“Houses speak. They speak in multiple languages, in different tones and dialects, each shaped by the particular conjunctures of broader contextual conditions: material, spatial, temporal, social, political, economic, cultural; interwoven with the personal and emotional. Houses, as ever-changing composites, are always in conversation with others. They are heard, engaged with and spoken to and through in diverse ways by a range of actors, human and non-human, present and absent. They also keep secrets and embody silences,” said Amanda Hammar of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Copenhagen. “The metaphor of ‘speaking’ offers productive ways of opening-up what has been a deeply compelling set of questions for me for decades, both theoretical and empirical: What is the relationship between property and personhood? And in the context of a country like Zimbabwe, with its colonial and postcolonial histories, how have the dynamics of race, class, gender and age shaped this relationship over time in the ever-shifting urban margins?”
Hammar explained that by listening attentively to how houses speak – “both what they say and their silences” – alongside other situational techniques of discovery, underpins an interdisciplinary, multi-layered, ethnobiographical approach which she plans to apply to selected houses in different urban settings in Harare and Bulawayo − Zimbabwe’s two major cities.
For her book project she aims to use this approach to reveal the complex connections and tensions between property relations, the shaping of individual personhood, patterns of social differentiation, exclusion and belonging, and processes of state-making and citizen-making across time.
“Part of the original conception of the book was to explore the connections between the wider political, structural, spatial and socio-cultural contexts of Rhodesia and Zimbabwe respectively, and the racialised, classed, gendered and generational access to and ownership of urban property in an ever-shifting political and political-economic landscape. This broad picture was intended to frame the more direct research question that asks ‘what is the relationship between property (ownership) and personhood (external and internal self-making)?’.”
“These are questions I have engaged with over several decades in different settings,” she added.
She highlighted some of her previous work, including for example with a community of 200 displaced ‘squatter’ families outside Bulawayo who – very unusually – were resettled in newly built houses on plots provided by the Bulawayo City Council. “This work showed me the significance not just of ‘housing’, but of houses in themselves and what they tell about more than themselves. Having lived ‘illegally’ for much of their lives, being resettled and entitled to own property had a profound effect on how they viewed themselves as persons. It transformed their sense of self despite persistent impoverishment and held the promise of becoming what they termed ‘proper’ citizens and persons through owning property.”
While having had in mind a structure for her book project before starting her fellowship, Hammar indicated that her time at STIAS has already profoundly altered her original plans for the work.
“STIAS is a place for thinking, feeling, questioning and discovery,” she said. “It’s a sanctuary away from constantly doing-doing, where we can meander aimlessly in productive ways.” Additionally, as a Zimbabwean usually based in Scandinavia where she lives and works, now being in South Africa for an extended period she says, “also means my body is starting to remember things it shouldn’t forget.” This matters deeply since the book is focused on Zimbabwe.
She explained that although the essence of the project remains the same, the vision has shifted from telling the broader story of property and personhood, with several different cases as illustrations, she has now decided to move to the centre of the story two specific houses located in Zimbabwe’s urban townships that she herself has been intimately connected to over many decades. This shift entails a deeper focus on these selected houses as “the primary speaking subjects of the book”. But in doing so, it entails making visible the ways in which her own family and herself are implicated in the unfolding of these particular house stories, and in turn the wider histories of property and personhood in different historical eras.
The ideas for this book are grounded in previous research, as well as drawing on her own life experience, relationships and encounters in relation to differently situated houses. Based on this she emphasised one key guiding observation, namely that “the relationship between property and personhood is provisional, unequal and inconstant”.
Exploring new directions
Hammar indicated that she originally planned for the book to unravel the interconnections between property and personhood through applying a familiar scholarly framing incorporating selected social science-oriented analytical logics and writing.
“But that’s the safe option,” she said. “Since having more time to reflect, and to ‘open the door into the darkness’ as Rebecca Solnit suggests, there’s been a change inside me – with deeper, more complex personal layers of the story insisting on being heard. The time and space at STIAS have allowed me to enter more risky terrain and move in a more uncertain direction. This allows a shift away from the constraints of academic rationale and decorum towards a more narrative-based, exploratory and intimate approach to the multilayered stories of individual houses, and in turn to the messy, multi-dimensional and always deeply political relationship between property and personhood. It allows for less carefully curated writing.”
The basis for unfolding such stories is a methodology she terms ‘speaking through houses’, which she has developed and applied previously to houses in her research on urban displacement and resettlement. This entails closely examining the interweaving historical, political, spatial, architectural, material, social, personal, sensory and emotional dimensions of each house. It attends both to the house’s own life and the lives of those within and around it. It means listening to all the different ways in which houses speak.
As she noted, “I’m planning to make the two houses literally the primary speaking subjects of the book. They are simultaneously the stories and their own narrators, speaking in their many tongues. Having slowly begun to learn their different dialects and to carefully discern their sophisticated grammars, I aim to be primarily a translator of the various languages they speak.”
Regarding the two selected houses that are expected to feature centrally in the book, she acknowledged that there are complex and delicate dynamics at play related to both Zimbabwe’s colonial and postcolonial histories of racial, class, gender and generational inequality. This is particularly related to the fact that each of the houses were bought for black working-class women by the white families for whom they provided domestic and emotional labour. While having sustained close relationships with these women and their evolving families over a period of more than four decades, Hammar is aware of the troubling territory this surfaces especially related to race, class and property.
The idea of doing this work and incorporating her own entanglements, she said, “makes me anxious”. And yet she feels there is a great deal to be learned from delving so deeply into these two houses stories that will combine both intensive ethnobiographic work alongside wider perspectives on the contexts and conditions of their becoming. It offers, she suggested, an opportunity to trace what it meant to each of these single urban, working-class woman, in two different towns, in two different eras of Zimbabwe’s history, to become a property owner, and how this shaped their sense of themselves, their lives and those who have lived with them.
Importantly, she emphasised that she is not planning to write a memoir, but that she does have to make visible the ways in which she herself is implicated in the biographies of the two houses. “I’m in the wider story”, she said, “but it’s not my story.”
Hammar also hastened to add that the bigger picture of property and personhood in Zimbabwe will not disappear from the book. But instead of the macro level shaping the telling of micro-stories, it will work the other way around.
“I don’t yet know how it will all translate in written and visual form. I also don’t know how it will work to do the needed research in houses and with people I have known for so long. Primarily, I see it as a practice of being present, inhabiting the space together, listening closely, and seeing what the material offers.”
Although there remains some uncertainty about how to proceed, or even whether to proceed or not in this direction given some of the hard and unsettling questions it raises, Hammar asked herself “what would be lost in the not-telling” of these complex house stories. It seems that she may well be compelled to take the risk of telling.
Michelle Galloway: Part-time media officer at STIAS
Photograph: SCPS Photograph