ABSTRACT
In this chapter my concerns are with the widest range of linguistic and spatial representations of masculinities in Zimbabwe. My account is autobiographical and what I describe has my own experiences and memories as its referent. General terms like ‘Zimbabwean’, ‘Shona’ and ‘masculinity’ mask fragmentary contexts. There is no universalized ‘Zimbabweanness’ or ‘Shonaness’, just as there is no single, universalized masculinity. I use the term ‘masculinities’ here to examine male preoccupations as celebrations of ideals of maleness, pluralized to render a definition as fragmented as the many domains in which men are constructed as ‘men’ through language and space. The noun murume (man), apart from being a designation of anatomy, has con-
notations of not only gendered difference but specific functions. To women in spaces designated as female, murume is a site of bother. The term used to describe what men do in courtship, kuruma – to seduce or literally to sting, bite, stimulate – defines masculinities in terms of activities and actions addressed to women. Mukadzi anoruma (the woman is seduced) shows, by use of the passive, the woman as being acted on. Kuruma can also be that which has potency. These idealized representations portray men as active and in control, yet they also carry with them a sense of the dependency of men on women and of the ways in which masculinities are defined and shaped through interactions with women. As I will go on to suggest, women are far from passive in these processes. Masculinities are negotiated and constructed in different areas through specific
language usage. Spaces designated as male, such as the dare (traditional meeting place of men) and the beerhall, are places in which men can show their prowess through the skilful use of language and embellish particular masculinities. In these domains, definitions and descriptions of murume create ideals of autonomy. In proverbial self-definition, the ‘Shona’ say ‘murume murume, anoti chamuka inyama’. A free translation would read ‘a man is a man, he asserts that anything that arouses is
fair game’, meaning that it is a prerogative of men in their own spaces to take whatever is placed before them. The use of metaphor to define maleness in this sense alludes to various ideals. The use of the word nyama (game, meat) not only defines men as masculine subjects in terms of their hunting prowess, but alludes also to anything discursive as fair game. The use of language in these domains marks out a space in which men contest and confirm particular masculinities through shows of verbal versatility, competence in the ‘language of men’ and the use of particular forms of discourse. As they grow older, boys learn what it is to be a murume chaiye (‘real man’) not
only through their interactions with those who profess to embody these ideals, but also through the myths of masculinity which are spun by female relatives. In spaces designated as female, in which men are not welcome, the discourse of women shapes the masculinities of boys as they move in and out of these and other gendered domains. Female relatives – particularly the vatete (father’s sister) and ambuya (paternal grandmother) – impress certain masculine ideals on young boys, instructing them in what it takes to ‘be a man’ and in the arts of courtship and love. Women, as custodians of the praise poetry which marks the particular masculinities of each totemic group, celebrate and affirm men in the language of mutupo (totems) in public places, and between lovers in private, through praise poetry known as madanha omugudza, ‘lovers’ discourse under the blanket’.
