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

Negotiating racial identity

The novel opens with Lindiwe’s childhood in Bulawayo in the early 1980s at the dawn of Zimbabwe’s independence. Narrated from the initially introverted perspective of the adolescent Lindiwe, a second-generation, “coloured”, Ndebele girl, the novel gives us insights into the changing political and economic landscape of the country as Lindiwe and Ian’s relationship blossoms against the backdrop of Zimbabwe’s transition into independence, the Gukurahundi massacres of the mid- to late 1980s, and finally the country’s economic meltdown which began in the early 2000s. The growth of Lindiwe’s racial consciousness and narrative voice as she matures into a more confident woman parallels the country’s political maturity. My discussion will show that Lindiwe’s growth occurs in a complex, interleaved relation with (rather than merely as a flat “backdrop” to) the changing sociopolitical context. Sabatini’s use of a young adult protagonist in the narration of the growth of the nation is crucial as it points to “the space-time idea or construct of the postcolonial nation as both an unstable and an ambivalent domain of affiliation or belonging, a relationship modulated by the slippages in the meaning of the nation” (Nwakanma, 2008: 2).

A focus on how race consciousness mediates sexuality and how Lindiwe as a “coloured” Ndebele girl negotiates issues of race within her relationship with Ian is a pertinent aspect in this article as issues of race, class, and sexuality are closely intertwined. I borrow Ibbo Mandaza’s definition of the term “coloured” as it is applicable to the Zimbabwean context. Mandaza, in his study of the “coloured” question in Southern Rhodesia, argues that the term not only denotes all persons of mixed race, it also

describes those who are entitled, on the basis of their being regarded as persons of mixed racial origin, to admission to various specifically and officially designated separate (from those of other racial groups) coloured institutions (schools, residential areas, hospitals, etc.) and who also regard themselves as coloured both in the genetic and social sense of the term. (1997: n.p.)

The usage of the term is thus imbued by a history of fraught and unequal racial tensions between white and black people. Given the historically racial symbologies of whiteness and its associations with “cleanness” and “superiority”, the “white but not quite” status of being “coloured” implies a tainting of the racialized body.

The Rhodesian state like many colonial states in Africa and other parts of the world sought to differentiate between the “natives” and “non-natives” by compartmentalizing them within biological, cultural, and geographical terms (Muzondidya, 2013: 157). As Lindiwe reveals in the novel, race was a determining factor to where one lived as there were designated residences for whites only, “coloured” people, and black people. As James Muzondidya argues, “classification of this sort did not necessarily lead to the assumption of ethnic identities on the part of those categorized” even though it set “parameters within which the production and reproduction of ethnic identities — coloured identity included — could occur” (2013: 157). For example, in the novel, Mr Bishop, Lindiwe’s father, is classified as “coloured” by the Rhodesian state and by everybody else, but he does not associate as racially mixed (“he didn’t talk like a Barham Green or Thorngrove coloured”; Sabatini, 2009: 33), ² preferring to identify with his Ndebele mother, who had raised him, than to claim his father’s whiteness. While Lindiwe’s father refuses a “coloured” identity (and “he didn’t like it when Mummy talked about coloureds and blacks” (33)), ironically his wife who is black obstinately claims the “coloured” identity for their daughter even though her daughter’s appearance is not recognizably racially mixed. Lindiwe reveals that “At my old school the real colored girls had called me names because I was not light-skinned and I had a wide nose” (33). Nevertheless, Mrs Bishop insists on claiming “colouredness” for her daughter, and Lindiwe follows by identifying herself as a “coloured” person up until her university days when the sociopolitical context of Zimbabwe begins to put more emphasis on blackness and black nationalism.

Desiring the other

“It was a one-night thing. It just happened.” “But you were such a good girl.” “I know, I know, and maybe that’s why it happened. I was kind of infatuated with him […] I don’t know, I found him really romantic and maybe I felt sorry for him …” “Lindiwe, a romantic killer —” (239; emphasis in original)

