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。由于对白化病病因的误解，白化病患者经常遭受社会排斥、强奸和仪式性杀戮。白化病患者的身体——被有能力的社会视为未着色或着色错误——栖息在白与黑、正常与异常、极度可见与不可见之间的不稳定的边缘空间。这种矛盾的立场解构了基于色素沉着的差异的意识形态建构，并表明白化病不能本质化为自卑。使用 Ben Hanson 的Takadini（1997 年，坎帕拉：东非教育出版社）和 Petina Gappah 的The Book of Memory（2015 年，伦敦：Faber and Faber），我提供了针对白化病患者所表现出的复原力结构的特定背景讨论，特别关注对白化病的误解如何与白化病患者的现实脱节。虽然这些文本生动地讲述了白化病患者身体面临的医学挑战，但它们也强调了它在面对文化介导的残疾时的弹性和全部功能。为了探索这两部小说中的这种动态，本文借鉴了结构工程中的弹性理论，提出了一种弹性美学。我认为，白化病患者的身体具有弹性，可以将其脆弱性转化为一种创造力，颠覆对白化病意味着什么的概念性理解。