Disseminating the Binary Opposition as a Way of Critiquing Postcolonial Project: Hove’s Bones

Abstract

Chenjerai Hove’s Bones warns of the danger of postcolonial critics and writers to entrap themselves into the hierarchical binarism the West has established and maintained. By trying to blur the boundary between what is considered masculine and feminine, and thus deconstruct the hierarchical relation of that binarism, Hove emphasizes the diverse important aspects in human affairs. To stress the diverse aspects and put the same importance on all human affairs, Hove deconstructs binarism such as man/woman, nationalism/womanhood, tradition/modernization, nature/civilization, and city/country since this kind of binary relationship is itself a product of the Western ideology. For his purpose, Hove has a powerless female farm laborer as the center of the text and her feminine qualities, later succeeded by another female character, function to overcome nationalism, which is to emphasize things Zimbabwean and African. By doing so, Hove makes himself not an author but a mere recorder of what the characters have said and thus disarms any kind of authority postcolonial critics and writers might possess however involuntarily. The feminine traits of Marita and Janifa do not, however, reject nationalism which is generally considered to have masculine aspects, but embrace it. What makes this text so unique is that, in describing Zimbabwean people’s suffering, Hove begins with the very private act of reading a love letter in a place where people help themselves in a time where the whole nation is fighting for national independence. What Hove is doing in the beginning is to overturn the order of importance, to make national and public agenda of fighting for national freedom overwhelmed by personal concern. Against the popular belief that freedom is more important to the colonized than the personal interest, Hove argues that the personal/private is as much as, or often more than, the so-called public benefit. Later in the text, feminine features function to regain and preserve things Zimbabwean which the freed Zimbabwean people, who are mostly male, are likely to reject in the process of urbanization and modernization. By having feminine features as the center of his work, Hove urges readers to do away with hierarchical distinction between the powerful/privilged and the powerless/unprivileged.