Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture

Judith Butler has recently considered “the possibility for precarity to be mobilized” in resistance to state policies that quite literally target specific populations.⁷ As discussed briefly in the previous chapter, when the vulnerability everyone shares by virtue of embodied existence, intercorporeality, and the relationality of social life is transformed into particular conditions of distributed and imposed precarity, vulnerability within normative human rights discourse often collapses into victimhood. Especially when precarity results from deliberate state action, “targeting and protecting are practices that belong to the same rationale of power,” both of which disenfranchise and imperil vulnerable subjects.⁸ Several critics have focused on the difficulty in theorizing political community in relation to Butler’s concept of precarious life because of this easy slippage from vulnerability to victimhood. The danger of that slippage is found in normative representations of distant suffering, as many have demonstrated, but more importantly for the argument here it also arises in Butler’s earlier writing from the primary role she ascribes to violence in defining vulnerability and political community. To cite but one passage, she writes in Precarious Life about “political life that has to do with our exposure to violence and our complicity in it, with our vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows, and with finding a basis for community in these conditions.”⁹ The question her critics raise that is relevant here, is whether political community can have a basis outside those conditions of violence and vulnerability, particularly if vulnerability is defined primarily as exposure to violence that is intrinsic to social life. Àngela Lorena Fuster, for example, argues that by making political community dependent upon the primary association of vulnerability with exposure to “grief, to death, to loss […]—Butler misses the opportunity of making the most of the rethinking of the common […] in which politics find meaning in the concepts of interdependency and worldliness. She misses this chance of thinking the community in terms of difference […].”¹⁰ Similarly, Moya Lloyd notes that if subjectivity is defined so substantively by one’s exposure to violence and the work of mourning, the results could just as easily be privatizing or directed toward self-preservation (violent or otherwise) as toward non-violent political coalitions and resistance.¹¹

Butler’s recent work attempts to address these important critiques by emphasizing two key facets of vulnerability theory: first, the positive modes of relationality such that “vulnerability cannot be associated exclusively with injurability”; and, second, the strategic use of vulnerability for a politics to “make the feminist claim effectively that such state institutions [that provide social welfare] are crucial to sustaining lives at the same time that feminists resist modes of paternalism that re-instate and naturalize relations of inequality.”¹² Fuster’s and Lloyd’s caveats about the potential of vulnerability theory to ground political challenges to oppressive state and economic policies, as well as Butler’s implicit response, shape my understanding of why rethinking the archive (and including cultural production in addition to the normative political and human rights reportage) around the Gukurahundi can be useful. Whereas the dominant history of repression and impunity has served and continues to serve the interests of the state against its many perceived opponents, including women, Ndebele citizens, white landowners, and members of the political opposition, my goal is not to posit a counter-archive of victim’s testimonies and stories. Instead, I want to lay bare different processes of archive-building, in history, testimony, and fiction, in order to broaden the range of voices included to be sure, but more centrally to open up readings of possible futures to which the archive points. As the Comaroffs conclude their analysis of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “The production of an archive […] in the service of victim’s rights poses a problem for historians and political activists everywhere.”¹³ The stories that have been suppressed by a violent state need to become part of the archive without masking the process of archivization, in order to open up negotiation about the future.

Anti-Colonial, Patriotic Nationalism

In her excellent discussion of the historiographic debate over Zimbabwean national development and its relationship to war fiction, Eleni Coundouriotis notes how the spotlight on nationalism can leave human rights concerns in the shadows. She calls for a privileged place for fiction to redress that imbalance: “Thus heeding the narrative of the people embedded in Zimbabwe’s war fiction can reclaim the human rights narrative entangled in this history and complicate in necessary ways the meaning of the struggle for the people’s independence.”¹⁵ In the official history of independence promulgated by the Mugabe government, liberation is the successful expression of a constant, cohesive struggle against the forces of colonialism and neo-colonialism, figured primarily through racial difference, and most often presented through the chronology of three chimurengas, the Shona term for “wars of liberation”: the 1896 uprising against Cecil Rhodes and the British colonizers; the war for independence and black majority rule, 1964–79; and, from roughly 2000 to 2008, the “fast-track” land seizures and political crackdowns authorized by the Mugabe government against its local political opponents and white landowners.¹⁶ In patriotic history, the three chimurengas result from the collective ideological consciousness (thereby masking internal political conflicts) and the “will of the masses,” including the rural poor. “War,” as Mxolisi R. Sibanyoni writes in the context of Hove’s earlier novel, Bones, which aligns with this official history, “is not only depicted as a unifying force, where everyone realised their selfhood in the body of the new post-independent nation, but is also seen as one of the final stages of the social evolution, a development from an ancient organic society to a modem nation.”¹⁷ The intranational violence of the 1980s, by contrast, falls outside of the narrative of history as chimurenga, although the official rhetoric couches the campaign in the protective language of maintaining the fragile unity of the new nation against rogue threats. The Gukurahundi campaign resulted from Mugabe’s exploitation of rifts in the struggle for independence and black majority rule between his own, primarily Shona, ZANLA/ZANU political and military forces and those of his Ndebele rival Joseph Nkomo (who led the ZIPRA/Z party and force) to impose one-party rule through ZANU-PF. As Zimbabwe’s first fully elected prime minister, Mugabe contracted the North Korean military to train the notorious Fifth Brigade (5B in the human rights report) in ostensibly attacking armed dissidents but also, in conjunction with other military branches, in terrorizing and/or starving civilian populations in Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands, regions with primarily Ndebele populations (as opposed to his Shona base). Civil disturbances and crimes committed by dissidents sponsored by the South African government under Operation Drama as well as those acting alone provided an initial rationale for government intervention, although the category of dissidents expanded to include “those who objected to the new political order […] and conveniently identified as ethnic Ndebele.”¹⁸ From 1982 to the deployment of the Fifth Brigade in 1983 and the imposition of the food embargo in 1984 (which also included a redeployment of the Fifth Brigade and a shift in its methods of operation) to the Unity Accord of 1987, in which Nkomo pledged support to Mugabe’s government through the formation of ZANU-PF, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe lists over 3,000 dead or missing, far more than 680 homesteads destroyed, at least 10,000 detained, and approximately 2,000 tortured.¹⁹ The report underscores that these numbers are only a partial representation of the violence; indeed, Archbishop Pius Ncube states in his Foreword to the 2007 edition that over 20,000 people, primarily “innocent, unarmed civilians,” were killed during this period.²⁰

When forced to respond to the evidence of his direct responsibility for the atrocities reported in Breaking the Silence in 1997, Mugabe significantly chose a national funeral for an opposition leader at Heroes’ Acres,²¹ the foremost monument of postcolonial Zimbabwe, for the occasion. In this context, he substituted his own willingness to mourn a rival politician for the kind of national recognition of and critical (political) mourning for the history of their differences that the report implicitly demands. As reported by The Sunday Mail, at the funeral Mugabe criticized the CCJPZ for its work: “If we dig up history, then we wreck the nation […] and we tear our people apart into factions, into tribes.”²² Here Mugabe differentiates between a tribal past and a modern nation–state in which ethnic differences have been violently suppressed. Although the specific occasion of the funeral reminds the public of political divisions and potentially their costs, those interruptions of a seamless national narrative are rhetorically resolved through the layered imagery and ritual of the proper burial of differences past and present. In that equation, digging up, rather than putting to rest, the past is both inappropriate and dangerous. Echoing Ernest Renan’s noteworthy and convoluted formulation of a nation as a group that “has to have forgotten” many things,²³ Mugabe continued, “The register or record will remind us what never to do. If that was wrong, if that went against the sacred tenets of humanity, we must never repeat it.”²⁴ In this statement, he invokes the archive as at once crucial to the production of hegemony and always bearing with it what Derrida describes as “the trouble of troubled and troubling affairs.”²⁵ Admitting only conditional responsibility (“if that was wrong”) for atrocities that he insists must only be registered, if at all, euphemistically, in officially approved ways, Mugabe foreclosed the possibility of heterogeneous narratives of the past precisely because of what they might mean for the future. Mugabe substituted the official mourning of a rival who no longer poses any threat, staged to highlight Mugabe’s own magnanimity, for familial, local, and/or national mourning of atrocities committed in the name of the nation. In this way, he also adapted a tactic used by the Fifth Brigade during the Gukurahundi for rhetorical effect: according to Richard Werbner, “in a practice of psychological warfare established during the guerrilla war, the Fifth Brigade deliberately stopped the proper burial and mourning through which people are expected to cope with bereavement,” and even years later local commemoration ceremonies and markers were banned.²⁶

The substitution of triumphant nationalism—whether violently imposed, legally encoded, or simply rhetorical—over the documentation of its costs suggests that, in this case, Butler’s theory of the political potential of critical mourning bears weight. Breaking the Silence/Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe draws on earlier (suppressed) human rights reports, survivor interviews, reportage, and secondary witness testimony. By refusing to admit these other voices into the official archive, Mugabe attempted to enforce a singular narrative of the modern nation that finds its promise in his rule. At the same time, the official state funeral as the site of his response to the CCJPZ’s work raises the key question of this chapter of the relationship between mourning and political community. Mugabe clearly sought to tamp down the political potential of the report by locating his response in an event that was staged to appear above politics, so to speak, as opposed to holding a press conference, releasing an official comment, or charging the judicial branch with a mandate to respond to the report’s findings. Thus, the response at Heroes’ Acres aimed to substitute the consideration of the politics of precarity that determined both the forms of violence employed during the Gukurahundi and its targets with de-politicized sentiment of national mourning tied to a universal vulnerability to death and loss.

