Paper short abstract:

The paper locates Chikwava and Bulawayo's representations of border crossings in the Zimbabwean crisis as renegade identities as a way to critique the complex narrative of desertion, betrayal and resistances as expressed by the migrating minds and bodies in the two texts.

Paper long abstract:

The Zimbabwean crisis novel has often been a representation of shifting national allegiances which have impacted on personal and national identities. The Zimbabwean crisis literary text, which is associated with the post 2000 land reform heralds personal and national discontent with power as it critiques the Mugabe regime and Zimbabwe's patriotic history. The writers being mostly voluntary exiles themselves represent shifting allegiances and migratory identities in their characters. The characters cross borders in both the physical and psychological senses to produce a whole new complex of subjective border crossings which this study identifies as renegade identities to mark the personal, physical and psychological migration as the characters deal with the changes in the Zimbabwean social, economic and political landscape. The characters' physical 'escape' to the diaspora and the individual transitions they also have to go through in order to adapt to the new environment presents a complex of spatial identities. The paper presents the argumen that the Zimbabwean crisis fashions identities after itself in the two texts. The Zimbabwean who tries to adapt to the changing Zimbabwean milieu and the Zimbabwean who runs away from the country embodies the crisis in search of a new identity for the nation and for himself or herself. The paper will utilise postcolonial theory to critique the identity transitions and complexes that are embedded within the discourse of a Zimbabwe in crisis in Brian Chikwava's Harare North and NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names.