Mourning and Melancholia in Zimbabwean Culture and Cinema

This thesis interrogates postcolonial melancholia and femininity through the textual analysis of literary and cinematographic works from Zimbabwe. The work is a transdisciplinary project encompassing psychosocial and postcolonial studies, as well as film and cultural studies. I define post-colonial melancholia in relation to how it has affected the postcolonial social sphere following the independence of Zimbabwe from British colonial rule in April 1980. I characterise melancholia as a loss of identity, ‘the missing object’/ lost object of affection that stemmed from colonial subjugation alongside the little remaining evidence of written Zimbabwean culture before colonialism. Today, there is a fragment of evidence that shows pre colonial Zimbabwean culture: it is forever lost. The colonial era is also relatively sparse regarding its cultural outputs, which is typical of any trauma that is ‘unrepresentable’. It is only recently that some films and plays have begun to address this head on. It is my argument that Zimbabwe is still in a state of melancholia, mourning the loss of her identity. I contend that the notion of identity is not straightforward, but rather is multifaceted and layered in trauma, tribalism, racism, class and sexism. There is, therefore, a need to reevaluate post-colonial theories in relation to post-colonial melancholia and find the correlation it has in forming a national identity. This thesis also explores the lack of female authorship in literature and film and what this tells us of the role of women in Zimbabwean society. I argue that the black female voice has been silenced through the ions of time and is only being regained very slowly. Thus autoethnography is used here as an anti -patriachal gesture, a resistance tool against the double interpellation black women endured/ are enduring in Zimbabwe.

How can one account for postcolonial melancholia and what tools does a researcher deploy to examine it? This thesis adopts a psychoanalytical approach to account for the gaps and silences in Zimbabwean culture because of post-colonial trauma. I draw upon foundational Western scholars including Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Homi Bhabha, Louis Althusser and Frantz Fanon, and more recent thinkers such as Agnieszka Piotrowska, Stephen Frosh, Lauren Berlant and Ranjana Khanna. I also draw upon Zimbabwean writers Alois Mlambo, Dambudzo Marechera, Robert Muponde and, most notably, Tsitsi Dangarembga, P Mbatha, Panashe Chigumadzi, Yvonne Vera and other black female thinkers and writers. These writers and scholars aid in investigating how the postcolonial narrative is created and in unearthing the notion of identity and race relations in Zimbabwe, as well as who can take charge of this narrative, and the role of melancholia in framing this narrative. This argument is executed through textual analysis of prominent films and literature produced in Zimbabwe from 1940 to the present. The thesis offers a re-interpretation of postcolonial thinking through the lens of psychoanalysis, combining the textual analysis of film and literature alongside psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory. Finally, it interrogates the silences and gaps (the lack of films, literature and academic research) through interviews conducted with prominent individuals involved in the creative industries, set alongside the evocation of my personal experience as a Zimbabwean woman and academic. This is in line with the autobiographical genre used by many scholars, notably Frantz Fanon.