Abstract

The agony and disorientation suffered by a girl child during and after the brutal rape by her father is the basis of Yvonne Vera's cumulative tale of unrelieved pain and unspeakable silences. The narrative of absolute loss sublimates into a sublime aesthetic experience through the finely honed metaphors of both subjection and recuperation, stasis and motion, trauma and resilience. The novel Under the Tongue (1996) is itself an instance of the unveiling of embodied atrocities that girl childhood inscribes. Vera looks at the idea of the rape of the girl child in a situation in which the entire country is engulfed in a war of liberation as rather ironic, but also as something that should place the struggles of traumatized and silenced voices on an equal footing with the national liberation struggles. This article demonstrates that these counter-pointing narratives of suffering and loss initiate the beginnings of new orders of knowledge and subjective consciousness, all animated by the figure of an abused girl child.

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