In examining Chenjerai Hove’s ‘experimentation’ with the English language in the novel Bones (1988), questions abound regarding the audiences and reception of the discourse of the text, a postcolonial narrative. The language of postcolonial African literature has been, for quite some time now, the subject of much debate, and a socio/political minefield. wa Thiong’o, for example, amplifies the need for postcolonial African writers to decolonise the language of African literature by subverting definitions of ‘themselves in terms of the languages of imperialist imposition’ (1987, p. i). Decolonial scholars agree that, indeed, the language of African literature, especially so postcolonially, could not be discussed meaningfully outside the context of an understanding of the idealised goals of such a collection of writings. Because of the imagined roles that postcolonial writings seek to fulfil, amongst them ‘the empire writing back’ (Aschcroft et al., 2003; Bhabha, 1984, 1994, 2012), reflecting instances of the subaltern speaking (Spivak, 1988), challenging ‘othering’ (Said, 1978) and agency and resistance (Achebe, 1958; Fanon, 2008), the chapter confronts questions regarding the voices and audiences of such postcolonial writings. In the process, it grapples with the notions of mis/representation, agency and resistance, modes of self-definition and self-referencing, as well as the ‘empire writing back’—as evinced in the communicative potential of the linguistic expressions that characterise the language of Bones, as a postcolonial text emanating from the erstwhile British colony of Zimbabwe. Interrogations are made of the role of the languages of postcolonial African literary imaginaries, in service of both postcolonial and decolonial agendas, through re/engagements with discourses on the roles that languages as living museums of African cultures can play in such processes.