The Place of Tears: the novel and politics in modern Zimbabwe (review)

A refreshing new addition to African literary criticism, Primorac’s The Place of Tears is ‘an exploration of the ways in which Zimbabwean fictional texts rehearse, refract and interrogate political themes and events’ (p. 2). Although the author’s intentions are straightforward enough, the book is structured rather like a doctoral dissertation, forcing the reader to work much harder than is necessary. Despite this lack of reader-friendliness, if readers can push through the first eighty pages or so, or are able to enjoy the author’s incessant references to philosophy, they will be duly rewarded.

Readers who negotiate her account of the philosophical infrastructure gain a much fuller understanding when specific pieces of Zimbabwean literature are deconstructed using Primorac’s methodology. It is this reader’s opinion that the author’s work would have benefited from leaning a little less on Mikhail Bakhtin; instead, she might have interwoven his and other philosophical perspectives throughout her book, allowing the literature she discusses to call more of the shots. My point is that The Place of Tears embraces a specifically Eurocentric philosophical perspective. The book’s overuse of Bakhtin aside, it seems strange that the author should turn to Eastern European philosophers, such as Aleksandar Flaker and Gajo Peles, but fail to refer to, or even cite, many relevant African philosophers. This is not to say that Primorac’s methodology is not productive, or not innovative. For instance, The Place of Tears usefully and extensively discusses the differences between urban and rural spaces. However, works such as Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject (1996) are glaringly absent from her account. Such philosophical silences within the intellectual spaces in which Primorac places her study detract from the socio-political connections she makes vis-à-vis literary studies.

Another reason why Primorac’s work does not do justice to its socio-political context is that she fails to engage respectfully with those scholars she indirectly labels as ‘Afro-radicals’ (pp. 7–9). Invoking the work of Achille Mbembe, the author even goes so far as to pair this group of intellectuals with ‘nativists’ (pp. 7–9). While both ‘Afro-radicals’ and ‘nativists’ may indeed exist, Primorac neither acknowledges any contributions that these intellectuals may have made, nor does she provide more than superficial problematizing of their work; her argument remains one-sided. With that said, her approach, while flawed, does pave the way for much-needed criticism and analysis of Marechera scholarship (pp. 41–4). Nonetheless, her failure to acknowledge ambiguities within the field of African literature disengages The Place of Tears from many socio-political discourses that are of the utmost relevance to the study of Africa.

Happily, the hundred or so pages that follow Primorac’s methodology are unquestionably in tune with Zimbabwe’s layered socio-political histories. The author’s extensive research capabilities are evident throughout her book and the reader feels that Primorac has encountered the full range of Zimbabwean literature. Such thorough research allows the author to apply her methodology in ways that achieve poignant insights and depths. Her analysis of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions as a Bildungsroman (pp. 112–16) is compelling, imaginative and particularly poignant in the light of Dangarembga’s recently released sequel, The Book of Not (2006). Additionally, Primorac’s theorizations of space-time, specifically her re-conceptualization(s) of ‘chronotope’, transform the ways in which Zimbabwean literature can be read and interpreted. Therefore, while The Place of Tears could benefit from some major restructuring, the book remains an invaluable addition to Zimbabwean literary scholarship, and African literature as a whole.