Turning Her Back on the Moon: Virginity, Sexuality, and Mothering in the Works of Yvonne Vera

Acclaimed Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera writes the history of colonialism, the liberation struggle, and postcolonial holocaust through the eyes and bodies of women, depicting how they suffered and survived in rural areas and urban townships. From a close reading of her five novels, I see the same story emerge, sometimes centrally and at other times as subtext. Vera consistently returns to a concern with the mother-daughter connection or disconnection, loss of the mother, rejection or abandonment of the child, and denial of motherhood. Protagonists in Vera's poetic novels are defeated by maternity: as young women, they commit infanticide, perform a successful self-abortion, or trade the physical for a spiritual life. In two of her novels, Vera's protagonists seek mother-love only to be confronted with mother's sexuality. Her latest novel, The Stone Virgins, is the only one that does not explicitly address these subjects, but my reading of it sees traces of the same concerns in the absence of the mother and the intertwining of the sisters. In her writings, Vera, while hopeful of a new voice and individual agency for women, cannot break away from a distrust of sexuality and the social trappings of motherhood, or from the fear of abandonment of the girl-child.