“Survival is in the mouth”: Yvonne Vera’s Nehanda

Abstract

In her Zimbabwean novels Yvonne Vera experiments with ways of retaining the features of precolonial orality from the perspective of a postcolonial kind of writing primarily concerned with offering contemporary African women a space of freedom and self-expression. Vera’s writings work against the silencing imposed on women by patriarchy and colonialism, and all her novels, which move fluidly between orature and literature so as to blend rather than juxtapose them, stress that “to write is to banish silence.” In a way this is the writer’s answer to the complex question asked in her first novel - “How can words be made still, without turning into silence?” - and it is also the woman’s answer to the socio-historical predicaments of her fellow African women and their search for voice and meaningful presence. This paper looks at how Vera juggles voice and silence, the oral and the written in Nehanda, and discusses her attempt to ensure the survival of the spoken word in the written text.