‘Such a Thing Does Not Have a Name in his Country’: Entanglements of Diaspora and ‘Home’ Homes in the Zimbabwean Short Story of Crisis

ABSTRACT

Home, crisis and migration have defined the experience and concept of being post-colonial Zimbabwe(an) for the past two decades. Much has been written about the post-coloniality of this entangled experience and about how, in particular, literary fiction re-discourses normative perspectives of the Zimbabwean crisis, the home, the unhomely and trans-national out-migration. Rarely considered a serious discursive site from which to (re)know the intricacies inhabiting versions, configurations and symbolisms of the concept of home (especially in the context of crisis and mobility), the Zimbabwean short story has largely remained underexplored. This article recentres the short story of migration (Farai Mpofu’s ‘The Letter’ and NoViolet Mkha’s ‘Shamisos’) in examining how, as socio-cultural and geo-political constructs, diaspora and ‘home’ homes manifest and orchestrate temporalities, processes, relations, attitudes, places, people, and discourses that shape a certain understanding of Zimbabwe as a contested post-colonial ‘home’. On the one hand, the protagonists in the stories live precariously in ‘refuge’ new homes (Botswana and South Africa respectively), and on the other, they attempt to make sense of their precarity through traumatic re-memories of their haunting ‘home’ home (Zimbabwe). We interpret this connection between these unstable ‘homes’ using a conceptual frame that we term ‘ambivalent continuum of precarity’, a concept we coined from the notions of ‘precarity of place’ and ‘continuum of precarity’ advanced by Susan Banki and Julia Ann McWilliams and Sally Wesley Bonet respectively. Our analysis of literary representations of the home(s) therefore focuses on their complex, multiple and shifting layers, signs, symbolisms and ontologies as constructs that reflect on the crisis of post-coloniality manifest in precarious mobilities and ambivalent homes.

KEYWORDS:

• Zimbabwe
• migration
• alienation
• precarity
• home
• political violence

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was declared by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tendai Mangena

Dr Tendai Mangena is an associate professor in African Literary and Cultural studies at Great Zimbabwe University and Research Fellow in the Department of English at the University of the Free State, South Africa. She was a Fulbright Research Scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature and Languages at the University of California, Riverside, USA in 2020 and an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Postcolonial Literary and Cultural studies at Bremen University in Germany from 2016 to 2018. Her research interests are in the areas of gender, politics, power, and justice in African literature and onomastics.

Oliver Nyambi

Dr Oliver Nyambi (PhD, Stellenbosch, South Africa) is an associate professor of African Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of English, University of the Free State, South Africa. He is a former Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow hosted by Susan Arndt in The Professorship of English Studies and Anglophone Literatures at Bayreuth University, Germany. A fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and former fellow of the Duke Africa Initiative at Duke University, USA, his research mainly focuses on crisis/humanitarian literatures, the Zimbabwean crisis, and the cultural politics of negotiating marginalities.