Index

Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera
edited by Robert Muponde and Mandivavarira Taruvinga

Writing Still
edited by Irene Staunton

Reviewer: Caroline Rooney
Wasfiri 44, Spring 2005

Yvonne Vera has emerged as on of Zimbabwe’s most prominent writers and Sign and Taboo is a collection of essays that gives due recognition to Vera’s literary significance. Its richly textured critical assessment of her achievements so far will serve as a crucial focus for further studies of her writing, whilst also having wider implications for those attending to a poetics of Zimbabwean and African fiction or interested in a potential cross-cultural poetics of women’s writing.

In Sign and Taboo, a clear critical consensus emerges in the characterisation of Vera’s writing as poetic or lyrical language that foregrounds a feminine presence of body and spirit in the visioning and re-visioning of Zimbabwean history. Where divergences arise is in the range of responses to such writing, especially regarding its import in philosophical and political terms.

In these well-organised volume, the first three essays are devoted to the exploration of the conflation of voiced language with presence in Vera’s work. In the opening essay Muchemwa boldly confronts – with reference to Derrida’s generalising of the grammatological – what he sees as the failings of phonocentrism and an homogenising essentialism of women, which constitute the pitfalls of an attempt to recover ‘the repressed discourse of woman’ (p.3). Samuelson’s ensuing essay celebrates the same strategic project in terms of a fortuitous attempt to ‘write orality’ (p.18), and in the affirmation of the continuity of mother-daughter or female genealogy against the fragmentation of the feminine. Muchemwa aptly draws attention to a desire to express ‘the collective woman’, or , it might be said, the feminine as such, since what does seem to be at stake is nothing less than an attempt to address the ontological in terms of the feminine. Ultimately, beyond the treatment of sexual violence against women and its ensuing effects on them that Vera unflinchingly confronts, it might be this that is taboo, the unspeakable beyond the sign: femininity as being, and as being beyond all prescriptions. But whilst Muchemwa’s critique is faithful to deconstruction, – can one be ‘faithful’ to deconstruction? – it could be further considered that Derrida’s scepticism regarding speech and the mystical logos as presence pertains to a Western tradition in which masculinity is equated with presence and femininity with absence. Whilst Derrida pursues a logic of spectrality as implicitly a de-presencing of the masculine, the question remains as to whether and to what extent a creative presencing of the feminine is permissible. Can it be attempted? Can it be allowed? As variously taken into consideration, Vera perhaps quite consciously rejects the Western privileging of the Authoritative written word (fixed, preserved), in favour of a language capable of expressing transient yet on-going living beings, an experimental and embodied consciousness. Hence, the poetic.

The next essay in this section by Martin Shaw convincingly addresses the frequency and insistence with which Vera uses water imagery, and other related imagery, but leaves the reader wondering as to its significance. Linking Shaw’s observations with the previous essays, my conclusion is that the prevalence of the ‘watery’ could supply the ontological with an expressible but unfixable creative fluid, let us say ink as opposed to the typewriter key, a formative rather then formal element. The next three essays take up aspects of Vera’s use of language that can be understood in terms of non-linguistic expression , that is, in the narrow sense. Bryce, with admirable dexterity, explains how Vera’s work tends to unfold from a visual image best understood as a photograph. Bryce works with and against the usual treatment of the photograph as spectral to reveal its political significance in African writing as a realisation or creation of reality. Hemmings and Attree respectively draw attention to an aesthetics of cloth and of kwela music, thus of texture, sound and rhythm. The documentary photograph, texture, sound and rhythm, may all be said to bring together that which signifies with that which is signified, e.g. a matted texture signifies ‘matted texture’.

Pleasingly, given the above noted resistance to ideality, the following essays go on to address a politics of the body together with questions of belonging. Here Primorac may be said to get to the crux of the issues at stake with her compelling observation that the minds of Vera’s characters are : ‘lively, mature and free from the very outset of their stories. It is their bodies that they do not fully possess, and therein lie their tragedies.’ (p.107). In a subsequent essay, Muponde serves to tease out some of the complexities that this implies through attending to how Vera’s fiction negotiates the counter-pulls of autonomy and commitment. Essays by Vambe, Mangwanda and Chiwome usefully contextualise Vera’s treatment of the Nehanda legend, creating an arena of debate. Whereas Vambe, with, ambivalent nuances, assesses Vera as writing in the mode of an authenticising cultural nationalism, Chiwome draws on Shona sources to maintain that Vera ‘invents’ her Africa and Mangwanda emphasises both Vera’s deliberately foregrounded mythical treatment of her material and her affinities with a nationalist agenda. Finally, there are some fine essays on the fictional relation to the temporal and historical in wider terms. Lunga writes observantly of the treatment of the constraints of the spatio-temporal in Vera’s work and Wilson-Tagoe offers an important essay on Vera’s advancement of the historical novel away from a Lukacsian representational realism towards a lyrical interplay of voices that serve to question the notion of singularised history in terms of again, a ‘fluid immediacy’ (p.160). Terence Ranger writes movingly of the effects of Vera’s work on his own and dialogically engages with her The Stone Virgins, whilst Vera attests to the reciprocation of his influence on her in the interview that concludes the study, an interview that clearly foregrounds her commitment to the registering of historical moments.

