The unsettling of colonialist and nationalist spaces : John Eppel's writings on Zimbabwe

Abstract

The Rhodesian and Zimbabwean space-time involved the creation and adoption of hegemonic discourses that influenced ways of behavior, thinking, perceiving reality and particular ways of identity construction based on mystifying nationalisms. In raced and politically charged spaces, such grand narratives depended, for their currency, on stereotypes, essentialisms, domination and dichotomization of ‘nation as narration’. The metanarratives of the two spaces functioned as discursive tools for the legitimation of particular forms of exclusions, elisions and distortions. As discursive and polemical literary tools, these discourses always found sustenance and perpetuation in the existence of a different other. In other words, these constructed narratives sought to use difference as a basis for scapegoating and naturalizing racial, economic, political and resource asymmetries in the Rhodesian and Zimbabwean spaces. Power was wielded not in the service of, but against, the majority who are marginalized. This study explores John Eppel’s writings on the constructions of both Rhodesia and Zimbabwe as ideological spaces for the legitimation of power based on class, race and politics. I argue that Eppel’s selected writings are a literary intervention that proffers a satirically dissident critique of the foundational myths, symbols and narratives of Rhodesian and Zimbabwean space-time. The study argues that Eppel offers literary resistance to unproblematized identity compositions predicated on socially constructed but skewed categories that limit the contours of belonging and citizenship. The Rhodesian space is viewed as a palimpsest upon which is overwritten the Zimbabwean patriotic discourse that also authorize racism, marginalization, power abuse and other forms of exclusion. In examining Eppel’s satiric disruption of both spaces, I use certain strands of the Postcolonial Theory that problematize issues of nation, identity, race, tribe and power. Its usefulness lies in its rejection of fixities, of absolutes and in its general counter-hegemonic thrust. I therefore invoke the theorizations of Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Maria Lara, Paul Gilroy, Mikhail Bakhtin and Benita Parry. These form the theoretical base with which the study confronts Eppel’s writings on Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. The focal texts used are: Absent: The English Teacher (2009), selected short stories in White Man Crawling (2007) and The Caruso of Colleen Bawn (2004), The Holy Innocents (2002), Hatchings (2006), selected poems from Spoils of War (1989), Songs my Country Taught me: Selected Poems 1965-2005(2005) and D.G.G.Berry’s The Great North Road (1992). I conclude by arguing that Eppel creates a fictional life-world where race, origin, politics, class and culture are figured as polarizing identity markers that should be re-negotiated and even transcended in order to materialize a more inclusive multicultural society. To the extent that both the colonial and post-independence eras cross-fertilize each other in terms of occlusions, creating hegemonic narratives, resort to race, violence, silencing and erasure of certain subjectivities, Eppel advocates the ‘hatching’ of a new national, moral and inclusive ethos that supersedes the claustrophobia of both spaces.