Manning the Nation. Father Figures in Zimbabwean Literature and Society

I - 'Why don't you tell the children a story?': Father figures in three Zimbabwean short stories

1 ‘Why don’t you tell the children a story?’: Father figures in three Zimbabwean short stories KIZITO Z. MUCHEMWA This chapter explores the tensions that inhabit fictional narratives of the nation in the short stories by Charles Mungoshi (‘The Sins of the Fathers’), Nevanji Madanhire (‘The Grim Reaper’s Car’), and Freedom Nyamubaya (‘That Special Place’).1 Psychic struggles mark the relations between fathers (real, putative, imaginary and symbolic) and their children, especially sons. The space that separates children from their fathers engenders emotions of endearment strangely mixed with violence. Paternity is used as a trope for scripting identity – both personal and national. Where father figures are associated, directly and indirectly, with the liberation struggle, the gun is an extension of this trope of (auto)biography. This chapter examines – in the ‘fathering’ of stories of individuals and the nation – the dynamics of continuity in discontinuity and the significance of democratic expression in the creation of father-and-child stories. The chapter is written against a backdrop of metaphors of national sovereignty produced by cultural essentialists of various persuasions,2 who have been co-opted by post-colonial ruling elites to legitimate a regime that uses fatherhood to foreclose political debate. The historian Terence Ranger (2005) has identified the production of partisan patriotic history that academics from a variety of disciplines are currently contesting. Here, we seek to critically examine literature’s contribution to constructions of nationalist fatherhood and manhood. In current unproblematic narratives of the nation generated by the ZANU-PF government, the father figure serves to provide an uncontested, benevolent authorship of the nation and the state. In a posthumous rehabilitation of Joshua Nkomo and a travesty of the holy trinity,3 Nkomo is re-claimed as father of the nation, Simon Muzenda reconstructed as its ‘soul’ and Robert Mugabe offered as the son who interprets and implements its essence. The three stories selected here provide counter-narratives to the discourse of hegemonic fatherhood, masculinity, and ethnicity as they affect constructions of the nation and its historiography. Absent fathers, tyrannical fathers, weak fathers, true fathers, putative fathers abound in Zimbabwean fiction. Dambudzo Marechera and Charles Mungoshi frame 1 the psychological and cultural terrain in which fathers and their children wrestle for the power to tell stories. This terrain is traversed by a later generation of writers with more nuanced approaches to the relationship between narrative power and gender. Fathering and speaking/writing tropes in constructions of identity manifest themselves at the level of self, family, community, and nation. This imbrication determines the discourse of authorship, authority, and creation in the three short stories. Contrary to traditional story-telling, the origins of the Zimbabwean short story in English has been patriarchal in both authorship and context of creation. Phallic symbols are then deployed to describe the creative process and the stories. The phallus, the gun and pen are often conflated as instruments of writing these texts in articulations of violence and masculinity. Story-telling becomes a violent, masculine, and patriotic act and the authoritarian father figure sees the son/historical narrative as an autonomous text that cannot deviate from a given script. The story-telling urge and atavism associated with sexualised creativity inevitably leads to the exclusion of other storytellers from sites of narration. Seamless and self-replicating narratives guarantee continuity of the ancestral line. The three stories discussed here subvert a re-configured official Zimbabwean masculinity that has over-determined fatherhood and nationhood . I want to place the father figure in the context of the re-tribalisation of Zimbabwean society, the obsession with self-perpetuation, self-replication of a militarised masculinity, and narrative closure in narrations of self and nation as articulated by Rwafa in ‘Sins of the Fathers’, the Grim Reaper in ‘The Grim Reaper’s Car’, and Nyathi in ‘That Special Place’. Children struggle with strong, tyrannical fathers to terminate hegemonic narratives leading to de-tribalisation, re-gendering, and re-articulation of nationhood. Narratives, rituals, and symbols are viewed as cultural productions that reveal power relations in society and telling and performance are the instruments of what Eric Hobsbawm (1983:3) calls ‘routinization or bureaucratization ’ in the invention of tradition that has seen a hagiographic packaging of history, culture, funerals and public holidays. Current cultural interventions by the state in Zimbabwe, which are a quest for legitimation, are manifestations of what Guy Debord (1994) called the ‘society of the spectacle’. Spectacle is about performance and visuality of power, a narcissistic admiration of self by those that...