Futuring a southern episteme

This chapter proposes reading Chenjerai Hove’s poems, novels and essays through the lenses of rupture and suture. This chapter offers dynamic interpretive practices for reading Chenjerai Hove’s essays and public commentaries articulated in Shebeen Tales and other stories and the equally sarcastic Palaver Finish . This chapter contends that answers to the Zimbabwean present postcolonial crises find expression in the multiplicity of voices, not monological narratives. Diversity, and therefore polyphony, is valued for its ability to suggest multiple ways of seeing and belonging to national imaginaries; its ability to suggest answers to the postcolonial problematic related to memory, heritage and transformation. This chapter explores how the meanings of cultural objects often display shifting appropriations that garner either symbolic or ephemeral qualities, demonstrating the ability of those in power at different historical junctures to determine and confer minted meanings.