Temporal Wounds And Fugitive Futurities: Waiting As Resistance In Postcolonial Zimbabwean Narratives
Auteurs : Kanté Lassana .
Résumé
The question of being in and by time in postcolonial world interrogates the elaboration of future through the exploration’s politics of experiences. Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera conceptualize in This Mournable Body (2018) and The Stone Virgins (2004) the alternative of temporality, linear progressive time in the postcolonial Zimbabwean literature. They theorize alternative temporalities in alternative postcolonial contexts. The present paper is a study of the way This Mournable Body and The Stone Virgins make resistance against colonial-modernist logics of time as an image of universal representation and foreground divided, cyclical, and embodied temporalities rooted in trauma, exploitation, and the rupture within history. This research paper challenges the dominant and linear conception of chrono-normativity. Trauma, gendered violence, and disillusionment shaped the representative image of alternative temporality. This article is an analysis of the way Dangarembga and Vera utilize narrative tools and forms with feminist aesthetics to disrupt colonial and patriarchal understanding of time. In this work, we seek to analyze futures in the Zimbabwean contextual precarious situations. This article will adopt a qualitative approach based on comparative literary analysis. It involves close reading and interpretation. The methodology will focus on theoretical frameworks of critical temporal theories in postcolonial world. It will include concepts like Mbembe’s chrono-normality and politics of waiting and Berlant’s ‘meanwhile’. This work explores This Mournable Body and The Stone Virgins in a socio-historical context of precarious futures. It reveals that African novels disrupt linear and colonial conceptions of time. The use of second-person voice in This Mournable Body characterizes a fragmented chronological reflection of suspended present that marks the psychological stagnation. In contrast, time in The Stone Virgins characterizes the cyclical condition of existence and trauma-laden in a poetic sensory fragmentation. The feminist agency through endurance, improvisation and reclamation of voice are expressed through the alternative experiences of time-marked by trauma, memory, and feminine endurance. In the present work, we engage to explore the way ‘waiting’ functions in a form of resistance. It is an examination of temporal wounds that reflect psychological bodies, social and historical scars left by colonialism and civil unrest. It will focus on the manner characters respond to traumas through deliberate delay, stillness and suspension in time.
Mots clés
Postcolonial Africa ; Temporality ; Logics of time ; Future ; Chronological Reflection ; Alternative experiences
