From: Meg Harris <meg_harris-AT-rdsinc.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 1997 10:53:00
Subject: RE: Zimbabwe literature search--Nehanda


Below is a record that mentions Nehanda and literature.  This record was found on the Contemporary Women's Issues database.  Anyone interested in learning more about the product may contact me directly.

TITLE:          Woman in Words:  Images of Zimbabwean Women in Literature.
ANNOT. TITLE:   Analysis of depictions of women in Zimbabwean literature, 
                which range from disgusting to visionary.
AUTHOR:         Hove, Chenjerai
SOURCE:         WomanPlus 1(2):15-6, May 1996.
WORD COUNT:     1393
KEY TERMS:      Literature
GEO. AREA:      Sub-Saharan Africa;  Zimbabwe
FULL-TEXT:
 Zimbabwean literary texts have divergent portrayals of woman.  The
 depictions range from the negative to the disgusting, from the evil woman
 to the perfect grandmother-figure who is probably blind, but is endowed
 with a new vision of life.  In this analysis, it is only possible to take
 a glimpse of some of the main trends in the projection of woman in the
 literature of the land.
  
 Ndebele pet, N.S. Sigogo, in one of this poems about a woman, NoNtando,
 bemoans her evasiveness in love.
  
 `When we met in the woods
  
 You whispered a great tune:
  
 Promising to die by my side.
  
 But now you have parted away;
  
 Laying my soul in a cold tomb:
  
 NoNtando, tell me why?'
  
 The woman is an object of love, but when she herself defines the man's
 love as inadequate, he feels he has been left `in the bush of
 abandonment'.  He decides to curse her betrayal by going to far off lands
 `where no bird sings your name'.
  
 Woman in Zimbabwean literature has numerous shades or images.  A betrayer,
 like Judas Iscariot.  A loved one, shying away from love, but eventually
 succumbing, as in J.C. Kumbirai's popular poem, `Kana Wamutanga Musikana'.
  In that widely studied poem, the woman has no initiative in love,
 pretending not to be interested in the man's amorous courtship and
 advances.  But once she says `yes', her love bursts out like a dam
 overflooding.
  
 The typical mother-figure is Nehanda, the spiritual leader of the last
 century who had the motherly courage to fight against the grabbing of the
 land by the settlers in the 1890s.  Nehanda, as she fights for the land,
 becomes also a piece of earth, `mwana wevhu', (child of the soil).  She
 is, in Zimbabwean literature, the woman who sees herself as symbolizing
 the fertility of the land, like all grandmothers that are portrayed by
 Zimbabwean writers.  The old woman is a mother-visionary, refusing to
 succumb to her defilement which also becomes symbolic of the defilement of
 the land's virginity by foreigners who have no respect for local shrines.
 She is, indeed, a shrine.
  
 In fact, the portrayals of women in most Zimbabwean literature begins with
 the woman as a lover, then woman as `my mother' pinnacle of her womanhood.
  Rarely does one come across woman as wife, in the prime of motherhood.
  
 There is also woman prostitute, as in Marechera's `House of Hunger', when
 woman is simply a `bitch'.  In one of Marechera's stories, woman is a
 sexual aberration.  When she is raped in the street, everyone comes to
 watch with outbursts of mirth.  And when she waits in her room, she
 unashamedly waits for a chain of lovers who make love to her before
 beating her up.  The eye of the child-narrator is a horrified one, haunted
 by the woman's shameless abundance of lovers as well as the woman's
 immortality.  In Marechera, woman is not symbolized by the romanticized
 mother-figure-cumvisionary of Nehanda.  The writer does not hesitate to
 use all the four-letter words that depict her as a symbol of moral-
 spiritual decay.
  
 Woman as prostitute also predominates Shimmer Chinodya's `Farai's Girls'.
 Farai, a young, flamboyant young man, has several women whom he treats as
 sexual objects.  His life is virtually a sexual rampage unlimited by any
 mortality.  The women are willing participants in their role as sex
 objects.
  
 If it so happens that the mother-figure is depicted, the woman transforms
 to her role of giving birth.  The act of delivering a child is the
 manifestation of her womanhood whose mission is to perpetuate the race.
 The final image in Shimmer Chinodya's `Harvest of Thorns' is of Benjamin
 Tichafa visiting his wife in hospital.  She has given birth, and as the
 husband gazes at the newborn child, he is gazing at his destiny.  He has
 harvested only thorns in life, and so leaves his vision of a future to the
 childman newly born to him.
  
