An Elixir to the Claustrophobia of home? Representations of the Diaspora in Harare North and Selected Short Stories in Hunting in Foreign Lands and Other Short Stories

The reality of what became known as the ‘Zimbabwean Crisis’ has, from 2000 onwards, been ambivalently fictionalised in the Zimbabwean literary geography of the time. Writers narrativise diasporic reality and migration into the Diaspora as Janus-faced in that these could lead to the opening up of democratic spaces and improving the well-being of those who embark on the hunt for foreign currency. But some view the genesis and execution of the odyssey as analogous to responding to the call of a strange bird that certainly leads to deracination from the family, moral bankruptcy, cultural alienation and, in some instances, metaphorical and physical death. The research therefore intends to interrogate the richly varying ways in which the writers wrestle with this epochal phenomenon and the extent to which they pack and unpack the issues of motive, causality and consequences of diasporanism. In doing this the researchers intend to use the novel Harare North and selected short stories from Hunting in Foreign Lands (2010).It is the researchers’ contention that the Diaspora option enacted mixed fortunes for the sojourners, their families and the Zimbabwean society at large.