Next to nothing: a novel and critical reflective essay

Abstract

This thesis comprises a realistic novel, Next to Nothing, and a reflective essay supported by in-depth research into the novel’s thematic, stylistic craft, intended reader impact, as well as its contribution to literature. The novel follows the experiences of three undocumented Zimbabweans—Zikomo, Ndabvei and Anesu—who trekked to South Africa in search of economic survival, political asylum, and educational and business opportunities where their economy had failed them. Told in multiple narrative perspectives, Next to Nothing presents the lived experiences of Black migrants from numerous angles. It engages the themes of love, migration, memory, resilience, homelessness, crime, exile, and displacement and competently experiments with the first-person past tense and third-person present tense points of view to tell this migration story. As a piece of literature, Next to Nothing thematically provides a mirror that reflects the lived experiences of undocumented Zimbabweans during the COVID-19 era, when locals as well as migrants lost their jobs to the pandemic lockdown. In many ways, the novel reveals the importance of identity and belonging as the plot unfolds. It questions identity and exclusion when the constitution, in its preamble, says “South Africa belongs to all who live in it.”1 Many migrants and locals who worked in the hospitality industry lost their jobs on one hand, and the local Black community upped their demand for the repatriation of undocumented foreigners, whom they scapegoated for all the ills facing the nation. The reflective commentary, as already stated above, categorises the novel as a postcolonial diasporic narrative buoyed by theories of identity, memory, and place.