ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the counter-discursivity of Zimbabwean life-writings on narrative negotiations of the trauma of state violence. It examines theories of narrative affect to read the political aesthetics of trauma in stories told by black Zimbabwean victims of state violence. The chapter focuses on the counter-discursivity of narratives, especially as it is enabled by the stories’ affective dimensions and dynamics. It explores narrative framing of the postcolonial experience of state violence and how it informs alternative conceptions of freedom that discursively contest dominant, state-constructed, and enforced notions of nation. Victims of state violence were constructed in state discourses of the Third Chimurenga as survivors and beneficiaries of the state’s violent interventions. The chapter shows how Aaron’s identity as a “victimised perpetrator” offers critical unique angles to see and know the nature, politics, and mechanics of state violence. This identity and the views and knowledge of militarised hegemony it engenders are invaluable to the anthology’s political focus.
