“The past a repast”: Past and Present in Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins

Abstract

This article concentrates on how, in Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins, Yvonne Vera foregrounds the past as inevitably contaminating the present: the resurgence of repressed memory operates as a determining factor in blurring the boundaries between victim and victimiser, and between past and present. It will be seen that Vera presents the violent Zimbabwean past as influencing the present, leading to a perpetuation of violence. The “repast” which is the past is therefore not a nourishing one, but an unwholesome one, and yet there is a trace of optimism in both novels as the female victims of violence manage to attain some form of liberation or “deliverance.” The tension between Ricoeur’s “destructive forgetting” and “forgetting that preserves” will be explored with a view to exposing how Vera highlights both the negative and cathartic power of repressed memory.