Yvonne Vera died shrouded in her own mysteries, just as she wrote them. In retrospect, it seems as if that is what she intended. But why?
In one of her novels, Butterfly Burning, she wrote: ‘The fire moves over her light as a feather, smooth like oil.” Fire would burn away the delicate elegance of the butterfly. A moth drawn to the naked flame.
And so, in a quiet ceremony, far away in Toronto in the presence of her mother and not too many others, she was cremated, her fleeting physical reality consumed by fire, her ashes distributed to a few close friends and family, to be scattered between the lakeside Canadian home, where she breathed her last days with her husband (a little-known figure in her publicly mysterious life), and later the Matopos Hills in southern Zimbabwe, where she grew up — the landscape she would always return to.
News of her death came like a shock of thunder in the night, something I had to gnaw at, shake like a terrier with endless calls to people who might have known her, doctors who might give me some insight into the long death that she seemed to be living out.
The official cause of death was meningitis. Meningitis is a creeping disease that eats at the soft tissue around the brain, one of the many symptomatic causes of death by this disease that has an all too easy name, but no meaning.
Small names, big names. Nehanda. Chimurenga. Marechera. And still not enough of a guess and estimation to place at the doorstep of her passing.
She never said it. We never thought it. Meningitis can happen to anyone, anywhere. So can tuberculosis, pneumonia, cancer of the breast or the bowel, all of the other creeping and alarming illnesses that await you as soon as you step out of the womb. Heck, I was hospitalised, isolated, burned to the brink of death by a form of the disease called meningitis in my childhood. I also discovered much later in life that I had come close to being ravaged by tuberculosis, that other mysterious no-no, and heaven knows what else. To survive is an honour in its own right.
And so, in later life, we, all of us, some more notable than others, come crashing down to Earth and expire. To be mourned by those few who knew us, and then forgotten.
Yvonne Vera was a legend — other-wise I might never have known of her. She was the darling of the Harare Book Festival for a number of years after her star first rose into the international firmament of writers who could say something, anything, about the human condition — especially the mock-mysterious condition of the post-colonial mind, which has its fangs, like Aids, in all of us.
She became a darling of book festivals all over the civilised world — a mixed blessing that she studiously avoided, while still rising elegantly, ephemerally, graciously to its challenge.
She became an icon in her own right, there in the self-congratulating spotlight of the post-colony. She was all of the important struggles — a woman, a black person, an intellectual, sexually liberated and indefinable.
But was she herself? Nobody could tell. And nobody really tried to — except, perhaps, those few who were able to really get close to her. Some of whom accompanied her remains on that last journey into the flames, and then dared to explore the ashes of what had been her life.
I can’t say that I wasn’t touched by her. Nor can I imagine that she did not do everything in her power to touch me. She did. She wrote. She spoke. And she was beautiful.
I met her only once — and you can hardly call it a one-on-one meeting, although we did the delicate, elegant thing and exchanged pleasantries and business cards. But I was aware that even as we did this butterfly dance, her enigmatic smile and her mysterious eyes were dancing over my shoulder to where the cameras and their flashing headlights were elbowing into our space, and time was of the essence.
She was robed and turbaned and carried herself like an African queen, an empress of a thousand realms, all purple and gold and serenity. She had graciously accepted to answer questions from a packed audience of wolfish, curious, rapacious admirers at the distant empire of the University of the Witwatersrand. She was ill, but we couldn’t see it. She wouldn’t allow us to.
Her composure was complete, until a young admirer, a Dutch or Swedish or German student of literature and philosophy, posed what she thought was an innocent or pertinent question: ‘Miss Vera, you write such elegant English. Can you tell me, when you write, do you translate yourself first from your native language and then put it down in English?”
The Empress Vera raised herself in her seat and stared in the general direction of the questioner and responded by saying that it was only Africa’s colonisers, people of an uncertain skin, who had insisted on imposing a foreign language and culture and then, as with Caliban, expressed wonder at the fact that their subjects could not only speak but also think in the language of their captivity. Could think themselves beyond the walls of their subjugation. And fly briefly like the wings of a burning butterfly.
That’s how I remember her response. Maybe I was only listening to myself as the words spouted like ashes of fire from her mouth, and then were gone. The contempt, the disdain and the scarcely hidden pain.
‘She is a bird with wings spread,” she wrote, perhaps describing herself, ’embracing each part of herself with flame, deeply and specially. A woman’s solid frame, even if the ground underneath her is already sliding, sliding away … As she lets go she feels nothing except her wings folding. A bird landing and closing its wings. Falling to pieces, easy, easier than she has imagined …”
And then she was gone.