The Re-membering of Literary Bodies in the Zimbabwean Classroom

Abstract

This article explores ways in which literary and physical bodies are interlinked in a high-school English literature classroom in Zimbabwe. In this study, twenty-four Grade 12 learners, who are conceptualised as living human bodies closely connected through intergenerational memory, responded to an indigenous literary body, the set novel The Uncertainty of Hope (Harare: Weaver Press, 2006) by Valerie Tagwira. The learners’ responses were in the form of poems and symbolic poem-drawings. Participants created their own literary bodies, which reflect and re-member their individual and intergenerational experiences of the set text and of literature in general. Importantly, these multimodal literary bodies of learner “re-memberings” represent the interplay among embodied intergenerational experience, the set text as a literary body, and the discussion of the findings as a body of interpretive work.

Keywords:

• classroom literature
• high school learners
• literary perceptions
• literary bodies
• re-membering literature
• Zimbabwean high schools
• The Uncertainty of Hope