trauma and resilience

Trauma and violence of all kinds--against women, against colonized subjects, against workers, against loved ones--pervades this novel. The pervasiveness of the violence is a reflection of the colonial structure under which Phephelaphi and Fumbatha are living, a structure that can only guarantee its authority through force and coercion. That said, the author’s determination to describe violent events through beautiful figurative language constitutes an attempt to reclaim Zimbabwe’s history and to face and reject the violence that mars the country’s past.

All of the character’s have faced trauma and violence in their lives. Phephelaphi witnessed her mother’s murder. Fumbatha was born in the same year that his father was hanged. Getrude was shot by a white police officer. As Fumbatha reveals in Chapter 19, Zandile once poured “an evil pt of cooking oil...all over her husband’s first wife till her skin flapped from her body and blew out like a blanket” and once “burnt off her husband’s entire arm with another pot of boiling water” (122). The specificity of the claim against Zandile is emblematic of this novel’s strategy and attitude towards violence as a whole. Rather than skip over the violent moments in the characters’ lives, the narrative lingers over them, giving an entire chapter to Phephelaphi’s induced abortion and to her self-immolation, as well as to the 17 men’s hanging at the beginning of the book. The length of the description clearly suggests the novel’s belief that it is important to face violence and to not look away.