of George’s children, Butho’s narrative is typically childish and ingenuous. However, as in Gugu’s case, beneath his seemingly innocent perspective is an implicit political commentary which depends on his inherent naivety for effect. This can be seen in one of the sections in which Butho describes the family’s situation following his father’s jailing: Daddy said he’s going to buy me a new bike, because the soldiers drove over my old one. Mummy says they are bad […] it’s boring when she [Mummy] shouts. These days she is always shouting. I wish Daddy was here, then she wouldn’t shout […]. She is going to see Daddy in jail (whisper) but he didn’t do anything bad […]. Only she’s allowed to visit. That’s what “they” (the bad guys) say. (183)
Butho’s child’s-eye view impressions of home are loaded with subtle political allusions. The child’s typical vulnerability is emphasized by the hushed voice at the mention of George’s imprisonment. Butho’s age-induced helplessness is also exploited to reveal both his deep-seated fear of victimization and the soldiers’ viciousness. The “bad guys” label that Butho ascribes to the soldiers ceases to become a mere impish tag; it is in fact an honest designation which is in sync with the soldiers’ displays of fiendish behaviour. Butho’s fermenting indignation at his father’s imprisonment further manifests in his symbolic brutal massacre of red ants, which he tellingly calls “dissidents” (183). In their “killing dissidents” game, Butho and his friend Themba, we are told, “squashed their (red ants’) heads off and chopped off their legs” (183). The boys’ acting out of the perpetrators’ role suggests their psychological conditioning by the Gukurahundi as a belief in the “necessity” of violence to demonstrate self-worthiness.
“Mummy” becomes increasingly irritable, and Butho’s description of her degenerating temper connects it to his father’s absence, thus laying implicit blame on the Gukurahundi. In this case, Butho’s childish consciousness can only allow him to see the overt cause and effect in Mummy’s behavioural change. However, the alerted reader sees both a deeper psychological problem and a symbolic significance. Moreover, since the family is a microcosm of the Ndebele ethnic group, its agitation as evidenced by Mummy’s changing temperament reflects the wider ethnic tension fuelled by the Gukurahundi.
Towards the end of the story, when Gugu and the rest of George’s family visit him in Chikurubi Prison in Mashonaland, a newspaper headline “GOVT CLAMPS DOWN ON MATABELE [Ndebele] DISSIDENTS” makes Gugu “feel the thorns rising inside [her] chest” (185). This is because just like her father, she believes that the dissidents are the government’s scapegoat to justify decimating the Ndebele ethnic group, and this compels her to identify Mashonaland as “enemy territory” (185). These encounters demonstrate deep-rooted anger embedded in a family’s psyche, which pervades the story until it ends with Gugu’s passionate vow to keep alive her incarcerated father’s resistance to a political and ethnic “checkmate” (181), rather than yielding to Shona hegemony.
A girl under sexual and political siege in “Broken Wings”
As in “Torn Posters” and Chirere’s short stories, Mlalazi’s short story “Broken Wings” links the ruling party to the systematic political exploitation of Zimbabwean society’s weakest members, especially children. “Broken Wings” demonstrates how evocative representations of a sexually abused girl-child can foreground a discourse of moral justice that magnifies the connection between sexual and political predation. Although Robert Pattison’s (1978) book The Child Figure in English Literature focuses on different contexts, it offers a useful general conceptual approach to my analysis of the aesthetic means by which a violated girlhood is connected to the construction and sustenance of political hegemony. Particularly important for my analysis is Pattison’s theorization of the inherent qualities of children — qualities which make them appropriate characters in stories that proffer subtle counter-discursive evaluations of the sitting political leadership. Pattison’s discussion of “the sentimental aspects of the child figure” (1978: 47) highlights the importance of sentiment in stimulating emotional reactions to children’s experiences. His conceptualization of sentimentality in child-centred fiction connects it to the Christian belief in the fall of man. The grievous condition of children caught up in this “fall” from social and moral righteousness not only reminds us of “the golden age [that] mankind is continually moving away further from” (Pattison, 1978: 49), but, perhaps more importantly, surreptitiously indicates the moral and social benefits that result from restoring children’s safety.
