Browsing by Author "Murray, Jessica"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Intersections of language, landscape and the violated female body in the texts of Yvonne Vera
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2004-03) Murray, Jessica; Ellis, Jeanne; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis will examine the way in which representations of landscape and the language of nationalist discourse contribute to the creation of an environment in which the female body is particularly vulnerable to violation. In her novels Without a Name, Under the Tongue and The Stone Virgins, Yvonne Vera identifies the extent to which the linguistic and representational legacies of colonialism, as well as the language and operational strategies of nationalism, conspire to facilitate the layered disempowerment and victimisation of women in Zimbabwe. Vera exposes the inconsistencies in the symbolic economy of colonialism and nationalism by problematising the equation of the African woman with the African landscape in the case of colonial discourse and by questioning the equation of the African woman with the good, nurturing and self-abnegating mother of the nation in the case of nationalist rhetoric. By articulating the experiences of her female protagonists, Vera makes it clear that the liberation of the Zimbabwean land from white minority rule does not necessarily lead to the liberation of the women who live and work on the land. Colonialism, nationalist movements and the wars that sought to reclaim the land that was appropriated in the imperial endeavour impacted men and women in very different ways. In order to voice the stories of women, Vera chooses to eschew conventional modes of writing and speaking since they are pervaded with metaphors that perpetuate the disempowerment of women. Instead, she attempts to develop a new discourse that amalgamates poetry and prose, orality and writing and innovation and tradition. She turns to the female body and engages with the Zimbabwean landscape in an alternative way in her attempt to speak the hitherto silenced stories of women. In doing so, Vera reclaims the subversive power of women's speech and silences within communities of women. The way in which women communicate in these distinctly female spaces forms the basis of the language Vera creates to tell of women's experiences of rape, incest and mutilation.