Longing, Belonging, and Self-making in White Zimbabwean Life Writing: Peter Godwin's When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

Abstract

This essay engages with the focus on 'generations' adopted in this issue of LiNQ by exploring how the private story of self so often will take on the quality of a cultural document that captures the complex social and political history of a place and a time. In this way, it is concerned with the way "the 'I' as an enunciatory site is a point of convergence of autobiographical politics and the politics of memory" in Sidonie Smith's words, but also of the politics of the postcolonial nation and of the literary representation of Africa.That, in a sense, is the double bind McCall Smith refers to in the first of the above epigraphs.