Although this conversation between Lindiwe and Bridgette takes place six years after Lindiwe and Ian first became intimate, it summarizes the fascination that Lindiwe had with Ian despite the fact that from the beginning their relationship was marked by restrictions. It also highlights the complexity and transgressive nature of their sexual union. The transgression manifests on a number of levels. First, Lindiwe as “a good girl”, “a bookworm, a teacher’s pet, a goody-goody” (77), defies expectations of female respectability with regard to sexual morality (which her mother had tried to instil in her) by having a one-night stand with a boy with a criminal past. Second, the reproachful tone in Bridgette’s voice when she hears that her friend had sexual intercourse with a “Rhodie” conveys the reservations that she has towards cross-racial relationships in an independent Zimbabwe emerging out of a history of unequal and oppressive relations between white settlers and black Africans. Ian and Lindiwe’s “friendship” only forms when Ian is released from jail where he spent two years after being accused of setting his abusive stepmother alight. He comes back to live in the dilapidated house next door to the Bishops. On the character of Ian, Sabatini explains in an interview that she deliberately invokes the “archetype” of the boy next door in the title of the novel, hence referring to Ian, in order to subvert the term because while “the boy next door” usually refers to “a good looking, shy, middle of the road person”, Ian is nothing like that. He is “a brash boy with a distinctive way of talking and seeing the world” (Geosi Reads, 2011: n.p.), and as a son of a now deceased, alcoholic former Selous Scout, ³ he is not financially privileged compared to the other white people in Bulawayo. Poppie Mphuthing explains that “the notion of ‘the boy next door’ is widely seen as an imagined, optimistic image of the perfect love” (2010: 57). This narrative archetype (especially in visual media forms produced by Americans for a supposedly global youth culture) is associated with a wholesome, unpretentious masculinity, in which an unassumingly average nice guy, the boy right under your nose, as it were, turns the ordinary proximity of neighbourliness into the promise of deeper, closer affections, even the extraordinary intimacies of feeling designated by the term love. Mphuthing notes that even though “Sabatini’s novel embodies this, it simultaneously removes the rose-tinted effect, by positing love in the inglorious light in which it often thrives” (2010: 57) and further subverts this stereotypical representation of the nice boy next door.

Ian’s relationship with his heritage, a white lineage which was so hostile to the liberation of black people, is ambiguous and complex. He is proud of his hypermasculine legacy, but at the same time he is tainted by the implications of such a heritage especially within the postcolonial space where he is located, given his family’s Rhodesian Selous Scout affiliation, representing an extreme, hostile version of whiteness. Among other settler colonials who remain in the new country that is Zimbabwe, Ian’s masculinity is associated with the overturned hegemonic colonial masculinity. In some ways, he is necessarily produced as a pariah by other whites, who need to exonerate themselves of guilt, and ideally to seem to ally themselves with a whiteness whose authority has been superseded by black rule. 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).

However, despite such perceptions, Ian sometimes allows himself to associate with black people even though he too has ingrained racist attitudes, often using derogatory terms such as “Gondie” and “Aff” when referring to black people. Despite the apparent danger that Ian poses as an ex-convict, Lindiwe is attracted to him and is curious about his racial difference as well as the class differences apparent in his convict “bad boy” status. Indeed, she fixates on his “otherness”, exoticizing his looks. For instance, several times she takes a newspaper clipping from her pink handbag; she would “look at the picture and then lift the paper up and put [her] lips gently on his hair” (101). From a young age, Lindiwe, who is conflicted by her “coloured” identity, is fascinated by “whiteness”, its cultural meanings, and white people’s modes of romantic and other social interaction. Whiteness seems both proximate and yet denied to her, and hence she fetishizes it and turns it into an object of excessive desire and identification. For example, when the Bishop family goes to watch a movie at the drive-in cinema, Lindiwe’s focus is usually diverted to how the young “Rhodies” associate with each other. “Most of the time I’m not watching the movie on the giant screen but the groups of young white people who are calling out to each other, kissing, laughing, talking in their style. […] They are my movie” (29). This cultural difference embodied in the expressions of affect and sexuality appeals to Lindiwe, whose own family denies such apparently explicit expression of sexuality.

The perverse exoticism that she attaches to the young “Rhodies” as a group is transferred to how she views Ian as an individual. However, even though race dynamics are at play in the way she views and relates to Ian — exemplified in the way she addresses him as “Mr Mackenzie” — the desire for the alluring other is complicated. I read Lindiwe’s projection of attraction onto Ian as an interesting reversal of bell hooks’s theory of white men’s attraction to black women. hooks argues that through this gesture, white men attempt to assert themselves “as transgressive desiring subjects” (2009: 24) by incorporating the “exotic” other into the self. This seems analogous to Lindiwe’s being attracted to Ian’s apparent difference. Because he is a pariah among the white friends he used to hang around with, as well as being ostracized by the white community at large, Lindiwe views him as an othered other and feels sorry for him. The feeling of being marginalized is one that Lindiwe identifies with, implying that her feelings for Ian are mediated by complex factors which include adolescent infatuation, the dynamics of race, and the need to socially belong. Both Lindiwe and Ian, one can argue, occupy an unsettled liminal zone in the society of the time. One is a “coloured” Ndebele and the other is a “Rhodie” and they both belong to an undesirable category of people who taint the new nation of Zimbabwe, hence corrupting the notion of proper national belonging. Despite their evident race and class differences, this shared interstitial quality establishes a space of possibility which is empathetically imaginative and charged with the sexual interest that Sabatini’s narrative needs. Although Lindiwe is instructed by her mother to keep their family’s “interaction with that boy to the strictest minimum” (49) — “if he comes here when there are no adults you must not let him in” (50) — she defies her mother’s orders and devises strategies of secretly meeting with Ian. For example, they sneak around town in Ian’s battered car hoping that Lindiwe’s mother will not see them together (49–50). However, aware of how taboo her desire for Ian is, Lindiwe keeps her fantasies and information about her rendezvous with Ian to herself, even keeping her best friend in the dark: “I don’t tell Bridgette that I lie on my bed and imagine him next to me. The two of us, side by side, on my bed” (78).

