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‘Survival is in the mouth.’

An extract of the interview between Jane Bryce and Yvonne Vera on 1 August 2000 in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

... We [Jane Bryce and Yvonne Vera] talked for a long time that Sunday morning, uninterrupted, and for the most part it was Vera talking. If her writing is spare to the point of minimalism, in speech she has the eloquence of a traditional storyteller like her grandmother, themes and stories weaving together with almost unconscious artistry, producing patterns which are part of a larger design. The challenge for me, therefore, has been how to cut and select from this tapestry of words without losing the colour and texture of Vera’s distinctive voice. I hope what follows succeeds in doing that.

Vera: I’ve always been visually oriented, and before I worked at the National Gallery, perhaps my larger influence was film, and how images are prepared, constructed and made to move. I also have a strong leaning towards photography. When I’m writing - for example, when I was writing Without a Name (published 1994) - I start with a moment - visual, mental - that I can see, and I place it on my table, as though it were a photograph. In Without a Name, I had this ‘photograph’, or series of photographs, of a woman throwing a child on her back. This photograph is a very familiar scene in Africa. If you walk down the street you’ll see it - a certain style and movement, a certain familiarity. And this moment came to me, how it’s done: the child is thrown over the left shoulder onto the mother’s back, she pulls the legs around her waist. Then I change it in one aspect: that the child is dead. But the mother performs the same action. So I take this series of images, and I put them on my desk, so to speak, as I write. This moment, frozen like that, is so powerful that I can’t lose sight of it, visually or emotionally. From it I develop the whole story, the whole novel: how do we get to this moment when the mother does this? Everything ripples around that, the story grows out of the image. I don’t even have the story at the beginning, I have only this cataclysmic moment, this shocking, painful moment, at once familiar and horrifying because of one change of detail which makes everything else tragic. For me, an entire history is contained in such a moment.

For instance, you’re looking at this woman, blind to that detail, so you don’t know what is happening to her. She, knowing the child is dead, is in an entirely other horizon of being. I always need to be anchored in such a way that I am inside a character, seeing this fragmented or fractured world, and how - usually a woman - is trying to bring the pieces together in her mind, to choreograph her life. Because, that moment I described is choreographed - but how does she then endure, how does she perceive her reality, how does she survive it? That fascinates me, it’s so powerful and charged and electric and worthy of a novel. For any of my novels, I can place the moment that inspired me visually to write, that enabled me to say, ‘This is my story, I want to tell it.’ ....

For the complete interview you will need a copy of Sign and Taboo edited by Robert Muponde and Mandivarira Taruvinga.

© The author/publisher.

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