Abstract
In Zimbabwe (like in most post-colonial African nations), history holds a critical place in discourses on constructions and reconstructions of national identity. The history of the Gukurahundi (the massacre of civilians in Matabeleland and Midlands regions of Zimbabwe in the early to late 1980s) continues to dominate debates on the politics of ethnic exclusion in contemporary Zimbabwe. This article explores the place of creative fiction in this political discourse. The article contends that Yvonne Vera’s novel The Stone Virgins (which is set in the Gukurahundi era) is a historically situated narrative of murder, rape, and trauma that powerfully challenges and renegotiates state power premised on hegemonic inscriptions and re-inscriptions of national history. The article focuses on the subtlety with which the psychic impact of rape and violence, especially as manifested in the suppression of the female victim’s voice and memory, can be read in turn (and paradoxically so) as the novel’s complex attempt at speaking back to the political stifling of debate about the Gukurahundi. The focus on the political significance of representations of a woman’s voice and memory in The Stone Virgins is informed by the pervasive politicization and masculinization of voice and expression in post-2000 Zimbabwean politics.
Highlights
Invoking Robert Muponde and Mandivavarira Maodzwa-Taruvinga’s metaphors of sign and taboo in Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera, Sofia Kostelac (2006) reads Vera’s subversive engagement with history in The Stone Virgins as an act of taboo breaking—a fictional yet gender-oriented intervention against the silencing of alternative remembrances and interpretations of the violent suppression of dissidents bordering on genocide in what was to be known as the Gukurahundi
As a counter-discourse to this abuse of history, Vera’s novel The Stone Virgins is a unique and complex text not least because it is written by a woman and puts a woman at the center of its subversive reinscription of politically abused history of the Gukurahundi
The actual Gukurahundi culminated in the signing of the Unity Accord—an uneasy “Unity Accord” between the liberation movements: the governing ZANU (PF) and the opposition, Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU)—in 1986 under circumstances that effectively turned Zimbabwe into a one-party state
Summary
More than subverting androcentric constructions of heroism, nationality and history, Vera’s fictional reconstruction of the Shona spiritual legend of Nehanda as the pillar of the Chimurenga wars becomes an act of re-gendering national memory much in the same way that Nonceba (in The Stone Virgins) is instituted as the “authentic” voice of the Gukurahundi and an indispensable repository of its memories—the prerequisite to the ethnically divided nation’s convalescence.
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