Reading the Fear of (Not) Returning to Zimbabwe: The Politics of (In)security in the Novel Harare North

Abstract

Old and recent migration studies have demonstrated the ubiquity of fear in acts, processes, and beliefs defining and characterizing various forms of human mobilities, particularly those involving transnational and transoceanic displacements. While much has been written, especially about the politics of this fear and its relationship to contested narratives of push and pull factors, only an insignificant number of studies has put fear at the centre in enquiries about the various forms and formations, constructs and constructions of what and where is (in)secure. Noting how much of the available scholarship on fear related to transnational mobilities uses mainly empirical data around causes, processes and contexts of displacement, settlement, and sometimes returns to one’s origins, this study shifts the focus to Zimbabwean fiction. It explores how a Zimbabwean fictional text has sought to interject and re-direct epistemological appropriations of fear as a reflective and refractive condition that is bound up with migrants’ processing of threat, security, and space. The article centres the motif of fear – particularly the fear of (not) returning to the homeland – in understanding fictional modes of re-discoursing crisis-driven mobilities in Zimbabwe since 2000. Focusing on Brian Chikwava’s novel Harare North (2009), the article converses with various (especially) sociological concepts of fear and space in its examination of the potential function of ‘literary fear’ as a complex epistemological site from which to rediscover the Zimbabwean migrants’ ambivalent attraction to (and repulsion from) a threatening homeland and to their entangling foreign havens.