Home and belonging in Irene Sabatini’s The Boy Next Door and Andrea Eames’ The Cry of the Go-Away Bird

Abstract

In this article I examine how, in their novels The Boy Next Door and The Cry of the Go-Away Bird, Irene Sabatini and Andrea Eames, respectively, allow us to reflect on questions of whiteness, home, and belonging in Zimbabwe. I argue that in these novels the experiences, behaviours, and attitudes of whites towards Africa and black people contest and subvert their belonging to Zimbabwe and highlight their failure to accept the end of Rhodesia. White people’s resistance to integration into Zimbabwe, their continued racializing of space, and their attempts to maintain white power and privilege bring whiteness sharply before the scrutiny of the black gaze and provoke anti-white rhetoric as well as a discourse on white unbelonging to Zimbabwe that becomes more strident and violent from the late 1990s.

Rethinking the nation: Intersections of race, desire, and love in Irene Sabatini’s The Boy Next Door

“…He is openly ostracized in the post-independence era, representing that which the whites can no longer openly claim or own or admit as representing their desire to obliterate blackness or black liberty. He is a pariah among the white community even as they continue to obstruct integration into a multiracial Zimbabwe, to racialize space in an attempt to maintain white power (Mthatiwa, 2018: 2).…”