Human Rights Reporting

Prior to the distribution of Breaking the Silence, there was little public discussion of the Gukurahundi. International readers first learned of escalating violence through exposés by white Zimbabwean Peter Godwin, writing for The Sunday Times (London), and British journalist and editor Donald Trelford writing for The Observer April 8–15, 1984. With the headlines “Mass murder in Matabeleland: the evidence” and “Stench of death everywhere in Mugabe’s siege of Matabeleland,” Godwin’s stories broke the nine-week press embargo of the region and included interviews with witnesses and victims of the violence as well as a visit to the Bhalagwe death camp and the Antelope mine where the army disposed of bodies of the dead.²⁷ The Sunday Times reprinted portions of the story twenty-five years later, as a reminder of Mugabe’s long tenure of abusive rule. In his memoir, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, Godwin provides a fuller description of his initial coverage of the Gukurahundi, beginning with the anonymous “old lady” who arrived “wearing the candy-striped pinafore of a hospital cleaner” at his Newsfile office and pleaded, “‘I[t] has started again—the killing in Matabeleland. This time it is in the south. […] You must write about this thing in your newspaper, otherwise it will never stop until all of us are killed.”²⁸ Godwin followed up with a covert journey, much of it spent dressed as a priest, to the region and a narrow escape once his presence became known. After the publication of three articles in The Sunday Times, he was forced to flee the country: “I was declared an enemy of the state, persona non grata in my own home.”²⁹ Godwin’s reporting and retelling of the events of 1984 not only recount his forced departure from Zimbabwe as a central event in his own life narrative, but also—particularly in his three national–personal memoirs, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa (1986), When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa (2006), and The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe (2010)—position the Gukurahundi as an early, crucial indication of the government abuses of rights and the national economic ruin that would follow.

Donald Trelford’s coverage during the same period also created controversy. Trelford went to Zimbabwe to interview Mugabe on the fourth anniversary of independence and then managed to sneak into Matabeleland and dodge his minder long enough to gather witness testimony of atrocities that corroborated Godwin’s reporting. When Trelford’s story ran in The Observer, Tiny Rowland, chief executive of Lonrho, the conglomerate that owned the paper and “perhaps the most influential foreign executive doing business” in Zimbabwe, according to the Washington Post,³⁰ condemned the reporting, calling it “discourteous and wrong.” Reflecting his close economic ties with Mugabe despite Mugabe’s anti-(neo)colonial rhetoric, Lonhro threatened to dismiss Trelford, notwithstanding the condition agreed to in the purchase of the paper that “the editor of The Observer shall retain control over any political comment published in the newspaper and shall not be subject to any restraint or inhibition in expression of opinion or in reporting news that might directly or indirectly conflict with the opinion or interest of any of the proprietors of The Observer.”³¹ Like Godwin and The Sunday Times (London), Trelford has revisited the massacres and the controversy, particularly in 2000 during a brief period of political flux, in hopes of adding to the momentum of documentation that could “hasten [Mugabe’s] overthrow.”³²

Within Zimbabwe, the press blackout at the time ensured that news of the massacres, abuse, and starvation was relayed primarily in whispers, although the national newspapers, including Bulawayo’s The Chronicle, provided ample coverage of dissident violence and of “the opinions and pronouncements of Government office bearers as events unfolded.”³³ The national media amplified the sense of fear and national instability attributed to dissident violence in order to provide a rationale for militarized nationalism that turned political opponents into targets. Over the same period and in keeping with the policy of silencing news of the state’s violent campaign against a portion of its citizenry in the name of security, the government suppressed human rights reports of violence and intimidation in the region, including the Dumbutshena Report (commissioned in 1981) and the Chihambakwe Committee report (commissioned in 1984). The commissioning and then suppressing of these reports suggests ongoing pressure the government faced to find means of containing representations of the Gukurahundi: it demanded representation; however, all representations outside of the official narrative of national security were banned. Not surprisingly, the combination of silence and official history fail to contain their contents.

In a Derridean reading of the Anglophone imperial literary archive that should construct Englishness yet is always already in a process of decomposition, Trevor Hope analyzes “the manner in which the archive works against the ideal of a singular and integrated structure, and the ways in which the archive, while appearing to coordinate a regularity of signifying practices into a unified corpus, also and in principle subverts its own ideal unity.”³⁴ Similarly, the rhetoric of national security, which would explain the Gukurahundi in terms of a fragile and new nation’s defense against primarily foreign subversive elements—as well as through naturalized, metaphoric language—cannot adequately account for the atrocities committed against citizens the new government has pledged to protect. Perhaps ironically, Mugabe’s strategy of relying on the state occasion (the funeral at Heroes’ Acres) and the official discourse of human rights (in the two commissioned reports), both of which normatively serve as proof of the legitimacy of the state, repeatedly fail to confirm the image of the state as the expression of the people’s undifferentiated will. In addition, the imploding archive fails to secure the singular narrative of the state’s triumphant emergence against the forces of colonialism and outside interference.

Breaking the Silence has an evidentiary and political function. The report organizes forensic and testimonial evidence of atrocity into an implicit demand for legal, political, and economic justice, although it stops short of directly demanding legal or economic reparations. It explicitly seeks official acknowledgment of the violence against civilians, perpetrated largely along ethnic lines, and reconciliation among Ndebele and Shona, rather than among black and white Zimbabweans. Addressed to human rights activists and legal scholars, in many ways it fulfills the narrative expectations of this “classic human rights document” with a “catalogue of horrible catastrophes visited on individuals” and a “diagnostic epilogue” in the form of final sections on implications and recommendations based on its findings.³⁵ These recommendations include publicizing the report as well as the suppressed Chihambakwe Commission report (1984) throughout the country, an official government response, and a “nationwide discussion, involving all ethnic groups […] to promote reconciliation amongst all the peoples of Zimbabwe.”³⁶ The new edition, published within Columbia University Press’s African Studies series, casts a wider net in terms of readership, but it also suggests a shift in the temporal and spatial context of the Gukurahundi. Instead of documenting a recent crisis for Zimbabweans in order to support various human rights claims, the second edition is framed in terms of a historical review from beyond the nation’s borders. Whereas Breaking the Silence, first released in 1997, emphasizes the relevance of the report to contemporary politics and the future of national cohesion, the paratextual frames of Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe position it a decade later as essential to a retrospective evaluation of Mugabe’s rule. As Stephen Chan writes in a blurb on the back cover, “This is a powerful book of testimony and truth about the first great tragedy of Zimbabwe’s independence—though not the last. It is a moving work and one that will always speak to the legacy of Robert Mugabe.”³⁷ The shift from the temporal address of Breaking the Silence to that of its re-publication reflects the passage of time, of course, but also a change in its intended audience from Zimbabweans who have never fully acknowledged the Gukurahundi to historians who already anticipate the end of Mugabe’s long rule.

Especially within Zimbabwe, the 1999 summary report of Breaking the Silence gave wide distribution to the scale of what international journalists and unofficial reports of the violence had partially disclosed. The summary states its rationale as follows:

People who live in Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands know only too well what happened to them during the 1980s. Their lives were affected in serious ways by both Government troops and also by dissidents and Youth Brigades at this time.

However, most people from other parts of Zimbabwe still have no idea what it was like for those who were suffering. They have no idea how people still suffer as a result of the violence that took place. People who were affected also do not have ways of talking to people in other parts of the country about what happened. Ordinary people all over Zimbabwe need to know what happened during those years in their own country.³⁸

The tone and tense of the introduction emphasize the continued relevance of these events fifteen years earlier to contemporary Zimbabweans and, thus, the need for a discursive framework and public sphere for airing the stories of civilian persecution. The imperative that people “need to know” insists that suffering caused by the post-independence violence of the 1980s can only be mourned—alleviated or consoled, redeemed nationally, or transmuted—through its restoration to a national discursive public sphere; moreover, the summary report insists that public dialogue must ensue in order to build a more cohesive nation. To the challenge of finding “ways of talking” about the Gukurahundi, the report provides a sanctioned language for primary and secondary witnessing, thereby incorporating them into the narrative of the nation, despite the inherent critique of nationalist politics they convey. This discursive foundation along with the initial title, “Breaking the Silence,” capture the link between narration and the law inasmuch as, in Joseph Slaughter’s words, “a human rights abuse is characterized as an infringement on the modern subject’s ability to narrate her story,”³⁹ such that to tell one’s story is (necessary) to make a claim for rights. The human rights report provides the common language—albeit that of the authors as opposed to the victims—through which those violated become recognizable as legal persons as well as full citizens of Zimbabwe.

The summary of Breaking the Silence takes great care to situate itself discursively in relation to the voices it represents. In contrast to the evidentiary status of the case studies and summary data tables in other sections of the full report and the book—documentation which could perform a legal function, Part One “tells the history of the 1980s in Zimbabwe, written as a general story” based on “human rights reports, histories by others, Government sources, and The Chronicle newspaper.” The cheaper production and distribution costs of the summary in addition to its translations into Ndebele and Shona increased the accessibility promised by the “general story”: as the report promises, “In this way, people in affected regions can read how their history has been told, and people in unaffected regions can learn about it for the first time.”⁴⁰ Rather than apportion blame or provide factual evidence of particular events, the “general story” attempts to provide a broad discursive foundation to enlarge the scope of, participation in, and audience for the narrative of Zimbabwe as an independent nation–state. Moreover, the “general story” begins the process of re-writing national identity to divorce it from an exclusionary patriotism that favors Shona over Ndebele Zimbabweans. Finally, it draws attention to the heterogeneity of the Gukurahundi’s historiographic representations.

The “general story” of the summary report provides a narrative based on discursive participation that prefigures political agency to enlarge a democratic public sphere and thus work toward a more inclusive national identity. The shift in the 2007 edition to retrospective re-evaluation manifests in Elinor Sisulu’s new introduction, in which she acknowledges her own complicity in the silences surrounding these events: “At the time many of us were too enamoured of our great liberation hero to allow ourselves to confront all the evidence of his direct complicity” in “the campaign of mass murder in the Matabeleland hinterland.”⁴¹ In this edition, the report’s political potential is explicit and is directed against the culture of impunity that Mugabe has cultivated throughout his long rule. Ethical and political obligation thus entails a renewed commitment to principles of political inclusion, transparency, and judicial autonomy.

