In fact, as Edward Said puts it, “everything about human history is rooted in the earth” (5) since over time human beings have struggled and competed over geography and territory, conceptualizing the environment as space that needs to be turned into place (5).
This thinking is traceable to the biblical story of creation in which humans are destined to control nature. Therefore, an analysis of these two texts, necessarily, has to rely on a triangulation of some of the most recent environmental philosophies, namely, deep ecology, social ecology, and ecofeminism.ĭeep ecology locates current environmental problems in the dominant Western philosophical outlook, which envisages humans as destined to dominate nature and control it.
The setting of Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing (1950) and Chenjerai Hove's Ancestors (1996) in colonial Zimbabwe means that they, in one way or another, engage with the environmental ideologies of the (Western) colonizers and the (African) colonized. The paradox plays on human, particularly Western anxieties and ambivalences concerning relationships with the animal world and nature in general. However, in the context of the current global “environmental crisis” it is essential to “recover” the discourse on the natural environment in Zimbabwean literature.ĭiscourses on the relationship between humans and the environment have always mediated human consciousness in one way or the other, centering on people as part of nature or as masters of the same, what Soper calls the “Human-Nature paradox” (49). Critical exegeses of the literature have focused on such aspects as gender, colonialism, and post-coloniality. Much of the criticism of Zimbabwean literature has skirted the ecological question.