 Literature can be analyzed in terms of `victims versus victimizers'.  In
 other words, we can talk of the powerful and the weak in every sense of
 the words, culturally, politically and otherwise.  As a projection of
 desire, literature can also be a search for the ideal, a critical
 examination of what is, and what ought to be.
  
 In Yvonne Vera's novel, `Without a Name', the woman character, Mazvita
 loses her identity in the midst of war.  By losing her name, she has lost
 her identity in circumstances not of her own creation.  She thus becomes a
 victim.  But as a victim, she does not succumb to her anonymity.  Her
 search for a name becomes symbolic of her search for her new personality,
 a new vision.  The writer, a woman herself, empowers her and enables the
 character to transform from being a victim to a visionary.  The story then
 becomes a story of the search for the woman's humanity and a new social
 position.  In the process, she questions so many values and beliefs taken
 for granted by those who would victimize her.
  
 The woman as victim is also the dominant figure in Tsitsi Dangarembga's
 `Nervous Conditions'.  The men are monstrous, and the women are `angels'.
 Babamukuru is a disfigured human being, without feelings for others,
 obsessed with keeping a certain `image of himself'.  Everyone is part of
 his image, so the man becomes a bizarre character poised against those
 women whose spirit wants to fly if it were not caged by his monstrous
 father-figured image.
  
 Chenjerai Hove's novel, `Bones', is another Zimbabwean novel that has
 depicted women as central characters.  By focusing on woman as the centre,
 the novel attempts to take the two central characters on a journey of self-
 discovery.  They are, at the beginning, as seen by others.  By the time
 the story ends, they are seeing themselves.  The young girl, Janifa,
 transforms from the `described' and `named' to the one doing the naming. 
 She is able to name her own destiny after discovering that destinies are
 personal as well as collective dreams.  She realizes that she is one of
 the major actors in the activity of naming and defining.
  
 Of course, it is clear that the two young women in `Bones' are grandmother-
 figures, with a vision moulded from their experience.  With such a
 portrayal, the writer does not fully escape the temptation to model woman
 on the grandmother-figure like Nehanda.  It could be argued that the two
 women characters, Marita and Janifa, are young Nehandas.  The traditional
 perception here is implied in the sense that traditional believes that the
 woman can only be wise in old age.
  
 Most Shona literature with the theme of the rural-urban migration takes a
 country boy, imbues him with dreams of the city of glowing lights, and
 eventually makes him escape the horrendous countryside which he hates.
 Such a one is Lucifer, in Charles Mungoshi's classic, `Waiting for The
 Rain'.  The hatred which Lucifer has of the decaying countryside becomes
 even a form of self-hate.  For Lucifer, with his bitterness, `Home' is the:
  
  
 `Aftermath of an invisible war
  
 A heap of dust and rubble
  
 White immobile heat on the
  
 sweltering and (...)
  
 The ancient woman's skirts
  
 give off the odor of trapped time...
  
 Equipped with such anger and pain, the young male would, in the rural-
 urban migration theme, leave home for the city and its luring lights which
 eventually dazzle the man's desires and imagination.  Our young man
 becomes a victim of the city's temptations of materials goods.  And if he
 does not get a job in order to earn money to buy the goods, he becomes a
 thief, corrupted by the city's glow of goods in shop windows.
  
 But one of the corrupting forces in the city is woman.  The Muchanetas of
 the city capture the young man's heart and soul to the point where he is
 corrupted that he forgets the country where he comes from.  Thus, woman
 becomes a symbol of corruption, defiling the supposedly `clean' men.  She
 becomes, in such portrayals, one of the evils of the city.
  
 One other interesting portrayal of woman in Zimbabwen literature is `woman
 as gossiper'.  This is a theme worth pursuing in greater depth in
 traversing the literary landscape of the literature of the land,
 especially dramatic works.  In this article, mention of it is enough to
 stimulate the reader to follow that line and discover interesting
 revelations and their meaning in society as a whole.

 Copyright 1996 Zimbabwe Women's Resource Centre and Network
PUB. COUNTRY:   United States
PUB. TYPE:      Journal
RDS RECORD TYPE: Fulltext
RECORD ID:      01013817



Meg Harris

meg_harris-AT-rdsinc.com
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Responsive Database Services, Inc.
producer of Contemporary Women's Issues database
visit our web site:  http:\\www.rdsinc.com