‘An ingenious tenderness’:

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ABSTRACT This paper reads Yvonne Vera's representation of bodily movements and gestures in The stone virgins as comprising a vernacular in Paul Gilroy's understanding of the term, developed in The black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. First, intimate gestures are read as barely perceptible sites of resistance to the colonial control of colonised bodies in which black subjects performatively, in Judith Butler's sense, construct themselves beyond the restrictions imposed on them at the time of the Rhodesian administration. Second, the recurrence of violent gestures in the post-independence violence of the 1980s becomes stitched onto this broader gestural fabric and the paper reads Vera's ‘choreography’, as she calls it, of these violent movements as a vernacular archiving of these undersignified atrocities in Zimbabwean history. The paper suggests that in restoring this history to the realm of embodied signification, a restoration that literalises the idea of gesturing towards this history, Vera's novel, like Gilroy's vernaculars, performs a ‘rescuing intervention’ of this violent past for literary representation.