I notice how the patterning of the sentence holds back from sexual explicitness, and yet, the repetition of a variation of syntactical units (“next to me”/“side by side”) and the loaded phrase “on my bed” makes the reader aware of a potent sense of Lindiwe’s growing sexual longing, as her young imagination places the two of them, girl and boy, as if they were just innocently adjacent bodies located only on the surface of the sexually associated object without the actual intercourse. Significantly, too, as an extension of both Lindiwe’s ordinary every day and her exceptionalist imaginative fantasizing of cross-racial sex, the bed here holds a subversive possibility which might challenge purist nationalist discourses based on ethnic and racial hierarchies. Their bodies exist in the space of romantic possibility, as if racial politics and sociocultural hierarchies are suspended. Lindiwe even resists articulating her desires and sexual fantasies in her diary: “I’ve stopped writing because what I want to write now is too big to be safe in there, even if I do have a lock and key. So I just put X’s, my secret secret” (79). Lindiwe’s use of Xs is a complex strategy of not only protecting her transgressive secret desires from others but also points to a withholding of naming her own desires from even herself. Moreover, Xs also represent kisses and therefore present an interesting ambiguity of displacement.

For Ian, Lindiwe is the first “black” person with whom he closely interacts and forms a personal connection. However, the fact that he interpellates Lindiwe as black, and not “coloured” as she would like to be identified, suggests his need to place her within that racial hierarchy, since acknowledging her “colouredness” would imply acknowledging a certain degree of whiteness and hence some degree of equality with him. His views of race, of course, cannot be exempted from his own “social history, which tells him he should be a racist, patriarchal pillar of Rhodesian society” (Mphuthing, 2010: 57), and in several instances, he is unable to separate racist ideologies from his relationship with Lindiwe although as he grows older he becomes more racially conscious. Consider, for example, an occasion during one of their rendezvous when he books them into a local hotel room to escape the scorching Bulawayo heat:

“Not being racialistic or anything, but heh, some black people stink as hell. You don’t.” “I am coloured.” “Coloured? You don’t look like a goffle. You’ve got more black blood than white. Look at your mother; she’s as black as …” He gets up from the bed. “Asch man, people get so touchy. Let’s just drop it. Soon as a white man opens his mouth he’s being racialistic.” (92)

There are two points to note here. First, Lindiwe’s assertion that she is “coloured” and by implication the reason why she does not stink like other black people seems to reinforce the boundaries that “coloured” people construct in order to blur and separate any similarities between them and the supposedly racially inferior black Africans. Lindiwe’s sentiments corroborate Kelly Nims’s observations on the “coloured” community in Zimbabwe. She notes that historically, “many coloureds have denied the reality of the boundaries that have separated them from whites or Europeans, and more recently, have reinforced the boundaries that have separated them from black Africans” (Nims, 2013: 10). Second, even though Ian constantly uses racist derogatory terms, invokes racist stereotypes, and obviously marks Lindiwe as other, he does not see himself as racist. He constructs himself as one of the “liberal” white Zimbabweans who freely associates with black people without the burdens of race, one who makes “a break with a white supremacist past that would have such desire articulated only as taboo, as secret, as shame” (hooks, 1992: 24). For example, when Lindiwe complains about the receptionist at the hotel, who, thinking she was a prostitute, had given her a snide look before asking Ian whether he was staying for the night (91), Ian responds by parodying the assumptions that society constructs around the appearance of a black woman in the presence of a white man: “Oh her, down there, that fossil. And I’m the king of Sheba. No, I’m a sugar daddy. A skint sugar daddy. That would be a first, heh?” (92; emphasis in original). By referring to the receptionist as a fossil, Ian challenges the historical and socially constructed assumptions that portray sex between black and white people as a sexual transaction which is motivated by economic necessity on the part of the black woman and sexual curiosity on the part of the white man.

