Weaver Press

Writing Yvonne Vera
Speech written and delivered by Robert Muponde at the launch of Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera, at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), Wednesday 23 October, 2002.

Introduction
Some time ago I was asked by Sarah Nuttall why Mandi Taruvinga and myself chose to embark on this book of essays on Yvonne Vera’s work. It was accidental, I said. Of course, in recreating this archive for Sarah, I had excised a lot of anguish. She wouldn’t have guessed that for a long time I stood at the edges of Yvonne Vera’s world, knocking at her door, but terrified to enter, much like Njabulo Ndebele’s visit to the prophetess. For a long time I consoled myself with collecting her treasured signature, and some of her customised poetry at book fairs, when a new book of hers was being launched. In other words, I was watching her, collecting from her, without her knowing it.

I heard of how she did her Masters in less than nine months, and how she simply waltzed over her PHD in less than three years. More, the rumour mill  churned out stories about how she wrote her first novel Nehanda when she was spiritually possessed; and how her second novel Without a Name was written in two weeks in the mountains of the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe; etc. More hair-raising was the story that we heard in Harare, that Yvonne had bought a house in Bulawayo and had converted it into a cave, and that she would retreat into the cave in order to write. Equally mind-boggling is the news that she has now not only moved out of the cave-house, but now lives in a house of stone, much like the stone houses of Great Zimbabwe. This stone-house stands side by side with an ancient fig-tree.  There is a sense of beginnings, a sense of kinship with land  and stone, a sense  of retracing and inhabiting inaugural moments,  a  sense of caves, of depth, of mystery;  and the desire to  push possibilities to the verge in  Yvonne Vera’s work.

As I have said, the idea of a book on her was accidental, but inevitable. A friend of mine, Mandi Taruvinga, came to my office one day, with a review essay she had just done on Yvonne Vera’s new book, Butterfly Burning, which had just won a Swedish Prize. She wanted my comment on it.

Mandi’s essay pulsed with the rhythms of kwela music. She had succinctly captured the novel’s force of metaphor and passion of thought. It’s soundscape. I saw and felt what she had seen in Yvonne’s work. We shared the same vulnerabilities, and the same desire to share her with the world. When Mandi came back later to collect comments on her essay, I said to her: why don’t we do a book on Yvonne. We both laughed long and loud. We knew that it was much more than a patriotic gesture:  doing a book was in some cases, a trial of character.  I am glad Mandi and myself are still friends. Our friendship has survived the book exceptionally well.

Marking the Terrain
It is not easy to read Yvonne Vera’s works without feeling disturbed, some rupture, and elation at the same time. She does not seek to soothe, so she massages the mind with spiked thoughts. Yet she does not seek to erode the mind and heart with endless tears: hence the healing, regenerative quality of her language. Language in Vera’s work has something of the qualities of a Shona ‘witchdoctor’: the enchanting incantations, the ability to transfix, to capture and terrorise the imagination as preludes to healing.

Some readers have expressed enchanted bewilderment with her writing. Some, unable to unlock her world, accuse her of being ‘difficult’. Yet others express outrage at the systematically shattered taboos. They are horrified by the unflinching descriptions of incest; rape; abortion; self-incineration; the dissolution and mutilation of the female body. They stammer the names of her characters (Nehanda,  Nyenyedzi, Phephelaphi,  Nonceba); wonder at some of her cultic idioms (‘under the tongue’); and yet they still find time to sway to the pulsating rhythms of mbira music in Without a Name and the sharp, energetic trills of kwela music in Butterfly Burning. It is this ability to meet pain with laughter; death with music; drudgery with poetry; silence with voice; absence with creativity, that underscores Yvonne Vera’s humanism.

Yvonne Vera’s work is a veritable feast: there is enough for every imaginative bent. It is this democratic spirit of her work which poses new vistas for the post-colony. There is an upsurge of insurrectionary feeling in the small people of her world. They negotiate the practice of everyday life in the cracks into which they are shoved by public histories. Yet, they insert their own ‘discordant’ voices in what Terence Ranger called the pauses and expectations of official history. These small men and women may not have body-bags to remind us of their roles in the liberation struggle; but they record their own stories as struggles, as memory; as history. Hence, Yvonne Vera’s work is a study in liberation politics: it portrays epic struggles against silence. She  struggles against the tyranny of being pinned down in a single narrative, a single history; and the terror of  a single capacious hell, and a narrow path to a single, exclusionary heaven. Her characters insist on living life on their own terms, and experiencing history bodily and psychically. It is a struggle against ‘nationalists’ and other self-proclaimed martyrs who insist on struggling, suffering, remembering and ruling on behalf of the ‘nation’. In this vein, what we may say about the present crisis in Zimbabwe is about the volcanic eruption of previously suppressed narratives, which are given presence and voice in Yvonne Vera’s poetic prose. It is a struggle about whose signs and taboos should rule us.

For Yvonne Vera’s characters, the ability to post a counter-voice to all-embodying histories and experiences, and the ability to draw the boundaries of one’s hell or heaven, is liberating. It is a creative moment. Her work is ultimately about setting off these creative moments and voices. It is  a refusal to have one’s biography pared down to the details of one’s space and history. The terrifying fates of some of her most promising characters illustrate the desire to transcend the limitations of a history, a space,  a body, a psyche, a soul. It is the desire to map one’s way in the world, without being circumscribed by it.

Here we find once again Vera’s inspiring dissidence frightening in terms of the larger existential possibilities it opens, and the newer contests that it calls into being.

The self is indeed a higher kind of struggle in most of Yvonne Vera’s work. Yet the self is enmeshed in the general struggles against tyranny, and forgetting. The self is autonomous in the sense that it can prioritise itself, while participating in the general fray. Inability to yoke the two terrains is often the source of tragedy for most of her characters. This is what makes Yvonne’s work hopeful. This is what makes her write when other writers’ pens run dry. It is not amazing that in a short space of time, a mere ten years, she now straddles the Zimbabwean literary landscape, and has become a medium of visions of the roads not taken in public culture.

Conclusion
Today we celebrate  the beginnings of a long journey, a long dialogue with Yvonne Vera and her world. It is a dialogue of boundaries, and beyond boundaries and borders. It is a dialogue of common strivings across cultures. It is a quest for signposts towards ultimate humanity and freedom. For Yvonne Vera, the act of saying is itself a way of shattering taboos and opening up spaces for the voice, the body and the mind, for taboos are about inhibitions, exclusion and control. Yet, Vera insists that it is not enough to say: it is important to develop systems of signs that can communicate past and beyond the ruins of taboos and other sites of cultural and psychological excisions. The present volume on her work, Sign and Taboo, points to distinct directions of her work, its textures, pleasures and visions. It is an invitation to a world, which makes all the difference.

Robert Muponde ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Tel : 11-7174275)