In Edward Said's introduction to Orientalism (2003 [1978]) there is one particular scene, from the French writer Gustave Flaubert, which symbolises the encounter between the West and the subaltern, and, in broader terms, the encounter between the coloniser and the colonised. The scene features the Egyptian courtesan Kuchuk Hanem who may have been Flaubert's lover too. Said comments: ‘He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was “typically Oriental”.’ Said goes on brilliantly to construct an argument, using some of Gramsci's ideas, on hegemonic forces in culture and society, ascertaining that the West/East and West/South relations at that point in time rested on a strategy of ‘flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing the relative upper hand’ (ibid.: 7) (emphasis in original). Re-reading the above quote today, what is very clear, almost embarrassingly blindingly clear, is that the colonisation taking place in the encounter between the prostitute and Flaubert is not only a colonisation of a subaltern non-Western subject by a dominant Western one, but it is also, or perhaps primarily, an intra-gender encounter of an all too familiar kind: a man buying a woman, penetrating a woman, taking things from her that he needs, including her voice which he then makes his own. Said's poignant point equates in some way a woman and the subaltern in the colonial encounter: and perhaps it is also true that a non- Western woman has been the most likely object of such a colonisation.

This chapter reflects on my own practice in Zimbabwe and in particular focuses on the issue of reclaiming the voice of a subaltern woman in colonial times. I focus on my practice research, which involves the adaptation of a theatre play by the award-winning Zimbabwean playwright Stanley Makuwe into an experimental film about colonial and post-colonial gender relations in a small mining town in Zimbabwe. The play deals with the painful legacy of colonialism: a black woman is the key recipient of discrimination and subjugation on the part of white colonisers but especially also on the part of her black lover.