(Un)Masking Grief

In this study I critically study selected short stories from Julius Chingono’s collection Not Another Day , a volume that skillfully captures the textures of everyday life in Zimbabwe through a fusion of irreverent humour and moving insight. My analysis attends to Chingono’s fascinating use of satire, linguistic play, and tonal modulation in order to interrogate the interplay of political decay, social absurdities, and the affective toll of systemic violence. Drawing insights from theories of relief, superiority, and incongruity, I interpret humour as affective release, philosophical wisdom, and socio-political critique. I contend that Chingono’s characters confront misery and precarity with a subversive laughter that unsettles normative representations of suffering. His narrative craft, which is deeply marked by tonal shifts, irony, and unforeseen narrative turns, enables a poetics of defiance that resists a sense of despair. Through presentation of grief in humor, the writer constructs a satirical grammar of resistance with a sharpness that cogently challenges official discourses and repressive state formations. Thus, this study also invites further academic conversations on the emancipatory capacity of laughter within the postcolonial African literary archive that is characterised by trauma, silencing, and emerging voices from the margin.