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Jan 1, 1964 — Apr 7, 2005· 41 yrs

ZIMBABWE AUTHOR · FICTION · YOUNG WOMEN

Yvonne Vera

5
BOOKS
5.0
AVG RATING (1)
0
READERS

Key Zimbabwean female writer

Bulawayo, Zimbabwe
Wikipedia

Selborne Avenue in Bulawayo cuts from Fort Street (at Charter House), across to Jameson Road (of the Jameson Raid), through to Main Street, to Grey Street, to Abercorn Street, to Fife Street, to Rhodes Street, to Borrow Street, out into the lush Centenary Gardens with their fusion of dahlias, petunias, asters, red salvia, and mauve petrea bushes, onward to the National Museum, on the left side.

— from The stone virgins

Most acclaimed

#1

Butterfly burning

0.0 (0)

"Butterfly Burning brings the brilliantly poetic voice of Yvonne Vera to American readers for the first time. Set in Makokoba, a black township of Bulawayo, in the late 1940s, the novel tells the story of Phephelaphi, who glows with vitality and a secret sense of her own freedom and independence. When she meets the much older Fumbatha, he fills her "with hope larger than memory." He, in turn, "wants her like the land beneath his feet from which birth had severed him." But despite their genuine happiness, Phephelaphi is not satisfied with this "one-room" love alone.". "She is pulled toward the experience of other lives, the possibility of alternative futures. Her youth enables her to believe that she is in control of her own body, of her own destiny. but the closely woven fabric of Makokoba, where everyone knows everyone else, has a mesh too tight and too intricate to allow her to escape her circumstances on her own."--BOOK JACKET.

#2

The stone virgins

5.0 (1)

Het leven van twee zussen in Zimbabwe tijdens de burgeroorlog in 1981-1986.

#3

Without a name and, Under the tongue

0.0 (0)

"Without a Name at once shocks with its violence and astounds with its beauty. In prose that reads like poetry, Yvonne Vera charts the course of a young woman, Mazvita, as she journeys from rural Mubaira to the chaos of late 1970s Harare, a hotbed of violent political action and revolutionary social change. After collapsing from mental and physical exhaustion, Mazvita moves in with a young man, who, when it becomes evident that she is pregnant, turns Mazvita out of his home. Destitute, she is led by fear and desperation to commit an unthinkable act.". "With Under the Tongue, Vera became the first Zimbabwean writer to deal frankly with the problem of incest that plagued the country. When Zhizha is raped by her father, a self-styled war hero, she loses all desire and ability to speak. Her relationships with her mother - jailed for killing her husband after discovering his brutal acts - and her grandmother evoke profound meditations on the nature and necessity of language and expression, and on the affinity between silence and sorrow: "A word does not rot unless it is carried in the mouth for too long, under the tongue.""--BOOK JACKET.

Books

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