Entrenched in politics and culture: negotiations of violence in selected texts by Dambudzo Marechera, Shimmer Chinodya, Valerie Tagwira and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Abstract

This study investigates the negotiation of violence by analysing how the selected texts, The House of Hunger by Damudzo Marechera, Harvest of Thorns by Shimmer Chinodya, The Uncertainty of Hope by Valerie Tagwira and Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie represent characters responding to different forms of violence. I have adopted postcolonial theory, psychoanalytic theory, resilience theory and relevant strands of feminism as lenses in my literary analysis investigating how the selected corpus represents negotiations of violence. The novels, novella and short stories depict colonisation, anti-colonial wars and post-independence ethnic and cultural conflicts as the causes of outbreaks of violence. The narratives also portray individual and collective characters navigating violence by either acquiescing or fighting its manifestations in specific political, cultural, and socio-economic contexts. I will analyse textual representations of violence, trauma, and resistance to demonstrate how the authors give fresh insights into how characters negotiate spaces colonial and postcolonial violence creates in their experience. The texts depict oppressed individuals and communities using different strategies to resist political and cultural forms of violence. Those strategies are negotiations of violence entrenched in colonial and postcolonial political systems and cultures. I read negotiation of violence as reflected in different ways by characters as they remember, interpret, narrate, and memorialise their experiences of violence.