A Mermaid in a Dry City: A Watery Reading of Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning

Abstract

Although Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning (1998) has attracted a lot of critical attention, her use of water and the trope of water spirits have largely remained unexplored. Most scholarship on the novel has not examined water as a discursive field, reflecting the broader focus on land as the medium of anticolonial discourse. The essay considers what happens when we decentre land in the novel and foreground water instead. How do the materiality of water and the trope of water spirits represent the world of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)? This essay demonstrates how Butterfly Burning, often read as a drought narrative, works with precolonial hydro-imaginaries as a way of refracting its colonial and gender themes, entangling them in water’s more material properties. The element of water allows Vera to explore the ambiguities and complexities of surviving in precarious Rhodesia and of writing gender. The different forms of water in the novel speak to the harsh conditions of Makokoba. Additionally, in reading Phephelaphi the protagonist as a water spirit, a creature that embodies contradictions, the essay amplifies the complexities of the gender dynamics of the novel. Drawing on the ambivalence, elusiveness, and fluidity of water spirits, Phephelaphi negotiates her way in colonial Bulawayo. She fights to own her life from the moment she emerges from Umguza River until she self-immolates at the end of the novel. Although this act of self-immolation points to immense despair, I read it as a paradoxical gesture of self-determination and catastrophe.