Women and the national agenda in Mashingaidze Gomo’s A fine madness (2010)

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ABSTRACTThis article interrogates the representation of women in Mashingaidze Gomo’s A fine madness through the prism of feminist postcolonial theory. Feminist postcolonial theorists such as Gayatri Chakrobarty Spivak have identified points of intersection between imperialism, patriarchy and nationalism in what has come to be known as ‘the double/triple oppression of women’. Mashingaidze Gomo’s A fine madness appropriates the anti-imperialist ideology of the Robert Mugabe regime to engage economic/political challenges facing Zimbabwe/Africa in the context of the neoliberal global order. In wrestling with these issues, Gomo adopts an Afro-radical approach that subsumes the concerns of women in the broader rhetoric of national and continental decolonisation. The role of women in discourses of nationhood remains a topical subject not only in Zimbabwe but also in Africa as a whole. In view of this, I argue that discourses of nationhood and sovereignty often tend to be couched in patriarchal terms that ignore the concerns of women. In post-2000 Zimbabwe, discourses of national sovereignty which have been promoted by the Mugabe regime, constructed women, not as active participants and contributors to the national project, but as symbolic figures whose primary role is to support men in their heroic ‘national’ endeavours.