The Albinic Body and the Architecture of Resilience in Ben Hanson’s Takadini and Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory

Abstract

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.