Doris Lessing's African Laughter is the account of four journeys to Zimbabwe. It presents transitions in everyday Zimbabwean life, which are mostly voiced by individual people's recollections and observations. The autobiographical travelling protagonist, Doris Lessing, was born of British parents, spent her childhood on a large farm in Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe) and first came to England in 1949. Declared a prohibited immigrant by the colony's white government, Lessing was forbidden to return to Southern Rhodesia because of her anti-colonial ideas. Since the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980, she has been allowed entrance again. African Laughter recounts Doris Lessing's four journeys to the country, made in 1982, 1988, 1989 and 1992.

The following close reading will discuss an aesthetic device that I will name ‘acoustic bricolage,’ which is used to represent the Zimbabwean everyday in the book. Deploying a number of narrative strategies – such as a fractioned visual aesthetics, the use of direct speech, and the obfuscation of the primary narrator's voice – African Laughter creates the impression that a multitude of coexisting individual voices are rendered in a microscopic and fragmentary way. In the genre of travel narrative, such a representation is unconventional and stands in stark contrast to the predigested and authoritative forms by means of which particularly male Western travel writers offer their encounters with others and otherness to the readers. One reason why this is so is because acoustic bricolage circumvents the often-assumed mimetic analogy in Western travel writing between realistic language and the mapping of the non-Western people and places visited. Acoustic bricolage estranges the reader and prevents him or her from fully understanding and domesticating the Zimbabwean everyday into clear-cut and stable meanings.

Nevertheless, the particular status of the autobiographical narrative voice, and specifically her everyday memory of colonial life in the book, requires closer attention in relation to its aesthetic of acoustic bricolage. Readers of travel writing are generically concerned with an account of the traveller's experience of her journey. Consequently, the autobiographical narrator exerts her influence on the descriptions of non-Western peoples and places that are represented. In particular, I will consider the ways in which the narrator's voice is characterised by multiple dimensions – Marxist, feminist, and Western – which stand in continuous conflict.