Because the human rights report as a distinct genre is directed toward political, legal, and civilian audiences and its validity depends upon facticity and the reputation of its authors,⁴² it typically exhibits three distinct characteristics as defined by Ron Dudai:

1 Letting facts speak for themselves;

2 An informal ban on using adverbs and adjectives;

3 Exclusion of all interpretative frameworks apart from international human rights law.⁴³

These rhetorical strategies and formal characteristics are often interspersed with photographs and brief excerpts from anonymous victim testimony, through which emotional immediacy and visual evidence amplify the unequivocal sense of crisis and reliability. Breaking the Silence/Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe conforms to the first two characteristics of the genre, through its focus on facts and non-emotional tone, with detailed attention to methodology and reporting mechanisms, maps and graphs, and carefully coded lists of violations. It also includes extensive historical background to contextualize the violence; and Parts Three and Four, respectively, document current economic, political, and emotional costs of the violence and make policy recommendations. A typical entry on the violations themselves includes source of data, place, date, victim’s gender and age, reported crime, and alleged perpetrator.

KEPANYANE (approx. 5 km W of Kepane)

FEB 1983: Villagers were rounded up by 5B and all beaten, men and women. One woman was raped. The older people were then ordered to go home, and the younger adults were shot. Shooting was heard for some time. Names of four dead. (2436–37, 2446, 3329–30)

Dead: 4

Raped: 1

Beaten: 50 estimated⁴⁴

Richard A. Wilson describes how, to pursue a report’s goal of mobilizing domestic and international legal and political audiences, “occurrences are universalized, that is, they are represented in human rights reports in such a way that the event can be comprehended by readers on the other side of the globe.”⁴⁵ In effect, a human rights report functions as an archive of the event whose reliability is tied to conventions of facticity and abstraction. Thus, Wilson explains, this process of archivization does not simply provide a standard language for actionable offenses; rather, the “category of ‘human rights violation’ does not exist independently of its representation in human rights reports.”⁴⁶ Individualized suffering is, by formal convention, decontextualized in the presentation of a pattern of human rights abuses, and the pattern itself highlights certain forms of violation over others. This pattern also constructs a class of persons who have been violated and thereby maps the distribution of precarity across an abstracted population. In the Zimbabwe report, for example, numbers of those dead, missing, raped, detained, physically tortured, and whose property was destroyed are carefully tabulated, although instances of psychological torture were “so widespread, no attempt has been made to quantify [them].”⁴⁷ Similarly, the report makes clear in its extensive narrative sections that the so-called “disturbances” in the region consisted of two distinct conflicts whose differences were elided by the government: that of dissidents versus police and military forces and, secondly, of Zapu supporters and Ndebele citizens targeted by the Fifth Brigade as well as by security and intelligence forces. Whereas those two patterns of offenses emerge from the summary data in the report, other forms of suffering and privation, including starvation from the punitive food embargo and water rationing in the south (exacerbated by a lengthy drought), leave few footprints in data alone.⁴⁸ Hence, the features that define the genre and make it effective in promoting political or legal action do so through an unavoidably selective presentation of the scope of human rights abuse.

The universalized language of the human rights report typically produces a framework for the liberal subject’s claim to rights, yet it does so paradoxically by “construct[ing] the category of ‘victim’” on whose behalf the report speaks.⁴⁹ The kind of vulnerability approach that might dislodge the centrality of the liberal subject as legal person emerges in both editions of the Gukurahundi human rights report in that they are infused with a sense of mourning. As Judith Butler has carefully demonstrated, mourning provides one means of ascribing value to lives otherwise dismissed as expendable in service to larger political goals. At the same time, her approach raises the question how potential mourners are constructed as a category and whether so much political weight should rest on them. Whereas Butler argues for mourning to disrupt antagonisms that fuel war, particularly in distributions of concern from the powerful upon the powerless, in the human rights report, mourning is presented as the collective work of the nation. In the Gukurahundi report, mourning does not simply denote the value of lives lost or diminished; instead, it shapes political history, in that mourning is linked to the long history of the nation as opposed to a clearly delimited and short-term crisis. The report’s insistence on the necessity of mourning and revaluation, in other words, does not indicate a temporary aberration in national history. Instead, it underscores the violence as constitutive of sovereignty’s ongoing illegitimacy, as opposed to violence that is excused in the name of nation-building. As Sisulu emphasizes in her introduction, “The report points out that one of the most painful aspects of the Gukurahundi massacres was that the plight of the victims and survivors was and continues to be unacknowledged. They are still suffering from the wounds of silence.”⁵⁰ The original introduction notes as well that during the interview process “[m]any wept, or expressed anger, or voiced confusion as to why the violence of the 1980s ever took place” and 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” (original emphasis).⁵¹ In his formidable study, The Ethics of Mourning, R. Clifton Spargo identifies inconsolable mourning when expressed publicly or politically as the “most persistent sign of a dissent from conventional meanings” as well as a “persistent sign of a dedication to the time and realm of the other.”⁵² The “other” in this case comprises those perceived to be oppositional to Mugabe’s anti-colonial nation-building project—or those who oppose Mugabe himself, considered to be one and the same as far as he and his supporters are concerned. In this respect, the report’s emphasis on inconsolable grief underscores the Gukurahundi’s ongoing political relevance and the need for heterogeneous narratives of national belonging in the face of Mugabe’s attempted erasure of so many kinds of citizens in the “new” Zimbabwe.

The continued relevance of the report to Zimbabwean national politics and to understanding Mugabe’s legacy speaks to the still-under-acknowledged losses of the victims and survivors, whose suffering haunts the national imaginary and presages future violations. The process of critical mourning enabled by the report (and expanded upon by the fiction) also incorporates an ethical engagement with the past, mediated in this case through the report’s formal structures and language, which calls for political accountability in order to make possible a more just future. In other words, ignoring the report would constitute what Spargo describes as “the injustice potentially perpetrated by the mourner against the dead as a failure of memory stands for the injustice that may be done to the living other at any given moment.”⁵³ Despite the report’s injunction that Mugabe’s legacy of impunity can only be countered by opening the archive to the representation of atrocity, the report also references its own omissions. These include evidentiary gaps (due largely to the passage of time, resource limitations, and the prior destruction of records) as well as the shame of bystanders and the lasting culture of impunity that continues to enable the violent targeting of groups deemed threatening to Mugabe’s rule. The ongoing work of the report thus demands a continual renegotiation of what constitutes an ethical and political response to the crimes of 1983–87, the ongoing suffering of those who were targeted, and the broader culture of violent political corruption that a failure to address the past has helped to sustain. At the same time, however, Spargo underscores the difference between the language of rights and that of the persistent ethical obligation to the Other that lies at the heart of his ethical framework. Building on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Bernard Williams, Spargo emphasizes how responsibility is paradoxical in ethical and political terms: “Understanding obligations through the construct of rights foresees an end to obligation at the very point where the language of rights also ends.” The language of rights, in other words, expresses even as it curtails the scope of ethical responsibility: the limitless ethical obligation to others is translated into discrete political claims. The report captures some of this temporal heterogeneity in the ways that it attempts to capture the longue durée of the Gukurahundi and the political import of the mourning it demands; and in doing so, the report presses against the conventions of its genre.

Mourning and political community are connected in multiple ways in and through the report. The data regarding rapes, disappearances, deaths, beatings, theft, and other crimes committed by dissidents and government forces provides only a partial accounting of the scope of the region’s forcible precaritization. Nonetheless, the expert discourses that frame the data—the introduction, extensive historical context, and recommendations—transform it into a story, if only an incomplete story, of political failure. What should be a political contest is resolved by military and other violent action; and, even apart from the atrocities, starvation, and terror, the stakes of that political contest are largely unclear to those upon whom the contest is waged. Although Sisulu’s reference to the “wounds of silence” in her introduction opens a political space for voices of those who suffered during the campaign, it is the ensuing report that enters that space. Despite these limitations, the report also attempts to instigate a larger, national political conversation that would necessarily require a reappraisal of the responsibility of the state to its citizens.

Arguing for a more expansive language for human rights reporting in general, Wilson notes that one way “to try to capture the nature of the subject matter is through engaging with the existential circumstances of the victims, bystanders, even the perpetrators. What are the choices they faced, the emotions they felt, their coping mechanisms and ensuing changes in personality?”⁵⁴ This aptly describes the theoretical turn to the vulnerable subject through psychosomatic, as opposed to disembodied, legal personhood as well as the work of characterization in human rights fiction. Within the conventions of the report, as noted above, individualized stories of suffering strengthen the emotional impact of the report’s data and neutral tone. In that sense, the carefully positioned first- or second-order testimonies (usually distinguishable by a box or font change) employ the conditions of bodily and social vulnerability to produce a category of victims on whose behalf the report functions. Vulnerability in fiction, on the other hand, is scripted through character development, affect, focalization and emplotment. Although these techniques may transform the data of a report into a selection of characters and contexts, they also risk the cultivation of readerly identification that masks its own problematics. In other words, literary fiction can enhance the emotional pull of victim’s stories for a distant, humanitarian reader, or it can disrupt the equation of victimhood and vulnerability by providing a differentiated representation of a character’s sedimented and embodied existence. Such portrayals of embodied vulnerability would allow for a complex reading of context and as well as literary subjects whose value does not derive solely from violence and suffering, grief and loss. The novel as genre, in other words, invites representation of the desiring, passionate, ec-static, relational subject, and can make possible the imagination of vulnerability that exceeds victimhood. Critical mourning remains important to these representations. Whereas the work of a human rights report is to define a violation and its vulnerable subjects and to render them grievable victims for empowered readers, a novel does more ambiguous representational work. In the shift from victims to characters, novels invite a more complex reading of vulnerability that attends both to the theoretical critiques of Butler’s earlier formulations as well as to the ways in which mourning may signal a wider range of political subjects and varying forms of political dissent. In the remainder of this chapter, I analyze how the novels by Hove, Kilgore, and Vera engage the challenge of disturbing the archive of the Gukurahundi in order to cultivate critical mourning for the past that opens up the political future of the nation.

