Hewing Fiction from History: The Writing of History, Conflict and Trauma in House of Stone

Abstract

This article is based on a public lecture I gave at Oxford University in May 2019. It looks at my critically acclaimed novel House of Stone and the role of literature in shaping the complex human experience, particularly through conflict and trauma. House of Stone explores Zimbabwe’s history, from the fall of Rhodesia right through the early years of Zimbabwe, during Gukurahundi, to the contemporary moment in 2007, going back in time and memory to the arrival of Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company in the late 19th Century. In looking at literature and trauma, the article analyses the relationship between the particular and the universal and the importance of nuance when approaching complex lives written on the page. In considering nuance, I explore the fascinating process of hewing fiction from history, and how it is that fiction does something different from the narration of history as ‘real events’. In looking at the novel as historical fiction, importance is placed on the connections and continuities between various demarcated histories and relationships – such as what we think of as pre- and post-independence, colonialism and post-colonialism, and liberation war and post-independence genocide. Equally important is the challenge of how to present the violence inherent in this history. Zimbabwe has had a long, violent, bloody history, from the 1890 s right through the 1970s and the 1980s to the contemporary moment of the novel, the 2000s. How does one not wear down the reader with ‘violence fatigue’? Which violence should one portray and how? The article considers the various ways in which the novel portrays violence and the reasons for some of these strategies. At the heart of the question about violence and its portrayal in fiction is the question of how to give the novel a human, rather than inhuman, shape – the shape of humanity. It would be all too easy to fall into the trap of portraying a continuous violence that could quickly become gratuitous and pornographic, its own reason for being.