Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne VeraRobert Muponde, Mandivavarira Maodzwa-Taruvinga Yvonne Vera's Nehanda (1993) signaled the presence of new and remarkable writing in Zimbabwe, and her four subsequent novels have confirmed her stature as one of the most important African novelists of the 1990s. Her art is alert to public life; and manifests the decisive moments of Zimbabwe's anticolonial resistance, the growth of the township culture and the competing demands of the city and the rural home. She records public experience through the consciousness of her female characters; but in prose as densely allusive as poetry, does not allow her style to register with a conventional realism, her characters always experiencing more than they understand, and seeing more than they and the reader may recognize. This work brings together critics from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and the United States, demonstrating through a diversity of approaches the complex beauty of Vera's work. It shows how Vera expanded the formal possibilities of the African novel by placing the experiences of women at the center of literature, and in so doing, retold and recreated Zimbabwe's history and imaginative life. |
Contents
Chapter | 3 |
Carolyn Martin Shaw University of California Santa Cruz | 25 |
Chapter 4 | 39 |
Copyright | |
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African Literature ancestors becomes birth body Bulawayo Butterfly Burning calabash chapter characters Chenjerai Hove child colonial consciousness construction context create cultural death discourse dream escape experience female freedom Fumbatha gender Grandmother Harare healing House of Hunger ibid identity imagination incest journey Kaguvi Kezi kwela land language liberation linked living London Makokoba Matabeleland Mazvita mbira meaning memory metaphor mother movement Muroyiwa myth Name narrative narrator nation nationalist Ndebele Nehanda Nonceba Nyenyedzi orality orature past patriarchal perspective Phephelaphi photograph political post-colonial pre-colonial present rain rape reader reality relationship representation represents resistance ritual river role Runyararo says Second Chimurenga sense settlers sexuality Shona Sibaso silence social space speech spirit possession story stranger structure struggle symbolic Tongue township traditional transformation University Vera's fiction Vera's novels vision voice woman women words writing Yvonne Vera Yvonne Vera's ZANLA Zhizha Zimbabwe Zimbabwe Open University Zimbabwean