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Yvonne Vera: Township girl to celebrity
Professor Terence Ranger
April 24, 2005

http://www.thestandard.co.zw/read.php?st_id=2243

YVONNE Vera was born in Bulawayo in September 1964. More than thirty years later the BBC World Service programme ran a two-hour programme about her entitled 'A Woman for Bulawayo'. Certainly both her background and her achievements qualified her for this title.

Thus she was brought up using all three of the main languages of Bulawayo. She lived in her maternal grandparents' cottage in Luveve, where the home language was Shona and she could never write literary Shona. For her Shona was the language of oral spirituality and story-telling. She went to Mzilikazi High School where she took Sindebele as a subject although for a long time it remained for her the language of business and everyday life. Meanwhile both her parents encouraged her to read in English - her father got her into the segregated Bulawayo Public Library by sheer force of character and her school-teacher mother plied her with books. Yvonne used to say that she thought she might be the only child in the world who had read all of DH Lawrence by the time she was 12 - and most of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy too. For her English remained the language of the novel and by the time she began to write she had complete mastery of it.

Yvonne also shared in the multiplicity of class identity in the Bulawayo townships. She grew up playing in the streets. Her thrifty grandfather sent her and her cousins to earn their school fees during the vacations by working on the cotton fields in Chegutu - she used to say that this enabled her to understand novels of Afro-American slavery.

Yvonne's mother, Ericah, was a fashionable township girl, wearing all the latest fashions and using Ambi skin-lightening cream. One of the highlights of the famous Thatha Camera exhibition of township photos which Yvonne laid on much later at the Bulawayo Art Gallery was a picture of Ericah as a young teacher, trouser-suited and be-wigged, with her class in Tsholotsho.

With this background it is not surprising that Yvonne herself was a top student at Mzilikazi and after independence passed out head of her class at Hillside Teacher Training College. Yvonne was 16 at the time of independence in 1980. In her last novel, The Stone Virgins (Weaver, 2002) she described both the joyous expectations of majority rule and also the horrified sense of betrayal which followed State repression in Matabeleland. After Hillside she taught English at Njube High School. There she met a Canadian teacher of mathematics, John Jose, and they became friendly. After he had left Bulawayo she paid two summer visits to Canada and eventually moved there to marry him and to begin her university studies at York University.

She spent the best part of a decade there, no longer 'a woman for Bulawayo' but a Toronto woman. (The Toronto Globe and Mail of 12 April 2005 carried a story headed 'Toronto writer top African novelist'.) She never wrote stories or novels about Canada but the foundations for her later career as a writer were laid there. Canada has been remarkably hospitable to a wide range of novelists.

Yvonne saw figures as diverse as Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje as models. She studied literature at York right up to doctoral level, undertaking a dissertation on African prison writing. Once again she was a brilliant student, winning scholarships and writers' rewards. She was by far the most formally educated of Zimbabwe's writers; a mistress of post-modernism and post-coloniality, theories which she made serve her rather than becoming servile to them.

Yvonne taught at York and elsewhere but she was determined to write rather than to teach; to return to Zimbabwe and to make her way there as a writer. So began a series of brilliant books - Nehanda, 1993; Without a Name, 1994; Under the Tongue, 1996; Butterfly Burning, 1998; The Stone Virgins, 2002. The first three explored the Shona world of her childhood imagination. The last two explored Bulawayo and its countryside. Yvonne had admired the way that Margaret Atwood had managed to set a novel in Toronto rather than in Paris or London. Now she herself brought Bulawayo and the Ndebele experience into the realm of the reader's imagination. Bulawayo itself was magically evoked. She was working when she died on another Matabeleland novel, Obedience, set in Bulawayo in the week before the 2002 presidential election. This would have carried the time-span of her novels from the 1896 of Nehanda right up to the current political crisis.

Remarkably rapidly these novels established her first as a Zimbabwean writer, then as an African writer, and then as an international writer. They won awards nationally, as part of Africa's best books, from the Commonwealth. There were readers' and writers' prizes in Germany and Italy and Sweden. Her novels were taught in universities in Africa, Europe and North America. They were translated into many languages. Critical essays on her work were published; it sometimes seemed as if there was a woman post-graduate student writing a thesis about Yvonne in every university in the north. In ten years she had become a celebrity and Bulawayo was on the imaginative map.

Her novels were intensely original. Her account of Nehanda's prophetic life and death set aside all history and ethnography. A township girl, she had never seen a spirit medium. Everything was invented as she placed herself in Nehanda's position - the personal experience of possession, the ritual and the symbol. What readers all over the world have accepted as a reproduction of tradition is entirely Yvonne Vera's creation.

Nehanda shows African women performing and defending tradition. But the next two densely poetic novels, Without a Name and Under the Tongue, show how tradition could be abused by patriarchy so that its silences conceal rape, incest, child abuse. She became a fearless breaker of taboos. In Butterfly Burning another two - abortion and suicide - are confronted in a vivid urban setting. The Stone Virgins takes on the deepest and most damaging silence of all - the silence which covers the crimes committed by the democratically elected state against its people. In her last unfinished novel, Obedience, Yvonne confronted the silence of political fear in contemporary Zimbabwe.

All this was profound and courageous. These books not only put Bulawayo on the map but reflected its, and Zimbabwe's experience. But Yvonne gave yet more. As Director of the National Gallery in Bulawayo she created a unique site in which to stimulate Bulawayo's intellectual and cultural life. There were lectures and openings; education programmes; artists' workshops. Her strongly visual imagination combined with her sense of the vitality of urban culture to create a series of memorable exhibitions - of township photographs, magically enhanced and enlarged; of township decorated bicycles; a projected exhibition to recreate the atmosphere of Bulawayo's western frontier and market, Lobengula Street.

Equally remarkable were the book launches. Butterfly Burning was launched in the Gallery amidst a plethora of wooden, metal, fabric butterflies and to the township music of the Cool Crooners.

This great period came to an end early in 2003 when Yvonne Vera was struck down with an agonising attack of meningitis. She recovered but from that time on until her death on 7 April 2005 she was fighting against recurrences of the disease. Early in 2004 John Jose came to take her back to Toronto where she could obtain top-class medical treatment. He cared for her with great devotion. She made several recoveries but in March 2005 a final seizure led to her death. These last years saw a heroic struggle by Yvonne to complete her sixth book. She, the mistress of English vocabulary, often lost verbal memory.

The world continued to honour her. In November 2004 Swedish Pen held a ceremony in Stockholm to award her their distinguished Tucholsky prize which she was not well enough to attend. Yvonne had a wonderful gift for friendship. In her illness she asked friends 'Have I done enough?' To this there were only two possible answers, One was 'Everyone longs for you to do more'. But the other was 'You have done much more than you or we could possibly have expected'. And so she had.

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