fbpx

On New Zimbabwean Literature

The line between “here” and “there” is unusually blurry for Zimbabweans.

Wallen Mapondera, Abandoned Hive 3. 2017, mixed media. 49.6 × 86.6". Courtesy of SMAC Gallery. © Wallen Mapondera.

Panashe Chigumadzi, These Bones Will Rise Again. Indigo Press, 2018.
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, House of Stone. Atlantic Books, 2018.

To love Zimbabwe from afar is an all-consuming task. Your virtual tool kit includes Twitter, Facebook, and an endlessly bleeping string of WhatsApp groups, each of which you curate to have overlapping but nonidentical networks of people in the know. You refresh each medium on loop as you get word that something shady is afoot in the usually laid-back capital city of Harare. Your eyes burn; hours melt; a familiar delirium seems to radiate from your phone. And this is just basic access. At minimum, to keep up, you will need working knowledge of two languages from among English, chiShona, and isiNdebele, the three most widely spoken in the country. Ideally, you’ll have the whole suite. If you are a Zimbabwean writer, you may capture some choice phrases in a novel or story. Soon after its publication, you may be greeted by furious Twitter debates about whether you were right to italicize and/or translate and/or appropriate African languages in your mostly English text, and whether you have done justice to their local contexts. These threads will be interspersed with frank confessions of despair over the future of democracy given the Zimbabwean leadership’s latest broken promise, and perhaps the occasional photo of a lion shot by an American dentist.

It’s not easy to be a Zimbabwean writer abroad: in addition to having to answer familiar questions about who speaks for whom, writes to whom, and by whom their books are published, writers in the diaspora have to negotiate citizenship from a distance. And the line between “here” and “there” is unusually blurry for Zimbabweans. Because of the country’s economic and institutional collapse over the last two decades, there are around five million Zimbabweans, out of a total population of seventeen million, living and working abroad. While not unique, the extent to which the Zimbabwean economy is not just connected but actually outsourced to its diaspora is a singular trait. According to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, diasporic Zimbabweans contribute upward of $750 million a year in remittances to the flailing GNP. It is difficult, as a result, to make a case that Zimbabweans who leave have less claim on what happens in the country than those who stay. But their experience is profoundly different. Over the past decade, a new generation of Zimbabwean-diasporic writers such as Petina Gappah and NoViolet Bulawayo have gained much-deserved international prominence and “world writer” status, publishing with major transnational conglomerates and signing lucrative contracts. Meanwhile, their peers at home face a bare-bones national publishing infrastructure and, as of 2015, a 40 percent import tax on books. A few small presses — Weaver, in Harare, and amaBooks, in Bulawayo — persist as costly labors of love, publicizing titles online in hopes of selling them to other small presses elsewhere. For better or for worse, those who have “made it” and those who have not converge in the digital commons, where the prestige economy of global literature meets the more frenetic literary scene of the World Wide Web. This convergence is both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because it makes diasporic Zimbabwean writers some of the most interesting thinkers about the role of virtual worlds in intellectual life, and a curse because of the surging, even manic pace it entails.

More from Issue 33

Issue 33 Overtime

The question of who gets to live, and how, has always been the realm of politics.

Issue 33 Overtime
The Korean Peace Process
Issue 33 Overtime

He behaves like a man who believes that history is not over, even if established ways of picturing historical change on the…

Issue 33 Overtime
Rededication
Issue 33 Overtime
Everybody Knows
Issue 33 Overtime

An American who leaves for war never leaves America. The war that is America, rather, comes to the American.

Issue 33 Overtime
Conversations with Bongjun
Issue 33 Overtime

Children are malleable and must be cultivated carefully and deliberately, like plants.

Issue 33 Overtime
What Good Is Love?
Issue 33 Overtime
The Painful Sum of Things
Issue 33 Overtime
We Can Still Think Our Own Thoughts
Issue 33 Overtime

Maybe this is how Great Men read books: like boys.

Issue 33 Overtime

More by this Author

August 23, 2016
Doing Philosophy Better
May 5, 2015

The radicalism of Charlie’s French leftist founders, like its cartoons, is by default grounded in the nation state.

August 26, 2016
After <em>Columbia</em>
October 5, 2015
The South African Novel of Ideas