No matter how we choose to approach Yvonne Vera’s work, perhaps its greatest accomplishment is that we are perpetually left with the question of what to make of it. Although her books seem to beg for a feminist or post-colonial reading, Vera lures us in with the obviousness of these readings and then complicates them into near-impossibility. Her books are deceptive for the sheer reason that they are books, that they fit onto shelves in a store the same as any other piece of bound writing. But even as Vera is writing novels, she is subverting the very genre, resisting our preconceptions about literature and altering received structures and modes of using language so as to make her work intense and difficult, and in many ways irreconcilable. Despite an instinct to “solve” her books, to develop theories and interpret them, these are books that simply have to be experienced if they are, in any way, to be understood. So the question becomes, how does Vera achieve this? How does she demand that we read her books even though they resist interpretation? What stylistic methods does she use in order to seduce us, as readers, into reading books that cause the very structures that created them to wobble?
Susan Sontag, in her essay “Against Interpretation,” argues that the concepts of “form” and “content” are not only inseparable, but they are false. Yvonne Vera is excellent proof of this; her novels are seamless. But because “form” and “content” are still part of our psychology as readers, and because the idea of “the novel” is crucial to understanding any singular novel, it’s important to recognize how Vera is using “form” and “content” and the seamlessness of these concepts to her advantage. The truth of the matter is, we have been taught that a book, in order to be a book, must obey certain rules, and when these rules are broken, we need to step back and consider how and why this is happening, and most importantly, how it affects us. The “pace” of Vera’s novels, tension between the general and the specific, the way in which her metaphors constellate, and the beauty of atrocity as it occurs in her work all contribute to the effect that Vera’s novels have on her reader.
“There is a pause. An expectation,” begins Butterfly Burning. “They had waited,” ends Under the Tongue. And indeed, this is what Vera both offers her readers and requires of them. A pause. Waiting. A pause that is long enough to accommodate an entire city, an entire way of life, an entire time period. The patience to allow her to begin the “story” itself well into the book’s pages. The patience to allow her to describe a single moment for pages. The pacing in Vera’s novels is disconcerting at best. “Pacing” seems like a ridiculous word to use; instead of moving in a linear way, Vera’s novels seem to radiate outward from a place of pain. So to say that, for example, Under the Tongue is about incest is to pretend that the novel progresses in such a way that it’s about something to begin with. Instead, the novel is a collection of thoughts and experiences and memories that spill outward from an instance which, in the structure of the book, happens before the book begins, but is only revealed at the very end. We approach that moment of revelation with extreme caution—it takes us over a hundred pages of preparation, of constructed silences, in order to touch the site of pain.
Butterfly Burning has a more intricate structure of pain because the instance of Phephelaphi’s pregnancy, which first leads to abortion, later recurs and leads to dashed hopes and her eventual death. In this book, the primary site of pain is framed differently, so it appears twice, at the middle and then at the end. As with Under the Tongue, the final chapters are the closest to the wound, although Butterfly Burning, again, approaches the wound towards the middle when Phephelaphi performs an abortion of her own child. This makes the second site of pain all the more upsetting—we think by that point, perhaps, that she has endured the pain of the abortion and therefore has emerged on the other side of it. “She has emerged out of a cracked shell,” the text reads after she performs the abortion. “She has endured the willed loss of her child” (Butterfly Burning 124). It seems as though the novel is progressing through this pain, but then this linearity collapses. “This whole action had been about tidying up. Ordering the disorder. Instead, her fingers are torn and bleeding. Her blouse is open at the top where the button has fallen.” These lines, which occur directly after the abortion, indicate that gesture towards linearity will eventually turn out to be an illusion, and Phephelaphi finds herself stuck in an identical situation of pain. The only way that she is able to release herself—narratively, at least—from this structure is through dying. The final page of the book, describing her death, says, “As she lets go she feels nothing except her wings folding. A bird landing and closing its wings” (151). The freedom that Phephelaphi finds in death shows that in order to break the cycle of pain that the narrative requires, she must end her life.
