The Art of Survival

Anna Chitando received her doctorate in English Studies from the University of South Africa. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages and Literature in the Faculty of Arts and Education at the Zimbabwe Open University. Her research interests include African literature, children’s literature and gender studies. She is the author of Fictions of Gender and the Dangers of Fiction in Zimbabwean Women’s Writings on HIV and AIDS (2012), in addition to articles in several refereed journals and chapters in various books. Joseph Chikowero received his PhD in African Languages and Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, with a dissertation on memory, violence and narration in Zimbabwean and South African writing and films of the liberation struggles. Previously, a teacher of English and Communication Studies at the Zimbabwe Open University, he holds an MA in English from the University of Zimbabwe. In 2011, he co-edited Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives with Peter Orner and Annie Holmes, an oral history of Zimbabwe’s decade of crisis. Chikowero has published scholarly articles on African children and juvenile literature, popular music and governance, film and political auto/biography in Sankofa: A Journal of African Children and Juvenile Literature, and Muziki: A Journal of Music Research in Africa. Angeline M. Madongonda holds an MA in English, and is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages and Literature of the Faculty of Arts and Education at the Zimbabwe Open University. Her publications include “The Language of Pain: (Re) Interpreting Nature as Metaphor in Yvonne Vera’s Under the tongue” in Emerging Perspectives on Yvonne Vera (edited by Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo and Helen Cousins, 2012). Her research interests include subaltern voices, HIV and AIDS in Zimbabwean and African literature, and traditional folklore in contemporary writing.