Another related perspective is offered by Mark A. Heberle (1994) in Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature. Heberle importantly demonstrates how children in literature offer means of engagement with deeper social phenomena: The significance of child characters […] does not primarily depend upon how closely they adhere to our conceptions of realistic, individualised children’s behaviour and speech, in any case. Their importance derives from the audience’s sense of the special nature of children: their innocence — which demands protection by and insulation from the harsher aspects of adult society […] the plays posit a direct relationship between social health and the welfare of children. (1994: 31)
“Broken Wings” foregrounds what Heberle in another context describes as the “terrible fate of children”, which “constitut[es] an implicit indictment of the aggressive pursuit of power [which is] variously and ironically undercut by its effects upon children” (1994: 32). The short story is an affecting narrative of child sexual abuse. It tells the story of Nozitha who, in spite of her tender age, carries the heavy burden of looking after herself, her diseased and dying mother, and equally helpless geriatric grandparents. Her social, economic, and political vulnerability is exacerbated by a ravaging drought, and the politicization of food aid by the ruling party. Her inevitable desperation makes her easy prey for a ruling party sexual predator, Abisha, who pounces on her using his privileged access to food aid as bait.
The short story deploys the symbolic image of broken wings to engender solidarity through character identification with the victimized child. The imagery in the title phrase “broken wings” implies limits to achievement — a symbolic reference to Nozitha’s denial of her potential to flourish. This troubling imagery is created early in the first paragraph as Nozitha, on her way to get some medication for her bedridden mother and grandparents, envies the carefreeness of a flying butterfly. The scene is described in an apprehensive and moving tone which foreshadows Nozitha’s impending abuse. The following quotation from the first paragraph demonstrates this point: her eyes fixed on the butterfly, chanting in a voice so low and so sad that the sky sighed a gust of wind across her gaunt face: Lend me your wings O Butterfly | Mother and Grandmother are waiting for me | And home is near if only I could sky | High with them over the trees. (2008: 1)
The song in this quotation highlights the short story’s main thematic and stylistic strands. In the song, Nozitha’s wish to borrow the butterfly’s wings symbolically reflects on her attitude to her entrapment. Her desperation prepares us for her suicidal fall for Abisha’s sex-for-food trap later on in the story. Her vulnerability is directly and intricately connected to the inadvertent transposal of familial authority, which leads to her assumption of roles and responsibilities which are clearly beyond her capacity. The situation is worsened by an unfolding national economic crisis and a ravaging drought which leaves a trail of food shortages. A family tragedy, the economic collapse, and the drought merge into one life-threatening force which causes Nozitha’s susceptibility to the sexual and political predator, Abisha.
The concept of the child as innocent in fiction is profoundly a European romantic trope (Goodenough et al., 1994). However, the notion of children’s “unacknowledged voices” (Goodenough et al., 1994: 4) and proneness to harm cuts across societies and cultures. It is against the backdrop of our knowledge of the routine suppression of children’s voices that we can perceive the ease with which “voicing” child characters can be manipulated for counter-hegemonic effect. In this sense, one can argue that although the political forces impacting on Nozitha’s life constitute “a world of discourse not yet fully inhabited by the child” (Goodenough et al., 1994: 4), her “habitation” of such discourses precisely indicates her entanglement and the nature of her agony. We can therefore conceptualize the “towardness” (Ahmed, 2012: 8) of our emotions for Nozitha when she is sexually and politically abused by the ruling party functionary, Abisha, as heightened by her situation in what Loo, in another context, calls “much more adult worlds”, due to her “surroundings being less that of the innocent ideals of childhood and more of the issues of the adults in [her] li[fe]” (2011: 61).
