Abstract

Skin pigmentation has a bearing on identity construction and the politics of belonging in Zimbabwean literature. Persons with albinism are often subjected to social exclusion, rape, and ritual killing due to misconceptions about the aetiology of their condition. The albinic body—regarded by ableist society as either unpigmented or wrongly pigmented—inhabits a precarious liminal space between whiteness and blackness, normalcy and abnormality, and ultra-visibility and invisibility. This ambivalent positionality deconstructs the ideological construction of difference based on pigmentation and shows that albinism cannot be essentialised as inferiority. Using Ben Hanson’s Takadini (1997, Kampala: East African Educational Publishers) and Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory (2015, London: Faber and Faber), I offer a context-specific discussion of the architecture of resilience exhibited by persons with albinism, with a particular focus on how misconceptions about albinism are disconnected from the lived realities of albinic characters. While the texts are alive to the medical challenges confronting the albinic body, they also underscore its resilience and full functionality in the face of culturally mediated disablement. To explore this dynamic in these two novels, the article formulates an aesthetic of resilience that draws on resilience theory in structural engineering. I argue that the albinic body has resilience properties that can turn its vulnerability into a creative force that unsettles notional understandings of what it means to be albinic.

摘要

皮肤色素沉着与津巴布韦文学中的身份建构和归属政治有关。白化病患者由于对其疾病病因的误解而经常遭受社会排斥、强奸和仪式杀戮。白化病的身体——被有能力的社会视为未着色或着色错误——居住在白与黑、正常与异常、超可见性与不可见性之间的一个不稳定的阈值空间。这种矛盾的定位解构了基于色素沉着的差异的意识形态建构，并表明白化病不能被本质化为自卑。使用 Ben Hanson 的Takadini (1997, Kampala: East Africa Educational Publishers) 和 Petina Gappah 的The Book of Memory（2015 年，伦敦：Faber 和 Faber），我针对白化病患者表现出的复原力架构进行了特定背景的讨论，特别关注对白化病的误解如何与白化病患者的生活现实脱节。虽然这些文本对白化病患者面临的医学挑战充满活力，但它们也强调了其在文化介导的残疾面前的复原力和完整功能。为了探索这两部小说中的这种动态，本文利用结构工程中的弹性理论制定了一种弹性美学。我认为，白化病患者的身体具有恢复能力，可以将其脆弱性转化为一种创造力，从而动摇对白化病患者意味着什么的概念性理解。