Anachrony, Gender, and the Future-to-Come in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins

In contrast to Hove’s haunting portrayal of loss and Kilgore’s argument for a people’s history (still tied to the formation of the nation-state) to compensate for silences in the historical record, Vera’s The Stone Virgins presents the atrocities and larger context of the Gukurahundi through complex shifts in perspective and highly aestheticized language that draws attention to its own constructions, but in doing so, also risks romanticizing them. The shifting, lyrical narrative voice “not only transforms the dead past into a living past but also allows the past to call insistently to the present for the continual re-interpretation of both.”⁷⁵ Driver and Samuelson, in their excellent analysis of the novel, discuss Vera’s critique of official history and the gendered dynamics that sustain it through her “rich entanglement of temporalities.”⁷⁶ I extend the reading of the archive with which this chapter began to build on their argument about memory, mourning, and political engagement in the novel. The “rich entanglement of temporalities” not only generates a “living past,” but also opens up the possibilities for imagining the future-to-come in a series of small, quotidian acts as opposed to grand, teleological narratives. Moreover, Vera’s prose draws attention to its own representational strategies. Rather than serve as a substitute voice of the silenced, the novel raises larger questions about how the human rights violations might become legible through fiction. For Vera, the imagination and the aesthetic’s engagement with the past are what catch hold of moments that “flash up in a moment of danger,” as Walter Benjamin wrote,⁷⁷ to disturb the historical record. Such writing also runs the risk that the Comaroffs identify of treating memory as a “sublime force from elsewhere uniquely capable of breaking the conventions of time and place.” Memory, they continue, is “‘plastic,’ interest-bearing,” and “[h]uman beings can be as readily dispossessed as redeemed by the sudden return of the past, especially when it comes back with the imprimatur of the law.”⁷⁸ Thus, the combination of Vera’s focus on the individual and attention to aesthetic representation disturb the historical record but not necessarily to activate a resistant political subject. Instead, the novel defines a role for fiction in shaping the social imaginary of the past, but not what the Comaroffs term “juridical history-making, of history produced, articulated, and authorized through the courts.”⁷⁹

Vera narrates individual and collective loss through telescopic writing that moves in and out of first and third person perspectives, close-ups and broad views, to tell the story of three fictional victims of the Gukurahundi: Nonceba; her sister, Thenjiwe; and a local storekeeper. Although the novel treats targets of both government and dissident violence, it focuses primarily on Thenjiwe’s murder and Nonceba’s subsequent rape and mutilation by the disaffected former liberation war soldier Sibaso and the possibilities these actions portend for the future. The attack on the storekeeper, Mahlathini, who is shot, tortured, and burned by government forces, receives far shorter treatment. At first glance, then, the novel seems to confirm the official history that dissident violence threatened the unity of the new nation. Such a reading could imply that Mugabe’s patriarchal rule remains necessary to restore Nonceba to health after the sexualized violence by government dissidents against her and her sister. However, as Driver and Samuelson demonstrate, the complex temporality of Vera’s novel “exceed[s] an impoverished nationalist discourse with its sharp temporal distinctions, its convenient historical misrepresentations, and its insistence on the need for sacrifice in the path of progress.”⁸⁰ In addition, the novel carefully reinserts the Ndebele rule during the First Chimurenga (against the British) into national history. The question of what kind of future is possible is tied to Nonceba as the central character; however, she comes to embody the atrocities committed by both sides as the female figure is instrumentalized by competing and failing nationalisms. Nonceba’s future is framed by Sibaso’s violence, on one hand, and the care offered by the archivist, Cephas, who shelters her as she heals, on the other. Yet as Eleni Coundouriotis rightly argues, “These two men, a destitute traumatized former guerilla and an urban, educated, idealistic nationalist, share a common preoccupation with the national past, and both idealize woman as an allegory of Zimbabwean nationalism.”⁸¹ Layered upon this division between violence and care is another: between Nonceba’s personal memory of crisis (her injury and the death of her sister) and the longer archival and re-creative process of national history. Thus, the novel carves a place for the anachrony and allusions of fiction over the selective linearity of nationalist history. This effort requires a careful dismantling of three masculinized narratives of national identity—Mugabe’s patriarchal rule, Sibaso’s violent dissent, and Cephas’s idealistic archival project—to rework the gendered terms of national identity.

The Stone Virgins has been lauded as the first Zimbabwean novel to deal directly with Matabeleland and Midlands atrocities and for establishing fiction as a space where the bearing of the past on the present can be reconsidered. In performing this work, the narrative reinscribes the violent birth of the postcolonial nation, and Zimbabwean nationalism more generally, as one enacted through gender, rather than solely through race or ethnicity as the dominant history dictates. The text concludes not only with a critique of the patriarchal, postcolonial present, but by insisting on the national identity of Zimbabwe and the gendered relations that sustain it as a site of active production and negotiation among past, present, and future.

The Stone Virgins is divided into two sections. The first begins with black township life during the 1950s and extends through Zimbabwe’s declaration of independence from Britain in 1965 under the white minority rule government of Ian Smith, the civil war between the national army and guerrilla forces of the ZANU and ZAPU parties (1966–79), and finally Mugabe’s triumph as the first elected black prime minister in 1980. The second section, 1981–86, spans the violence that followed, particularly in Matabeleland, when dissidents from the losing ZAPU party’s army, ZIPRA, as well as the government’s own Fifth Brigade—deployed in 1983 and 1984 to attack dissident guerrilla and civilian sympathizers with the opposition ⁸²—both attacked the civilian population. The only references in the novel to even this spare history are the chronological parameters of the sections before and after independence and occasional, cursory references to the unfolding events: “[W]ar is in their midst” or “[The women] expect some crack, some sound that will wrap over them like lightning and they will not need to ask if independence is truly here, or if this indeed is a new day” or, with respect to the Fifth Brigade: “The team of soldiers who had congregated on Thandabantu Store had demonstrated that anything that had happened so far had not been random or unplanned. Atrocious, yes, but purposeful. They committed evil as though it were a legitimate pursuit, a ritual for their own convictions.”⁸³

In place of chronology, Vera allows brief historical allusions to frame individual portraits of violence, suffering, and survival. Intense scrutiny of such moments potentially disrupts inexorable historical flow, enabling a reimagining of what the past might mean for an undetermined future. The novel also shifts among different perspectives, although it only occasionally charts the central characters’ interior development. As perspective shifts from victim to perpetrator to third person narration and events are retold multiple times, the novel calls into question any unitary or objective claim to witness or record. In doing so, it opens up a multiplicity of readings that also, paradoxically, limit the potential of a collective political consciousness for the future.

The heterogeneity promised by such a narrative of the nation carries with it the admission that mourning for past tragedies will never be complete because representations of them can only ever be partial, and it emphasizes that because the past has multiple meanings, the future must similarly remain open-ended. The novel shares with Breaking the Silence a commitment to representing what has been previously silenced; however, as opposed to simply correcting or humanizing the historical record through characterization, The Stone Virgins offers a meditation on what a multi-perspectival and anachronous rendering of the past might mean for the future. To borrow Butler’s phrasing in “After Loss, What Then?”: “a fractured horizon looms in which to make one’s way as a spectral agency, one for whom a full ‘recovery’ is impossible, one for whom the irrecoverable becomes, paradoxically, the condition of a new political agency.”⁸⁴ The novel takes place on that horizon and it concludes poised on the threshold of what the political might entail. Vera’s lyrical writing of both interiority and external conditions does not recuperate a singular, fixed subject capable of progressing from melancholia to mourning, nor from haunting to citizenship, but activates an episodic and imagistic discourse of mourning in which, Wendy Brown argues, “history becomes less what we dwell in, are propelled by, or are determined by than what we fight over, fight for, and aspire to honor in our practices of justice.”⁸⁵ However, Nonceba’s “progress” is measured not by the law, but by the possibility of physical and social life, as well as conviviality.

In Politics Out of History, Brown invokes Benjamin’s angel of history, turned toward the wreckage of the past yet being blown into a future he cannot see, to consider the relationship between the atrocities of the past and an undetermined future. Defining the present by the “political impotence” one feels against “the trajectory and the wide range of effects of capital (as the most powerful moving force in modernity)” and the suffering that trajectory implies, she asks, “How can such a present be loved—and if it cannot be, what are our investments in addressing its ills?”⁸⁶ In Zimbabwe, one looks back across decades of land expropriation during the colonial era in order to enrich the white settler class and establish apartheid rule; the independence government’s decision—despite the socialist rhetoric of the liberation struggle—to maintain the structure, private ownership priorities, and patriarchal privilege of the colonial government;⁸⁷ the government’s use of force against its own people; the more recent economic collapse, in part from illegal land seizures of productive farms; and the failure of the state to address an HIV/AIDS crisis that according to the World Fact Book has reduced life expectancy by approximately twenty years, infected 25 percent of the adult population, and to which Vera succumbed in 2005.

