Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera (review)

Zimbabwean Yvonne Vera is an author difficult to read and to characterize. As someone who believes that the better part of a critic's job is accurate description of the text, I am very sympathetic to the task undertaken by the critics in this collection. The subtitle characterizes Vera's fiction as "poetic," and Lizzy Attree points out that the right-justified prose in her novels could easily be end-stopped in order to look like poetry. Vera's five novels and collection of short stories are all short, no longer than a volume of poetry. In the novels there is no narrative drive forward, no character development, and little reflection of a social and physical world outside the protagonist's perception. Instead there is a great deal of repetition, of words, of lines, and of imagery. As Ranka Primorac points out, there is a remarkable consistency of stylistic register and no concession to shifting narrative points of view. Meg Samuelson suggests that the author who might be closest to Vera in feel is the Trinidadian-Canadian poet Marlene Nourbese Philip (which raises the question of the influence of Vera's years at York University in Toronto on her prose).

Some of the critics, Attree for instance, rely on literary history in order to describe Vera's prose, classifying it as either modernist (Woolf regularly comes up as a point of comparison in this book, but Gertrude Stein is perhaps more appropriate) or postmodernist. As Kizito Muchemwa argues, however, the classification of postmodernist can be misleading: whatever Vera is doing, it is nothing like the counter-realism of her fellow Zimbabwean, Dambudzo Marechera. Unlike Marechera, Vera seems to write without reference to a literary tradition. Although highly trained herself, her novels, with their short sentences and rhythmic repetition, seek a level below consciousness. Her lyrical language does not deconstruct ideology and problematize language, as several critics here suggest, but would seem to promise direct access to a women's experience as located in the body and as expressed directly though orality. As Meg Samuelson says, this is not language based on a mother's absence but on the recovery of a mother's presence. In their insistence on the body, Vera's novels refuse the allegorical almost completely.

Several critics try to come to terms with Vera's lyricism by focusing on the elements whose repetition constitutes its rhythm. Carolyn Martin Shaw looks closely at the way colors, especially red, and the four elements, especially water, function to create a textual world. Other critics take single images and build them into extended metaphors for the novels themselves. Jane Bryce shows that the novels are each constructed around moments frozen by photographs, an insight that accords well with Vera's experience as curator of the National Gallery in Bulawayo. Jessica Hemmings compares Vera's novels to textiles and Attree compares them to kwela music. Primorac relates the slow circular movement of the characters to the style.

Surprisingly little is made by the critics of the violence of Vera's subject matter, which deliberately resists meaning (and in this she is like Marechera). The novels all feature infanticide, rape, abortion, or suicide. The critics seem most interested in the treatment of history and of spirit possession in Nehanda. I cannot help but notice that Vera is admired by the women in this collection and criticized or at least regarded with suspicion by most of the men (with the important exception of Terence Ranger), but I am reluctant to speculate on what this difference means.