Meg Samuelson   

During her short life, Vera published five novels and a collection of stories, and edited an anthology of writing by African women. Her fiction garnered numerous awards and accolades, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa, the Macmillan Writers' Prize for Africa and the Swedish PEN Tuscholski Prize. Butterfly Burning was listed among Africa's Best 100 Books of the twentieth century. Vera was undoubtedly the most successful and prolific female novelist to emerge from Zimbabwe and arguably one of the most important writers on the continent. Her prose is treasured for its characteristic lyricism, its lightness of touch, which was brought to bear on some of the heaviest realities in which her characters found themselves, often by virtue of their gender.

Her first novel, Nehanda, was based on the incarnation of the ancestral spirit of Nehanda in the medium Charwe, who led the first chimurenga, the resistance war waged against British incursions into what is now Zimbabwe. While her later novels often turned from such public political conflicts to focus on the intimate negotiations of life and love, her writing was always in spirit waging war - most often on taboo and the narrow limits her characters encountered and transgressed. Without a Name gave an early indication of the taboo-breaking shape Vera's oeuvre would come to take as it tells of rape and infanticide during the years of the independence war. Under the Tongue continues to explore sexual violence - this time the incestuous rape of a pre-adolescent child by her father. In both novels the emphasis falls on healing and restoring the things that have been broken in a social world fragmented by colonialism, war and nationalism. False optimism, however, plays no part in Vera's literary worlds.

Butterfly Burning, her penultimate novel, lovingly inscribes the streets and sounds of Bulawayo, while continuing to explore women's predicaments in social worlds crosscut by intersecting patriarchies and racial structures. The protagonist first performs an abortion in order to keep alive the dreams she nurtures in her heart, and ultimately immolates herself in a devastatingly paradoxical gesture of liberation and defeat. Paradox of this kind has marked Vera's writing, which consistently refuses the consolation of presenting us with hopeful images that would be a departure from a social reality manifestly unkind to women, and yet still seeks and finds hope in the most unlikely and unexpected quarters.

Vera's final novel, The Stone Virgins, which is perhaps her most beautiful, carefully crafted and ethically pressing offering, will long be cherished as a touchstone against which literary attempts to transform trauma into potential can be measured. The novel takes up a broad historical span, allowing it to trace the movement from colony to independence and then, at the searing core of the text, the post-independence massacres in Matabeleland. The tender gesture of the closing paragraph, which speaks of the need to restore and memorialise without casting memory in stone, is among the most powerful passages to have issued from Vera's pen.

Vera was born in Bulawayo in 1964; in the years before her death, she had returned to her city of birth, reinvigorating its cultural life through her position as Director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo. On the 7th April 2005 she succumbed to AIDS-related meningitis in Toronto, where she spent the last year of her life in the care of her husband, John Jose.1 Once again southern Africa has been deprived of one of its most challenging literary voices by this scourge sweeping across our societies. In Zimbabwe, first Dambudzo Marechera, now Vera: the loss and waste of such keen gazes, such skilled wordsmiths, is indicative of what is happening to our world. More than just another statistic, they symbolise the magnitude of what is taking place all around us, each minute, every day.

"Where would we find the mouth with which to tell what we had to tell?" asks a character in Nehanda. Vera's evocative prose provides us with a mouth to tell the things we have to tell, and it will continue to do so for years to come. It is customary at times such as these to say "Hamba kahle". But Vera will not leave us; her words will remain, circulating as much-needed guides on the quest for survival and dignity, on the limits that produce and constrain such yearnings, and on the means of surmounting such limits. And so I say, Sala kahle, Yvonne Vera. Stay with us; stay well.

1.   The only report I have come across that explicitly notes HIV/AIDS as the underlying cause of Vera's death is Sandra Martin's obituary published in The Globe and Mail (23/204/2005;http://www.theglobeandmail.com). Martin quotes Per W"astberg, Vera's friend and member of the Swedish Academy, as observing that Vera's long struggle against HIV/AIDS proved unsuccessful due to lack of timely access to anti-retrovirals.