Representation of Violence against Women in Zimbabwean Fiction: A Collection of Short Stories

This thesis is a collection of loosely linked short stories entitled Homewards, resulting from research on the representation of violence against women in Zimbabwean fiction. The stories mainly explore themes of violence and sexual violence, dislocation and displacement, silence and articulation, and how the Zimbabwe/South Africa border, temporary and informal settlements, and the undocumented migrant status have become additional spaces for violence against Zimbabwean women. The concern of the creative work is the tension between history, personal stories and fiction. Homewards is based on Zimbabwean women's lived experiences displaced by violence and who at the time of writing were living in the diaspora in Johannesburg and the border town of Musina in South Africa. The project's practical, sociological aspect involved conducting interviews and creative writing workshops with the participants to collect personal accounts and narratives from refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants of gender-based violence experiences. The stories and accounts were used as the inspiration and ethical guide for writing about difficult and sensitive subjects, especially the taboo topics of sexual violence and rape. The choice of short stories as the creative project was influenced by emerging trends and arguments in academia, literary criticism and fiction that the most useful way to present and represent Zimbabwe, within the context of highly contested accounts of the past and the recent past, is to acknowledge multiple experiences. This project contributes to the larger project of restorying and re- examining Zimbabwe's past and challenging historiographic conventions of how Zimbabwe's past is celebrated and remembered. The project is predicated on the realisation of the ways women's voices have been marginalised in the ever-urgent struggle over Zimbabwe's past and recent history. The stories in Homewards add to the growing body of women's contributions that complement and problematise dominant historical and official accounts and other artistic representations to resist what Kizito Muchemwa (2005) calls 'the slipping into oblivion of unacknowledged, unspoken and unwritten traumas of history'.