Review from The Herald, Harare, 28 Dec 2002, Scribe’s Scroll column, by Farayi Nyandoro

Groundbreaking reader on Vera’s fictional works out

Title: Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera
Editor: Robert Muponde and Mandi Taruvinga
Publisher: Weaver Press, Harare, 2002
Reviewed by Aaron Mupondi

Renowned local and international academics and critics, most of whom are women, have published a groundbreaking reader on Yvonne Vera’s fictional works – Nehanda, Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals, Without a Name, Under the Tongue, Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins.
Vera has attracted a lot of critical attention because of her consistent focus on women’s problems and commitment to women’s struggles for freedom. In her fiction, Vera maintains a no-holds-barred confrontation with African men and the colonial system as she sees these as sources of women’s domination and oppression. The writer, therefore, belongs to the category of radical feminists in Zimbabwean literature.
Another element that makes her works outstanding is her unique style that is characterised by poetic prose and the blending of African orature with modernistic techniques.
Sign and Taboo deals with the above issues in Vera’s creative writing. For a reader on Vera’s fiction, the title Sign and Taboo is very appropriate. The ‘sign’ part of the title refers to Vera’s use of symbols and images to signify meaning and reality in her works. The ‘taboo’ part refers to such events as rape, incest, abortion, suicide, murder and women’s other expressions of freedom in the author’s works. ‘Taboo’ also denotes Vera’s courageous interrogation and challenge of the established systems through her alternative vision of society expressed in her works.
The reader has five parts and ends with a useful interview of Vera by Jane Bryce. In part 1, Kizito Muchemwa argues that Vera’s main concern in Without a Name and Under the Tongue is the recovery of the repressed discourse of women. Thus, in Muchemwa’s view, the two novels are ‘a strategy of reinscription and recovery’ of women’s identities and the ability to represent themselves.
Meg Samuelson, like Muchemwa, shows how sexual violence perpetrated on women by men in Vera’s novels traumatises women into silence. Samuelson argues that Vera sees the redemption of victimised women coming from other women as is the case with Zhizha, who is helped to recover her voice by her mother, Runyararo, in Under the Tongue. The critic sees this as an act of empowerment.
The critic also observes that Runyararo’s artistry (mat-weaving) represents Vera’s search for ‘a specific post-colonial writing that will retain the features of pre-colonial orality that the mats connote while simultaneously managing to offer African women a moment of intervention’.
In the same part, Carolyn Martin Shaw points out that Vera vividly freights her stories through an elaborate use of signs and images. The critic explores the use of colours and images in Vera’s story ‘The Shoemaker’ in Why Don’t you Carve Other Animals and novels such as Butterfly Burning, Without a Name and Under the Tongue in a very informative and refreshing way.
Jane Bryce in her essay in part 2 argues that photographic and cinematic texts help Vera to capture things in a convincing and all-encompassing way. She says that even taboo subjects – incest in Under the Tongue, infanticide and rape in Without a Name, female resistance and heroism in Nehanda – ‘are brought under the lens into focus, where they can no longer be ignored’.
Jessica Hemming’s forte is Vera’s use of cloth to convey meaning. She indicates that in Under the Tongue cloth refers to the fragile relationships between characters and the poverty that they are subjected to as they use cloths to create physical boundaries between them in one room. The critic further points out that in Without a Name cloth is a metaphor for Mazvita’s alienation and social malaise as Mazvita ‘sees herself as part of a torn social fabric encased in a body that is worn to the bone through years of unrelenting hostility’.
In the last essay in part 2, Lizzy Attree observes that in Butterfly Burning Vera fuses poetry with prose, poetry being the ‘private language of beauty and emotion’. She says that these artistic forms are woven around the fabric of kwela music that ‘threads through the novel’. The critic indicates that kwela music and the poetic prose in the novel are suitable devices to express freedom, resistance and soothe characters in very difficult situations.
The first essay in part 3 by Shaw reflects how perennial the suffering of women is. The critic observes that from Nehanda to Butterfly Burning Vera shows women suffering from generation to generation.
Shaw thus points out that the archetypal symbol of water in Vera’s novels refers to women’s ‘tears’ as well as their healing and biological identity as child-bearers. In her discussion of rape and recovery in Without a Name and Under the Tongue, Samuelson shows rape as a form of oppression of women by men and also points out that women can only genuinely recover from rape through memory, confronting the incident and thus coming to terms with reality.
