Sonic Sensibility: Reading the Soundscape in Zimbabwean Diasporic Literary Works

Abstract

ABSTRACT Representations of Zimbabwean migrants to South Africa, in scholarship as well as the media, have tended to focus on the often spectacular violence experienced by these migrants. Southern African literary criticism, too, has often privileged the visual, the ocular, and the spectacle. In this article, I focus on a different sensory dimension: the literary representation of sound. I show how sound and soundscapes, as represented in selected literary works, can illuminate everyday aspects of migratory experiences. I focus on aurality, arguing that listening provides a new methodology for reading and interpreting migrant fiction about the lived experiences of Black Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa. Building on theories of the soundscape, I examine how literary representations of migrant listening practices are deployed to comment on lived experiences, and how migrant literary characters’ encounters with other migrants illuminate the layered dimensions of forced migration. I argue that a sound-focused analysis of literary works, rather than a focus on the representation of visual spectacle and description, can give readers access to the sense of rootlessness experienced by migrants. Such an aural approach demonstrates that literary and creative works are useful archives of subverted and denied claims of belonging premised on ancestry and geography.