The Memory of Violence: trauma in the writings of Alexander Kanengoni and Yvonne Vera and the idea of unreconciled citizenship in Zimbabwe

Abstract

The 2000s have been years of political violence, agricultural and economic degeneration, and the suppression of liberties in Zimbabwe. As the nation counts down towards the 2005 parliamentary elections-25 years after a hardwon independence that promised peace, prosperity, and freedom-it might be time to reflect, not on the chronology of decline, but on its impact upon the idea of citizenship and the idea of individuals as citizens. There is a dual problematique here, the first part of which was expressed in political scientific literature comparatively recently,2 to do with the extent that communitarianism is embedded in humanity as a polis,3 and the extent of individual freedom founded on an agency answerable finally only to a 'natural law' of universal justice. This has been typified as a Hegelian/Kantian divide; that the divide is artificial has been pointed out by many.4 However, what has not been indicated sufficiently, and this is the second part of the problematique, is just how messy both the polis and the individual can be. In Zimbabwe, the polis has been hijacked by the party, so that the idea of citizen rights has been funnelled into rights for party loyalists; and the citizen, far from revelling in his or her association with natural justice, is deprived and traumatised. In short, the preoccupation with normative values has left little apparatus to deal with the abnormative and the actuality of political life under an increasingly totalitarian government. Anglophonic philosophers and theorists have written little originally on despair, either communal or individual despair. French thinkers have, but have drawn from psychoanalytical and linguistic traditions far removed from those seemingly apparent in Africa. They have often privileged creative writing, fiction, in their reflectionsas if no clinical revelation could ever be carried so far into abjection as Celine writing about the spilt guts of a World War I battlefield.5 In this article, too, we turn to literature-that written in Zimbabwe itself-and seek to illustrate a condition