Unhomed: Existential Homelessness as Trauma in Brian Chikwava’s Harare North and Noviolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names

Abstract

Contemporary Zimbabwean literature is increasingly migrant in content and outlook. This study analyses two novels by Zimbabwean migrant writers, Brian Chikwava and NoViolet Bulawayo, focusing on their portrayals of African migrants’ experiences of homelessness, dislocation, and the complex struggles inherent in their desperate attempts to negotiate and transcend borders. Chikwava’s Harare North and Bulawayo’s We Need New Names are two representative novels that exemplify the traumatic imprints of migrancy on African postcolonial subjects, foregrounding how they grapple with fractured notions of home and the resultant crisis of belonging. The narratives are closely read, employing theoretical insights from Homi Bhabha’s conception of unhomeliness and current research in postcolonial trauma studies. In the novels, characters are displaced by the Zimbabwean government’s infamous Operation Murambatsvina, leading them to flee their “homeland” through safe and clandestine routes. In the diaspora, the characters are again displaced, having realised only belatedly that “Fortress Europe” selectively bestows its succours. The figure of “umgodoyi”—the stray dog that belongs to nowhere and no one—runs through both novels as a central metaphor, ultimately epitomising unhomeliness. The characters in the novels experience double displacement and lack acceptance and integration at “home” and abroad. Hence, homelessness functions not merely as a narrative backdrop but as both a catalyst and a repercussion of migration, positioning it as the central ontological traumatic stressor that precipitates the mental disorders experienced by characters in Harare North and We Need New Names.