Because of the restrictions placed on sexual interaction across racial lines, the most common instances of black–white relationships came in the form of clandestine affairs between white men and black women. Ian therefore criticizes those views as belonging in the past. The derisive self-reference as a skint sugar daddy — whoever has heard of such a male sexual patron being short of cash! — further mocks such constructions and seeks to undermine long-established social assumptions that white men and black women cannot have a relationship devoid of colonial power relations, one moved not by exploitative motives but rather by a genuine interest in another person. Thus, Ian’s self-construction as a white male “Zimbabwean” is complex, at once transgressive and at the same time complicit with racially skewed perceptions of black and white relations.

Despite his self-construction as “liberal”, he is still conscious of the boundaries embedded in interactions between people of different races, and in order to remain accepted within the race group which identifies him and has historically, under the national body of “Rhodesia”, granted him superiority, he sometimes feels obliged to perform being a “Rhodesian”. For example, this becomes evident when months after his release from jail, he goes to see his old school friend John. He leaves Lindiwe in the car and walks over to the gate where John is standing on the other side. After their usual greeting, John says,

“Tell you what, how about Grey’s Inn, six o’clock. Check out the chicks. New stock just arrived from England, come to save the natives.” Ian turns a bit. I sit in the car very still. “What’s that?” says his buddy looking over the gate to the car. “Nothing. Just giving a lift.” “So Grey’s Inn, right?” “Right.” (70)

Here, I am interested in the intersections of racial and gender discourse in this conversation and the underlying meanings within such discourses. Performing codes of masculinity, John objectifies and commodifies English women by referring to them as new stock, obviously marking their difference from the local white girls. Degrading though it is for the women, this pattern of voyeurism and interaction is sanctioned as it does not involve any kind of racial transgressions and neither does it offer any space for transgressive sexual desires. On the other hand, John’s morally disapproving tone when he asks Ian “what’s that?” not only points to the objectification of Lindiwe and her reduction to a state of nothingness, it also highlights how transgressive Ian’s act of appearing in public with “a native” is and how socially inappropriate such interactions remain. Ian’s body language in response to John’s invitation to go to Grey’s Inn to check out girls is complex. He turns towards the car a bit as if to get Lindiwe’s approval, thus acknowledging her influence on him. At the same time, whether deliberately or not, he draws John’s attention to Lindiwe’s presence in the car, as if to signal that the two of them are now together. However, this is a fleeting moment, as he quickly dismisses Lindiwe’s presence in his car as “nothing”. His dismissal of Lindiwe reflects the conflict he faces in acknowledging such desires. He wants her, but at the same time he finds his desires shameful. This also reflects the tension between received “truths” about the inappropriateness of cross-racial unions and his apparent need to remain accepted among his peers and his desire to break such boundaries. On the other hand, Lindiwe’s bodily response at Ian’s movement betrays her own sense of fear of what she knows both their communities disapprove of, even though she still goes ahead to exercise her agency by forging a relationship with Ian. Unlike Ian, she sits still as if to ensure her presence is a secret. By hiding herself from John’s disapproving gaze, she concedes to his false sense of superiority and effaces the agency in her desires.

Representing dissident desires and reconceptualizing the nation

Although Ian and Lindiwe’s relationship is personal, their coming together as people from two historically antagonistic races becomes a sociopolitical concern and receives disapproval because of how it is framed by the society within the discourses of “Settler!” “Sellout” (71). As a white man, Ian is associated with the oppressive white settler who illegally dispossessed the Africans of their ancestral land. On the other end, Lindiwe’s romantic involvement with a white man who represents those who “stole” her people’s land is perceived as an act of betrayal and hence makes her a “sell-out”. Pia Thielmann also makes a general observation that “black–white love relationships can be, and often are, represented as the result of selling out” (2004: 28), framed within narratives of betraying one’s racial identity. Interestingly, Sabatini positions Ian and Lindiwe’s relationship, their first sexual encounter, and Ian’s sudden emigration to South Africa when he fails to fit in the new Zimbabwe at the same time and space as the Gukurahundi massacres, which were also premised within discourses of dissidence, pollution, and selling out. I read this strategy as a critique of exclusionist attitudes which are directed towards interracial unions and their claims to national belonging on the basis that they are polluting the purity of the nation. Even though there were calls for racial reconciliation at the dawn of Zimbabwean independence whereby the country officially became a multiracial state, the politics of reconciliation, redistribution, and reconstruction degenerated into “government sponsored violence, repression and corruption that would bring the country to an economic collapse by the end of the twentieth century” (Pucherova, 2011: 6). As Julia Seirlis notes,

[I]n Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, race and spatial sensibilities worked together to polarize whiteness and blackness, effectively restricting the struggle for power and the land to those two poles. Those not easily fitting into the categories of “black” or “white” were — and continue to be — excluded from power and from any substantive connection to the land and the nation as home. (2004: 408)

