‘And They Never Spoke to Each Other of It’: Contemporary Southern African Representations of Silence, Shame and Gender Violence

Abstract

Literary texts open up creative spaces where authors can expose the persistence of patriarchy; simultaneously, they can resist and oppose widespread patriarchal views by positing alternative, less oppressive understandings of women and their experiences in societies. A number of Southern African women authors have produced work that is both innovative and exciting in this regard, and this article will offer a critical analysis of representations of silence, shame and gender violence in three such works. Representations of the intertwined dynamics of these issues have received scant attention from literary critics, and this also applies to the texts selected for discussion. Gender violence extends beyond physical abuse: indeed, physical gender violence is enabled by a much more pervasive problem, a kind of structural gender violence that arranges our societies at institutional, discursive and epistemic levels. The selected texts are Dark Whispers by Joanne Macgregor (2014. Pretoria: Protea Book House), What About Meera by Z. P. Dala (2015. Cape Town: Umuzi) and We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo (2014. London: Virago). The elision of women’s narratives of gender violence and shaming knows no barriers of class, race or sexual orientation, and I trace the common thread of the silencing back to gendered power structures. This common thread notwithstanding, all manifestations of gender, shame and violence are always already shaped by and embedded in very specific contexts. Without losing sight of either the mechanisms of patriarchy or the myriad forms of women’s agency within environments of gendered structural oppression, this article seeks to create a scholarly space where the uncomfortable conversations about the persistence of misogynistic constructions of gender and sexuality can take place in a way that both recognizes the differences among female characters, and identifies points of commonality as potential sources of strength and resistance.