The angel cannot “stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed,”⁸⁸ but only seeks to understand the wreckage from within the storm. In her reading of Benjamin, Brown notes that the figure may initially appear to be a passive witness: “The muteness and the impotence of the backward body […] together figure the agency of the meaning of history as approximately nothing.”⁸⁹ Passivity is better understood, however, in terms of the withholding of teleology: the angel’s back is toward history because the notion of progress is unsubstantiated and the future is yet indeterminate. For Brown, it is the possibility of interrupting the steady pace of history—of creating an alternative temporality that brings muted experiences to the fore, that “allow[s] the redemptive powers of hope, dream, and utopian passion a place on the political and historical stage. Only then can history be rewritten, as a different future is coined from the present.”⁹⁰ In his careful analysis of how Benjamin and Derrida approach these temporal entanglements and irruptions—the messianic for Benjamin, and what Derrida more frequently refers to as time out of joint, Owen Ware demonstrates that they share “the awareness that causality is not something fixed but created retrospectively, a construction existing only in the present and subject to change and alteration itself.”⁹¹ From there, however, Benjamin and Derrida diverge in their temporal foci. Because the present lacks inherent meaning, Benjamin looks to the past “as our responsibility to liberate history,” whereas for Derrida it “affirms the future-to-come” and, with it, “the future-to-come as the site of justice.”⁹² Here it is important to note that the future-to-come does not guarantee justice of any sort; rather it is tied to anachrony and heterogeneity, to rethinking historical ties and obligations to one another outside of predetermined limits.

For some readers, Vera’s highly allusive and imagistic writing (as well as Derridean deconstructive readings) evacuates the atrocities of the past and their bearing on the future of political and corporeal materiality. What the remainder of this chapter attempts to demonstrate, however, is how reading the novel through Benjamin and Derrida’s overlapping approaches to messianic time can illuminate two key aspects of Vera’s work: first, that it is only through the decomposition of official history that an open-ended struggle for the future can take place; and, second, that gender functions as what Gayatri Spivak describes as a “general critical instrument rather than something to be factored in special cases.”⁹³ Although Vera overtly resists writing phenomenologically about experience of rape, deprivation, and torture that women and the rural poor suffered in Matabeleland and the Midlands during the Gukurahundi, she unmasks the gendered dynamics of the political struggle that instigated those atrocities.

On one level, Vera follows Benjamin’s dictum that “to articulate the past historically […] means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger”⁹⁴ by beginning to write each novel from an image of a single photograph, real or imagined: “I don’t even have the story at the beginning, I have only this cataclysmic moment, this shocking, painful moment, at once familiar and horrifying because of one change of detail which makes everything else tragic. For me, an entire history is contained in such a moment.”⁹⁵ Vera cites two images that launched The Stone Virgins. The first is of a woman forced by the Fifth Brigade to kill her husband with an axe in order to spare their two sons. In the human rights report, a similar incident appears in one of the boxes of individual testimony that break up the compilations of data, spotlighting a specific, horrific crime:

When he collapsed, they told me, his wife, to kill him with an axe. I refused, so they hit me on the head with the axe. When I regained consciousness, I was covered with blood. […] They made me kill him. They made me chop him in the neck with the axe. They chopped his head right off. […] [T]he next day I took my husband’s head, in the bag, to the hospital as they had told me to do.⁹⁶

This testimony is remarkable, not only for the atrocity it recounts, but for the destruction of both the husband and wife, as the speaker becomes first the object of and then an extension of the weapon: “they hit me on the head with the axe. […] They made me chop him in the neck with the axe. […] They chopped his head right off.” The “I” appears at moments of passivity, resistance, and finally, resignation at being now beyond the sensible (“I refused,” “I was covered with blood,” “I took my husband’s head, in the bag, to the hospital”). Within the human rights report, this testimony set outside of the larger narrative functions “to support the organization’s factual and legal claims, not the other way around,”⁹⁷ and this particular example speaks of depravity and savagery in ways that reinforce a view of human rights law as the (only) bulwark against atrocity, yet one that is grossly insufficient to restoring either victim.

Portraying a similar incident in the novel, Vera focuses as much on the politics of witnessing as on the crime itself. A fluctuating narrative voice moves from the third person to a first-person point of view that is loosely attached to Nonceba, who is recovering from violent rape and mutilation in a local hospital. Like the reader of Breaking the Silence, she gains access to another’s trauma, but only by overhearing it at a distance. The excerpt below appears as a fragment of an overheard conversation between two undisclosed speakers about another patient at the hospital:

She has killed her husband. Two soldiers walked into her house and sat her husband on a stone. They handed her an ax. These men were pointing guns at her two grown sons, threatening to shoot them if she did not listen. She fell on her knees and begged them to let her sons go. One soldier pushed her away with the butt of his gun. She fell down and wept for her sons as though they had already died, and for the heart of the solider, which she said had died with the war. Her husband raised his voice toward her and said, ‘Kill me … Kill me.’ He pleaded. He was desperate to die and to save his sons. She stood up, silently repeating what her husband had said, with her own two lips, with her own arms. She opened her eyes and raised the ax above her shoulders till he was dead. This is what happened to her.⁹⁸

Vera’s retelling retains the core of the original: that by being forced to kill her husband, the woman participated in her own destruction. She repeats to herself, “Kill me … Kill me,” as she wields the axe. However, as opposed to an exceptionally shocking example used as a pull-quote in the human rights report to dramatize horror that simultaneously distances readers from the event, Vera’s imagination invokes a community of listeners. The fictional telling repositions the hospital as a site of care and healing rather than uselessness, signifying as well that social institutions exist to address the depravity. The overheard and repeated story also provides both a clearer storyline and ethical stance for the woman and her husband: they are both clearly the victims of atrocity, however, even in the midst of their powerlessness, they retain their role as parents. Perhaps most significantly, Vera’s retelling—both its fictional context and its formal characteristics—understands the important work of testifying as something that must take place among citizens and neighbors, rather than solely between victims and human rights workers. Although overhearing a conversation about the woman forced to kill her husband may seem further removed than the direct testimony excerpted in the human rights report, Vera’s emphasis is on approximating Nonceba’s position, on what it might mean to overhear atrocity, on the obligations to others that apprehension requires. The narrative structure, in other words, asks the reader to consider what responsibility, if any, accompanies this retelling, this hearing. Nonceba’s response is not identification, but vivid imagination of the scene and of being, momentarily, present for it, just as Vera’s lyricism creates other staccato moments of present-ness for the reader.

The second photographic image that launches the narrative is an imagined scene of dissident violence, when Sibaso beheads Thenjiwe. Vera describes this passage as a challenge to convey “in [a] way which celebrates writing.”⁹⁹ Driver and Samuelson underscore the challenge of employing “language [that] shows itself capable of representing the multiple horrors of war-torn Zimbabwe in words and sentences that do not reproduce the contempt for others that lies at the basis of such horrors.”¹⁰⁰ In the same way that Abani attempts to capture humanity “when we’re most ugly,”¹⁰¹ Vera pushes against the limits of ethico-aesthetic representation by writing that slows time in order to highlight moments when atrocity and the aesthetic intersect. In the novel, the beheading appears within the larger scene of Nonceba’s rape and disfigurement, when she sees Sibaso approach:

His head is behind Thenjiwe, where Thenjiwe was before, floating in her body; he is in her body. He is floating like a flash of lightning. Thenjiwe’s body remains upright while this man’s head emerges behind hers, inside it, replacing each of her moments, taking her position in the azure of the sky. He is absorbing Thenjiwe’s motions into his own body, existing where Thenjiwe was, moving into the spaces she has occupied. Then Thenjiwe vanishes and he is affixed in her place, before Nonceba’s eyes, sudden and unmistakable as a storm. The moment is his. Irrevocable. His own.¹⁰²

The tension of the scene exists not only in the horror of the event but in the deep silence that surrounds its slow-motion presentation; even Nonceba watching the murder “falls in the same way sound disappears.”¹⁰³ Although Vera presents the beheading from Nonceba’s perspective, the text slides into third-person narration at the end of the passage (“before Nonceba’s eyes”) and thereby undermines any parallel between Nonceba and Sibaso’s authority over this moment. Rather than present this moment solely through first-person testimony, Vera depicts the lethalness of desire for complete control over the space and time of an other.

Thenjiwe is less a character in the novel than a symbol of an idealized landscape, past, and politics. She encapsulates the seasons, rocks, pools, trees, and soil of the Matapos hills, what Campbell calls the “inalienability of land, seeds and water”¹⁰⁴ that colonial rule denied through decades of legislation: the formation of Native Reserves (1894), Land Apportionment Act (1930), Native Husbandry Act (1951), Land Apportionment Act (1968), and the regulation of storing and breeding seeds in order to support commercial farmers.¹⁰⁵ Like the spirits of the Mwali shrines housed in the caves of those hills, and often called upon in liberation struggles by both Ndebele and Shona,¹⁰⁶ Thenjiwe is associated with the rain needed to assuage the drought and an alternative ideation system to that promulgated by the colonial state. She acts as a bridge to Vera’s first novel, Nehanda (1993), which reimagined the First Chimurenga from the perspective of the female spirit medium who had been largely ignored historiographically (including in British historian Terence Ranger’s Revolt in Southern Rhodesia 1896–7 [1967], which focused on the importance to the rebellion of the male spirit medium, Kaguvi, as opposed to Nehanda). The difference in their perspectives initiated a lasting friendship between Vera and Ranger, who told Vera, “It’s all absolutely wrong and I love it.”¹⁰⁷ Their friendship included an ongoing dialogue, conducted in person and through their published works, between and about ways of representing the past, a dialogue particularly important given Ranger’s foundational role in writing Zimbabwean national history.¹⁰⁸ For Ranger, The Stone Virgins marks a break with Vera’s earlier treatment of the past: “It is not a book that establishes a deeper truth through myth and invented ritual. It is a book that confronts the reality of History and which transcends that reality by means of confrontation.”¹⁰⁹ In this last completed novel, Vera does not so much imagine a solely feminized counterhistory as insist on history itself as open-ended and in need of constant reimagination and negotiation through both masculine and feminine nonviolent perspectives. Thenjiwe is a pivotal figure in forging a connection with Vera’s earlier reinventions of myth and ritual as well as demarcating the limits of that approach in facing the future. Although not any kind of spirit medium herself, Thenjiwe embodies the sacredness of the land which forms the foundational beliefs of ancestor worship and communal ownership, principles invoked repeatedly in the liberation struggle, and her death reads as a desecration of those foundations. At the same time, the novel resists an essentializing, melancholic focus on this loss: Thenjiwe’s story becomes a shared lens through which to read her attacker and her sister.