Pucherova further explains that since 1980, “violence against white farmers, immigrants, undesirable ethnic groups (such as the Ndebele) and slum dwellers has been justified on the basis of absolutist conceptualizations of nationalist identity based on ancestry and racial purity” (2011: 6). At independence, Zimbabwe was the global poster child for a newly self-governing, thriving nation. However, it was not long before Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF began to exhibit authoritarian tendencies, unleashing terror and atrocities on those people who were perceived as political dissidents, apparently representing a threat to the unity of the newly formed nation. Here, it is also important to explain that in the first elections after independence, the victory of ZANU-PF which is/was predominantly Shona (the Shona form the majority of Zimbabwe’s population) “was celebrated as not only a victory of a liberation movement over settler colonialism but also as a victory of [a] Shona political elite over the Ndebele elites” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2011: n.p.). The tensions signalling the beginning of the divisions along ethnic lines are illustrated at the beginning of Sabatini’s novel as the Bishop family gather around the television to watch Mugabe’s first Address to the Nation:

“Well, he sounds quite reasonable and sincere,” Daddy said afterwards. “Reconciliation is the best and only policy.” Daddy sounded as though he was trying to convince himself with good arguments … “He’s a Shona,” Mummy interrupted him. Ever since the elections when Mugabe and ZANU-PF had shocked them by winning fifty-seven of the eighty seats while Nkomo and ZAPU had only won twenty, Mummy had been making daily predictions about what life under Shona Management would bring. “This is their chance now. Everyone will be forced to speak Shona. Watch, he will even make his Address to the Nation in Shona”. (17)

Mrs Bishop’s views prove prescient. In October 1980, barely six months after attaining independence, “Mugabe entered into an agreement with the North Koreans to train a praetorian guard that would answer to him personally — this became the Fifth Brigade, given the name ‘Gukurahundi’ by Mugabe himself” (Eppel, 2008: 10). Even though “Gukurahundi — a Shona term that refers to ‘the rain that washes away the chaff before the summer rains’ — was initially used by Mugabe to name the praetorian Fifth Brigade, the term has now generally come to be used to describe the period in which the Fifth Brigade terrorized the provinces of Midlands and Matabeleland” where an estimated 20,000 civilian people were killed and many more left maimed for life (Ncube and Siziba, 2015: 2). For this military group, being a member of Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) was synonymous with being Ndebele and hence being a dissident (Eppel, 2008: 12). In itself, the term Gukurahundi connotes images of filth and its cleansing. Ian Phimister argues that “fear of pollution” seems to have been a significant driving force behind the massive violence towards Ndebeles (2008: 207). Most of the victims were convinced that the Shonas wanted to wipe out all the Ndebeles and that “the intent of the attack” was exercised for the purposes of “moral renewal, the purification of the country from rubbish” (Phimister, 2008: 207). At the same time, Ndebele victims perceived the widespread use of rape “as an orchestrated, systematic attempt to create a generation of Shona children in Matebeleland — a ‘shoni-zation’ of the region” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2011: 25).

In a deliberate narrative strategy, Ian and Lindiwe’s short-term relationship, which also invokes discourses of dissidence, begins and abruptly ends at the same time the nationalist state is expelling dissident bodies in favour of “moral renewal” and purification of the new nation. Both of their identities, Ian as a white man in an independent Zimbabwe and Lindiwe as a “coloured” Ndebele woman, are at the margins of national belonging, and therefore, their union poses an even more terrifying threat to the unity and purification of the national body. Ian makes mention of the pervasion of rape of Ndebele women during this period, hence associating the commonplace practice of rape of Ndebele women by Shona soldiers with a particular threat to Lindiwe, who in this new Zimbabwe is also at the margins and thus dispensable. His comments that black on black violence — “gondies versus gondies” (118) — had to happen also betray his sense of superiority over a group of people whom he considers unsuitable to govern each other. They also reveal his nostalgia for Rhodesia which he claims was much more peaceful under Ian Smith than under the rule of blacks. In the novel, the Fifth Brigade erect roadblocks to monitor who comes in and who leaves. The violence is pervasive, as Ian describes: “the Fifth Brigade is busy tshaying people left, right and center. Speciality: broken ankles, wrists. Man, even talk of bodies dumped in Antelope mine” (102). At this time, Ian decides to move to South Africa because he has no family left in Zimbabwe and no proper livelihood. Lindiwe still fantasizes about being in love with him and holds romanticized visions of a life together, which ironically would be even more difficult to achieve under apartheid. She decides to run away with him to South Africa without his approval. She ostensibly only asks for a ride to Gwanda, which is on the way to the South African border, and it is only when he sees her passport in her bag that Ian realizes she wants to cross the border with him. Whether he deliberately chooses not to see that Lindiwe intends to cross the border to go and stay with him in South Africa is not clear. He, however, tells her protectively, and at the same time patronizingly, about the dangers of being black, young, unskilled, and female in apartheid South Africa, and that she should “be reasonable; there’s no ways you’re going, not a chance” (122).

