Hybridity and Hegemonic Relations: Yvonne Vera’s Postcolonial Zimbabwe

Abstract

In Yvonne Vera’s first novel, Nehanda, she employs “spirit possession to recall and reconstruct an idyllic pre-colonial Shona past” and the onset of the ensuing conflict between her country and the colonizing country, Britain, during the later part of the nineteenth century. This paper examines and
makes analyses of the writer’s representations of the consequences of colonialism as she charts the rapid movement of her country away from the past glory of Great Zimbabwe in her subsequent novels, especially in Without A Name, Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins. It begins by explicating, though briefly, the salient features of the post colonial literary theory. It goes on to highlight and interpret Vera’s varied exemplifications of the multiple problems that have emanated from the issues of hybridity and the hegemonic relationships that exist between the colonizer and the colonized. In the main, it argues that the problems associated with these constitute great dangers to the colonized people of Zimbabwe and to the Zimbabwean space. The paper discovers that, in all, the colonial encounter with the West, the post colonial upheavals and atrocities, coupled with the challenges of modernity, to a great extent, transformed the initial peaceful and traditional society profoundly. As a result, they impacted so much negatively on both the people’s personal lives, the Zimbabwean nation
and by extension the entire African space.