When the archivist Cephas and Thenjiwe first meet, she offers a healing respite from the political world of colonial Rhodesia and the war: she “takes over the corner in his mind where some thought is trapped, some useless remembrance about fences with NO TRESPASS signs and NO WORK signs.”¹¹⁰ Their brief love affair symbolically brings together rural and urban, female and male, eastern and western parts of the country into a potentially regenerative unity. The subsequent failure of their relationship reads as a failure of communication and the impossibility of this national ideal: she “forgets his name” and everything she would like to have told him about herself, the hills, her sister, and the village of Kezi is introduced as hypothetical (“she would start, perhaps, with the marula tree”).¹¹¹ Cephas represents a caring form of masculinity, but one that never acknowledges its own privilege. Not only was he removed from the violence in Matabeleland (he read in the newspaper about the attack on the sisters and then sought out Nonceba), but gender and political privilege afforded him both a security and mobility that the women lacked. Nonceba is understandably suspicious of his sudden arrival in Kezi¹¹² as well as his request for her to move with him to Bulawayo; he travels freely even “when the roads are blocked and a multitude of soldiers are disturbing the peace of the land” and “wants her to leave everything, as though she does not belong here and could just leave because it makes sense to do so, makes sense to him, his view of the future and his past.”¹¹³ Even when sheltering Nonceba, he begins to desire her in place of her sister. Recognizing at last that he “had not heard [Then-jiwe] at all,” and thus that this desire cannot be fulfilled, he “retreat[s]” from Nonceba into his job as a historian for the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe: “A new nation needs to restore the past. His focus, the beehive hut, to be installed at Lobengula’s ancient kraal.”¹¹⁴

In his overview of Zimbabwean literary responses to violence, Kaarsholm critiques the novel and the conclusion with Lobengula cited above for its symmetrical presentations of violence (individual and communal, perpetrated by a dissident and the state), which, he argues, are resolved through “healing[,] reconciliation,” and “unity” offered by Cephas through his own travels from the Eastern Highlands to Bulawayo and his reconstruction of the past.¹¹⁵ Kaarsholm reads this conclusion as an evasion of political agency in favor of aesthetic concurrences. Driver and Samuelson, in contrast, read Cephas as modeling the kind of productive masculinity necessary to subtend the reconciliation process. On one level, Cephas’s delicate work in constructing a livable past, present, and future through the interweaving of their tender branches provides an alternative to the linear historiography Vera captures in the novel’s ironic opening of the urban grid labeled with the names of the colonizers:

Selborne Avenue in Bulawayo cuts across Fort Street (at Charter House), across to Jameson Road (of the Jameson Raid), through to Main Street, to Grey Street, to Abercorn Street, to Fife Street, to Rhodes Street, to Borrow Street, out into the lush Centenary Gardens with their fusion of dahlias, petunias, asters, red salvia, and mauve petrea bushes, onward to the National Museum, on the left side.¹¹⁶

The colonial past inscribed on the city (whose name means “place of the persecuted man”) and terminating in the National Museum raises the question of the story the museum tells versus what it might take victims of that history to survive in such a place, and early chapters describe black Rhodesians living on its margins. However, as a concluding statement to both Cephas’s story and the novel, the turn to Lobengula has more ambiguous gendered, political, and individual connotations as well. Cephas’s work installing the beehive hut of Lobengula, the last Ndebele king who was defeated by the British in 1893, countermands the “logic” of ethnocide that Mugabe tries to impose; however, it still participates in the project of actively reconstructing the past in the name of national history and unity. Reconciliation of intranational violence depends upon learning that past (Ndebele as well as Shona), in order “to re-create the manner in which the tenderest branches bend, meet, and dry, the way grass folds smoothly over this frame and weaves a nest, the way it protects the cool, livable places within.”¹¹⁷ Here, the past is a source of wisdom able to transcend political violence and its legacies to recover the protective order of materials shaped into shelters within the ecosystems of the natural world. At the same time, throughout the novel the reader has access to perspectives Cephas never does, and knows, therefore, that an idealized, naturalized, and feminized past, and the language of reconciliation and unity within which it is framed can never adequately serve as a foundation for a just future.

For instance, whereas Cephas continually looks back, Nonceba remains caught in the same violent “storm” of Sibaso that claimed her sister, and her challenge is to find a way to look forward. Her perspective on the decapitation reveals its larger, gendered political ramifications. Sibaso expresses the skewed masculinity of wartime that can find no haven during independence.¹¹⁸ The promise of independence—of viable, black male subjectivity after decades of white colonial and settler rule—fails to materialize under Mugabe’s consolidation of power for all the men who participated in the liberation struggle (not to mention the female liberation fighters, who receive only brief mention in the novel). As a former member of ZIPRA, Sibaso finds himself marginalized by ZANU-PF: “Independence is the compromise to which I could not belong.”¹¹⁹ Having fought in the sacred caves of the Matopos hills, he is guilty of sacrilege. Although he has survived by eating spiders and making sparks with his fingertips, he discovered in the caves “that history has its ceiling” and that he has lost the ability to feel.¹²⁰ Returning home to his father’s house in the Njube Township, he finds a new tenant, and only a novel and map from his university days exist as remnants of his former life there. Both texts signify his earlier, idealistic commitment to the liberation struggle and his recognition of the failures of independence. With no connection to his family (his father has disappeared and probably died in prison, and his mother died while giving birth to him), no home, and no reward for the sacrifices made as a guerrilla fighter, he claims, “geographies are my only matter”; yet relegated to the hills, without a declared enemy, “he invents another.”¹²¹ His attack on the sisters therefore stems from the political failure of the nation to include him rather than their status as political enemies. His violent, “finely practiced” motions usurp Thenjiwe’s space, mind, and body, seeking only to claim their territories for himself.¹²² Sibaso provides the strongest evidence in the novel for Vera’s claim that the “sort of weightlessness [of not being gendered] should be experienced at least once by each human being, and all the time by all nations.”¹²³

The metaphor of spiders that runs throughout the novel counters an essentialized and idealized reading of nature that Thenjiwe and Cephas’s final return to the land might suggest. Whereas in Nehanda, spiders symbolized the anticolonial struggle,¹²⁴ in The Stone Virgins and Vera’s short story, “In Africa There Is a Kind of Spider,” spiders are associated with the corruption of the postcolonial future by masculinized discourses of power. In the short story, set in 1999, Sibaso, who can find no place in the new Zimbabwe after his participation in the struggle for liberation and as a dissident in the Gukurahundi, tells his niece: “Every spider is a politician, every politician envies a spider. Dancing with a wasp.”¹²⁵ Together the novel and the story trace Sibaso’s transformation, from living with spiders in the bush during wartime to gradually subsisting as one, waiting for his prey. In a description that evokes Thenjiwe’s murder, Vera writes in the short story, “A spider never wastes its venom. You could feel its belly graze your skin. Poised. It made an art of inflicting harm and approaching you in daylight. It had a swiftness about it that seemed not to belong to the species.”¹²⁶ Although the story extends the narrative of Sibaso beyond the temporal frame of the novel, which ends with him as a social outcast in 1986, only in the novel does Vera grant access to his interior consciousness. This willingness to explore the damaged psyche and to imagine from his perspective extends the work of mourning in the novel. Without diminishing or rationalizing his atrocities, Vera links them to psychological and political damages that must be addressed.

The narrative trajectories of Cephas and Sibaso offer two failed models of national belonging. Whether they are enacted through reconstruction or destruction, both are motivated by gendered ideations of the nation and both storylines draw attention away from the widespread regional violence suffered during the Gukurahundi. That story, which provides more context than plot, is represented by the murder of Mahlathini and the burning of his store, which represents the larger destruction of the community: “[T]here is nothing else left communal since the day the Thandabantu Store blazed down.”¹²⁷ Earlier the store functioned as a village center (the site where Cephas and Thenjiwe first met), a link to the wider world, and a locus of victory celebrations. Vera describes the female freedom fighters, “the ultimate embodiment of freedom,” as they lounged at the store, in terms that recall Thenjiwe: “Freedom: a way of being, a voice, a body to behold. From this veranda, independence could be watched like a sun in the distance; an arm held up could capture a few of its rays.”¹²⁸ That vision of female empowerment and independence, coded in natural imagery, threatens the local men, who “stare and let themselves be enamored by the possibilities of freedom,” yet are “unable to imagine anything at all they hold in common [with the women], not even independence or the soccer score, nothing to discuss […]. With disbelief at their own inability, they submit to a lengthening silence.”¹²⁹ Sibaso, described as similarly unable to “capture a few of [the] rays,” instead “tak[es] [Thenjiwe’s] position in the azure of the sky.”¹³⁰ If the recurring metaphors relegate the contributions of female freedom fighters a personal challenge to Sibaso, the women have a more political function in the story of Mahlathini. The soldiers who attack the store accuse him “of offering a meeting place where anything could be spoken, planned, and allowed to happen.”¹³¹ The government attack on the site where the women freedom fighters congregated rewrites the accusation of dissident activity into gendered trespasses against patriarchal rule. Vera’s imagery critiques the gendering of national power that violently insists on its own masculine privilege.

