ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 explores how epistemic injustice is written on the bodies of literary characters. In NoViolet Bulawayo’s twenty-first-century Zimbabwe in We Need New Names a democracy activist called Bornfree is beaten to death by state thugs, and a baby called Freedom is killed by a bulldozer during an urban clearance project. Epistemic injustice also leaves its mark in the form of a pregnancy: the child Chipo has been raped by her grandfather, who in a misogynist patriarchy knows he can abuse her body. Bulawayo’s more recent novel Glory plays in a country called Jidada, which shares its history with Zimbabwe. Here, too, epistemic injustice is written almost literally on bodies: the body of the protagonist Destiny is covered with scars from a police beating, scars that mirror the scars on the body of her mother, Simiso, ‘as if the Defenders were creating on both bodies an important archive of the seat of Power’s cruelty’, as the narrative voice explains. The literary body records the truth of injustice.
