Precarious discourses: herstory and the politics of re-articulation in Panashe Chigumadzi’s These Bones Will Rise Again

Abstract

ABSTRACT Zimbabwe’s nationalist historiography is founded on an androcentric political imagination that excludes women from sites of nation-narration and knowledge production. This scenario has sparked a proliferation of women-authored and women-centred historical narratives (‘herstory’) that seek to displace male-centred history (‘(his)tory’) and reinscribe women into the nationalist narrative. Through a close reading of Panashe Chigumadzi’s autobiography, These Bones Will Rise Again (2018), the article offers a context-specific evaluation of herstory’s capacity to transcend the single-eyedness and misogynistic underpinnings of (his)story. I demonstrate that herstory and (his)story are equally monolithic discourses that seek to eliminate each other, and this antagonism undermines the possibilities of a multi-inclusive nationalist history. Overall, I argue that while herstory can be a potent tool for subverting masculinized national memory, it inherits some of the exclusionary tendencies of (his)tory in ways that undermine its overarching goal to de-gender the discursive space. The article finally proposes that herstory necessarily needs to be (re)situated within the tradition of negotiation politics if it has to transcend the faults of (his)tory. To explore these dynamics, I draw on Chimamanda Adichie’s ‘The Dangers of a Single Story’ (2009).