In The Stone Virgins, the primary site of pain occurs at the middle, when Nonceba is raped and her sister Thenjiwe is killed. But unlike Butterfly Burning, this pain is not repeated, it is endured. The book ends with Nonceba and Thenjiwe’s lover sharing a home, piecing back together their lives after the violence. But they do this with the recognition that it is impossible to ever reconcile what has happened. After all, “With some powder on, [Nonceba] looks almost unharmed. Almost” (Stone Virgins 170). This quote represents another way in which The Stone Virgins is distinct from Butterfly Burning—it ends with the acknowledgement that the past is never going to excusable, and that itself is a minor type of redemption. After all, “deliverance” is the novel’s final word. This final paragraph begins, “[Cephas] must retreat from Nonceba; perhaps he has become too involved in replicating histories,” and this recognition of history’s tendency to repeat itself is what allows this novel to reconcile the linear nature of time as we experience it, and also the permanence of the effects of the violence experienced by Nonceba (184). The frame of this novel allows for an examination of the aftermath of the pain in a way that Under the Tongue does not, because Under the Tongue deals first with the aftermath of an unnamed incident, and then names it.
Because these novels were written and published in the order that they have just been discussed, it’s possible to see a progression in Vera’s own thinking about the idea of “trauma.” In Under the Tongue, the naming of the trauma is hard-won and only occurs at the end. In Butterfly Burning, the trauma can be named and consciously experienced, but it circles back into itself in such a way that it takes death to break the cycle. The Stone Virgins represents the most satisfying and intricate conclusion, because in it the pain can be named and experienced, and the permanence of it acknowledged, but there is a certain amount of deliverance, and Nonceba continues to live, and in effect to extricate herself from the cycle as we see it in Butterfly Burning. But Vera earns this deliverance by constantly attesting to the fact that linear time does not eliminate the effects of the past. It can be useful to view these novels in such a way, however, in all three novels, it is also deceptive to talk about a single or primary site of pain, because the complications that arise because of patriarchy and colonialism, including civil conflict, are a constant hum of pain that underlies the book. In this sense, The Stone Virgins is the most accurate in representing the tension between constant pain (such as that related to trauma or oppression) and the necessity to move beyond it in order to survive.
Part of what allows Vera to “pace” or frame her novels in an atypical fashion is because she is not afraid to reel off into the “general” and describe situations, groups of people, and places for pages on end. Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins are similar in that so much of both novels is told in third person plural. Granted the plots of the novels are third person singular with named characters, but huge portions are devoted to describing various "thems." "They" are a large assortment of people: customers, children, lovers, builders, those who live in a certain place, etc. In a way, it's problematic that Vera lumps people together and describes them in a plural and general way because it strips them, even linguistically, of personal identity. But it's also inclusive, it implies a certain unity of motion in a given place or situation, even a unity of emotional movement. In a sense, it gives them more humanity than a name could, because it assumes that people are people, acting and thinking and desiring and fearing in the same specific ways. It's not only humanizing, but a kind of relief, a kind of un-loneliness.
And the way that Vera gets away with breaking one of literature's more basic rules--avoiding sweeping generalizations--is that her generalizations are specific, and also maddeningly beautiful. For example, on page 17 of Butterfly Burning, it reads, in reference to the children, "Now, they pick the skeleton of a broken old umbrella and hold it up to the sun as though they have found shelter of a separate and distinguished kind. They huddle under the umbrella and pretend heavy rain is falling and that their tattered clothes are now wet." The way that Vera is able to not only create a vivid image, but to convey the imaginings and emotions of a group of individuals is worth noting. But the density and depth and texture of Vera's language allows us to excuse the generalization, and not only that, but to believe it, to appreciate it, to find a certain beauty or insight that could only be expressed in a grammatically communal way. Perhaps the most simple evidence of this general/specific tension is the following line, from page 44: "Makokoba is a place where every child has a story which stuns by its detail."
In all three of these novels, Vera tampers with our notions of metaphor as well. In them, metaphors braid into other metaphors in such a way that the relationships cannot be seen in binaries. In Under the Tongue, the metaphors that get worked through and worried have to do with the tongue, rivers, the sky, voice, silence, Grandmother and Zhizha, although more and new words are netted into this structure on every page. For example, Vera writes:
Rivers begin in the sky. Rivers begin with our tears. Grandmother’s cry follows me everywhere. I touch my tongue. It is heavy like stone. I do not speak. I know nothing of rivers. Grandmother is a river. I am not Grandmother (Tongue 122).
