Political Repression and Human–Animal Transformation in Ian Holding’s Of Beasts and Beings

Animal protagonists in present day African fiction inhabit complex, often contradictory positions between preconceived notions of indigenous tradition, racialised colonial legacies and postmodern and environmentally inflected challenges to essentialised human identities. This article focuses on the trope of human–animal transformation in contexts of political violence and repression in Ian Holding’s novel Of Beasts and Beings (2010). Here the animal figure is linked both to human suffering through animalisation and to acts of atonement through an allegorical rendering that recalls the Christian nativity scene. While the novel stresses similarities between human and beast when taken captive and forced to labour under deprivation and duress, it also explores the functions and limitations of literary representation. Within the context of white Zimbabwean writing, particularly Holding’s two other novels, Unfeeling (2005), and Of What Happened to Us (2018), I argue that the animal figure, as well as representations of animal suffering, rely on what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o identifies as the ‘zoological image’ in colonial human–animal juxtapositions. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Matthew Calarco, I further argue that Holding’s use of the suffering animal body perpetuates rather than challenges the racial rhetoric of animalisation.