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The writing that started during colonial times, often under the not so benevolent eye of the Rhodesia Literature bureau and also against it, has found its place in African literary creativity.There is need to salute those departed who pioneered writing in Zimbabwe particularly on the black side of the Zimbabwean literary canon- Solomon Mutswairo, Wilson Chivavura, Patrick Chakaipa, Lawrence Vambe and Bernard Chidzero.

These departed luminaries were later joined by some of our artists who died in their prime — Dambudzo Marechera, Wilson Katiyo, Yvonne Vera, Freedom Nyamubaya, Chenjerai Hove, Alexander Kanengoni and others.

In literature the mission of each generation is to forge new forms of art and new forms of commitment. It is literature’s primary function to create images that are fresh and not prefabricated. Such fresh images are necessary if literature is to enable men and women to see the familiar in an unfamiliar way.

The celebration of life, the mockery and exposure of vices, the therapeutic laughter and mourning when good values die are threatened, and the assertion of justice in the face of its denial are only possible when imagination is not stultified.

In African literature, the writer is often one or a combination of the following: griot, bard, teacher (Chinua Achebe), iconoclast (Dambudzo Marechera) and revolutionary (Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Freedom Nyamubaya). Whatever role a writer assumes, points to a special relationship he or she has with society.

In each specification of the role of the writer, society and its taboos, norms and ethics are constantly re-imagined.

I want to link this re-imagining to the concept of defamiliarisation (ostranenie) coined by Russian Formalist (Victor Skolvsky) in examining the connection between literature and the task of questioning and re-articulating taboos, morality and ethics. These are developed by communities to ensure their survival.

They do not cover all aspects of human experience and some of them cannot be universal throughout all temporalities, for example- the taboo against keeping an albino child after birth.

Petinah Gappah in “The Book of Memory” challenges the disposability and invisibility that we find in traditional African culture.

“This is a compelling modern example of literature’s power to question taboos. Gappah’s novel enables readers to move out of uncreative and imprisoning modes of seeing, thinking and feeling in traditional ways.

In moving out of deadened ways of perception, literature through making strange the familiar, enables us through complexity to view taboos, morality and ethics as not so simple and so easy.

This challenges ways in which lives are lived and human subjects are constructed. The novel and drama are about experiential morality and about transgressing ethics in order to arrive at greater ethics. These genres, specifically deal with situational constructions and deconstructions of laws that govern hypothetical and actual communities.

They demand that we feel, judge and think from different points of view. Compassion and justice are only possible when one moves out of the comfort zone of one’s individuality

The concepts of morality, taboos and ethics are not new to us as Africans, first and foremost, and as producers, consumers and critics of literature. As we may well be aware, taboos are put in place to regulate behaviours and to enforce morality and adherence to the ethics enshrined in ones society.

Scholars such as Tarisayi Chimuka (2001) and Clemence Makamure and Vengesai Chimininge (2015), to mention a few, discuss the use of taboos as enforcers of “good” behaviour. It is through ethics that taboos and morality as defined and vice versa.

In defining these behaviour moulders individuals in societies are stifled of individual expression and, rather, compelled to conform to the ‘norm’ or to normative behaviours. What I read as contemporary Zimbabwean literature, today, has fractured the ground of normativity and normalcy as it is traditionally understood.

Literary artists have come to understand that it is through taboos, myths, superstition and profoundly immoral beliefs that many atrocities are hidden, protected and normalised.

More and more of Zimbabwean literatures have grabbed the normative bull by its horns and they have tamed the raging bull.

I refer here to the courageous writers who have taken it upon themselves to speak the unspeakable, demystify myths and be transgressive and aggressive in shocking readers and consumers of literature to the realities of the changing environs of the world, Zimbabwe included.

Allow me to state here that Zimbabwean literature in dealing with taboo subjects such as disability, sex and sexuality, gender and national politics, among other previously silenced subjects, rebels against basic norms of society and presents characters that may seem mentally ill, anti-social, nihilistic or just out of order.

