ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 returns to the issue of narrative voice. Where Chapter 2 dealt with silencing, the focus here is on the unsilencing of voices from the margins. In the nonfictional world marginalised voices are rarely heard, but in literary fiction ex-centric or eccentric narrators are as old as the novel itself. They are picaros and picaras, children, marginalised people, sometimes nonhuman animals. They are discursive infiltrators who either cannot or will not observe the rules about what is sayable and knowable. They bring disruptive perspectives to the table. This chapter looks first at the disruptive knowledge transported by picaresque and trickster voices in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. The second part of the chapter moves on to the animal narrators in Life and Death and in Bulawayo’s Glory who are, it is suggested, epistemic guerrilleros. Guerrilla epistemology operates a reversal of epistemic privilege, as a suppressed voice becomes the dominant voice. As an aesthetic strategy it unsilences voices that would normally be inaudible. They intervene in and disrupt dominant knowledge.