Sentimentality in “Broken Wings” is bound up with the way that evocations of Nozitha’s helplessness powerfully elicit the reader’s sympathy for her. This sympathy is first called upon by the striking incongruity between Nozitha’s age and her familial responsibilities. It is intensified by the awareness of a tragic absence of family safety nets for children, which is conveyed through a vivid and highly affective portrayal of her home. The following description of Nozitha’s diseased mother and grandparents highlights the family’s poverty, and the concomitant desperation which “breaks her wings” and informs her piteous envy of the flying butterfly: Old Siziba sits statue-still on the edge of the bed, his hands clasped on his lap […] the cuffs of his khaki trousers are frayed, and his feet, dirty, the skin cracking, are swollen. On the bed lies his wife MaDewa, covered in a grey blanket. His eyes are fixed on her face, which is an ashy green-black. The fetid smell of human waste pervades the circular room. It comes from the floor where his daughter Sihle lies, also covered in a threadbare blanket, this one brown in colour. The blanket is almost flat, as if there is no one underneath. His granddaughter, poor little Nozitha, will see to her when she comes back from the clinic, because, well, he is also not in such good health. (2008: 2)
The wretched situation of the family symbolized by its affliction with disease movingly guides us into what Martha Nussbaum (2001: 319) would call Nozitha’s “circle of concern”. This is the fictional lifeworld of her traumatizing experiences which impacts on our emotions and influences our perception of and attitude to people and institutions benefiting from Nozitha’s calamity. The close character identification informed by our recognition of Nozitha’s dire situation can potentially draw us into what Nussbaum (1995: 7) terms “bonds of identification and sympathy” with her. These bonds are further cemented by the construction of Nozitha as a “recognizable” victim; that is, her characterization as a typical victim whose precarious situation bears the markings of post-2000 social realities in Zimbabwe. According to Suzanne Keen’s theory of narrative empathy, “[r]eaders’ empathy for situations depicted in fiction may be enhanced by chance relevance to particular historical, economic, cultural, or social circumstances” (2007: xii). In this light, Nozitha’s dilemma can be read as symbolically reflective of the socially, economically, and politically victimized in post-2000 Zimbabwe.
The nexus between poverty, the drought, the economic collapse, and vulnerable girlhood creates a deadly teleology which points to the inevitability of Nozitha’s desperation and eventual sexual and political abuse. Our knowledge of the disturbing situation at Nozitha’s home, and the fact that she is the only member of that family who can address it, makes her seem to be one of the most deserving candidates for food aid. We are therefore naturally astounded when we discover that she misses out on the food rations. Our sympathy for her is intensified by this revelation, consequently alerting us to the moral repugnancy of the system which deprives her.
The conscious reader is immediately drawn to the reasons behind Nozitha’s failure to access food aid. Apparently, her grandfather Old Siziba has misplaced the ruling party card that serves as both confirmation of his allegiance to the ruling party and the “green card” to its food aid programme. Food aid is thus reduced to a political reward for supporters of the status quo, as political power is prioritized at the expense of the weak, diseased, hungry, and young. When political power so evidently takes precedence over human life, especially that of the most vulnerable members of society, then the foregrounded political moral is unmistakable. This censure of the ruling party’s “food for votes” politics is further challenged in the following exchange between Nozitha and Sibiya, who is one of the ruling party’s food allocation officers: “Where is it [the party card]?” He had held his hand to her. “Some people are defecting, and they are going to pay for it.” His lips had curled in a sneer. “The dogs. This country will never be a colony again. Not as long as I live.” Nozitha had shrugged her thin shoulders. “Grandfather can’t find it, but he said I must tell you he is still a supporter, and will never change […] he said viva”, she had added, punching the air with a little fist. And grandfather had also made her wear his old party t-shirt, which hung to her angles, for effect. The T-shirt had the picture of the local MP on its front, a fat faced man, jowls hanging, as if he was capable of barking. (2008: 5)
In this passage, the dark humour generated by the grandfather’s and Nozitha’s desperate efforts to show patriotic support for the party reveals the extent to which survival is bound up with political affiliation. Not only is Old Siziba a holder of the ruling party membership card which also doubles as a food aid “access card”, but he also owns a party T-shirt, which Nozitha wears as a display of the mandatory loyalty. There is a weird juxtaposition of the poverty-stricken Nozitha with the member of parliament emblazoned on her T-shirt. It suggests an unstable and unsettling relationship between the child and the politician, censuring the politician — for where he is normally expected to serve through saving his people, he takes advantage of their desperation to entrench his power. When read in the context of actual cases of the ruling party’s politicization of food aid, 6 Nozitha’s experience assumes a symbolic, politically subversive effect. If, as Lara (1998: 93) posits, “[n]arratives draw on the materials of everyday life, but, as the story unfolds in the public sphere, they return to and shape life itself”, then one can argue that the readers are likely to transpose their sympathy for victims of political predation in the fictional lifeworld to the real world. When such emotions cross the front line between the fictional and real worlds they can generate antipathetic feelings against the ruling party, and any such politicians or political institutions of similar disposition.
