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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Power, Popular Consciousness, and the Fictions of War: Hove's 'Bones' and Chinodya's 'Harvest of Thorns'
Author:Gunner, LizISNI
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)ISNI
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.
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