Yvonne Vera insisted on telling those Zimbabwean stories that ordinarily would have been denied. Those stories were often women’s stories; they were alternative narratives that challenged mainstream/malestream understandings and constructions of history under the current regime.
Across the arc of her work from Under the Tongue in 1996 through to The Stone Virgins in 2002, Vera was concerned with the investigation of voice, language and subsequently text. She took very seriously the relationship between history and memory and challenging what can and cannot be said, what this meant in the everyday lives of women, men and children in colonial Rhodesia and post-colonial Zimbabwe, and what this recasting of history would mean if translated into an agenda for social change.
Last September, in The Guardian, in the lead-up to the Booker Prize, South African writer Achmat Dangor saw the potential enrichment of African literature as a matter of taking to the streets: ‘I have also observed with some relief how other African writers have taken to the streets, as it were. Yvonne Vera beautifully evokes Bulawayo in her novel The Stone Virgins, Moses Isegawa’s depiction of Idi Amin’s Kampala in Snakepit is heady yet claustrophobic. Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying accurately captures the sprawling, elegiac architecture of peri-urban South Africa. African writers are starting to reclaim the African city from the colonialists who by their association with it had poisoned it as a centre of culture and ‘dark, gleaming light’.”
Vera’s work was a perpetual claiming and reclaiming of the spaces of everyday life, and in particular of women’s everyday lives. The Stone Virgins opens: ‘Selborne Avenue in Bulawayo cuts from Fort Street (at Charter House), across to Jameson Road (of the Jameson Raid), through to Main Street, to Grey Street, to Abercorn Street, to Fife Street, to Rhodes Street, to Borrow Street, out into the lush Centenary Gardens with their fusion of dahlias, petunias, asters, red salvia, and mauve petrea bushes, onward to the National Museum, on the left side.” It’s all about Selborne Avenue, ‘the most splendid street in Bulawayo”.
To enter Vera’s literary world is to enter the space and time of real places (even in more fabulous works such as Nehanda, which ironically concerns a historical figure): women’s spaces and times; Shona women, Ndebele women, ‘Indian” women, ‘coloured” women, ‘European” women; ‘Rhodesian” women, ‘Zimbabwean” women, and, as Christine Sylvester has noted, in Producing Women and Progress in Zimbabwe, Zimbabwean ‘women”, a floating signifier if ever there was one.
Vera’s readers had to learn to know, to admire and to revere the ways in which Zimbabwean women live. Note that we do not say ‘survive”, for not everyone survives the moment. They live their lives in intense spaces, in the neighborhoods of and surrounding Bulawayo, Kezi, Mubaira, Harare. They live in the cities, townships, locations and the bush. They struggle with incest, rape, torture, civil war, betrayal, and even peace. And even peace in Zimbabwe cloaks ‘its women” in violence. They live the intensities of love, tenderness, forgiveness and hatred. Though they often seem to stand perfectly still, the women of Vera’s works are in constant movement and continuous turbulence. They constitute the flowing waters that can be touched an infinite number of times and only once.
The characters in Vera’s work occupy time. They live in real material historical time, marked in years. Mazvita’s story of struggle against circumstance and betrayal, personal and collective, in Without a Name, is cadenced by the invocation of 1977: ‘After all it was 1977.” ‘It was 1977, freedom was skin deep but joyous and tantalising.” ‘The streets smelled of burning skin … It was like that in 1977.” ‘The city pushed forward. It was 1977. It was nothing to see a woman with a blind stare on her face, with a baby fixed spidery on her back. It was nothing to be sorrowful.” ‘Freedom was a thought tantalising and personal. You had to wear your own freedom to be sure it had arrived. 1977. That is how it was expressed. People walked into shops and bought revolutions.” ‘The carnival was necessary and complete, so they lay in the dead bodies which they had rejected in the heightening clamour of the voices of their men, in the turmoil of faint-hearted whispers. The year was 1977.” ‘1977. People were known to die amazing deaths. Natural deaths were rare, unless one simply died in sleep … 1977. It was a time for miracles. If you arrived at your destination still living, then you prayed desperately to continue to live.” ‘1977. Everyone was an accomplice to war.”
And how does Without a Name end? The last chapter loops around the simple incantatory statement: ‘It is yesterday”. ‘It is yesterday. The trees are heavy with pod.” ‘It is yesterday. Mazvita sees the smoke and hills.” ‘It is yesterday. The village has disappeared.” In the end, ‘the silence is deep, hollow, and lonely”.
It is 1977. It is yesterday. All of Vera’s people, in particular all of Vera’s women, live in real time and real places, in Zimbabwe. In one book, it is 1977; in another, Under the Tongue, it is 1980, ‘the end of loneliness and unfulfilled desire long kept”, ‘a time to shorten distances to desire”. In Vera’s work, it’s always yesterday, it’s always today, it’s always the moment in which women refuse the offers of patience and the supposed rewards of silence as acceptance. Vera offers her readers the courage, the full heart, of deliverance, deliverance understood not as deliverance from, as flight, but as deliverance into. ‘Deliverance” is the final word of The Stone Virgins, her fifth and as it turns out final completed novel. Who today is writing the story of Zimbabwe, and of ‘its women”, the story that keeps whispering, ‘It is 2005”, and how will it end?
For this is the challenge. How will it end in a world that in so many ways negates the meaning of postcolonial Zimbabwe? A world that refuses to hear Zimbabwe’s women and to see and read the challenges facing Zimbabwe for what they are? As a Zimbabwean writer, this invitation is threaded through Vera’s work. To read her work is to confront and act upon the challenges and take up the invitation. Or at the very least to re-look and re-think. It is 2005 and how will it end?
Hamba kahle Yvonne, hamba kahle.
Shereen Essof is a researcher at the African Gender Institute, UCT, and Daniel Moshenberg is the director of the Women’s Studies Program at George Washington University, Washington, DC.