Weaver Press

Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera
edited by Robert Muponde and Mandivavarira Taruvinga
2002: (pp: 252) 215 x 135 mm
ISBN: 1779220049


Journal of Southern African Studies
Vol. 29, No. 4, December, 2003
Reviewer: Tony Simones da Silva


Edited by Robert Muponde and Mandi Taruvinga, Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera (2003) seeks to account for Yvonne Vera's increasingly central place in contemporary Zimbabwean writing in English, and to explore her relationship to Zimbabwean literature in general. Given Vera's considerable output, a collection of essays on her work has been long overdue. The present textbook fills the gap with great success, and it consolidates the still rather flimsy web of critical work on the work of African women writers. Sign and Taboo brings together a rich and broad set of critical perspectives on Vera's novels. Essays range from narrowly focused readings of particular novels, with a particular accent on Nehanda and Under the Tongue, to overviews of both her writing and its place within contemporary Zimbabwean writing. One of the book's strengths is the patient, thoughtful and illuminating close-reading approach adopted by most critics. Many of the essays share a concern with Vera's complex weaving of politics and aesthetics.

Noted for her imaginative and provocative use of language and narrative strategies, Vera is a deeply political writer, willing, as the title of this essay collection suggests, to leave few taboos unbroken. Indeed, the editors' suggestion that Vera works outside any identifiable literary tradition is a rather odd one: some critics approach Vera as one of a number of writers working expressly within a women's tradition. In writing that is in turn poetically suggestive and brutally honest, Vera explores some of the decisive issues in contemporary postcolonial writing, especially as they reflect on nationalism and identity. On the whole, these aspects of her work are handled with great care and perspicuity, much as the emphasis on the political may at times seem lopsided. For if Vera is a Zimbabwean writer for whom the anti-colonial struggle offers a deep and rich source of material for her novels, all her texts seem to me to complicate definitions of postcolonial writing in ways that few writers are able to do. Drawing as she does on a range of aesthetic and political motifs for her work – a point the title of this collection of essays perfectly illustrates, with its overtly post-structuralist and psychoanalytical echoes – Vera challenges reading models and any reductive attempts to classify her as this or that kind of a writer.

Meg Samuelson highlights this aspect when she enlists Gayatri C. Spivak's work to suggest a way of reading Vera that veers away from allegorical or metaphorical readings of postcolonial writing, towards, precisely, a more specific focus on the texts as art, as aesthetic constructs in their own right, rather than as always addressing some colonial grand narrative (p. 93). The 'writing back' that Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin identify as one of the intentions or qualities of much postcolonial writing is not, and cannot be, the main criterion through which such narratives can be read. In Vera this is made particularly evident through her focus on women's experiences of, and in, the nationalist struggle, and of the trauma that ensues. For if at the heart of Nehanda, or Under the Tongue, resides a concern with (re)visioning the past, these are texts also essentially preoccupied with what Samuelson, citing David Lan's work, identifies as the hijacking of 'the symbolic system' (p.96) by men. Indeed, the collection's penultimate piece, a discussion by Terence Ranger of Vera's latest novel, stresses the way in which Ranger's own historical writing has been profoundly affected by Vera's novels. The implication, then, is that it is time African women novelists are seen to be initiating new critical and analytical parameters, rather than simply engaging with established paradigms.

Inevitably, a review of this nature can make only cursory reference to the excellent critical work offered in this collection. Let me move on to those essays that I thought most genuinely engaged with Vera's work. Meg Samuelson's essay, for instance, impresses in spite of, or perhaps precisely because of, a conscious realisation that the critic can only ever seek to provide partial answers. Similarly, Lizzy Attree's essay engages convincingly with Vera's work, although I wondered why, yet again, a reading of an African woman's work has to perform such an agonised interpretation of its feminist politics. Faced with a writer who so brutally foregrounds women's suffering at the hands of men – yes, coloniser and indigenous – why should the critic refrain from drawing on feminist reading models for fear of becoming infected by their western views? Jessica Hemmings' reading of four of Vera's texts within a cloth paradigm offers a rather structuralist, but imaginative, analysis of works that demand of the reader a deep and careful engagement. Similarly, through a focus on the kinetic quality of Vera's writing, Jane Bryce produces an analysis of some of the texts that is wonderfully attuned to their unique qualities, much as her essay risks trying too hard to find a pattern that 'fits' Vera's complex and unwieldly prose.

