Zimbabwe's creative literatures in the interregnum: 1980–2009

Abstract

Creative literary cultures, unlike the visible political institutions such as education, law and the security forces, are less amenable to total destruction even in the face of the most brutal and dictatorial regimes. The possibilities that creative cultures can be manipulated by tyrants can never be doubted and in post-independence Zimbabwe, the scars of abuse of creativity by the ruling elites abound. However, creative literary cultures work with their own logic; the fact of a social, political and economic meltdown can be the suitable condition of possibility of rebirth of creative art that interrogates this slide. This means that creative cultures can authorize their own narrative patterns in ways that both confirm and interrogate the conditions of the country and of the arts' terms of imaging the Zimbabwe crisis. The subversive element in literature and other creative cultures is that even creative work by official griots is destabilized from within its symbolisms so that when read, listened to and watched on television using different protocols, these forms of art can contradict the collective national memories that a regime such as the one in Zimbabwe seeks to claim as its own. This article demonstrates that Zimbabwean literature in English and the Shona languages and the popular musical creative cultures are born out of, confront, and have been at the forefront of documenting the different kinds of crises that have defined Zimbabwe since 1890. The literature and popular music also depict the crises that any narrative has to endure and suffer; literary narratives can never command sufficient vocabulary that can enable them at any imagined secure vantage perspective to capture all the nuances of the Zimbabwe crises in their political, economic and legal dimensions. This inability to settle on an absolute representation of the Zimbabwe crises can be viewed as a welcome development if it should be expected that literature's images and metaphors are flexible enough to anticipate the shifting nature of the crises and allow varied interpretations.