Zimbabwe in Creative Imagination: Environmental Crisis and Human Migration as National Tragedies in Shimmer Chinodya’s Dew in the Morning

Abstract

This study examines the representation of Zimbabwe’s environmental history, with a focus on the tragic interface between environmental crisis and human migration, in Shimmer Chinodya’s novel Dew in the Morning . The paper reveals the interconnectedness between literature and the environment. It demonstrates the creative reflection on Zimbabwe’s environmental crisis, the burden on land, and human displacement. Migrant ecocriticism as the theoretical framework of the study aids in interrogating the intersection and mainstreaming of environmental crisis and social displacement in the novel. The discovery is that rising human population, adverse technological forces, and unbridled economic considerations accelerate the degradation of the environment and result in ecological disturbances which induce human migration. The novel’s characters are circumscribed in a web woven by their actions and inactions as their depressing circumstances reflect the degree to which they exploit the environment. These contending realities provoke environmental crises and social tensions which precipitate human migration.