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Responding to many of the same neo-colonial concerns as earlier African writers, Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing and Yvonne Vera bring contemporary, hybrid voices to their novels that explore spiritual, cultural and feminist solutions to Africa's complex post-independence dilemmas. Their work is informed by both African and western traditions, especially the influences of traditional oral storytelling and post-modern fictional experimentation. Yet each is unique: Ben Okri is a religious writer steeped in the metaphysical complexities of a traditional symbiosis of physical and spiritual co-existence; B. Kojo Laing's humor grounds itself in linguistic play and outrageous characterization; Yvonne Vera translates her eco-feminist hope in political and social transformation with a focus on the developing political actions of Zimbabwean women. All three reflect on the colonial and post-independence turmoil in their respective countries of birth - Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe. Together, they represent the evolution of a brilliant contemporary generation of post-independence voices. ARLENE A. ELDER is Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of The Hindered Hand: Cultural Implications of Nineteenth-Century African-American Fiction and has published essays and articles on African, African-American, Native-American and Australian Aboriginal literatures and orature.

THIS IS AN NJR - NOT JACKET BLURB, DO NOT USE IT THIS RAW FORM -This new and original work is the only recent monographic treatment of the Zimbabwean novel and its political implications. An earlier one by Veit-Wild (1992) has not been updated, and other, such as that by Zhuwarara (2001), are not easily available outside Zimbabwe. The author resided in Zimbabwe for almost a decade and has visited the country regularly in the last five years. She has published extensively on Zimbabwean literature, and brings to her work a deep contextual richness as well as theoretical sophistication. Thoroughly up-to-date, the book examines all the published novels of the recently-deceased Yvonne Vera (d. April 2005) as well as major novels of five other internationally-acclaimed Zimbabwean writers, including Tsitsi Dangarembga and Chenjerai Hove. It does so against a political backdrop which goes right up to the March 2005 parliamentary elections. The book provides a modern and original historical account of post-independence Zimbabwean writing and its relationship to history and politics. The critical investigation focuses on fictional representations of space-time – which links the book the tragically topical Zimbabwean issue of land. Dr Primorac employs a form of literary and cultural theory reminiscent of Bakhtinian analysis, but drawn at length from East European theoretical sources. She investigates what the novels have to say about the Zimbabwean condition, and makes a sophisticated link between ideas about space-time and novelistic ideologies. More than that, drawing a parallel with the experience of Eastern Europe, she shows how the novel itself breaks out of the confines of the quasi-Marxist analysis which still holds sway in Zimbabwe. As such, the Zimbabwean novel is itself a source of hope in that troubled land. Ranka Primorac has degrees from the universities of Zagreb, Zimbabwe and Nottingham Trent. She has taught Africa-related courses at several institutions of higher learning in Britain, including the University of Cambridge and New York University in London. She is interested in non-western writing and cultures, theoretical approaches to the novel and the narrative production of space-time. Her co-edited volume, Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture was published in 2005 by Weaver Press in Harare.

Yvonne Vera's The Stone Virgins (2002), both thematically and stylistically, dramatizes a pathological patriarchal system that engages in the oppression of women and their right to normal, happy and productive lives. I argue that, in this novel, she employs the creative imagination and skill of the female I/eye to interrogate a deformed masculinist ideology that has colluded with religion, politics and the class system in the oppression of women, often excluding them from historiography and from public life. In The Stone Virgins, Vera represents a historiography that has marginalized and erased women's histories from the patriarchal grand narratives of their national liberation history; her narrative points towards women's future involvement in the whole process of citizenship and nation-building in a 'reformed' nation as is evidenced in the closing lines of the novel where the focus is on restoration, recreation and deliverance as essential to the future of the new nation. Writing within the context of a political and economic crisis in 1990s Zimbabwe, with the country showing signs of increasing political decay and growing economic despair, Vera fictionalizes not only the general malaise but specifically the suffering of women under masculinist repression at both the domestic (household) and national levels. In this manner, it parts company with a more celebratory interpretation of history found in conventional liberationist historiography. Vera's writing in this novel, in her construction of African female subjectivity, critically reassesses the interconnections between masculinist violence as a vital component of liberationist ideology in Zimbabwe both during the liberation struggle and the post-independence years. The corrective narrative of The Stone Virgins resists the masculinist realism of Zimbabwean liberationist narratives that seek to impose a censorship on interrogations of the 'official' account. Vera's writing underscores the importance of counter-narratives (counter-memories) to falsified accounts of history.

