Identity, dislocation and home between Zimbabwe and Canada

Chido Muchemwa's debut short story collection centres queer voices while mixing folklore with reportage to grapple with history. By Gibson Ncube

- Gibson Ncube

Zimbabwe-born, Canada-based Chido Muchemwa's debut short story collection, Who Will Bury You?, was published late in 2024 and immediately attracted the right kind of attention.

Here was an unexpected range of themes: queer identity, dislocation in the diaspora, the lingering complexities of family and cultural belonging. The 12 stories, set between Zimbabwe and Canada, trace moments of rupture and reconnection across time and geography. And they're mostly about women. Women, selfhood, loss and love.

Gibson Ncube, who researches queer African fiction, unpacks why the book is such a good read.

What are some of the stories about?

The recurring questions in Who Will Bury You? are who will remain when we are gone, who will understand us, who will grieve for us and who will honour the truths we live by?

These questions are animated through emotionally layered stories that work to centre the lives of Zimbabwean women and queer characters.

Written with subtlety and care, some of the stories draw on Zimbabwean folklore, allowing Muchemwa to bridge the mythical and the present. She demonstrates how ancestral narratives continue to shape how people really experience love, loss and forms of belonging.

The title story introduces a Zimbabwean “churchgoing woman” and her daughter, who is living in Canada and has embraced a lesbian identity.

In Zimbabwe, same-sex relationships remain criminalised under laws inherited from colonial rule and reinforced by state-sponsored homophobia. Political leaders often frame queerness as “un-African” or morally deviant.

The story is told through alternating perspectives and offers a portrait of intergenerational estrangement, cultural friction and love strained by silence — what one of the characters calls “things that might never feel sayable”. The theme of queerness recurs in several other stories such as This Will Break My Mother's Heart