Zimbabwe in Verse: Anthologizing an Alternative Historiography

The study of Anglophone African literature has predominantly focused on fiction, and primarily the novel form. Drama's relation to orature and to indigenous performance histories has made it a similarly significant form for African literature. Poetry, however, has received less attention, with most studies focusing on single-authored works. This article proposes an alternative approach, focusing not simply on individual poems or the corpus of individual poets but on the poetry anthology as a national genre. In the shadow of renewed reactionary nationalist movements across the globe, collecting literature offers other ways to conceive of the collective. Zimbabwe offers a uniquely apt case to examine these questions as part of a broader inquiry into poetry and race. Gaining independence much later than most formerly colonized African nations, Zimbabwe shares with other settler colonies a history of racial subjugation, and aesthetic authority has mirrored political power to a large extent. Anthologies, with the apparatuses of selection, prefaces and other paratexts, and distinctive organizing principles for the contents demonstrate the shifting agendas of literary authorities in constructing and reconstructing an imagined community, the nation, as a coherent and representative whole. In a formerly segregated and ethno-linguisticly diverse context, anthologies also reflect reckonings with racism and ethnocentrism that go unspoken otherwise. This article examines anthologies published in Zimbabwe in its long transformation from Rhodesia to iconic independent nation to precarious postcolony to consider how material text and its digital afterlives allow poets who are also editors to shape a plurality of national assemblies, a vital site for democratic national historiography.