Intersections of language, landscape and the violated female body in the texts of Yvonne Vera

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis will examine the way in which representations of landscape and thelanguage of nationalist discourse contribute to the creation of an environment inwhich the female body is particularly vulnerable to violation. In her novels Withouta Name, Under the Tongue and The Stone Virgins, Yvonne Vera identifies theextent to which the linguistic and representational legacies of colonialism, as wellas the language and operational strategies of nationalism, conspire to facilitatethe layered disempowerment and victimisation of women in Zimbabwe. Veraexposes the inconsistencies in the symbolic economy of colonialism andnationalism by problematising the equation of the African woman with the Africanlandscape in the case of colonial discourse and by questioning the equation ofthe African woman with the good, nurturing and self-abnegating mother of thenation in the case of nationalist rhetoric. By articulating the experiences of herfemale protagonists, Vera makes it clear that the liberation of the Zimbabweanland from white minority rule does not necessarily lead to the liberation of thewomen who live and work on the land. Colonialism, nationalist movements andthe wars that sought to reclaim the land that was appropriated in the imperialendeavour impacted men and women in very different ways. In order to voice thestories of women, Vera chooses to eschew conventional modes of writing andspeaking since they are pervaded with metaphors that perpetuate thedisempowerment of women. Instead, she attempts to develop a new discoursethat amalgamates poetry and prose, orality and writing and innovation andtradition. She turns to the female body and engages with the Zimbabweanlandscape in an alternative way in her attempt to speak the hitherto silencedstories of women. In doing so, Vera reclaims the subversive power of women'sspeech and silences within communities of women. The way in which womencommunicate in these distinctly female spaces forms the basis of the languageVera creates to tell of women's experiences of rape, incest and mutilation.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University