In Ranka Primorac's essay we have possibly one of the most thorough and fascinating textual analyses of Vera's oeuvre. It is, in spite of its ambitious scope and the overview approach that the essay develops, possibly the most challenging contribution to the collection. Willing to question the dogma that all postcolonial writing is inherently about colonialism (how can it not be about it?), it imagines a time when Vera herself might begin to situate her novels in the post-independence movement (which she does in The Stone Virgins, 2002). Indeed, criticism such as Primorac's begins to suggest ways of reading, and of writing, that go beyond the rather linear apprehension of postcolonial literature as in some sense 'unlock[ing] the nation's conscience', to quote from Mangwanda's reading of Nehanda. It seems almost perverse, if ironic, that writing such as Vera's, Emecheta's, and Aidoo's, to name but a few of a growing body of African women writers, should be co-opted both to give birth to and nurture a nation that their writing repeatedly set out to critique and analyse. If Chimurenga was a struggle for freedom, for land, for justice and dignity, it was also a struggle fought by both men and women. Forms of resistance, as Fanon, Bhabha and Spivak have noted, differed greatly between colonial settings, but were equally inflected differently in terms of gender, class or sexuality. As numerous postcolonial critics have noted, resistance to colonial oppression was often, for the colonised woman, a transferral from one master to another. Vera's treatment of the rape of the black female body illustrates her emphasis on this aspect. Ruth Lavelle's 'conclusion … that perhaps [the] urge to reclaim masculinity may have contributed to acts of sexual violence committed by freedom fighters in an attempt to prove that they had not, in fact, been emasculated by colonial governments' (p. 110), naïve as it may seem in view of Fanon's pioneering work in The Wretched of the Earth, reflects provocatively on an issue that imaginative writers have yet to address in any detail.

Indeed, as Nana Wilson-Tagoe puts it in her dense and rewarding essay, in Vera's work the rape acts 'as a subtext that writes a discourse of gender within the text' (p. 170). If anything, I suggest that she puts it only too mildly – the rape of the female body and the trauma that ensues are inextricable from the way in which Yvonne Vera reads the postcolonial nation. In the words of Wilson-Tagoe, 'Such a writing of rape moves it beyond individual violation into the wider, socially constructed sphere that organises sexuality and power relations' (p. 171). She goes on to explore the significance of incest in Vera's writing, and especially her treatment of incest as a comment on narratives of liberation. Referring specifically to Under the Tongue, she writes: 'Herein incest has other connotations: it is an exploitation of women's powerlessness within a world constructed around their silence; on another level it is a negative symptom of a construction of masculinity embedded in the community and particularly heightened during the war' (p. 174). The point here is not that one should overlook the specific historical constraints on human, and notably male forms of behaviour, but to temper the urge to read all such actions as excusable in terms of a narrative of resistance that repeatedly silences women's participation in the anti-colonial struggle. Rape is not a 'battle of the sexes', as Samuelson proposes, drawing on a long list of such views, but a more insidious manifestation of gender structures, an exercise in power that is inextricable from a larger social model in which men and women are 'marked out' not as biological but as social beings.

However, Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera offers such a wide and rich array of readings of Yvonne Vera's work that might be read, in part, as the requisite response from a reviewer. I would recommend it to anyone encountering Vera for the first time, or engaged in a more detailed exploration of her work. Such exploration will, ideally, move on to attempt to situate her precisely within a complex web of literary, aesthetic and political affiliations.

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