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5. The Consolidation of Voice: White Farmers’ Autobiographies & the Narration of Experience after 2000
- Weaver Press
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149 The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. – Milan Kundera1 Introduction This chapter looks at memoirs written by white farmers since 2000. They are one of the key ways that the farmers have chosen to relate the ordeals they have been through, and as a result provide an insight into their understandings of place, race and belonging within Zimbabwe. Such understandings of the past have a major impact on people’s beliefs and outlooks. For Edward Said, ‘How we formulate or represent the past shapes our understanding and views of the present’. It also allows us to think about how people pit ‘versions of the past against each other’.2 Both Paul Cohen and Luise White have shown how texts often compete with each other to represent the past for certain groups or agendas.3 ‘The past’, or the events that did or did not happen, are no longer what is primarily at issue. Rather it is how beliefs of that past impact on the actions and reactions of the protagonists. Said remarks on this in a way that is remarkably apt for the Zimbabwean context: More important than the past itself, therefore, is its bearing upon cultural attitudes in the present. For reasons that are partly embedded in the imperial experience, the old divisions between colonizer and colonized have reemerged … which has entailed defensiveness, various kinds of rhetorical and ideological combat, and a simmering hostility that is quite likely to trigger devastating wars – in some cases it already has.4 The Consolidation of Voice White Farmers’ Autobiographies & the Narration of Experience after 2000 5 150 The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Farmers’ Voices from Zimbabwe Discourse & Myth Much has been made of the rhetoric employed by Mugabe and his supporters to exonerate their actions in the countryside, but the same attention and critique has not been applied to how white farmers and their supporters frame discussions over land issues.5 Ironically, what emerges from the following analysis is that the discourse of the white farmers is just as rooted in the past as that of ZANU-PF.6 For Michel Foucault, a discourse was ‘groups of statements which provide a language for talking about a particular topic at a particular historical moment’.7 Nicholas Dirks expanded on this, saying that discourse is ‘about the conditions under which the world presents itself as real, about the way institutions and historical practices become regimes of truth and of possibility itself’.8 Zimbabwe’s white farming community has such ‘regimes of truth’, that inform and mould their responses to the land reforms. The literary reaction of farmers to the land occupations has been considerable . Novels, memoirs, autobiographies, countless opinion pieces, articles and letters as well as websites have been dedicated to telling their story. But the context of the writing has not been confined to recent events. The space has been opened up for the telling of farming or pastoral experiences reaching deep into the past. Thus the discursive threshold of 2000, marked by the land occupations and state-sponsored violence, implies two things.9 Firstly, it is a point that allows such writing to come to the fore, containing sentiments and beliefs that previously had few avenues of expression. For example, the fears of the farming community about life in independent Zimbabwe were seemingly shelved once Mugabe adopted such a pacifying and reconciliatory tone with white farmers.10 Secondly, these works have become agents in the identity politics of the white farmers, cultural artefacts of the community that represent their beliefs, and their understandings of their history and of their place in independent Zimbabwe. Indeed, as Andrew van der Vlies has noted: Many scholars have explored the role of books and writers in the construction of postcolonial national identities, and there is by now a large body of work in the field. Timothy Brennan, for instance, observes that nations are ‘imaginary constructs’ whose existence depends on ‘an apparatus of cultural [54.152.43.79] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:59 GMT) 151 The Consolidation of Voice fictions in which imaginative literature plays a decisive role’; Homi Bhabha suggests that the ‘repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative’ informs the ‘conceptual ambivalence’ of national identity – that it is literally a case of ‘writing the nation’.11 This ‘writing of the nation’ is important in the Rhodesian/Zimbabwean case. Rhodesia, as a place and as a nation, no longer exists but it still...