Yvonne Vera’s death in 2005 brought to a tragic close the career of one of Zimbabwe’s, indeed Africa’s, more engaging contemporary writers. But her powerful novel, Butterfly Burning continues to mirror an aspect of Vera’s enduring concern: the place of African women in the context of power both within the colonial and the postcolonial moments. This image of the “woman in shadows” also resonates in the kernel of the subaltern subject in Spivak’s essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” I draw from Spivak’s canonical essay, but simply as a critique of its notion of the burdened subjectivity of the colonized reified in the widow’s self-immolation, and seen as a problematic condition of representation—a form of impotent silence. In contrast, I suggest that Vera’s Phephelaphi directs our attention by a votive suicide that speaks. This essay thus proceeds from a re-reading of the discourse of subalternity to situate Yvonne Vera’s novel as an act primarily of resistance against the situation of patriarchal enclosure under colonialism.

This essay is a commemoration and celebration of the work of the late Yvonne Vera, one of Africa's most cosmopolitan and gifted writers. It argues that history was central to Vera: it animated her imagination, framed her stories, her characters, and her literary vision. History looms large in the African intellectual and literary imagination as a source of anxiety, anger, and affirmation for a people whose humanity was once derided and even denied by Europe. Vera's literary oeuvre enables us to examine the close but complicated connections between history and literature. The essay examines Vera's poetic histories, that is, the way her five novels engage and reconstruct Zimbabwean history. Particular attention is focused on two novels, Nehanda and Butterfly Burning, that interrogate the colonial encounter long before the outbreak of the war of national liberation that constitutes the backdrop of her other three novels, Without a Name, Under the Tongue, and The Stone Virgins.

This article examines Yvonne Vera's representation of sexual violence in her 2002 novel The Stone Virgins . Set during the violent period of Zimbabwe's postindependence history known as the gukurahundi , the novel shows how women's bodies are made to bear the material wounds of protracted national struggles. Vera complicates this critique by articulating scenes of murder and rape using an intensely intimate lexicon, conventionally associated with amatory discourses. In order to elucidate the metaphoric and symbolic connections Vera establishes between desire and violence, I adopt a psychoanalytic framework that seeks to explain the pleasure culture derives from images of subjugated femininity. I argue that Vera's disquieting conflation of violation with intimacy formulates a powerful critique of women's inscription by dominant masculinist paradigms, and implicates normative attitudes concerning women's passivity and sexual availability in a catastrophic national violence.

Since the nineteenth century, land in Zimbabwe has been an immensely contested site with far-reaching implications in the socioeconomic and political scenario, first, between Africans of different ethnicities and, subsequently, between these Africans and European immigrants. Thus, a plurality of contesting narratives addressing the land question either directly or indirectly exist more so today than ever before in a scenario where the land question has become inextricably linked to Zimbabwe's political future. In this essay, I show how black Zimbabwean women in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not and Yvonne Vera's The Stone Virgins find prospect, refuge, and voice in their ancestral landscapes. While many critics have analyzed the works of these two authors individually or compared them with other authors, few have made a detailed study comparing these two black Zimbabwean female writers, with Shona and Ndebele heroines respectively. These works exhibit a de-silencing of women through landscape and a finding of womanist spaces of refuge in it, spaces thatare liberatory and enable women to perform a psychological, economical, and even a bodily emancipation instead of using mental breakdowns as \"tools for female autonomy in situations of powerlessness\" as theorized by Ketu H. Katrak. I focus on this aspect of women and landscape extending the work of critics such as Christopher Okonkwo, Michel Foucault, Barbara Britton Wenner, and Robert Rotenberg. In addition, I use Dangarembga's ethnic unhu (or hunhu ) philosophy, defined as the \"I am well if you are well too\" view of the universe in her novel The Book of Not , to read Vera's subversive use of landscape as an umbilical-cord-connection between people and place in her novel The Stone Virgins . Both authors alternatively admire and satirize the improvement of Zimbabwean landscape while simultaneously creating free spaces that their heroines can occupy and transform. The essay, therefore, tries to offer a more complete picture of these authors and their heroines and the ways their larger and personal histories as women interact to shape their lives in a Zimbabwean landscape complicated by race, ethnicity, and class.

My interest in the narrative of suffering and physical pain addresses the way in which an overwhelming and consuming physical experience disrupts time and imposes a profound, if temporary, forgetfulness and disorientation. In this disorientation, [Yvonne Vera] creates both the possibility for transformative historical agency and for a differently focalized historical narrative.