In her theory of narrative empathy, Keen (2007: xii) warns that “[e]mpathy for a fictional character does not invariably correspond with what the author appears to set up or invite”. However, in “Broken Wings”, the author deftly inscribes an implicit political commentary on the “situational empathy” 7 (Keen 2007: xi) which is generated by the readers’ strong character identification with Nozitha. This affectionate attachment with Nozitha builds up as the plot unfolds and reaches a tipping point with the rape scene. This is how Nozitha reacts to the rape: “it had been so painful […] but she had gritted her teeth, and held her breath, wishing away the pain by thinking of the runny waste of her mother’s stomach that she threw into the bushes every day. She imagined hurling it at Abisha’s face” (2008: 7). Nozitha subconsciously connects her rape to the political card, in a melancholic song she sings on her way home: “Dove O Dove | Fly fast to Grandfather | help him in the search | And find the card quickly […] For today is the day of the food again | That is given by snakes that bite” (2008: 7–8). The imagery of sexual power preying on the helpless body of a desperate girl has powerful political connotations. It reconstructs Abisha, and by symbolic extension the ruling party, as representing a callous political system which sets up weak members of the society in order to debauch them.
Conclusion
Child characters in focal texts in this discussion are essentially victims of socioeconomic and political crises, and their victimhood and victimization have multiple layers of symbolic meanings ascribed to them. The inherent nature and qualities of children as innocent, vulnerable, clear-sighted, and so on, are invoked in the context of political, economic, and ethnocentric impediments to their flourishing. As with the Romantic form of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, the trope of the idealized victim-child gives the short stories their aesthetic, affective, and moral texture, enhances their subversive candour, and compels us to imagine the possibility of alternative and just political dispensations. Like the archetype Romantic child figure, the child characters in these short stories are stripped of their innocence and purity, and underlying their corrupted childhoods are implicit commentaries which link the children’s tragedies to historic socio political problems afflicting Zimbabwe. A fuller understanding of what Lara calls “the disclosive workings” of affect in these short stories’ counterdiscursive engagement with state historiography comes from considering the location of these fictional child victims in imaginary settings with clear historical allusions. This “situation” of fictional victims and victimization in known victimizing contexts makes vivid the immorality of both the children’s victimization and victimizers. Affect is thus foregrounded to influence the “towardness” (Ahmed, 2012: 8) of our feelings — to guide our sympathetic attachments towards the children and (especially) away from state-circumscribed crisis narratives. Thus, Gugu’s and Butho’s unchildlike retributive temperament in “Torn Posters”, for instance, can be read as reflecting on the Gukurahundi’s potential to create enduring ethnic antagonisms which subvert the nationalist unity-in-diversity project. The victim–child figure is therefore both an artistic and aestheticized manifestation of socioeconomic and political crises in the postcolony, and also a complex site for transgressing the hegemonic stranglehold on the crisis narrative in Zimbabwe.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.