Later she adds, “It is not true rivers come from the sky,” and “I am Grandmother,” and the book can sustain these contradictions only because there are so many metaphors supporting each other that they make a sort of tapestry that can’t be unraveled by a single string.
In Butterfly Burning, the metaphors that flow into each other often have to do with land, water, and fire. Attempts to divide land and water along masculine/feminine lines falls short, as do most attempts to separate them at all. Additionally, water and fire weave together, as in the following lines:
A woman’s solid flame, even if the ground underneath her is already sliding, sliding away. And she is dying in her own storm, and can hear the wind gather over her knees, and the finest flood threatening each terraced plain, each threshold, each slope and incline, and she is underneath that flood holding her breath...she is in a flood and buried in the most liquid breeze and will surely drown (150).
Here, Vera complicates and unsettles our notions of what the “burning” from the title might entail, and links Phephelaphi’s death to the death of Fumbatha’s father from the beginning. Chapter 2, after all, beings with the line “The voices of drowned men cannot be heard.” So the drowning from the beginning—which is also linked to the land because the men are hung from a tree—comes full circle, strangely and startlingly, with the fire at the end.
But to talk about these metaphors of speech and identity, drowning and burning, it’s also necessary to address what the metaphors are driving at in terms of the book’s “story” or emotional/political territory. It is an oversimplification of the most damaging kind to say that these books are “about” incest or rape or abortion, but the manner in which these books, tenderly, address those topics is worth considering. All three books pivot around a moment in which violence and sexuality intersect in the very literal space of a woman's body. And, perhaps more importantly, the descriptions are indeed beautiful, in a way that adds to the depth and sadness and emotional power of these moments instead of detracting from it. In many ways, Vera is insisting that we look at these moments with an intensity that is not sensational or melodramatic, but simply intense.
For instance, Under the Tongue describes, vividly but not necessarily graphically, the moment in which incest occurs.
A hand dark and heavy descends over my face, over my eyes, tightens around my neck. My legs are crushed. My stomach is hard like rock. He enters. I cry into the night but my cry returns to me and spreads down into my stomach like water, water, at the bottom of leaves, water, water beneath rock, water, water between my legs, water. (227).
The repetition of the word “water” makes these lines flow together in a way that betrays the jarring experience they describe. The blunt descriptions such as “My legs are crushed” give way to metaphors that simultaneously distance us from the pain by their place in an imagistic register, but also bring us closer to the pain by the detail and intensity of their description. Here the violence and trauma are assigned words that do not necessarily have negative connotations; night, water, leaves, rock, which forces us to re-conceptualize the standard modes for describing violence with language.
Similarly, in Butterfly Burning, Vera uses soft, everyday diction to describe a self-inflicted abortion, in which Phephelaphi
receives each motion of her body and the liquid spreads over her arm, over the sliding nylon of her fingers, and the unborn child too small to be a child, just a mingling within the nylon, something viscous and impolite amid the lace spreading along the hem, and the elastic gathering the nylon into pretty pink frills that glisten, shimmer, cupped in her hand. She closes her hand secretly. (121-122)
In fact, some of the diction here suggests standards of femininity or domesticity; child, lace, hem, elastic, nylon, pink, frills, glisten, shimmer. The moment is not overwrought with emotive words, instead it is a simple description, it doesn’t dip off into melodrama, but describes an image that is unsettling by how ordinary it seems. Here Vera is able to make the atrocious seem mundane, which makes it all the more powerful. We don’t need Vera to tell us that a woman performing an abortion on herself is wildly painful and traumatic, and because she doesn’t, and instead she insists on low diction and a clear image, we can read the trauma underneath the polish of these lines.
Vera’s ability to subvert not only our ideas about the grammar of tragedy, but also about pacing, specificity and metaphor show that she is more than capable of writing in a genre—the published novel—that we’ve come to associate primarily with the white patriarchy. However, because she is able to write comfortably in the genre and simultaneously subvert it, she illustrates that a certain amount of violence has to be done to the traditional "novel" itself in order for it to be able to contain the experiences of these people, in these places, under these circumstances—of Africans, Zimbabweans, women, men, the colonized, the liberated, the poor, and many other groups. Vera is working “in the system,” so to speak, to bring about radical change in our perceptions of writing and reading, as well as our perceptions of the breadth of human experience.
By Chelsea Jennings
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