What I remain somewhat dubious about are the occasional designations of Vera as a postmodernist writer. That she is an experimental avant-garde writer does not necessarily mean that she writes in accordance with a Western aesthetic of late capitalism. Her interest in the text is not, I would argue, an idealist one but a materialist one; this emerges strongly across this critical study and seems confirmed by her emphasis on reality in the interview she gives. Perhaps, with the editors’ sub-title in mind, she could more appropriately be termed a ‘poetic realist’ than a ‘postmodernist’?

Poetic realism is a term that would be fairly accurate for the range of contemporary Zimbabwean writing represented in the reflectively and defiantly named Writing Still, whilst the title may further be alluding to the ‘Walking Still’ (1997) of a master of the genre of the short story, Charles Mungoshi. Well established writers such as Mungoshi and Vera are represented in this anthology alongside lesser known or emergent voices, a scope reflective of the constituencies of ethnicity, gender, sexual orieantation and generation. Vera’s ‘Sorting it Out’ offers a warmly humorous and modestly self-ironic story of a female genealogy and family crypt that issues in a thwarting of infanticide whilst Mungoshi’s ‘Sins of the Fathers’ is a superbly crafted narrative of personal and political disvowal gradually exposed. Whilst these two stories are delivered with poised assurance, they are not necessarily the most accomplished of the stories included, for there are a number of contenders here. For example, Chikwava’s ‘Seventh Street Alchemy’ greatly impresses as a witty and jazzily composed urban bricolage, whilst Chinodya’s – isn’t Chinodyua just as accomplished as the other two?- ‘Queues’ intrigues as it deftly blurs and invents the literal and the metaphoric, the personal and the historical. Many might find the most powerful story in the collection to be Freedom Nyamubaya’s ‘That Special Place’, a story that manages to find the right register and tone to deliver an account of torture. The torturer in the story demands of those intimidates, ‘narrate your story as it should be: no lies, no exaggeration and no withholdings’ (p.224). The story itself answers back to that, word for word, with a layered and telling lucidity that one would be reluctant to summarise. Generally speaking, the stories are concerned with the interweavings of personal and political histories, and threat of suffering, self reckoning and, now and again, mutedly reconfigured optimism, where there is an unsparing condemnation of the governance of the Mugabe regime. While white writers tend to convey an apologetic or humble stance, many of the African writers write of despair without resentment. A certain national consciousness comes to express itself in precisely shared disillusionment with former cultural and ethnic nationalisms. Furthermore, racial boundaries are rendered questionable through the crossings of other differentials such as sexuality, class and generation. Whilst the gay white man of Kilalea’s ‘Mea Culpa’ finds echoes of his father in his African lover, the African narrator of Kanengoni’s story sees his fathering his white farmer neighbour, and Chingono’s ‘Maria’s Interview’ observantly dramatises the de javu of the ‘white madam’ in the ‘black madam’. Although, unsurprisingly, some of the stories could be said to be more effective than others, the inclusion of each is justified with respect to its particular contribution to an understanding of contemporary Zimbabwean experiences and sensibilities. There is a noticeable experimentation with the off-setting of voices within the stories (by, for example, Chihota and Gugu Ndlovu), whilst a number of stories (say Mupfudza’s and Brickhill’s) are movingly written in a voice of quiet truth. Finally, one of the most memorable effects of this collection is its creation or capturing of spirit in either character or narrator: Musengezi’s ‘Mukoma Amos’, Saidi’s ‘Tambudzai’ and Wilson’s ‘woman in red’, to name a few instances of this. Wilson’s ‘The Twelve Chitenges’ concludes the volume, and, until I noticed that the sequencing was alphabetical, I thought this was deliberate for its concluding paragraph acts as a kind of summary of the collection as a whole. Not only that, it offers a meta-commentary that is also a literality or actuality as regards the poetic or lyrical realism that this review has been trying to draw attention to as quite definitive of modern Zimbabwean writing. For that reason, I should like to cite the paragraph in full as follows:

'And as the sweet voices and guitars blended with the rhythm of the bus, people began to clap their hands and join in. It was soon obvious that every single person excerpt him knew every word of every song by heart. And was able to sing along in perfect tune. At least, he was familiar with the music and as the clapping and singing increased, interspersed with piercing ululations from the Woman in Red now sitting directly behind him and drumming on the back of his seat, he began to get into it and pretty soon was grooving along as well. The live voices and the recorded music were indistinguishable, as Oliver and the girls with their angel voices were actually there amongst them, on the bus, singing out their pain and suffering, their joy and love, uniting them all as they sped through the dark towards Harare. (p.252)

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