The price of that privilege is not just the victimization of the sisters, but the loss of community—Kezi has become “a naked cemetery”—and the silencing of that loss: like that of Johana’s father in Hove’s Shadows, Mahlathini’s murder “would not be registered,” and on the charred grounds where his store stood, the center of village life, “there is nothing else left communal.”¹³² Although Vera does not provide interiority to the Fifth Brigade soldiers as she does for Sibaso, she does retell the attack on Mahlathini from multiple perspectives, including his. On the one hand, the novel draws attention to rather than substitutes for the incomplete historical record: “Some of the men who are missing in the village are said to have certainly died there; the others, it is said, walked all the way from Kezi to Bulawayo,” versus, “Others insist that nobody fled to Bulawayo on that night but that some men were forcibly taken kilometers from Kezi, dragged way past the hills of Gulati, deep into campsites where many others were being held, tortured, killed, and buried in mass graves.”¹³³ As with Nonceba’s violation, however, the time of the attack is frozen for its victim. Mahlathini “could no longer hear the voices, the gunshots, the chaotic movements inside his store. Everything he knew to be happening seemed to take too long.”¹³⁴ This heterotemporal telling reveals the gaps in the historical record as well as the ethical imperative of disjointed time: the impossibility of translating Mahlathini’s experience into the larger, singular historical narrative without further violence. These divisions in temporal and sensory experience also occur in the narration of Nonceba’s torture.

The silence that surrounds Thenjiwe’s beheading envelops Nonceba when Sibaso, after raping her, cuts off her lips. Much of her physical recovery intertwines with her emotional need to discover how to speak again in addition to raising the larger problem of the representation of atrocity as integral to historical consciousness. The tension between the desire for and suspicion of narrative authority sustains the novel and disrupts the neat symmetry Kaarsholm rightly distrusts. Signifying this tension, Nonceba’s attack receives five tellings: the narrator’s initial description from Nonceba’s point of view, her partial memory of the attack interspersed with Sibaso’s narration, the newspaper report, the hospital card that summarizes her injuries, and her retelling of the first version in the first person. Each offers a partial representation available to particular audiences, and none fully reconstructs the attack. These retellings also provide different rationales for the violence. For instance, the novel provides evidence to suggest that the sisters’ independence outside of patriarchal norms (their father has died, Thenjiwe is in her thirties and unmarried, and Nonceba has just returned from boarding school) renders them at once vulnerable and perhaps threatening in their ability to exist in a world Sibaso cannot. At the same time, Sibaso’s violent and skewed masculinity is itself depicted as a product of a failed, inclusive nationalism.

In either case, the novel ties the remaking of the world, as Elaine Scarry might put it, with the need to witness atrocity: “only then will [Nonceba] discover a world in contrast to her predicament.”¹³⁵ Despite the exigency of witnessing, the novel remains circumspect on the ways in which narrative authority may be misappropriated and misused. Cephas only gains access to the two public records of Nonceba’s trauma through the hospital card and newspaper report; as with Thenjiwe, he is not patient enough to wait for Nonceba to tell her own story. The reader, on the other hand, may find in the space between the third- and first-person narrations a glimpse of the future political agency that the text only hints might be possible but stops short of imagining. Scarry writes that “political power […] entails the power of self-description,”¹³⁶ and Nonceba, without the metaphoric flourishes that mark much of the text, at once describes and resists describing the minute details of her mutilation. However precisely she remembers the cutting, she describes the action itself, as did Mahlathini, in terms of the loss of sensory perception, a loss the imagination must fill without resorting to the terms of phenomenological identification:

I close my eyes briefly. Perhaps I do not close my eyes at all, but I miss his next act. It occurs between one breath and the next, one gesture, one act. I carry this moment now like a blindness.

[…] His scent vanishes […]. I miss his arm swinging toward me, and him, holding the shape, the curve of my body on his palm, on the edge of his sudden and fine instrument. I recall no sound. I hear nothing […]. I do not feel his first stroke.¹³⁷

The denial of seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling the torture and torturer does not invalidate the subjective “I,” which remains steady throughout the passage, though it does insist on the impossibility of complete representation. As opposed to associating narrative authority with complete knowledge, Vera offers a lyric voice that promises only fractured representations and that admits some experience cannot be represented conventionally. The more linear beginning and end of the novel cannot contain the stories and silences within, and individual memory cannot offer a counter-record: Thenjiwe and the rural community are gone, Nonceba’s memory is incomplete, and accounts of Mahlathini’s death are conflicting—although the need for critical mourning continues.

The moments of the attacks provide an example of memory’s irruption of history in Benjamin’s terms as well as its imminent critique, and the book circles around them. For Nonceba, “Nothing is said. Not about Thenjiwe. Not about the war. Nothing said can return Thenjiwe to us. Nothing said today or tomorrow. Nothing.”¹³⁸ This moment at which time stops crystallizes Vera’s desire to “revisit the horror of this […] to ask how it was possible.”¹³⁹ Although Mahlathini’s death dissolves and silences a community in the logic of the novel, time begins to flow again for Nonceba once she finds a voice with which to witness what she experienced as well as to come to terms with that violence, and the losses it occasioned, as inescapable companions for the future. Her story ends optimistically in that she has found a way to make life livable again, but it is also (productively, I argue) ambiguous: “A new path has opened for her; she will meet other people at work, build new friendships, have colleagues, discover qualities of her own.”¹⁴⁰ Whereas Cephas, like Benjamin’s angel of history, turns toward the past, Nonceba faces the future.

As discussed above, Cephas’s attempt to reclaim the past by resurrecting Lobengula’s kraal couples historical consciousness and the desire for redemption (for not understanding and then leaving Thenjiwe) in the terms of mourning Brown locates in Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History; however, his attempt also demonstrates the insufficiencies of that project. Brown argues that “Benjamin’s location of historical consciousness ‘within the cultural work of mourning’ allows for the possibility of redeeming historical losses, a redemption that conventionally melancholic attachments to those losses would foreclose. Achieving this redemption through what Benjamin terms an ‘activation’ of the past opens new possibilities in the present as well.”¹⁴¹ This logic depends on the separation of mourning (grief that takes a particular object) from melancholia (unspecified grief), and Brown clearly indicates the focus on past and present in Benjamin’s approach. Cephas’s present is made meaningful by his yearning to learn from the past, in hopes that sheltering techniques used in Lobengula’s hut offer some protection for the present as well. His desire to recreate a sheltering nest by learning to weave together the tenderest branches invokes the earlier associations of Thenjiwe with Zimbabwe’s natural world of land and seeds. Although the novel ends with the idealized, naturalized, and feminized image of those branches woven together, Vera’s consistent critique of such idealizations and the singular histories they produce also suggests that readers should be wary of this romanticized conclusion.

In contrast, Nonceba represents an open-ended future that, while seemingly positive, is neither as explicitly national as Cephas’s is nor redemptive in either its religious or secular senses. She is saved from neither evil nor the debt of social obligation, and the essentialized rooting of identity in the land has given way to an urban future. In the course of the novel, she is propelled forward from vulnerability as injurability to the vulnerability of relationality with all of the messiness that implies. Significantly, relationality also takes the place of the “feminist and ‘free’” subject of human rights that one might anticipate and that would tie Nonceba once more to a particular narrative of the modern subject.¹⁴² Instead, the inconclusive ending to her storyline, particularly as compared with Cephas’s, exemplifies the shift from Benjamin’s concept of the angel of history to Derrida’s concepts of messianic or disjointed time. Ware demonstrates that for Derrida, “disjointed time does not necessarily lead to justice; it simply opens up the heterogeneity crucial for any respect and responsibility toward the other.”¹⁴³ If readers are asked to chart the options offered by the two surviving main characters of the novel, Cephas represents a renewed calling to the singular narrative of national development—symbolized by the movement from the enclosures of Lobengula’s beehive hut to the National Museum. In contrast, Nonceba calls forth an experience of atrocity that includes disfigurement as well as the loss of family and home; however, her future remains open and undetermined through her movement first into the city and then out of the apartment she shares with Cephas and into the larger social—though not necessarily politicized or national—networks.

Notes

1. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, xvi.

2. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, 82.

3. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, 4.

4. Azoulay, “Ending World War II—Visual Literacy Class in Human Rights,” 159.

5. Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 17.

6. Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 50n14.

7. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 99.

8. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 112.

9. Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, 19.

10. Fuster, “More Than Vulnerable: Rethinking Community,” 137.

11. Lloyd, “Towards a Cultural Politics of Vulnerability: Precarious Lives and Ungrievable Deaths,” 93–98.

12. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 114, 110.

13. Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa, 151.

14. Campbell, Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation.

15. Coundouriotis, The People’s Right to the Novel: War Fiction in the Postcolony, 153–59, 159.

16. For analysis of how historiographic debates continue to shape current politics in Zimbabwe, see Ranger’s “Rule by Historiography: The Struggle over the Past in Contemporary Zimbabwe” and Ndlovu-Gastheni, “Mapping Cultural and Colonial Encounters, 1880s–1930s.”

17. Sibanyoni, “‘The Fading Songs of Chimurenga’: Chenjerai Hove and the Subversion of Nationalist Politics in Zimbabwean Literature,” 60.

18. Davis and Samuelson, “History’s Intimate Invasions: Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins,” 177.

19. CCPJZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 284–87. Twenty thousand deaths is the most commonly cited figure.

20. Ncube, “Foreword to the 2007 Edition,” Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, xi.

21. For outstanding analyses of the politics of memorialization and national identity at Heroes’ Acres, see Kriger’s “The Politics of Creating National Heroes: The Search for Political Legitimacy and National Identity” as well as Werbner’s “Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory and Reinscription in Zimbabwe.”

22. Quoted in Alexander et al., Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests’ of Matabeleland, 258. The ZIPRA/ZAPU and ZANLA/ZAPU divisions corresponded to a limited extent to ethnic divisions between the Ndebele and Shona peoples, respectively, though both parties and armed forces were multi-ethnic, had nationalist platforms, and were at various times and in various incarnations united. See, for example, Alexander, et al.’s chapter on “The Rise of Nationalist Violence” in Violence and Memory and Bhebe and Ranger, eds., Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War.