Under the ominous gaze of the Fifth Brigade, Ian has to explain where they are going and the reason why they are together when they are suddenly stopped. He explains that she is his half-sister to avoid scrutiny of why such unlikely people would be travelling together and to protect Lindiwe as well as himself from being punished:

Jeez, did you see how that gondie looked at you. I thought he was going to drag you into the bush and do God knows what. […] Quick thinking, heh, half-sister. Thought he was going to drag me into the bush when I came out with that, almost did a double take myself. Shit. You check those gondies in the cattle truck? Where the hell were they taking them? You see the look in their eyes and the smell, shit. Fear. […] Bob has it in real good for you Ndebeles. Shit man, gondies versus gondies, had to happen. (118)

The day that they witness the violence wrought on “dissidents” when the soldiers burn down their houses, Ian and Lindiwe have sex for the first time, which results in the conception of their son, David. This highly unsettling juxtaposition of the destruction of families, lives, and homes in order to purify the nation just as these two marginalized people become intimate and in fact conceive a child is significant in Sabatini’s novel. It depicts the intertwining of the personal and the political, and functions as a narrative strategy to unsettle and problematize the definitions of a “pure” nation. If mixed race sexual relations were a threat to colonial Rhodesia, and even within the new, postcolonial nation state, Lindiwe and Ian’s desires for each other are construed as transgressive and subversive. Despite political independence and concomitant liberty, their love cannot be accommodated even within the paradigm of being Zimbabwean. Their exclusion from proper national belonging is implied in their ethnic and racial embodiments. Their sexual unification (with its potential of reproduction) further complicates and subverts the notion of purifying the nation which the Mugabe regime was trying to achieve through Gukurahundi.

The physical/sexual encounter between Ian and Lindiwe is implied rather than described in Lindiwe’s narrative, and there are long gaps between paragraphs which describe their parting. I argue that this is an authorial strategy to signal the taboo and transgressive nature of the act, not just because of the racial implications but because of Lindiwe’s underage status: she is 16 years old and therefore legally regarded as a minor with regard to sexual consent. Since a large part of the narrative comprises Lindiwe’s thoughts, focalized through her consciousness, this mode of representation also corresponds with forms of female respectability into which she has been socialized. A paradoxical decorum, restraint, and propriety obtain, even if (perhaps precisely because) she has already transgressed sexually. This is a form of masking or pretence which, albeit obliquely, resonates with debates about “passing”. As readers, we are left to assume that Lindiwe and Ian had sex, because the next morning she wakes up first and says, “I pick up my clothes which are scattered on the floor” (128), implying the reckless abandon of desire, in the heat of passion. When Ian leaves for Beitbridge without her and without any hesitation, she reminiscences about the previous night, further hinting at the intimacy they had shared: “On the bus I think of his hair, his eyes, his ears, his nose, his arms, his hands. I think of my face in his hands. My head pressed tight against him. I think of never seeing him again” (130). Again, the authorial tactic is subtle, the list of body parts seeming to point to, but never reaching the most intimate. But the description stops, foreshortened, and for a reader the taboo sexual encounter must exist as a representational absence. This also serves to reinforce Lindiwe’s girlishness: it is not the sex, per se, that captures her thoughts. Rather, even soon after the fact, she creates a romantic catalogue of the lover’s features; her young imagination struggles to give expression to the sexual, displacing it into his ordinary-extraordinary features such as nose, eyes, and hands which are then, paradoxically, invested with sexual charge.

I further read Lindiwe’s pregnancy, a significant physical part of Ian which remains with her, as symbolizing complicated nationalist efforts of achieving a pure nation. She keeps her pregnancy — a physical connection between them — a secret from Ian who is trying to make a living in South Africa, even though they maintain their more conventional correspondence through letters all throughout her university days. She is forced to bear the shame of her sexual transgression alone:

I think of those nine months, the look on Mummy’s face as my stomach grew. She tried to convince Daddy to send me off somewhere. […] I think of those years when I had to go Speciss College with all the other failures to do my O and A levels because none of the schools would take on a girl who had been pregnant, the bad influence she might have on others, the contagion she might spread. (177)

She is turned into a pariah not just within her immediate family — her mother tries to send her away to avoid the tainting on the family — but also among her wider community, in which she is perceived as a social misfit, especially by other girls who brand her as morally loose and irresponsible. She reveals, “The girls I would bump into from school, who would look at me up and down, pass comments to each other, words like cheap, slut, baby dumper tossed from one lip glossed mouth to another” (177; emphasis in original). Yet in the end, the baby that Mrs Bishop thought was a shame to the family becomes a substitute for the babies that she herself lost to miscarriages. Having always longed for a baby boy, when Mrs Bishop realizes that Lindiwe’s baby is a boy, she takes over from her and practically excludes Lindiwe from raising the child. Moreover, the boy’s “colouredness”, which Mrs Bishop could not attain and had aspired to for her own daughter, is undeniable in the boy and it fills the gap that Lindiwe could not.

