Encountering Yvonne Vera in a small Welsh village
Tinashe Mushakavanhu
A few months ago, I was in Wales when a good web-designer friend of mine and his dear wife invited me along to one of their village parties. As can be expected I was a lone black figure in the deep south-west valleys of the lush green Welsh veldts often dotted with populous sheep, and the caressing whispers of meandering rivers. The whole village was there. The night was tipsy with red and white wine, and crooning music from the walls.
Everything changed when my friend introduced me to two women huddled in a corner as ‘my young Zimbabwean friend’ and their twin faces lit up with excitement. The two women were mother and daughter. ‘I am Jessica Hemmings’, the younger woman said, extending her hand. ‘Have you read Yvonne Vera? I did her work for my PhD.’ She said, smiling. My night became an animated conversation of Vera, Zimbabwe and how to survive a PhD.
I was pretty much curious to know what had drawn her to Yvonne Vera, of all writers. She told me that it was while studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London that she encountered Vera’s work and got fascinated in the inter-texuality of her writings and how cloth gives meaning and feeling to her characters. She confessed though that she had never been to Zimbabwe, prohibited by the vulgar political turmoil embroiling the lovely southern African country.
Good conversation eats up a night. So we were going to meet again the following day, before she travelled to Norway. We didn’t get to meet again, but she left me a pleasant gift, in the form of a book – Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth published by Bettina Weiss in Germany. The book is a significant contribution to the critical appreciation of Zimbabwean literature especially as it is exploring Vera’s work from a textile point of view, a method of analysis of the material as a metaphor, structure, and object in Zimbabwean fiction.
In the book, Hemmings certainly provides and introduces a hybrid form of methodology for the analysis of Vera’s corpus. Her study calls upon textile theories in corroboration with literary theories and is able to connect the threads of experiences as they occur during the spiritual journeys of the characters. Here this often overlooked element of narrative and life – the textile – is shown to play a central role in the articulation of the often silenced experiences of incest, infanticide, abortion, and rape that make up the narratives of Nehanda (1993), Without A Name (1994), Under the Tongue (1996), Butterfly Burning (1998) and The Stone Virgins (2002).
Such a reading as in Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth is innovative as it detours from the methodologies that have characterized the study of Zimbabwean literature thus far which have been somewhat traditionalist and socialist – establishing a monolithic thinking that encumbers a varied and rich discussion on the literature and the result has been only a partial understanding of the multiple layers of meaning in Zimbabwean writing. The addition of textile interpretation expands the scope and complements and encourages other eclectic readings of Zimbabwean literature.
The textile metaphors we find in literary contexts come to life when we understand the world in which they originate. Textiles are not only a source of metaphor for an innovative creative writer like Vera, but are also a means of storytelling. Cloth lends our personalities an extra voice!