23. Renan, “What is a nation?” 11. See also Anderson, Imagined Communities, 199–200.

24. Quoted in Alexander et al., Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests’ of Matabeleland, 258.

25. Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 57.

26. Werbner, “Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory and Reinscription in Zimbabwe,” 98, 97.

27. See Peter Godwin, “Mugabe stifles resistance with rape and murder,” From the Archive, 15 April 1984; “Peter Godwin finds evidence of brutality as troops lay siege to Matabeleland,” The Sunday Times (London), 6 December 2009: Features, 29; “Stench of death everywhere in Mugabe’s siege of Matabeleland,” The Sunday Times (London), 15 April 1984: 13; and “Zimbabwe massacre bodies found in mine.” The Sunday Times (London), 15 April 1984: 1.

28. Godwin, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, 340–41.

29. Godwin, Mukiwa, 385.

30. Glenn Frankel, “Zimbabwe criticizes foreign media,” The Washington Post, 18 April 1984: A24.

31. Reported in R. W. Apple, Jr., “London duel: business vs. journalism,” The New York Times, 18 April 1984: A3. See also Donald Trelford, “Unruffled surface hides Matabeleland violence,” The Globe and Mail (Canada), 17 April 1984.

32. Donald Trelford, “Journalist who first exposed Matabeleland atrocities,” Newzimbabwe.com, 3 December 2000. Republished http://zimfinalpush2.blogspot.com/2007/06/journalist-who-first-exposed.html.

33. CCJPZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 13.

34. Hope, “Revisiting the Imperial Archive: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and the Decomposition of Englishess,” 52.

35. Mutua, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique, 11.

36. CCJPZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 378.

37. Chan, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands in 1980–1986, Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, cover.

38. Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe and Legal Resources Foundation, Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace: A report into the disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands 1980–1988. A Summary (April 1999).

39. Slaughter, “Narration and International Human Rights Law,” para. 8.

40. CCJP, “A Summary,” Breaking the Silence.

41. Sisulu, “Introduction to the 2007 Edition,” Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, xv.

42. Wilson, “Representing Human Rights Violations: Social Contexts and Subjectivities,” 151.

43. Dudai, “‘Can You Describe This?’ Human Rights Reports and What They Tell Us About the Human Rights Movement,” 249, 250.

44. CCPJZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 196.

45. Wilson, “Representing Human Rights Violations: Social Contexts and Subjectivities,” 139.

46. Wilson, “Representing Human Rights Violations,” 134.

47. CCPJZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 288.

48. CCPJZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 11.

49. Wilson, “Representing Human Rights Violations,” 142.

50. Sisulu, “Introduction to the 2007 Edition,” Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, xiv.

51. CCJPZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 7, 4.

52. Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature, 11.

53. Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning, 4.

54. Wilson, “Representing Human Rights Violations,” 156.

55. Veit-Wild, Patterns of Poetry in Zimbabwe, 35–36.

56. Each of Vera’s six previous novels, in addition to her final uncompleted work, focus on a key moment (the First Chimurenga, 1950s black township life, the Second Chimurenga, the violence of the 1980s, and, reportedly, Mugabe’s Third Chimurenga), reimagined and retold from the margins and illuminating women’s lives.

57. Sibanyoni, “‘The Fading Songs of Chimurenga’: Chenjerai Hove and the Subversion of Nationalist Politics in Zimbabwean Literature,” 71.

58. Hove, Shadows, 91.

59. Hove, Shadows, 96.

60. Hove, Shadows, 108, 110.

61. Werbner, “Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun,” 98.

62. Hove, Shadows, 109–10.

63. Hove, Shadows, 110.

64. Sibanyoni, “‘The Fading Songs of Chimurenga,’” 64.

65. Redfield, “Imagi-Nation: The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning,” 81.

66. Hove, Shadows, 91.

67. David Smith, “Robert Mugabe: from liberation hero to villain to redeemed father of a nation?” The Guardian (UK), 10 May 2013.

68. Kilgore, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, 9, 34–35.

69. Dingani, “Power and Pitfalls of Historical Fiction.”

70. Kilgore, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, 242.

71. Kilgore, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, 248.

72. Kilgore, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, 252.

73. Kilgore, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, 257.

74. One book that responds to the novel’s call is Orner and Holmes, eds., Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives.

75. Driver and Samuelson, “History’s Intimate Invasions: Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins,” 200.

76. Driver and Samuelson, “History’s Intimate Invasions,” 181.

77. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255.

78. Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, 152.

79. Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, 141.

80. Driver and Samuelson, “History’s Intimate Invasions,” 176.

81. Coundouriotis, The People’s Right to the Novel, 208.

82. Alao, in “The Metamorphosis of the ‘Unorthodox’: The Integration and Early Development of the Zimbabwean National Army,” provides a useful overview of how the formation of the Fifth Brigade out of former ZANLA guerrillas, as part of the country’s new Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) has had lasting influence on the failures of the ZNA as an apolitical force.

83. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 9, 51, 135.

84. Butler, “Afterword: After Loss, What Then?” 467.

85. Brown, Politics out of History, 155.

86. Brown, Politics out of History, 139, 142.

87. Horace Campbell writes, “All the major ministries [in Rhodesia], the prime minister’s office, finance, internal security, foreign affairs, combined operations, planning, transport, commerce, and education were organized for the defence of white privilege […]. The victorious guerrillas were either going to dismantle the massive organization of coercion or integrate the freedom fighters into the coercive institutions of the state. The government chose the latter path and ZANU became a party of militarists not very different from the Rhodesian Front in its military organization” (16).

88. Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 257.

89. Brown, Politics out of History, 159.

90. Brown, Politics out of History, 160.

91. Ware, “Dialectic of the Past/Disjuncture of the Future: Derrida and Benjamin on the Concept of Messianism,” 102.

92. Ware, “Dialectic of the Past/Disjuncture of the Future,” 105, 107.

93. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 74.

94. Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 255.

95. Bryce, “Interview with Yvonne Vera, 1 August 2000, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe: ‘Survival is in the Mouth,’” 219.

96. CCPJZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 64.

97. Dudai, “‘Can You Describe This?’” 255.

98. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 89.

99. Bryce, “Interview with Yvonne Vera,” 224.

100. Driver and Samuelson, “History’s Intimate Invasions,” 200.

101. Abani, “Chris Abani Muses on Humanity.”

102. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 73.

103. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 74.

104. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 85.

105. Campbell, Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation, 105.

106. Ranger’s Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matapos Hills of Zimbabwe (1999) details Joseph Nkomo’s visit to the sacred caves of the Mwali cult in 1953, the role the caves and spirit mediums played during the liberation war for both ZANLA and ZIPRA forces, and contemporary struggles over their political significance as well as land use rights.

107. Ranger, “History Has Its Ceiling: The Pressures of the Past in The Stone Virgins,” 203.

108. Ranger has also said he is working on social history entitled Bulawayo Burning to “respon[d] to the challenge of Vera’s Butterfly Burning […]. I do plan to write a ‘real’ history, but one which reads like a novel” (“History,” 204). For a critique of Ranger’s early historiography, see Ndlovu-Gastheni.

109. Ranger, “History Has Its Ceiling: The Pressures of the Past in The Stone Virgins,” 206.

110. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 32.

111. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 45, 46.

112. See Driver and Samuelson for an excellent reading of how Vera’s introduction of Cephas emphasizes his “dangerous proximity” to Sibaso and the sisters (Driver and Samuelson, “History’s Intimate Invasions,” 188).

113. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 149, 161.

114. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 184.

115. Kaarsholm, “Coming to Terms with Violence: Literature and the Development of a Public Sphere in Zimbabwe,” 15.

116. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 3.

117. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 184.

118. In his critique of Mugabe’s rule, Campbell links the status of women in Zimbabwean society to a “crisis of masculinity” resulting from the liberation war. He refers to the “Zulu/Ndebele word doda […] to capture the necessity for African males in southern Africa to demonstrate their virility and masculinity in the face of the hegemonic masculinity of the settlers and those with economic power,” adding that “the socialisation of males as brave warriors became deformed throughout the region and this deformity was especially acute in the aftermath of liberation struggles where the victorious African males could not demonstrate concretely the fruits of their victories” (Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation, 131).

119. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 97.

120. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 83.

121. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 106.

122. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 75.

123. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 122.

124. For a discussion of this symbolism, see Bull-Christiansen, Tales of the Nation: Feminist Nationalism or Patriotic History? Defining National History and Identity in Zimbabwe, 97.

125. Vera, “In Africa There Is a Kind of Spider,” 922.

126. Vera, “In Africa There Is a Kind of Spider,” 924.

127. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 130.

128. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 130.

129. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 62.

130. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 73.

131. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 132.

132. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 159, 133, 128.

133. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 134, 135.

134. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 133.

135. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 91.

136. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 279.

137. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 110–11.

138. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 117.

139. Bryce, “Interview with Yvonne Vera,” 225.

140. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 174.

141. Brown, Politics out of History, 144.

142. Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, 138.

143. Ware, “Dialectic of the Past/Disjuncture of the Future,” 107.

144. Raftopoulos and Mlambo, “Introduction: The Hard Road to Becoming National,” xix.

145. Eppel, “‘Gukurahundi’: The Need for Truth and Reparation,” 46.

2 Disturbing the Archive

Anti-Colonial, Patriotic Nationalism

Human Rights Reporting

Fiction of the Gukurahundi

Haunting and the Failure of National Politics in Chenjerai Hove’s Shadows

Rewriting the Archive from Above and Below in James Kilgore’s We Are All Zimbabweans Now

Anachrony, Gender, and the Future-to-Come in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins

Conclusion: Against Reconciliation

Notes