“The Country We Built Up”: Geocriticism, Rhodesian Places and the Nefarious Bush in John Eppel’s The Holy Innocents

Nhlanhla Dube

doi:10.25159/2663-6565/15267

Authors

Nhlanhla Dube University of Cape Town https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9915-0671

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/15267

Keywords:

Zimbabwean literature, geocriticism, John Eppel, The Holy Innocents , spatiality

Abstract

This article discusses John Eppel’s Bulawayo novel, The Holy Innocents, in order to see how space and place are constructed. By deploying geocriticism as a spatially oriented theory, the article shows how attention to literary geography reveals political insights into histories of race and Zimbabwean belonging. The city of Bulawayo and the literature it inspires provide a unique commentary on the cultural imagining of place. It is demonstrated that the suburb, as a locale in John Eppel’s writing, is a key unit of analysis in exploring the literary city. The political transition and cultural metamorphosis of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe are discussed through the prism of geography. Through recognising the power of space and the arguments about place Eppel makes, our understanding of Zimbabwean literary culture and its interactions with spatiality is developed.

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...

References

Caquard, Sébastien, and William Cartwright. 2014. “Narrative Cartography: From Mapping Stories to the Narrative of Maps and Mapping.” The Cartographic Journal 51 (2): 101–106. https://doi.org/10.1179/0008704114Z.000000000130. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1179/0008704114Z.000000000130

Eppel, John. 2002. Holy Innocents. Bulawayo: amaBooks.

Fletcher, Lisa. 2016. “Introduction: Space, Place, and Popular Fiction.” In Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings, edited by Lisa Fletcher, 1–8. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56902-8. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56902-8_1

Golding, William. 1954. Lord of the Flies. London: Faber and Faber.

Hamlin, Madeline. 2016. “Geographies of Mobility in James Joyce’s Dubliners.” Literary Geographies 2 (2):128–143. https://www.literarygeographies.net/index.php/LitGeogs/article/view/43.

Keidel, Verena. 2020. “(Urban) Sacred Places and Profane Spaces—Theological Topography in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.” In Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity, edited by Martin Kindermann and Rebekka Rohleder, 45–64. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_3. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_3

Kipling, Rudyard. 1894. The Jungle Book. London: Macmillan.

Leane, Elizabeth. 2016. “Unstable Places and Generic Spaces: Thrillers Set in Antarctica.” In Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings, edited by Lisa Fletcher, 25–43. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56902-8_3. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56902-8_3

Moyo, Thamsanqa. 2018. “The Unsettling of Colonialist and Nationalist Spaces: John Eppel’s Writings on Zimbabwe.” PhD diss., University of South Africa. https://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/25320/thesis_moyo_t.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

Mullin, Katherine. 2021. “Cities in Modernist Literature.” The British Library. Accessed 28 December 2021. https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/cities-in-modernist-literature/.

Ndlovu, Prosper. 2020. “Bulawayo Marks 100 Years Since First Flight.” The Chronicle, last modified March 6, 2020. Accessed December 20, 2021. https://www.chronicle.co.zw/bulawayo-marks-100-years-since-first-flight/.

Peraldo, Emmanuelle, and Yann Calbérac. 2021. “How to Do Narratives with Maps: Cartography as a Performative Act in Gulliver’s Travels and Through the Looking-Glass.” In Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination, edited by Robert Tally, 31–46. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003056027-4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003056027-4

Rutledge, Thais, and Tally Robert. 2016. “Formed by Place: Spatiality, Irony, and Empire in Conrad’s ‘An Outpost of Progress.’” Transnational Literature 9 (1): 1–16. https://hdl.handle.net/10877/9352.

Tally, Robert. 2011. “Translator’s Preface: The Timely Emergence of Geocriticism.” In Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, by Bertrand Westphal, ix–xiii. New York: Palgrave.

Tally, Robert. 2014. “Geocriticism in the Middle of Things: Place, Peripeteia, and the Prospects of Comparative Literature.” In Geocriticism: A Survey, edited by Clément Levy and Bertrand Westphal, 6–15. Limgoes: Pulim.

Tally, Robert. 2017. “The Novel and the Map: Spatiotemporal Form and Discourse in Literary Cartography.” In Space, Time and the Limits of Human Understanding, edited by Shyam Wuppuluri and Giancarlo Ghirardi, 479–485. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44418-5_37. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44418-5_37

Walker, Casey. 2010. “The City Inside: Intimacy and Urbanity in Henry James, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf.” PhD diss, Princeton University.