In the parody of an English drawing room that Sa'eed has left, thenarrator discovers a notebook. On the first page Sa'eed has written: "MyLife Story?by Mustafa Sa'eed" (150); yet the rest of the book, except forthe dedication, has been left blank. Drawings, photographs, and scraps ofpaper with Sa'eed's handwriting are found mixed together in a differentfile. The papers are left for the narrator to arrange into a coherent volume;perhaps then Sa'eed's life story can be writ

At the same time the narrator is convincing himself that "the world isas unchanged as ever" (2), he recalls an unfamiliar face in the crowd of vil-lagers who had come to welcome him home. The unknown man in thecrowd is Mustafa Sa'eed, a "stranger" who arrived in the village five yearsago and who bought a farm to settle down and marry a local woman. Thenarrator recounts that he was struck by the fact that while the other vil-lagers asked questions about cultural differences between Sudanese andEuropeans, this man alone remained silent.

Convinced that they are endowed with a vital mission, the children make aneffort to remember Pip’s fictitious world and recount their memories in class.In turn, Mr. Watts, a “helmsman sorting and assembling them into somecoherent order” (132), puts these memories down on paper to be preserved.Afterwards, he re-reads the notes to the whole class, again inserting otherelements: “Mr Watts had added a line or two of his own” (112).

Mr. Watts, the white foreigner, introduces the children to an alien world,an unknown territory and a cultural and linguistic environment throughthe book he reads to them in class, Great Expectations, “the greatest novelby the greatest English writer of the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens”(18).

What should we make, though, of a recoto readers - to witnesses, as it were - buttims? In Roy's novel, the recovery is achof narrative, allowing one past momentand to suggest a continuous

s emerge.8 On a temporal lecontradictions within her novel, explorhybrid time reflects a damaging blend, butity might finally unsettle a rigid understanfor new temporal pos

Although presented as a collective of escape from material lack in How They Left (ch.10)migration is once again linked to post-independence disillusionment through a reference ofAchebe’s Things Fall Apart; ‘When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry andscatter like birds escaping a burning sky’ (Bulawayo 2013, 145).

which evokes Zimbabwe’s nationalist strugglefor independence – or Mzilikazi Road, with reference to the founding father of the Ndebelenation, King Mzilikazi. The Ndebele are the ethnic majority in the author’s native city of Bula-wayo. These names can be read as signifiers that inscribe the novel as a certain history of the Zim-babwean nation, given the post-independence dominance of the Shona majority and the politicalmarginalization of the Ndebele ethnic group.

Although this description of her is romantically "natural," i.e.,the earth, the Red Girl encourages Annie to break away from thelier primordial sympathy of parent-child. When the Red Girl brethe "law" and picks the fruit for Annie (56), the equally romantmyth of a fall into experience comes to replace the unity of motand daughter. The rest of the novel details Annie's move away fdesiring a unified paradise a la Wordsworth and into the Blake-ldivided world of experience. Indeed, the romantic journey fromnocence to experience emerges from within this mythical, psychoical interpretation: the Bildungsroman and the mother-daughtercombine to form a novelistic version of a contemporary female q

My call for a gender-integrated romantic-quest critique beginthe threshold of the novel, through the very terms of a woman storteller recollecting a psychological journey within a mas