Food, Gender and the Crisis in Zimbabwe: An Approach to Virginia Phiri’s Highway Queen and Valerie Tagwira’s the Uncertainty of Hope

Abstract

ABSTRACT Beyond its ubiquitous functions in human physiology, food is one of the most distinctively experienced cultured phenomena. Its significance varies in time and across categories of space, race, religion, traditions, economic status and gender. Over the years, analyses of intersections and inter-connections of time, food cultures and gendered power have revealed a long history of evolutionary human identities based on temporal and sometimes timeless arbitrary ascriptions of gender to various aspects of food and food traditions. This makes food a convenient site to understand time and gender, firstly, as distinct concepts constructed by humans to structure life for the ease of its negotiation, and secondly as interconnected phenomena reflecting the evolutionary trajectory of social identities. This paper uses the novels Highway Queen and The Uncertainty of Hope to examine how evoked gendered food cultures reflect (on) gender identities in a flux, particularly some of the defining aspects of the Zimbabwean crisis time-space. Borrowing from Warren’s work on the unsteadiness of the male breadwinner as a masculine identity, our textual analysis shows that as a symbolic cultural leitmotif that is synonymous with gender, food demonstrates gendered ways in which the Zimbabwean crisis is experienced, perceived and known.