The Australasian Review of African Studies, Volume 25, Number 1, 2003

Re-examining Gender and the Politics of Social Change in Zimbabwe: A Critique of Yvonne Vera’s Novels and Chenjerai Hove’s Palaver Finish

Robert Muponde and Mandi Taruvinga (eds) Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera,

Harare, Weaver Press; Oxford: James Currey, 2003. pp. xvi +236,

ISBC 0-85255-584-9. (James Currey p/b). Chenjerai Hove, Palaver Finish, Harare, Weaver Press, 2002; M&G Books, Johannesburg, 2002. ISBN: 1 77922001 4 (Weaver p/b).

Available from: African Books Collective, 27 Park End Street, Oxford, OX11HV, UK.

Yvonne Vera stands out as the most remarkable female writer to emerge out of Zimbabwe and indeed, out of Africa, in the last decade. Her novels reflect the use of creative imagination to reconstruct rituals, myths and events absent in written political history about women in Zimbabwe. The narratives present women as the main actors in a genre traditionally occupied by men. The heroines exude spiritual leadership, inspiration and heroic passion. Vera not only claims the city for African women, she enables them to move between boundaries in the past and the present. In doing so, Vera’s women characters emerge from the spaces of silence and one is immediately made aware of the sense of urgency. In Sign and Taboos:Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera, Robert Muponde and Mandi Taruvinga have taken on an ambitious and detailed task to edit this collection.

This collection of essays is an important, well-researched and thoughtful account of Vera’s works by a group of critics from literary, historical, anthropological and political backgrounds in different continents. The editors are to be applauded for taking a remarkable task in bringing together such varied perspectives on Zimbabwe’s most challenging and gifted writer of surreal and poetic prose. While the novels present themselves as historical, the editors are quick to point out that they do not necessarily represent real events or facts, but attempt to ‘mark sites for metamorphosis and resurrection’ (p. xii). Some of the critics focus on the narrative technique and the use of imagery and less on the political and cultural nuances of change.

The book would not have been complete without the notable Terence Ranger’s chapter on ‘The Pressures of the Past’ in The Stone Virgins (pp. 203-216). Ranger problematises creation of fiction as history in Yvonne’s novels. In the end, however, Ranger appears to accept the notion that Vera is inspired by known events in history but is not writing about factual historical events. Nana Wilson-Tagoe sums up the use of history in Vera’s novels by recognising that Vera’s narratives ‘are not narratives of history, but narratives out of history’ (p. 177). For Wilson-Tagoe, Vera has written female agency in order to bring different historical meaning to colonial and traditional representation of history.

Despite their differences in approach, the common themes emerging from the essays show that Vera has recreated a gendered past and present absent in literature not only about Zimbabwe, but about the place of women in pre-colonial and colonial Africa in general. The critics have therefore helped us to rethink visions of Africa’s past, present and future. Vera celebrates the unheard voice of African women in literature. I want to put emphasis on the notion of the literary voice because I do not believe that African women were silent in the past. The lack of a written word does not mean the absence of speech as Vera demonstrates very well. In this regard, the critiques are celebrating the ‘speech’ accorded to the submissive and silent woman inadvertently undermine the strength of oral narrative.

At times the depiction of women’s behaviour and how they relate to small acts and objects is taken too far when framed within psychoanalysis. For example, Jessica Hemming’s ‘The voice of cloth: interior dialogues and exterior skins’ (pp. 57-62) portrays the use of cloth as representing the silence in social relations between men and women. Hemmings’ essay on Without a Name leaves us wondering whether a piece of cloth such as the apron can indeed be seen in that ideological and psychoanalytical framework. The most thought provoking essays, however, are Ranka Primorac’s ‘Iron butterflies: notes on Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning’ and Ruth Lavelle’s ‘Without a Name: reclaiming that which has been taken’. In these separate essays the two critics demonstrate the realistic unchanging being of Vera’s female characters. tragic heroines do not have control of their bodies but their connection to spiritual forces and ancestral voices help them to emerge intact. Similarly, Robert Muponde and Maurice Vambe’s essays on ‘Spirit Possession and Resistance’ explore women’s ability to claim symbolic space and defy the traditional bonds of patriarchy and colonialism.