In this light, most upcoming Zimbabwean literature may be viewed as transgressive. Rene Chun, a journalist for The New York Times, describes transgressive fiction as:

A literary genre that graphically explores such topics as incest and other aberrant sexual practices, mutilation, the sprouting of sexual organs in various places on the human body, urban violence and violence against women, drug use, and highly dysfunctional family relationships, and that is based on the premise that knowledge is to be found at the edge of experience and that the body is the site for gaining knowledge.

In writing about the need for writers, and women in particular, to be bold in their art, Yvonne Vera in her preface to Opening Spaces states the need for a writer to “ have an imagination that is plain stubborn, that can invent new gods and banish ineffectual ones” (1999, 1). Her clarion call here is to speak that which is called unspeakable, banish the barriers of expression that are enforced through social acceptance of so-called taboos, morality and ethics. If confined to ‘normalcy or normativity under the heavy hand of these behaviour shapers, the writer is inevitably stripped of the responsibility to educate and inform.

This rebelliousness is not knew it has always been there from western classical times to the present. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, emphasises the primacy of experience as she defies medieval scholarship that in its ecclesiastical and secular forms inferiorised and silenced women. In her garrulousness, the wife of bath asserts that “experience, though noon autoritee/ were in this world, is right enough for me”.

Experience gives her the authority to speak in defiance of scholarly authorisation.

This open defiance is expressed in what Michele Foucault calls other space removed from the constraints of medieval home — the journey space offers the wife away from the wrath of authority.

While all this is commendable, I should submit here that most transgressive literatures in Zimbabwe seem to hide behind the English language. It is no doubt easier to describe the sexual act in English, for example, than it is to do so in any of Zimbabwe’s local languages.

However, until we break this language and cultural barrier, the success of transgressive literatures in Zimbabwe remains confined to the realm of the not so many readers who are able to enjoy a novel, poem or drama in English.

I wish to impress upon us all, the need to write and produce more literature that is brutally frank but in our local languages. Of course there are semantic issues and limitations of the ability of certain languages to commune idiomatic expressions of other languages but here lies the power of imagination.

Another ailment, in an otherwise promising writing trajectory, that I wish to lay bare is that of self-censorship among writers. Not that personal restraint and limitation are bad, but let it not hinder one’s authorship, particularly when one fears being labelled “out of order” or when one fears society’s reaction to a work of art.

Colleagues, writers, poets, actors, performers, artists unless we take the initiative, through our art, to effect perception changes on the many subjects that ail society, then we have not yet started to write and write passionately. I dare you.

Literature is potent with possibilities of unconfined expression and articulation of creative realities.

I wish to borrow a little from Mozambican author Mia Cauto’s essay delivered at the award ceremony for the international prize for the twelve best African novels, in Cape Town South Africa in July 2002, when he alludes to the acceptance of membership to a culturally mixed world.

He rightly notes that the writer isn’t just someone who writes. That the writer is someone who produces thought, who is capable of pollinating others with feeling and delight. Our makers and producers of literature in Zimbabwe are doing no less than that.

As I see it, today, literature has become more transgressive, challenging the basis of thought and virtually all convention, subverting the definitions of what is ‘correct’.

The Zimbabwean writer and producer of literature in all its forms, fulfils a commitment to educate and inform society even of that which would otherwise be considered taboo, unspeakable and unethical.

I concur too, with Tauriq Moosa that one important purpose of literature has always been to allow us to safely test our moral fibres against the grain of hardened anathema such as adultery, and so on.

All these subjects have been explored through literature and it is through literature that one is able to repair, improve and debate moral failings and mistakes.

In an interview at the University of Texas in November 1969, renowned writer Chinua Achebe gave a new reading of his novels, calling himself a protest writer. Indeed, all African literature, he said is protest writing. He says

It is impossible to write anything in Africa without some kind of commitment, some kind of message, some kind of protest.

In fact I should say all our writers whether they are aware of it or not are committed writers. The whole pattern of life demanded that you should protest, that you should put in a word for your history, your tradition, your religion and so on.

