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Dr.
Yvonne Vera - A tribute to a fine and ingenuous mind
Tinashe Chimedza
April 13, 2005
A short statement
that I got in my email on the 10th of April announced the peaceful
death of Dr Yvonne Vera in a hospital in Canada. Her death is indeed a
blow not only to the intellectuals who have studied and search for deeper
if not sometimes confused meanings of Vera’s work but more so to the silent,
those that are not supposed to speak. The multitude, those that are now
wedged but struggling to create and carve their alternative liberating
and autonomous spaces between a globalizing and marginalizing world on
one hand and a political situation at the home front that is threatening
to ‘descend us into history’. Her writing helped break the male dominated
publishing field in Zimbabwe and it must continue to be an inspiration
to young women who must express their understanding of this society and
invoke thoughts and possible liberation from a male dominated society.
Dr. Yvonne Vera worked
for some time at the National Arts Gallery of Bulawayo and she studied
English in Canada at York University and also took up a post as a Writer
in Residence at Trent University. Her doctoral thesis was on African writers
like Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Soyinka, Ruth First and Breytenbach. Her death
has robbed Zimbabwe, Africa and the world of a legendary women writer
who did not believe in silence and who deployed her skill to write, expose
and attempt to deconstruct social and cultural limitations that gagged
society especially women. Her work will remain endeared on many people’s
hearts and minds. She leaves a legacy of a liberating expression that
confronted not only the question of gender and sexuality but also the
thorny issues of ethnicity, violence and with some deeper analysis the
limitations of the nationalist liberation movement in Zimbabwe. My exposure
to Zimbabwean women writers started Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions,
a novel whose opening still sticks to my subconscious like maggots and
I found myself reading but never managing to cope up with Dr Vera’s prolific
publishing.
Her most popular works
include, Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals (1992), Nehanda
(1993), Without A Name (1994), Under The Tongue (1996) which
one the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, Butterfly Burning (1998) and
Stone Virgins (2003) which won the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for
Africa. In 2004 after leaving the National Art Gallery of Bulawayo she
won the Swedish PEN Tucholsky Prize and the Sweden Pen described her as,
‘Zimbabwe’s greatest writer. She also won, in 1999, the Voice of Africa,
and, in 2002, the Initiative LiBeraturpreis Germany (or German Literature
Prize). In Zimbabwe her exploits were numerous she won in 1995 and 1997
the Zimbabwean Publishers’ Literary Award for Without A Name and
Under the Tongue respectively. Her works has been translated into
various languages like German, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian and Italian
making her one of Africa’s celebrated writers in the ranks of Chinua Achebe,
Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Shimmer Chinodya and many others. What is even more
striking about Vera is her prolific capacity to continuously write and
publish works that did not diminish but increased in quality and provocation.
Commenting on her engaging writing Eva Hunter observed that, ‘It is
the intensity and elegance of Vera's "poetic" prose, with its use of repetition,
ellipsis, and accretion of metaphorical meaning, that compels the reader's
engagement with content’. Thus her work’s impact and effect can never
doubted.
It is her seething
revelation and incomparable capacity to unearth that part of our ‘new’
history that the ruling elites have sought to be hidden from us that distinguishes
Vera from other contemporary writers and she confronted and achieved this
task with bravery, passion and powerful expression. In Stone Virgins she
straddles the social, cultural and political processes of ‘post-colonial’
Zimbabwe; she wields her pen to slice through the traumatic experiences
of a people butchered in their own ‘independent’ country.
Vera wrote with a
brilliant and unparalleled compassion that did not shy away from taboos
but her writing also painted the human spaces that define who people have
become, how they have come there and how this mélange has been
mixed and becomes undefined and even confusing in a ‘post-colonial’ setting
that more and more resembles the violence and subjugation of yesteryears.
In Stone Virgins she vividly constructs the streets of Bulawayo, the beautiful,
peacefulness and spirit of the ‘City of Kings’ and its colonial history
and its identity is captured with immense emotion and expression that
one’s mind travels back into history to identify that which was ‘Bulawayo’
and that which is now "Bulawayo’. Her powerful description of the
streets of Bulawayo reminds me of a walk in the streets of Bulawayo and
in Mpopoma in 2004 with my father who grew up in Mpopoma who relayed stories
of soccer weekends after scrubbing the houses ready for ‘inspection’ and
how often he had to hide when House Inspectors made their rounds because
he stayed ‘illegally’ in the male ‘blocks’ with his brother who worked
at the Zimbabwe Sugar Refinery, (kusugar).
What is most striking
about Vera’s writing is her ability to capture the contradictions that
ensue in the post-colonial and juxtapose them to the ‘source’ of liberation
which is presented in Nehanda, the women heroine. She does this powerfully
and more so if one looks at where she begins writing from, beginning from
her short stories collection in Why Don’t You Crave Your Own Animals,
through Nehanda, importantly Without A Name and finally in Stone Virgins.
Her powerful stories in Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals takes one through
the ‘identity’ crisis that is faced, or more true forced, on women freedom
fighters as they ‘return’ home and how they continue together marching
with ‘patriarchy’ going to independence celebrations, participating in
strikes yet power relations remain largely dominated by men. Women are
forced to remain invisible only allowed to occasionally surface as mothers
in a society dominated by men and women ‘virtue’ is ascribed to silence
and obedience. In Nehanda she resurrects the conflict of African religion
and Christianity and one student of her commented that in Nehanda she
confronts the ‘Empire’, in fact it is ‘challenged and cultural spaces,
symbols and resistance reclaimed’. What is to be found without doubt in
her writing is a challenge to a ‘mass conformity’ society produced and
reproduced in modern society on one hand and the contradictions that still
tear down the appeal of the nationalist rhetoric that brought us to where
‘we’ are. This is the legacy that Vera leaves for generations present
and to come, of challenging the concocted but in all this we are reminded
to search and accept the plurality, diversity and fully reconcile with
the painful episodes of our history and social structures – but only through
speaking out, transformation and liberation.
It is never easy to
do justice to what Dr Yvonne Vera wrote and it will take years of writing,
peering and in certain cases re-reading her work to understand it and
fully come to its ‘consciousness’. To her family I say you must be proud
and you must beat your chests for letting the country and the world share
with you the hope that she implanted in speaking out and in saying ‘no
longer must we be silent.’ In an interview with Eugene Soros in 2002 she
commented that, ‘I am against silence. The books I write try to undo
the silent posture African women have endured over so many decades."
In an era in which the past is being conjured as the future and the
present has become so blurred in this political moment Vera’s writing
consistently invites us to a threshold of seeking our identity and most
importantly liquidating social constructions like sexism and racism that
take us into the drudgery of a past that is gruesome and grotesque. Consistently
in her published work she constructed characters who in the midst of a
society in living in terror are able to create their own ‘corners’ of
love and solidarity but they are perverted by the never ending terror
of the male dominated society always at war. But this writings and carved
‘corners’ create hope of love, peace and solidarity that she consciously
brings to us a possible path to liberation and true expression of our
humanity. Indeed her writing sets us onto the path of reclaiming liberation,
replacing the dominance and official ‘history’ with a plural, diverse
and maybe more true history of this great house of stones.
Rest in peace Yvonne
Vera. Your work is the work of a fine, reflective and ingenious mind.
*Tinashe Chimedza
is a Zimbabwean studying and writing from Down under (Sydney, Australia)
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.
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