Paper short abstract:

This paper explores NoViolet Bulawayo’s mirthless satire and other literary strategies in Glory (2022) and proposes that her text shows that in Zimbabwe, her strained novel which excavates a tragic past, projects and predicts a decidedly bleak future; a reflection of the mis/fortunes of the nation.

Paper long abstract:

In Glory (2022), NoViolet Bulawayo marshals satirical strategies to suggest that Zimbabwe’s future will resemble the past by lamenting, mourning and wailing the country’s recent tragic history. In fictionally articulating events that are already so tragically fantastical as to be unmediatable by fictional reimagining, Bulawayo employs strategies that disarticulate fictionality by seemingly cutting and pasting statements from everyday news media and attributing these to animal characters. Bulawayo’s satire and other strategies that mimic social media styles, suggests the floundering of fictionality at the very moment it is needed the most leading to what one can call muteness. This is where muteness is heard as the discourse of death in the sense in which Walter Benjamin uses this word. Since when it comes to language use in recent Zimbabwean history there is already overnaming, if one may resort again to Benjamin’s terminology, Bulawayo’s text gropes for new names, to allude to the title of her debut novel, We Need New Names (2013). To achieve fictionality, Bulawayo follows on the footsteps of other African writers such as Ahamadou Kourouma in Waiting for the Wild Beast to Vote (2004) and Patrice Nganang’s Dog Days (2006) in using satire and animal characters to resemble and dissemble Zimbabwe’s history to project and predict a decidedly bleak future. This paper explores Bulawayo’s mirthless, expository and expansive satire and other literary strategies to proposes that her text shows that in Zimbabwe, her strained novelistic discourse reflects the mis/fortunes of the nation.