What I want to write about is the penetration, expansion, skirmishing, coupling, mixing, separation, regrouping of peoples and cultures-the glorious bastardisation of men and women mutually shaped by sky and rain and wind and soil. . . . And everywhere is exile; we tend to forget that now. The old ground disappears, expropriated by blood as new conflicting patterns emerge. Breyten Breytenbach, Dog Heart,
In this article we discuss how places of belonging are imagined in relatively recent white Zimbabwean narratives dealing with issues of land, landscape, and belonging. Two white Zimbabwean narratives, Peter Rimmer's Cry of the Fish Eagle (1993) and Douglas Rogers' The Last Resort (2009), are read for the ways in which the paradoxically imagined spaces of the "bush" and the "farm" can be seen to enable, in alternate forms, exigent accommodations with place under different historical and political circumstances. In Cry of the Fish Eagle, which preceded Zimbabwe's land reform process of the 2000s, "bush" is a privileged category by virtue of its supra-national allowance of a claim to white belonging in "Africa" at large. In The Last Resort, on the other hand, the "bush" is a derelict wilderness rescued by the ingenuity of white subjects, who create "farms" of splendid regenerative capacity in an effort to purchase belonging in the Zimbabwean nation-state.
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