Opinion, Dialogue, Review

Abstract

The Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera mobilizes recollections of childhood not only as an event in his adult life, but as a way of articulating a longing for new forms of social consciousness. Childhood itself is recalled both as narrative and source of narrative. As such it is a place and time of memory. It is not just a construct of writing, but a way of coming to terms with an enormous social experience. This article discusses the nature of childhood and its uses in Marechera's dystopian fiction. It demonstrates the ways in which Marechera's fiction revises sets of concepts that constitute ‘the child’ by portraying childhoods that point to the dissolution and reinvention of a symbolic order in a post-national African space.