Ian only discovers Lindiwe’s secret accidentally, when he sees the photo of the six-year-old biracial child in her purse when he comes to visit her from South Africa. In an attempt to build a life with Lindiwe and his son, he stays on in Zimbabwe even though his educational qualifications do not guarantee him a proper job. Moreover, the political landscape in the 1990s emphasized the offering of opportunities to “indigenous” Zimbabweans, sidelining descendants of British settlers perceived as having already enjoyed the economic benefits of colonialism. In this sense, white Zimbabweans — especially farmers, framed within a discourse of filth and dirt — are perceived as having benefitted from a dirty history, and therefore “they should be cleaned out” (Radio Africa, 2012) from the new Zimbabwean national body. In representing the growth of Ian and Lindiwe’s relationship and their attempt to raise their biracial child in the midst of hostile racial and political tensions, Sabatini suggests the need to rethink or reconceptualize the idea of the nation and who belongs in it. The three of them together provide a spectacle for people who are perplexed by the sight of them claiming their space in a context which advances narratives of racial exclusion: “A woman in red plastic stilettos walked past us just now and almost fell into the pool because she couldn’t stop gawking at the sight of the three of us” (187). At times, Lindiwe is mistaken for a maid by Ian’s white friends, who cannot fathom the idea of an intimate relationship outside the paradigm of master and maid. At other times, she is looked over by black people who see her as a sell-out for “sleeping with the enemy”, as it were.

The pressure of prejudice that they experience causes tension between them. By this point, Lindiwe has ceased identifying herself as “coloured” in favour of the term “black”, as the sociopolitical landscape of Zimbabwe continues to change. Ratele and Duncan (2003) argue that the dynamic nature of identity, its shifting contextually defined meanings, and the political function of self-definition require one to remain open to new and different possibilities of defining oneself. It also necessitates being attentive to one’s shifting significance against an ever-changing subjective and sociopolitical landscape. In the same vein, Ian’s shifting racial consciousness also increases the tension between the two of them. As Syned Mthatiwa argues, “in grappling to belong and make Zimbabwe a home like Rhodesia once was, young whites create Rhodie hangouts and enclaves such as Sarah’s Nightclub and the Keg and Sable”, places which are exclusive to white people (2018: 6). By patronizing these places, Ian also excludes Lindiwe from being part of his inner circle. Moreover, Ian fails to recognize that by invoking racial stereotypes with his “Rhodie” friends he is not merely being “inconsiderate” towards Lindiwe, he is actually being racist (he, anyway, tellingly prefers the milder expression “racialistic”, unable to categorize himself bluntly as racist). He also fails to acknowledge that their son is “coloured in Zimbabwe” (since to him “he doesn’t even look like a coloured” (341; emphasis in original)). He is also unable to recognize the uncomfortable stares that are usually directed at Lindiwe and not at him. Lindiwe says,

I look about and an image of Troutbeck Inn before independence fixes itself on me, just like this one: the white golfers teeing off around the lake, the wives nursing children here at the patio, the black waiters carrying trays […] yes just like this, except, of course, I wouldn’t be here getting looked over by wives, nannies, and waiters. And I can hear Maphosa all right; his anger still fresh and raw, “Amabhunu” and then right at me, “Sellout”. I look at Ian and see “the White Man”, “the Oppressor”, “the Settler”, “the Colonizer” for the first time really. (169)

Paradoxically, within this discourse on race, nationhood, and belonging in independent Zimbabwe, it is actually Lindiwe and not Ian who is subjected to hostility whenever the two of them are together. Because of the colour of her skin, she is looked at with contempt and ignored by white women for they consider her an outsider, a social misfit, somebody who does not belong in spaces such as Troutbeck Inn which have been designated as “white”. The only black people that enter those white spaces are nannies and waiters. Lindiwe’s presence at the inn, not as a nanny or a waiter, but as a spouse of a white man, disrupts the power differentials which maintain white authority despite Zimbabwean independence. In a way, she is one of them. Looking over her then is denying her presence and entry into the white social space. Ignoring her is putting her in her place, so to speak. On the other hand, accusatory stares of contempt from the black waiters and nannies are directed to Lindiwe as she is considered to be complicit with “amabhunu”, oppressive settlers who continue to exploit and enjoy economic and social privileges that are not attainable for black Zimbabweans. To them, to be with a white man is to be a “sell-out”, to betray the values for liberty and equality that had been fought for during the liberation war. Therefore, by “looking over her”, they express their disapproval over such a union, at the same time punishing her by refusing to acknowledge her apparent transgressions.

