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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Power, Popular Consciousness, and the Fictions of War: Hove's 'Bones' and Chinodya's 'Harvest of Thorns' |
Author: | Gunner, Liz |
Year: | 1991 |
Periodical: | African Languages and Cultures |
Volume: | 4 |
Issue: | 1 |
Pages: | 77-85 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Zimbabwe |
Subjects: | national liberation struggles literature novels Literature, Mass Media and the Press |
About persons: | Shimmer Chinodya (1957-) Chenjerai Hove (1956-2015) |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/1771683 |
Abstract: | This paper shows the very different ways in which two novels - Chenjerai Hove's 'Bones' (1989) and Shimmer Chinodya's 'Harvest of thorns' (1989) - use narrative discourse to image the period of the Zimbabwe war of liberation. Both Hove and Chinodya seem to be searching for a reevaluation of the war years and the preceding era, and a means of linking it in people's consciousness with the present. However, Hove uses an altogether more oral mode, reflecting the speaking or thinking voices of the peasants, although in a dreamlike rather than a realistic fashion. Chinodya's 'Harvest of thorns', on the other hand, is more of a richly detailed realist chronicle of the war and of the quiescent fifties and rebellious sixties. Although very different in their expression of the war, both work against a one-dimensional patriotism and avoid the urban-rural dichotomies and female stereotyping of so much Zimbabwean fiction. Bibliogr., note. |