Travel, Migration and the Redefinition of Home in Two Zimbabwean Novels
Travel, Migration and the Redefinition of Home in Two Zimbabwean Novels

Summary/Abstract: Numerous studies have looked at the literary depiction of the crisis period of the 2000s in Zimbabwe particularly through the lens of the land redistribution programme. Nonetheless, there is little scholarship of how traveling through migration affects the definition of home and homeland. The novels of Brian Chikwava and NoViolet Bulawayo discuss the multi-layered issues that are at play in the intersection of migration, nostalgia and homemaking. Drawing on Svetlana Boym’s fascinating work on nostalgia, this paper contends that “nostalgia (from nostos – return home, and algia – longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy” (2001: xiii). Of particular concern is the manner in which traveling allows for a reconceptualised definition of home, land and homeland and this certainly entails a redefinition of nationality against the contemporary “borderless global neighbourhood which keeps shrinking interminably” (Tsaaior, 2011: 101). Such a reconceptualisation of home, land and homeland will be analysed vis-à-vis current trends that “downplay the national in cultural and postcolonial studies in favour of the trans- or multinational” (Hayes, 1998: 445).

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