In this talk I will present my journey as a researcher and the purpose of the work I do on African literary cultures. My work exists in the cracks between creative and critical methods, and writing genres, in order to imaginatively reconfigure the strictures that conventionally separate the poetic and the theoretical. The desire for this mode of thinking was born out of an uncomfortable tension with the authoritarian politics of my home country, Zimbabwe, an environment which made it difficult to be fully expressive as an intellectual and writer. But here I am in Oxford in pursuit of knowledge.