African Women Writers- Yvonne Vera

a space for dialogue among Women's Studies students, scholars and African Women Writers.

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Like hands, Vera’s words knead through the knots of a worn and aged back, untying the preconceptions in the spine of another man’s past.
Like hands, Vera's words reach and stroke the tender spots- uninvited- where we are rarely touched, where it hurts;
we find nerves anew.
Like hands, Vera's words give but also take: and we are forced to give as well.

We give up the histories we did not choose to learn, we loose the stories that write women and Africans out of existence; we gain space.
How does one rewrite the past?
In order to reconstruct a history, certain aspects of the former cannot be kept. Audre Lorde in "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," writes that the master’s tools “may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” However, it may be said that Yvonne Vera has the master’s tools, she has the power of the written word, and not only does she use it, she takes the previous guidelines and rules and turns them on their heads. I dare to say that “genuine change” is embodied within Vera’s texts. Her Zimbabwe is the Zimbabwe of the people who have been silenced for far too long, and her words make it real.
Less like creation and more like release, Vera’s stories enable her readers to think and rethink, to antagonize over the duality within each turn of events. The words will not comfort us, but strip us naked, bring us closer to a truer history, a truer identity. Cloaked in colonial breath and belief, we are warm, shielded, and supposedly safe.
We must undo what a one-sided account has taught us, peel away the layers of an uncontested lie and rebuild.
Vera’s texts do not resemble western construction. Heavy and poetic, women are intermingled with land, spirits, and men. Women are not invisible, not silent, not spectators. In Nehanda, women, earth, and ancestral beings compose one another, and what is done to the land by the “white stranger” is also done to the people; the hostile takeover and the feelings of loss are close and tangible. Women were not handed a position or a leading role in colonial histories. There was not a space designed and reserved for them in the dialogue of every past, sometimes they are simply invisible. We come to terms with the idea that equality for women within history must be seized, but how?
Vera’s voice bends in a way that our bodies cannot recognize. Spaces are opened, but only if we choose to see them. In the process, with the usage of language and paper and type in a way that colonial teachings cannot recognize, it is not hard to become confused. Personally, I find myself easily frustrated with the density of Vera’s works; peppered with precise intricacy, dialogue from vague sources, and layered meanings. As someone used to reading within a colonial context, I too often and too easily characterize Vera’s works as “other” and begin to criticize them within that context.
There is another way to read the stories of Yvonne Vera. The sentences are not sentences; they are an understanding, musical. The pace at times is intentionally agonizingly slow, and it provides a wider space for a deeper connection with the atmosphere and characters, exhibited in works like Butterfly Burning. In this novel, we see Phephelaphi’s abortion in a chapter that is spatially wide; time is manipulated. Structured differently from literature such as that of the standard cannon, we as readers are guided to read away from old understandings. We are not meant to stop at the book’s end, but instead go back to the beginning to re-read and rediscover.
In Nehanda the African community is not constructed within the limits of colonial order. Reflecting this, Nehanda herself challenges what the language of western culture has taught us to disregard. She converses with spirits and communicates in ways other than words. My education has taught me that this is nonsense, irrational and unbelievable. Vera throws my education to the wind. What is it exchanged for? Is it chaos? Or do I sometimes want to call it that because it makes me uncomfortable? Do we not have license to feel comfortable within the abstract?
To be lost among the new can be an enlightening experience. To lose yourself within some of Vera’s words can be essential, one of the best ways to get the grand tour. You may not know where you are, but how are you supposed to if you haven’t experienced it before? One can choose to see confusion and discomfort as a way of learning more about yourself and your surroundings. On your way, eyes intently seeking something familiar, you can notice what you’re doing and choose to stop, tread slowly, and breathe.
There are revelations and revolutions within Nehanda, Butterfly Burning, Opening Spaces, etc, but Yvonne Vera will not force them upon us. Let go of the colonizer, and find them. Let yourself be lost. The words, like hands, will find you.
By Rachel Malis



16:19 in Poetry | Permalink | Comments (3)

Your life began
on this dark continent.
Born unto a wise land
where the arrogance of a captor
shakes the soil.
Baby puts its feet on the soft earth,
but shifted and pulled,
baby is unbalanced.

