Broken by her Country of Broken Things: Memory, Resistance, and the Politics of Time in NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory (2022)

This article presents a reading of NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel Glory (2022) in the light of indigenous temporality and structural and administrative violence in the transition from pre-colonial to colonial, and then to postcolonial times in an imaginary African land. The study argues that structures of neocolonial violence and active erasure create a pseudo-temporality in the people of the ex postcolonies. It seeks to explore the idea of time in the postcolony, the distortion of communal past by the colonisers, the imposition of an invented past, present and future on the subjects, and the multitude’s resistance to and rejection of this imposed time in an African society. The novel depicts the patterns of violence in the postcolony. The indigenous population in the novel seeks to build for them a just future. Historical consciousness of suffering and pain of the ancestors is the starting point of liberating self. Remembering and memorialising the ancestors who suffered is the first step towards it. The study gives us a key to understanding parallel democracy that decolonised nations should aim at, keeping in view the damage caused by the invader’s view of progress (Western concept of development with neocolonialism) and democracy (a colonial byproduct). memorialising the ancestors who suffered is the first step towards it. The study gives us a key to understanding parallel democracy that decolonised nations should aim at, keeping in view the damage caused by the invader’s view of progress (Western concept of development with neocolonialism) and democracy (a colonial byproduct).