Muponde and Taruvinga have undertaken an ambitious task with significant results. However, after reading this fascinating collection, the question presenting itself is: whose theory? Western theoretical approaches to gendered narratives seen through the lens of an outsider, at a certain time and place is bound to present problems. I recognise that we cannot run away from theory. But I am left with numerous questions regarding meaning, intention, location and the appropriation of postcolonial feminist and other theories to provide meaning to the gendered experience of African women in Yvonne Vera’s fiction. Another problem arising from this text relates to the quest to reclaim the strength of African women in Africa’s past in the way that Vera re-imagines them. The essays did not go as far as to ask the extent to which Vera’s representations of the heroic past we now claim for African women subjects itself to critical scrutiny. In an interview with Jane Bryce, Vera acknowledges that she ‘recreates’ history. ‘Because, as Africans our history is there to serve us, not us to serve it’ (p. 221). Vera therefore creates mythic historical images of powerful women. These exemplary images are inspiring to Zimbabwean women. But such a major shift in recreating power in past gender relations would require new models to help us re-imagine the political and cultural place of women in Zimbabwe now. The critics fail to determine how the strength reflected in Vera’s characterisation of women might have helped us to re-imagine the future of womanhood in present day Zimbabwe.

Nonetheless, this dense collection of essays highlights the essential relationship between the African past, the period after independence and the plight of women in Mugabe’s present day’s Zimbabwe. It is also an important contribution to the problematic interpretation of feminism in the African contexts of post-colonial literature.

While Yvonne Vera’s critics focus on her novels written up till 1998, in contrast Chenjerai Hove’s latest book, Palaver Finish is set in 2002, at the height of what has been called the second ‘Chimurenga’ or the war to reclaim the land from the white farmers. There is a marked disparity between Vera’s gendered narratives and Hove’s essays, which takes us to the harsher realities of the present.

In Palaver Finish Chenjerai Hove presents the most ambitious and courageous critique of the political situation in Zimbabwe. He invokes the spiritual context of his past to capture voices of the struggling masses in Zimbabwe. In the past Hove wrote about the horrors of colonialism and how Africans took to arms to win their liberation. In 1982 he published his first collection of poetry, Up in Arms, in which he demonstrated the brutalities of Zimbabwe’s war of liberation. Since then, he has published several novels including Bones in which he depicts the heroic but tragic lives of African women and critiques patriarchal tradition of idealising the oppression of women. Hove, like the late Dambudzo Marechera and Yvonne Vera, represented the voices of the oppressed in search of their identity in post war Zimbabwe. At that stage, we were celebrating a nationalistic awareness of owning the country. But the land had not been won yet. While acknowledging inequality and the urgency for an equitable distribution of land, Hove here questions the chaotic and violent methodology used to reclaim land from the white farmers.

In Palaver Finish Hove has followed the footsteps of Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiongo in fearlessly awakening us to the slow disintegration of morality, democracy and freedom in the postcolonial state. Although Hove has always been outspoken about the failures of independence, Palaver Finish is his most important commentary of current events in Zimbabwe. In Palaver Finish, Hove mourns the death of moral leadership and democracy in a country that Julius Nyerere used to call ‘The pearl of Africa’. Hove writes, ‘Violence and lawlessness will not end until our politicians examine their consciences and re-shape their sense of public morality and responsibility’ (p. 7).

Such a critique of the Zimbabwean state had not previously been done. Hove successfully helps us to see where, and to borrow from Achebe, ‘the rain began to beat us’. The essays in Palaver Finish leave us wondering where we went wrong, and how we should pick up the pieces and avoid the way of violent chaos ever so common in some postcolonial African states.

Sekai Nzenza
The Postcolonial Institute
Melbourne, Victoria