Playing with the Tensions between Animal and Human Allegories in Ignatius Mabasa’s Novel Imbwa Yemunhu [Youdog]

This article aims to uncover how Ignatius Mabasa’s novel Imbwa Yemunhu [Youdog] (2013) uses story, narrative, and allegory as symbolical responses to a range of crises in contemporary Zimbabwe. The article analyzes how human experiences are recreated in the narrative form of allegory. Musa, the main character of the novel, reflects on and refracts his multiple lives through the prisms of hedonistic, nationalist, and Christological allegories. Allegories in Imbwa Yemunhu are meant to enable the protagonist to regain self-mastery, renegotiate the terms of his relationship to society, and arrest an inexorable descent into a life of depravity. However, while in this article I read the narrative strands in the novel as allegories, I also show that the songs and poems in Imbwa Yemunhu act as stand-alone narratives even as they complement, and conflict with, the truth claims of the allegories.