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Shattering the taboos that exclude and control
For visiting Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera, the act of saying is itself liberating; a way of opening up spaces for the individual

At a conference on African literature in Berlin in May this year, attended by Yvonne Vera, the Zimbabwean writer, critics referred t what has now become known as the ‘Vera phenomenon’. By this they mean the spiritual and intellectual whirlpool stirred by her profoundly disturbing subject matter and individual writing style.

Last month the Wits Writers’ Series invited Vera to conduct a writers’ workshop and to attend the launch of the first collection of critical essays on her work. She conducted the workshop at the Wits Writing Centre, and read from her works at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic research where she also spoke at the launch of the essay collection Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera (Weaver Press, Harare, and James Currey, Oxford). I co-edited the book with Mandivavarira Taruvinga.

I have long been impressed by the sheer energy and brutality of Vera's poetic prose. The gusto with which she shatters taboos is regenerative in a public culture tyrannised by a nationalist and patriarchal history, her ability to shore up doubt as self-critique sets her apart from those who follow blindly the traditions of protest literature.

Vera, who popularised fictional geographies of Bulawayo and Johannesburg in her award-winning novel Butterfly Burning (1998), was in Johannesburg for the first time. She only remembered flying over it to some place else, but remaining anchored to its fictional possibilities.

Born in Bulawayo, Vera is a doctoral graduate of York University in Canada and at present works at the director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo.

In denying the authority held by present public histories over the micro-narratives of women, Vera is not simply retaliating She is also opening up spaces for the body, the mind, and the voice.

In Without a Name (1994), Vera’s main character, Mazvita, refuses to be pinned down to one single narrative of struggle, the land. She rejects her lover, Nyenyedzi (a self-appointed custodian of the land), because she wants to live the experience of pain and defeat for herself.

To show her that she does not quite mater in the land struggle, a guerrilaa (the current terminology is war veteran in President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe) rapes her even as he calls her his dear ‘sister’, even as he claims to be in the war for her sake. Similarly, a father rapes his young daughter in Under the Tongue while calling her ‘my child’.

The hollowness of the guerrilla’s rhetoric and the brutality of the rape drive Mazvita to the city (Harare) to seek her own horizons. Revolution, tradition, home, men/fathers (by extension, nation) betray and savage women in verb’s novels.

Her female characters distinguish themselves by their capacity to think through the horrors of their stories. They are not often defeated by a predetermined male history; they insist on controlling their own bodies and histories.

In Nehanda (1993), Nehanda, the spirit mother of the Zimbabwean nation, is executed by white settlers in 1896-7, but remains a death-defying icon, taunting the settlers even as they slip the noose over her head. Mazvita, finding herself undermined by an unwanted pregnancy, kills her baby in a frighteningly rational manner. she straps the dead body on her back, and climbs onto a bus headed for her rural home to bury both the baby and her past.

In Butterfly Burning, Phephelaphi, betrayed by an unwanted pregnancy, uses a thorn to abort the foetus in a barren part of the city, and goes back to her lover Fumbatha whom she allows to enter her sexually, in spite of the pain. She again falls pregnant, and decides to put paid to the traitorous female anatomy by dousing herself with paraffin, and setting herself alight.

In all these incidents, the female body possesses the initiative, whether in its own dissolution or recovery. Dissolution of the female body is in this case an act of self-retrieval, if not self-apotheosis, and self-flagellation.

In The Stone Virgins (2002) Vera’s latest novel, there is a remarkable shift in agency regarding the disposal of the female body, and bodies in general. In a very traumatic period in Zimbabwean history, the so-called ‘dissident era’ between 1981 and 1987, more than 20 000 ethnic Ndebele people were murdered by the present Zimbabwean government.

Vera focuses on one such incident where the brutality is most inexplicable. This is the beheading of Tenjiwe by an unnamed gunmen [.........must be gunman, see next line …….] and the savage mutilation of her sister Nonceba by the same man. A dozen more people are killed in cold blood by government forces while enjoying a conversation on the verandah of a rural store. The storekeeper is killed in a horrendous manner for allowing his shop to be used s a venue for rural gossip. This is a government and a twisted nationalism obsessed with what Achille Mbembe, a leading postcolonial studies theorist, calls necropower: the monopoly and discretionary powers to distribute death among its citizens.

The Stone Virgins questions this practice, by no means an invention of the Mugabe regime, but perhaps a continuation of the age-old practice of burying virgins alive with a king/chief when he died, an unsettling memory that is etched in stone in this novel. The implications of this analogy are many, and the trampling of the right to life of those who are ruled is quite evident in recent African history: mindless genocides in Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, apartheid South Africa, Idi Amin’s Uganda and Rwanda are perhaps the most dramatic. What makes Vera’s work significant is its ability to institute memory both as oppositional critique and therapy. The various truth commissions in Africa have been perhaps too public and too official. Vera is concerned with that private loss, that private horror, which no amount of forgetting can get rid off [SIC ……..].

For her characters, the ability to post a counter-voice to all-embodying histories and experiences, and the ability to draw the boundaries of one’s hell, are liberating. Vera’s work is ultimately about setting off these creative moments and voices. it is a refusal to have one’s biography pared down to the essentials of one’s space and history. The terrifying fates of her characters illustrate the desire to transcend the limitations of a history, a space, a body, a psyche, a soul. It is the desire to map one’s way in the world, without being circumscribed by it.

The struggle for the freedom of the self is indeed a higher kind of struggle in most of Vera’s work. yet the self is enmeshed in general struggles against tyranny and forgetting. The self is autonomous in the sense that it can insert itself into the turbulence of public histories to which, ideally, it lends integrity. It is this fundamental and complementary significance of the self that is denied, often violently, in the histories interrogated in Vera’s novels.

Her work animates a dialogue of common strivings across cultures and histories. For Vera, the act of saying is itself a way of shattering taboos, for taboos are about inhibitions, exclusion and control. yet she insists that it is not enough to say: it is important to develop effective signs that communicate past and beyond the sites of cultural and psychological excisions. Her work is therefore a welcome invitation to visions of the roads often overrun in public narratives. Echoing the title of her first collection of short stories – Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals? – there are echoes of disenchantment with a dormancy of mind and culture. Indeed.

* Robert Muponde is head of literary studies at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research.

© The author/publisher

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