Speaking for the Voiceless: Yvonne Vera’s Characters and Social Conditions

Abstract

This paper focuses essentially on the characters we find in Yvonne Vera’s four subsequent novels after Nehanda, namely: Without a Name, Under the Tongue, Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins. It is the objective of the paper to substantiate Vera’s implied posture that the women of Zimbabwe, whose portraitures she presents to us, and who also she perceives as constituting the major voiceless members of their society, are the ultimate victims of both colonial experience and post-colonial tensions. In the course of pursuing the thesis that the bulk of the events that make up Zimbabwean history is synonymous with oppression and suffering of the women, the paper argues that these casualties of Zimbabwean political and social developments are genuinely handicapped and that is why the female characters especially usually end up not living fulfilled lives in as much as they have their set goals and dreams in life. The paper reveals that society-imposed structures and conditions account greatly for their many bizarre deeds, so that when all is considered, it is discovered that Vera wants us to absolve her female protagonists because society has sinned more against them than they have against it.