Contesting Homosexuality

Unreliable Narration in Tendai Huchu’s "The Hairdresser of Harare"

Abstract

Tendai Huchu’s The Hairdresser of Harare is arguably a queer text. It presents the homosexual orientation of one of its male characters, Dumisani. By positioning this character in-between, the normal and abnormal spaces, this essay attends to the politics that coalesce around homosexuality and demonstrates how Huchu’s novel gestures towards queerness, but narrative techniques undermine these overtures. Adopting deconstruction as a theoretical framework, the essay gets down to the nitty-gritty of what constitutes queer sexuality and measures this with the liminal presentation of Dumi as a queer character to show how he falls short of the queerness that he is deemed to harbour. The paper challenges prevailing interpretations of queerness in the novel by examining the politics of representation through the lens of unreliability and logo-centrism. By interrogating the reliability of the narrator and the centrality of language in shaping perceptions, the essay reveals the complexities of interpreting identity and sexuality in literature.