The Stone Virgins – by Yvonne Vera, Weaver Press 2002
Reviewed by Vivienne Hamblin
‘The Stone Virgins” will be launched on Thursday16th May 2002 at the Gallery Delta.
It has already won the Macmillan Writers’ prize for Africa, a new award
given for unpublished works of fiction. Yvonne Vera’s previous novels
include Under the Tongue and Butterfly Burning. She is in the business
of preserving a national heritage as Director of the National Gallery in
Bulawayo.
My favourite shop sign walking round Bulawayo 1985 was that of the
“Personality Cleaners”, a Dry Cleaners. Yvonne Vera in ‘The Stone
Virgins’ renews our license to remember and to live on. It’s not an easy
journey. But there is no other truth or reconciliation commission. As
in her earlier work “Under the Tongue”, she speaks for women who
have not been heard who have lost their voices through trauma and
force. ‘The Stone Virgins is a ‘must read’ for every Harare, or city
resident, as we become her Bulawayo of 1986, centre to a brutalised
countryside.
The intense relationship between women who give a voice to the
next generation is at the core of the life force and the writings of Yvonne
Vera. She names feelings and sensations for herself and for others.
In ‘The Stone Virgins” it is the sister and the aunt who have this power.
In ‘Under The Tongue” it is the grandmother. But why should an adult
need someone else to name her feelings? The one answer is the
loss of the power to speak. But this is a loss of both a personal and
national voice. The background is the reign of terror in Matabeleland,
the perpetrators pensioned, historical reports lost. The voice and ambience
of a region, the community and thus the time and place have been
dislocated.
The increased strength of ‘The Stone Virgins”, over Vera’s
other works is the intensity of the local. This is also the area that I
found most difficult. The question emerging from a brutal history is how
to share ‘the emotional force which comes directly out of the community
whose scattering it traces?’ (Maria Margaronis London Review of Books
25th April reviewing works rooted on the Greek Albanian border). The
local is at the core of the work, its colour and historical complexity. The
problem is how to give the outsider, and by definition every one is an
outsider, the taste of the place, its history, humidity, landscape and flora
in order to know a particular character without losing the emotional story
and the reader.
Yvonne Vera uses her locale as her opening theme or character.
By the end of the book I longed for the safe, mundane matrix of streets
offered in these first passages and to be freed from the personal,
to return to the beginning. But at the beginning I resented the over
detailed, languorous descriptions of place and needed a character
or travelling companion to experience it with. However, on entering the
choreography on the corner ‘ekoneni’ I became involved in the writing. I’m
safest at corners, able to see what’s coming from all sides and the choices
they offer of meeting or fleeing. It takes the whole novel to achieve this
sense of the value of the untranslatable of what is bound to a particular
place and time, and readers are rewarded for the effort that the beginning
demands.
Through such devices, as returning to the same places with different
people or in different times, the book also makes clear its time thesis,
that the future can determine the past, (as “he portions her to a dead
past’.)
In “The Stone Virgins”, Yvonne Vera’s descriptions evoke the experience
of intense and delicate sensations. The stone virgins themselves emerge
from a hidden underground cave among the rocks, which resonates with
its history, just as the ‘Cave of Swimmers’ does for Michael Ondaatje in
‘The English Patient’. But the national disaster, that it lurks below,
replays and the personal debris continues to be scattered. Perhaps
the most direct passage in the novel keys us into the national disaster…
“The team of soldiers who had congregated on Thandabantu
Store had demonstrated that anything which had happened so far
had not been random or unplanned. Atrocious, yes, but purposeful.
They committed evil as though it was a legitimate pursuit, a
ritual for their own convictions. Each move meant to shock, to
cure the naïve mind. The mind, not supposed to survive it, to
retell it, but to perish. They flee, those men who witness
Thandabantu burn. They flee from a pulsing in their own
minds….Kezi is surrounded by fast-pace soldiers, their
minds evaporating.”
Yvonne Vera pins together Bulawayo, Kezi and the Cave through some
beautifully written women. ‘Nonceba. She who is patient like a mantis..
as though she moves on a delicate ray of light .. a mantis in sunlight’,
and a sympathetically written male character, who enters as a facet
of the sister. Some find meaning in the hidden root structures and the
spaces underground, and others in their fruits, the arbors and cityscape.
The complete testimony of survivors of the time may have been lost
on a stately corner out of Borrowdale but “The Stone Virgins’ will
preserve its own space.
Vivienne Hamblin

Copies of the book can be obtained direct from Weaver Press:
Irene Staunton: Weaver Press, Box 1922, Avondale,
Harare. Phone 308330 Fax 339645 weaver@africaonline.co.zw
http://www.weaverpresszimbabwe.com

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