Born
unto a proud land.
Baby OPEN YOUR EYES
the captors have come
to mold you.

Your life began
in this dark womb.
Every child, a product of the soil,
your innocence, stolen.

Snatched
into a world
quickly fading.
Look into the eyes of your father,
ask him what is to become of us all.

A stranger
in your own land
before you are even born.

By Lauren-Joy Goss

14:51 in Poetry | Permalink | Comments (1)

For Yvonne Vera

You open spaces with words that evoke
that yell and silence
that scream defiance
that sting, that sing
that give the already dead inside some hope
Your words break through with the water of a womb
developed and heavy
they came when ready
to prove, to move
To resurrect ideals that were entombed

You open spaces with words and inspire
translating the beats of a heart
every murmur containing poetic art
preaching the truth, convincing the youth
exhaling actual reality for them to respire
Your words suffocate the liar and his rhetoric
years of infliction
years of submission
years of tradition, years of affliction
You show how all of his lies nursed a nation to be sick

You opened spaces with words and created room
for muted voices
for strangled choices
for her, for them
for everyone forced into the maschista fumes
Your words opened, opened the world to your world
opened eyes to a nation raged
to Zimbabwe's stage
to women's lives, to those colonialized
to a place left aside, until we opened your words

By Samantha McQuibban

14:43 in Poetry | Permalink | Comments (3)

Keeping a Foot in the Land of Hurt

The other day I met a man named Moses,
He showed me liberation on the streets.

We spoke in turns,
As he carved, I hunched over on the ground and listened.
There were no animals,
Or images he’d dreamed of seeing.
They were his inflictions,
History.
His carvings made up his troubled days and dark nights.
He carved and carved.
As he moved along the song begun,
He allowed me inside,
And it became ours.
He told me that music had touched him
With every note.
I long to feel the same.

He asked me at what age confidence was taught,
And that he doesn’t think he made it that far.
I told him it was just a feeling that had grown inside of me.

Women, he said,
You are the top!
Moses’ mother never let go,
She never gave up on herself,
Now she was a Mother of the Revolution.

The beautiful struggle that my Mother fought, he said,
Was for my land,
My soul,
I let it go.

How could a prophet let a dream go?
Just like people had let their lives fade away,
Moses had surpassed what he could have had,
What could have been.

When you fight,
You fight for everyone,
There can be no selfish fighter,
They have no chance.
You do it for your mother, he said,
For our land,
For a collective identity,
That you were born into.


His name had meaning,
Deep rooted in tales of the times people live by,
Every single day,
Passion.
Your roots,
Are you.
Legacy was created,
To be continued,
Passed down,
And pushed forward.

Filled with an image of a time before Christ,
I rejoice in his name,
The image that goes along with a time before Christ is strong.

Is it something inside of you?
How did my mother know how to be a revolution, he asked.

Imposing, implementing, pushing,
Hurts.
You have to take a step in,
To help get everyone else out.

Harare was wherever Moses went,
His epicenter
His city of change
He was always on edge,
And Harare would appear.

So life happens,
It goes on and on.
Clouds move and days roll
Time flies so you can soar.

Moses reminded me about loneliness,
How it can not be a fear.
State of mind,
It’s all what you make of it.

I know what I met him,
Everything has a reason,
He’d never heard of Zimbabwe
Or even had the words come out of his both.
What Moses shared
Was just as important,
He expanded my lens.
Moses opened my space.

By Cherice Tearte

14:31 in Poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yvonne Vera Obituaries

  • Guelph Mercury.com
  • University of KwaZulu Natal
  • African Bullets & Honey
  • The Guardian
  • Weaver Press

Links

  • Feminist Africa
  • Gender and Women's Studies for Africa's Transformation (GWS)