Abstract
Abstract:
This article looks at inscriptions of whiteness in selected white Zimbabwean narratives.
Through a reading of Andrea Eames’ The Cry of the Go-Away Bird (2011), Alexander
Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2003) and John Eppel’s Absent: the
English Teacher (2009), the argument proposes that white Zimbabwean narratives
situate whiteness within the context of change and marginality in Zimbabwe. The
narratives deal with experiences of change and apprehensions of lived reality marked
by the transfer of power from white minority to black majority rule. Our reading of The
Cry of the Go-Away Bird examines how whiteness in the postcolonial Zimbabwean
state is perceived through an outsider’s gaze, resulting in a kind of double
consciousness within the (racialized, white) subject of the gaze. It is argued that the text
depicts whites as torn between two unreconciled streams of possibility, reinforcing
their sense of alienation. Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight represents
whiteness as a thoroughly ephemeral experience. The meaning of whiteness is
mediated through perpetual physical movement as whites travel from one point to
another. Eppel’s Absent: the English Teacher affords a rethinking of whiteness as an
unstable form of identity contingent on historical and political factors.