According to her, trying to repress the memory of rape leads to self-destructive tendencies as shown by the case of Mazvita in Without a Name.
Ranka Primorac views women in Butterfly Burning as ‘iron butterflies’ due to both their resilience and vulnerability. These women are marginalised by both men and colonialism. The critic points out that the protagonist, Phephelaphi, makes a fruitless search for a space of her own and chooses death rather than stillness. Hence, in Primorac’s view, Vera’s novel reflects ‘a new perspective on what is meant to be a black woman in the country called Rhodesia’. However, ten years before the publication of Butterfly Burning, Tsitsi Dangarembga, in Nervous Conditions, had expressed concern about the double suffering of black women from patriarchy and colonialism.
Ruth Lavelle is of the opinion that Vera’s depiction of Mazvita is meant to make the reader understand the character’s situation and even sympathise with her and also other women in similar circumstances. This ensues from the fact that Mazvita commits infanticide to ‘salvage her freedom and heal the wounds of the past’.
In part 4, Robert Muponde attacks Vera for her limited understanding of the machinations of colonialism and the nature and role of the liberation war in Zimbabwe as reflected in her novel Without a Name in which Mazvita blames the land for her rape and abandons the national struggle for land in search of personal freedom in the city which is, ironically, the centre of colonial oppression.
However, Muponde reads Mazvita’s victimisation as an ‘indictment of the predatory and exclusionary revolutionary theory of the nationalists’. The critic further indicates that in Without a Name Vera shows that liberation of self is also possible in the context of liberation of the land and nation.
In his essay, Maurice Vambe is of the opinion that in Nehanda the positive contributions of women to society, especially Nehanda, shatter the identity of black women as mere victims of patriarchy and colonialism. The critic goes on to say that, in this respect, Vera challenges both the patriarchal and colonial ideologies and puts at the centre of the novel a woman-centred vision of society and meaning of independence.
Vambe, however, observes that Vera’s liberatory vision is embattled with contradictions based on the politics of gender, ethnicity, class and Vera’s use of the coloniser’s language (English) in her novels.
Khombe Mangwanda’s essay in part 5 sums up Nehanda as ‘a tale of land reappropriation that deconstructs the imperial narrative of appropriation’. Like Vambe, Mangwanda notes that in Nehanda, Vera re-maps colonial Zimbabwe using Shona mythology and symbolism that excludes whites.
Nana Wilson-Tagoe shows how Vera’s novels reconstruct history by recreating the images of women and also by creating space for women in a patriarchal and colonial society. She claims that the revolutionary story of Nehanda ‘unsettles the collective ethic and its assumptions and paves way for a possible re-constitution of leadership, authority and the social order’.
Emmanuel Chiwome points out that both Vera and Solomon Mutswairo depict Nehanda as a symbol of resistance and liberation and pay attention to cultural details in their novels about Nehanda to revitalise the legend vis-à-vis its distortion and suppression by the colonisers.
Chiwome, however, notes that unlike Mutswairo, Vera’s depiction of Nehanda’s death is ‘from a supernatural rather than an organic point of view’. The critic also attacks Vera for misrepresenting some of the African traditional norms and practices in Nehanda. He says that this act will unfortunately reinforce the outsider’s stereotypes about traditional African societies. Chiwome echoes Vambe when he reflects Vera’s dilemma of attempting to represent the African world in new ways using the English language.
In her essay on Butterfly Burning, Violet Bridget Lunga is of the view that space, time and memory shape identities and destinies in Butterfly Burning. She shows how women such as Phephelaphi, Dehuwe, Getrude and others are affected by the colonial space and time as black women. She shows how colonial constraints and patriarchal restrictions in the form of Fumbatha stifle Phephelaphi’s ambitions, causing her to react with suicide.
The well-known Zimbabwean historian, Terence Ranger argues that although The Stone Virgins pursues the victimisation of women by men, the novel marks a change in Vera’s engagement with history as the book is not one ‘in which narratives are compressed into a private tragedy’ but is one ‘about people caught up in and destroyed by a public disaster’. In other words, Ranger is saying that The Stone Virgins is not gender-biased but has a national perspective as its real focus is not Thenjiwe but the national tragedy in Matabeleland in the early 1980s.
After going through Sign and Taboo, readers will realise that some critics on Vera’s style and the poetics of her novels tend to end with stylistic criticism in their approach, while, on the other hand, other critics are more socio-historical in their approach, as they highlight Vera’s perception of social reality as a woman. Nevertheless, I find the reader very suitable for teachers’ college and university students and lecturers dealing with her works.