To compliment Achebe’s observations, Nuruddin Farah describes the writer as being

in a sense everybody: he is a woman, he is a man: he is as many other selves as those whose shadows reflect his ghostly images; he is as many other selves as the ones whose tongues he employs to articulate his thoughts; he is as many others selves as there are minds and hearts he dwells in (1983,9).

I cannot claim to have read all or as many literary works but in the few that I have engaged, I have come to appreciate the ability of the producers of such works to speak, write and inspire.

I wish to single out a few of the authors who have written on the unspeakable in Zimbabwean society; disability (Petinah Gappah), prostitution (Virginia Phiri and Valarie Tagwira), deviant sexualities (Violet Masilo), ethnicism and racism (Christopher Mlalazi and Charles Mungoshi among others).

I admire Virginia Phiri’s boldness in her mind provoking novels; Highway Queen and Destiny, in speaking about prostitution and providing room for a reconsideration of this way of life that even wives can become entangled in, or the manner in which she portrays the calamity of a society ill-prepared to deal with hermaphroditism.

I look too at the eye-opening poems by the late Freedom Nyamubaya among other poets, established and upcoming, film and drama script writers and all those who are endowed with the gift of expression.

I am not apologetic for providing examples from mostly female authored literature because women need to be encouraged to bite the bullet and tell their own stories for themselves and by themselves.

I have reasonable ground upon which to claim that there is a paucity of female representation in bold Zimbabwean literature on taboos, morality and ethics.

Literature, in all its forms has provided fertile ground for research and further academic engagement.

Those from academia where I come from will agree with me on this point. Academics and literary critics rely on you artists to provide new knowledge and cultural expression for the development of a sound knowledge base for the study of the various forms of literature.

Allow me at this point to talk about my university, Great Zimbabwe University, and its contribution to literature.

The university was given a unique and exciting niche by government to promote and advance the study and preservation of the arts, culture and heritage.

I find literature, in its entirety, playing an immense role in this endeavour. Literature, whether fictional, non-fictional or semi-fictional is a rich cultural resource for the expression, preservation and engagement of people’s culture and heritage.

Literature, as art, is an expressive and potent perception maker. The university, with the help of the Litfest secretariat included in its annual Dzimbahwe Arts and Cultural Fair a literary segment that left attendees longing for more.

The segment saw the university’s students, staff and guests enjoying the rare feat of interacting with a number of novelists and poets and debating topical social issues and their representation in literary works.

Other segments of the festival included theatre and other performance arts as well as fine arts exhibitions. This is just to show you how much Great Zimbabwe University values each and every one of you here.

This is also a gesture of how wide and exciting our niche is.

Whereas Zimbabwe’s literary artists have performed so well on the literary arena, one sad fact is that our burgeoning literary landscape has not translated into a significant increase in readership.

Much still needs to be done by mothers and fathers, teachers, fellow students and communities to ensure that we revive the reading culture.

Information Communication Technologies (ICT’s) have had both positive and negative impacts in this regard but I suggest that we ride on the same technologies to make our works known. I had someone whisper to me this morning that ICT’s are not all bad and as literary artists let us be sensitised about these and make them work better for us. Having said all this, I wish to share with you Chinua Achebe’s warning, in Hopes and Impediments, that we must remain vigilant about the kinds of narratives that we tell and visions that we pursue.

In “The Truth of Fiction”, Achebe observes that “there are fictions that help and fictions that hinder. For simplicity, let us call them beneficent and malignant fictions”.

Imaginative literature belongs to beneficent fictions.

“It does not enslave; it liberates the mind. Its truth is not like the canon of anorthodoxy or the irrationality of prejudice and superstition. It begins as an adventure in self-discovery and ends in wisdom and humane conscience” (1988, 105).

This is not at all to suggest that literature should be prescriptive but it need not be destructive, or be just a piece of work produced only for a pound of flesh, lest we fall back to the misconception art for art’s sake.

Having appreciated the potential and power we have as producers, consumers and critics of literature we remain with that colossal responsibility as writers to be just to the communities we serve.

This was a paper presented by Great Zimbabwe University vice-chancellor Prof Rungano Zvobgo at the Literature Festival held in Harare recently