Zimbabwe Ruins: Claims of responsibility within speculations on psycho-social experiences of exile and diaspora Leigh Ann Reilly Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Leigh Reilly All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Zimbabwe Ruins: Claims of responsibility within speculations on psycho-social experiences of exile and diaspora. Leigh Ann Reilly ‗The Crisis‘ in Zimbabwe, which in significant part began in 2000 with the appropriation of white owned commercial farms, is political, economic and psycho-social, and has resulted in major upheavals and catastrophic changes to Zimbabwean society. The researcher investigates from an autobiographical and speculative point of view what it means to live in and after such a crisis by considering the experiences of loss, mourning and melancholia as they relate to the kind of exilic existence experienced by many Zimbabweans as a result of ‗the Crisis‘. This kind of exile has been called ―internal‖ and ―external‖ (2007) exile by the Zimbabwean poet Chenjerai Hove, by which he means that those still living in the country under the Mugabe regime are living in conditions of exile emotionally, psychically and psychologically just as those in the diaspora, numbering three million or a quarter of the population, are living in conditions of physical and geographic exile. The researcher uses ‗the Crisis‘ as a site of inquiry into considerations of individual and collective responsibility as a possible response to the emotional, geographic, and existential rupture caused by crisis. This study, which is partly autobiographical, but also historical and political, takes a speculative and conceptual approach to understanding effects of ‗the Crisis‘. The hybridized methods of writing as inquiry (Richardson, 2000), speculative essay as philosophical inquiry (Schubert, 1991), and autobiography as a form of narrative research, allow the researcher to articulate, meditate and speculate on questions regarding loss, temporality, mourning, melancholia and nostalgia, community, and responsibility from a position of personal interpretation, while accepting that those interpretations are fractured, partial and biased. The study proposes responsibility as one possible response to ‗the Crisis‘ and suggests five claims of responsibility as avenues to open up considerations of how one possibly could respond to such formative experiences. The five claims are: return, melancholia and reflective nostalgia (Boym, 2001), art, learning, and community. These claims are drawn directly in relation to the researcher‘s interpretations of ‗The Crisis‘ and so are not meant to be seen as normative but rather as suggestive. The recent scholarship that has been produced in response to ‗the Crisis‘ has predominantly focused on logistical and practical concerns; this researcher establishes that psycho-social considerations of how one experiences crisis and could live with/in it are of equal importance to the scholarship of ‗the Crisis‘ in Zimbabwe. Table of Contents Chapter I...............................................................................................................................1 Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 Motivation ................................................................................................................6 Methodology ..........................................................................................................15 Chapter II: After birth: A (brief) history of Zimbabwe’s pre-colonial, colonial and post- colonial past .......................................................................................................................33 Afterword: Departures...........................................................................................52 Chapter III: After words ....................................................................................................54 What‘s in a word? .................................................................................................54 The abuse of history ...............................................................................................58 Afterwards..............................................................................................................62 Afterword: Many-headed Monsters .......................................................................73 Chapter IV: Afterlife ..........................................................................................................78 Communities ―lost / And found and lost again‖ ....................................................95 Afterword: My Ghastly Tale ................................................................................100 Chapter V: Aftermath .......................................................................................................104 i Definitions of diaspora .........................................................................................106 Diaspora and responsibility..................................................................................110 Diaspora and trauma ............................................................................................119 Diaspora and class................................................................................................122 Diaspora and community .....................................................................................128 Diaspora and transnationalism .............................................................................130 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................135 Afterword: Will the Swallows Return? ...............................................................136 Chapter VI: Afterwards ....................................................................................................139 Individual Responsibility .....................................................................................141 Judith Butler (2005) and responsibility as accountability....................................144 Collective responsibility ......................................................................................149 Suggestive claims of responsibility .....................................................................153 Return as responsibility........................................................................................153 Melancholia and Reflective Nostalgia as Responsibility.....................................163 Art as Responsibility ............................................................................................167 Learning as Responsibility ...................................................................................171 Community as Responsibility ..............................................................................173 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................176 Afterword: The Omay ..........................................................................................180 ii Acknowledgements I am indebted to numerous people who have made this dissertation possible. My advisor, sponsor and friend, Janet L. Miller, guided me throughout the whole process from our very first class together in Spring 2007. I am grateful for her constant support of the work, her always thoughtful reading and helpful suggestions, and her gentle prodding, which helped get it done! Megan Laverty and I bonded over our (or was it my?) love of T. S. Eliot, J. M. Coetzee and a good laugh. I am most grateful for her always careful and thorough reading of my work, her challenging commentary and always interesting suggestions for further reading. The importance to my dissertation of the Fall 2009 class that Marianne Hirsch taught on ‗Feminism and Diaspora: Rites and Rights of Return‘ cannot be underestimated. It opened up whole avenues of thought, which crucially helped in the building of my dissertation. I wish also to thank Lesley Bartlett and Robbie McClintock for their insightful and thought-provoking comments and suggestions at the dissertation defense. My New York family, Kerry McKibbin, Tom Lynch and, more recently, Declan Lynch, often gave me a couch to sleep on, a meal to eat, a laugh to share and a shoulder to cry on! I am so grateful to have met them. It is to my parents and family in Zimbabwe that I owe the biggest debt of gratitude. Their support, encouragement and love helped me get started, keep going and successfully complete this degree. And now, it is time to return home to repay the debt! iii 1 Chapter I Introduction ‗The Crisis‘ in Zimbabwe, which is political, psycho-social, and economic, has resulted in major upheavals and catastrophic changes to Zimbabwean society. As I write in early 2011, my home country is dramatically different from what it was eleven years ago. In many ways it is no longer recognizable. The lives of most Zimbabweans have been disrupted by emigration and exile, crippled by economic imprisonment, or devastated by violence and atrocity. The trajectory of our lives has been interrupted and many now flounder in the gap between what went before and what has come after. The home we knew in a literal and figurative sense is not the home we now inhabit, whether we live there still