Index

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

From: New Directions in African Literature
Reviewer:  Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo, Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge, UK

Yvonne Vera has produced a significant body of work in a short period of time. Since the publication of a short story collection in 1992, she has written five novels and edited an anthology. This first critical collection on Vera’s work, written by scholars from Southern Africa, Britain and the Americas, examines the fiction largely within its Zimbabwean context.

In the section ‘language, technique and imagery’, Vera’s work is interpreted using theories of art forms other than the literary. Jane Bryce’s persuasive essay analyses the influence of film and photography in Vera’s aesthetics. Controversially, in her discussion of the camera-eye point of view in Vera, Bryce compares Vera’s technique with that of the anthropological filmmaking of Jean Rouch, arguing that both bring what is usually hidden or secret into view.

Jessica Hemmings’ essay combines an academic interest in textile design and literary criticism to produce an unusual article on the role of cloth in Vera’s fiction. Hemming was working on a PhD on Vera and her essay appears to be work in progress. The problem is that the design history she is applying to Vera’s work does not provide adequate theorization of literary texts. To compensate for this, Hemmings is over-reliant on her own practical criticism of Vera’s novels. Nevertheless, her close readings draw the reader’s attention to the language of Vera’s work.

In other sections of the book, Maurice T. Vambe and Kizito Muchemwa analyse Vera’s use of orality and ritual. Vambe is more critical of Vera’s historical reconstruction than Bryce, arguing that Vera, in her appropriation of spirit possession in Nehanda, represents black women as speaking with one voice, and ignoring contradictions within their experiences. Rather than presenting a critical realist perspective on pre colonial-Zimbabwe, Vera presents a Shona society with a traditional idyllic past which, ironically, not only ‘nornalise(s) the colonial discourse’ (130) it attempts to deconstruct but also fails to challenge a male dominated discourse of nationalism. Muchemwa too takes issue with Vera’s rewriting of history. He argues that her reconstructed orality is essentialist and sits uneasily with the hybridity and postmodernism of her novels.

In contrast, Nana Wilson-Tagoe argues that Vera uses dialogism in Nehanda to represent history through the voices of those on the margins. In her convincing article, Wilson-Tagoe makes the important distinction that Vera’s novels are ‘narratives out of history’ rather than ‘narratives of history’ (160). According to Wilson-Tagoe, in Nehanda, Vera represents a world in crisis in which history itself is contested as it is rewritten in ways which challenge the official version. In a stimulating reading of Under the Tongue, Wilson-Tagoe shows how Vera, through writing incest into a narrative set during the liberation struggle and through presenting multiple perspectives, moves beyond retelling women’s history to interrogating gender and power relations.

Wilson-Tagoe contrast Vera’s foregrounding of Nehanda’s chimurenga role with the emphasis the historian Terence Ranger places on the male medium Kaguvi. Ranger is the author of an essay in this collection which offers a historian’s commentary on Vera’s The Stone Virgins. The essay’s significance lies in the auto/biography it relates as Ranger explains the influence he and Vera have had on each other’s work. Ranger rightly assets that The Stone Virgins breaks new ground as the first novel by Vera to confront history directly and also as the first Zimbabwean novel to delineate the horror of both army and dissident violence in Matabeleland during the early 1980s.

Large claims are made for Vera in this book, particularly by those critics, arguing from a feminist perspective, who see Vera as a pioneering writer, breaking the silence of traditional taboos and bearing witness in a newly created historical discourse. The essays, as a whole, demonstrate that Vera is worthy of this acclaim. The variety and quality of the essays in this well edited collection suggest that it will be the definitive work on Vera for some time.

© The author/publisher

TOP