Arts Events List
May 15, 2002
Reviewer: Vivienne Hamblin

The Stone Virgins will be launched on Thursday at the Gallery Delta. It has already won the Macmillan Writers' prize for Africa, a new award given for unpublished works of fiction. Yvonne Vera's previous novels include Under the Tongue and Butterfly Burning. She is in the business of preserving a national heritage as Director of the National Gallery in Bulawayo.

My favourite shop sign walking round Bulawayo 1985 was that of the "Personality Cleaners", a Dry Cleaners. Yvonne Vera in The Stone Virgins renews our license to remember and to live on. It's not an easy journey. But there is no other truth or reconciliation commission. As in her earlier work, Under the Tongue, she speaks for women who have not been heard who have lost their voices through trauma and force. The Stone Virgins is a 'must read' for every Harare, or city resident, as we become her Bulawayo of 1986, centre to a brutalised countryside.

The intense relationship between women who give a voice to the next generation is at the core of the life force and the writings of Yvonne Vera. She names feelings and sensations for herself and for others.

In The Stone Virgins it is the sister and the aunt who have this power. In Under The Tongue it is the grandmother. But why should an adult need someone else to name her feelings? The one answer is the loss of the power to speak. But this is a loss of both a personal and national voice. The background is the reign of terror in Matabeleland, the perpetrators pensioned, historical reports lost. The voice and ambience of a region, the community and thus the time and place have been dislocated.

The increased strength of The Stone Virgins, over Vera's other works is the intensity of the locale. This is also the area that I found most difficult. The question emerging from a brutal history is how to share 'the emotional force which comes directly out of the community whose scattering it traces?' (Maria Margaronis, London Review of Books, 25th April, reviewing works rooted on the Greek Albanian border). The locale is at the core of the work, its colour and historical complexity. The problem is how to give the outsider, and by definition every one is an outsider, the taste of the place, its history, humidity, landscape and flora in order to know a particular character without losing the emotional story and the reader.

Yvonne Vera uses her locale as her opening theme or character. By the end of the book I longed for the safe, mundane matrix of streets offered in these first passages and to be freed from the personal, to return to the beginning. But at the beginning I resented the over detailed, languorous descriptions of place and needed a character or travelling companion to experience it with. However, on entering the choreography on the corner 'ekoneni' I became involved in the writing. I'm safest at corners, able to see what's coming from all sides and the choices they offer of meeting or fleeing. It takes the whole novel to achieve this sense of the value of the untranslatable of what is bound to a particular place and time, and readers are rewarded for the effort that the beginning demands.

Through such devices, as returning to the same places with different people or in different times, the book also makes clear its time thesis, that the future can determine the past, (as "he portions her to a dead past'.)

In The Stone Virgins, Yvonne Vera's descriptions evoke the experience of intense and delicate sensations. The stone virgins themselves emerge from a hidden underground cave among the rocks, which resonates with its history, just as the 'Cave of Swimmers' does for Michael Ondaatje in The English Patient. But the national disaster, that it lurks below, replays and the personal debris continues to be scattered. Perhaps the most direct passage in the novel keys us into the national disaster: