Deliverance, according to the Oxford English Dictionary is “the process of being rescued or set free.” (1)But what does it mean to evoke the concept of deliverance? What characterizes an experience in such a way that the processes of reconciliation require rescue or emancipation brought upon by a savior or through collective interventions intended to liberate the self? Within the context of articulating conflict and post-conflict narratives, what does it mean to express both longing and attainment of deliverance?
To decipher the questions at hand, the concept of deliverance itself must be explored. To be rescued is to be freed, but presumably freedom through rescue asserts the delivered to be a passive subject. A person who awaits a savior to release them from a “dangerous or distressing situation”(2) Alternatively, the concept of freeing or to set free holds multiple connotations located by the processes through which freedom is obtained. To be freed by another suggests that the delivered must ask for their freedom, and in turn is required to request permission of exemption from an assemblage of hierarchical designations. Whereas self or collectively granted freedom rests upon the understanding that freedom cannot be asked for, instead it is the responsibility of the delivered to take and shape social existences critically situated towards (or away from) realms of authority be they consensual or dictated.
The very definition of deliverance is characterized by juxtaposed perceptions. The process of asking or being released conflicts with the promise of taking freedom on an ontological level. The nullifying positionry which the portrayal of deliverance enacts suggest an underlying complexity afflicting the possibility of simplicity in the evocation of deliverance.
Deliverance as a term is an assemblage of interconnected matrices informed by pervasive structures determining the thinkable, thus incorporating amalgamations of passive, active, and neutral states of being. Situations which require or presume the need to evoke deliverance are spaces of intersecting hierarchies coupled with consequent struggles for spaces lacking the definitive oppressions of existing hierarchies.
In The Stone Virgins Vera critically questions what it is to plead for deliverance and what it is to weave ones own deliverance in times of closing conflicts in Zimbabwe. At moments presenting her examples as nearly juxtaposed, while simultaneously suggesting the act of deliverance is the weaving of pleas for the forgotten and recreated. The term deliverance appears twice in The Stone Virgins the first occurs nearing the end of the war for Independence, the other at a time of growing calm ending the 1981-1986 civil conflict between ZANU-PF and ZAPU-PF. Touching upon segways in time, wrought with changed dreams and hopes of past and future, these memories intersect in the summons of deliverance. The request for answers and calm winds through the yellow grasses.
Deliverance is introduced in the context of Thandabantu store. Kezi’s general goods shop, a perhaps common scene in the rural borderlands of Zimbabwe Rhodesia of the 1970s and 1980. “Thirsty, they plead for deliverance from the rows of warm Fanta bottles that have sat on the shelves for weeks, untouched.”(3) Underneath the dust of untouchability, lay the memories they starve for, “…of something they have left behind. Being absent witnesses, they seek knowledge about whatever it is that has happened in Kezi without their assistance.”(4) Without their assistance. But whose assistance? With the expectation of knowing, of describing a place the reader ought to touch through the panes of their own memories, Vera does not say whose assistance.
Vera’s unexplanation of those thirsting for a buried past, attempting to extract the rescue of soft bubbly fizz suggests the search for a common knowledge known by those who lived the liberation struggle. Specifically those that conventional liberation historiography has attempted to silence by monumentalizing impetuses. The mothers and children of the revolution who fought a quiet struggle lined with beatings and the smell of mealie-meal. The forgotten roles of armed women who donned pants and bore children with rifles in their arms. The tales of youth who left, returning to no assurances or access to provide for themselves in a landscape littered with the sharp edges of broken promises.
Coupled with the common stories spanning ‘post-struggle’ Zimbabwe is the unreachability of past. Like a new Fanta, the present is bubbly and fresh, at moments unbelievably real. Whereas the past yields a far away, less potent knowledge, as dreams turn to faint whispers. Alongside re-organizations of kinship and human possibility branded by the deterioration of the known laid expectations of returning to what was once normalcy. An expectation of return accompanied by the implementations of dreams ontologically grounded in mechanisms buried in dust and blood, unsown in the bewilderment that manifests itself in unexpected results.
Kezi’s no-longer-absent summon deliverance not from a soft drink, but from rows of nearly unrecognizable dreams. Pleading the actualization of the hopes they risked their lives for. But in the growth of time, the contents of initial dreams change, their skeletons being the only pieces which remain. Buried beneath the abandonment of past and wonderings of future situated in the present, deliverance is evoked, in anticipation of restoring flesh to boney dreams.
The momentarily juxtaposed partner of pleading deliverance is the weaver who delivers. The historian. Anointed by the power to restore flesh and fizz, Cephas, the conventional post-colonial historian, the man of past and present, the non-martyr with nothing to save, constantly attempts to rescue, thinking he has already accomplished his own salvation. There is the attempt to protect Nonceba from a fate of aloneness in the passing of Thenjiwe into nothing, but bone. The re-piecing of ancient kingdoms, delivering a time of previous deliverance to validate present shuffles for emancipation:
His task is to learn to re-create the manner in which the tenderest branches bend, meet, and dry, the way grass folds smoothly over this frame and weaves a nest, the way it protects the cool, livable places within-deliverance. (5)
The livable places within deliverance are the overlapping, grafted areas where the tears between the living and the dead meet, covering the exposures of the other.
Re-constitutions of past, for new nations and deeply connected strangers evoke deliverance through the re-creation of a past history within present frameworks. Thirsting new knowledge that only overlapping opposites fading into the same colour can bring. Knowledge’s covered in dust and dried to the bone are opened up. The dust about the bottles rim shifts the taste. Redistributing the flesh and fat, making that which came before from new characteristics in an attempt to rescue the already delivered.
Between contrasted understandings of a word, a time, and a discipline thought to be modeled out of raw materials into books and showcases exists a schema of two sisters, the pasting together of rescue and self-liberation, the history of past and the history of future, none diametrically opposed. Always informing each other in the tender act of soothing brutal processes. Within the folds of comfort is a world of make believe continuously attempting to sterilize wounds that will never heal, and dreams that can never be actualized until time stops growing. Behind the curtain of make believe is history and the wielders of her sword, naked, and unable to face the challenges of defining victimhood and saviors as something other than the same thing.
Vera writes and recovers history, performing her own historiographical dance. Reminding us of martyrdoms that saved no one, and of where relief waits silently inside amalgamations of contrasting contradictions and bitter similarities. Weaving quiet whispers of deliverance for those who have forgotten how to ask, or take.
By Alex Freedman
1. Soanes, Cathrine, ed. The Oxford English Dictionary. Third Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. “Deliverance”
2. Soanes, Cathrine, ed. The Oxford English Dictionary. Third Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. “Rescue”
3. SV p. 28
4. SV p. 28
5. SV 184
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