As defiance at this kind of hostility towards their interracial relationship, Ian patronizingly advises Lindiwe that she “shouldn’t care so much what people think”, to which Lindiwe angrily responds, “You don’t know anything! You’re white, how would you know” (169). Their daily experiences are overdetermined by race, which further cause tension between them. Frustration at the fragile status of their union causes Lindiwe to confront the history of race relations in her country and to reexamine her relationship with Ian. Ian’s feelings for Lindiwe, genuine though they are, are fraught and complex due to the insecurities caused by the racial tensions that he has to negotiate with daily as well as his failure to provide for Lindiwe and their son. The ever-changing political landscape, which is becoming increasingly repressive under the Mugabe regime landscape and further sidelines white Zimbabweans, makes it difficult for Ian to find a job which would sustain him and his family. The insecurities between them are the cause of a number of fights. To hurt her feelings, a number of times, Ian accuses Lindiwe of being attracted to white foreigners for financial gain. He bases these accusations on one interracial relationship she had with a French man who had come to work in Zimbabwe. “Get off my back. Or you’re so used to the expat lifestyle, you are having trouble coping with local rates. How come you are so into foreigners?” (236). Although this sentiment originates from his jealousy, it is also mediated by dominant views regarding black women’s relationships with or attraction to white men as being expedient and financially motivated.

The notion of love as the primary motivation for Lindiwe and Ian’s continued relationship — despite the fact that he is white and she is black, and their life together does not seem to amount to anything — shocks Bridgette, Lindiwe’s high school friend. The conditions that Lindiwe and her son found themselves living in, “the cheapness, the makeshift quality of the furniture: the straw couch she is sitting on, care of the vendors along Avondale road, the table made of crates, the bookshelf balanced on bricks” (239), embarrass Lindiwe. Nevertheless, she defends Ian when Bridgette questions his past and Lindiwe’s reasons for staying with him:

“Lindiwe, he’s a Rhodie!”

“A Zimbabwean, Bridgette”.

Another roll of the eyes.

“Maybe he’s a new breed of enlightened Rhodie, but Lindiwe he’s still a Rhodie”.

“Bridgette, he’s the father of my child, and he’s a good person”. (240)

By calling him a Rhodie, Bridgette locates Ian’s identity in relation to the past and to the oppressive white regime that exploited people like Bridgette and Lindiwe — as well as, of course, forbidding interracial relationships like Lindiwe and Ian’s. Here, Bridgette reminds Lindiwe of what a “Rhodie” identity means in post-independence Zimbabwe and the apparent transgressiveness of their relationship. A “Rhodie” is located outside the margins of national belonging, and therefore, being intimate with an “outsider” is betraying the project of building a pure Zimbabwean nation. When Lindiwe corrects Bridgette by insisting that Ian is a Zimbabwean and not a Rhodesian, she challenges pervasive popular and state narratives that exclude whites from the official version of independent, Zimbabwean national identity. In addition, as I have indicated, this discourse also constructs the interracial relationship as a pollution to the national body, counterproductive to proper, independent nation building. Therefore, Lindiwe’s decision to stick it out with Ian despite the tension between them and their contention with racial prejudice challenges exclusivist notions of true Zimbabwean identity and belonging. It also reminds us, as Jennifer Cole and Lynn Thomas have argued, that people in Africa have deployed various ideologies of love to debate difference and to claim political inclusion (2009: 29). Even though at the end of the novel, Ian and Lindiwe make the decision to leave the country when the Mugabe regime becomes increasingly oppressive to people with dissenting views, they still lay claims to Zimbabwe as home. Ian’s decision to finally ask Lindiwe to marry him, with a “single Zimbabwean emerald full of promise and light” (402), and his subsequent sweeping of her “in his strong African arms” (402), cements both their union and their claim to Zimbabwean national identity. Ultimately, Sabatini’s novel demonstrates that even though the decision to enter an interracial relationship is personal, the implications are political and they elicit various responses including disapproval from families, the state, and society at large. The novel not only shows how sexuality is used as a site to mark belonging, it also seems to corroborate with Pucherova that dissident interracial desire can be the most powerful force to counter the racial exclusivity of southern African discourses of belonging and offer new ways of reconceptualizing the nation. Ian and Lindiwe’s relationship, which later becomes a marriage, challenges such exclusivist narratives of national belonging.