Entering the Oppressor’s Mind: A Strategy of Writing in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power, Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins and Unity Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent

Abstract

In this article, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974), Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002) and Unity Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent (2003) are read as examples of texts in which women writers explore from within the minds and motives of fellow-African, male figures who perpetrate crimes and cruelties against women in their respective postcolonial societies. It is argued that, by doing so, these authors employ a strategy of both acknowledging (“owning”) and analysing the evils against which they simultaneously protest by their vivid portrayal of the harm done to women or girls by such men. Writing of this kind is seen as a form of social action through the authors’ employment of “illocutionary force” (Maria Pia Lara’s phrase). Following the introduction, the individual social setting and the texture of writing in each text is analysed in turn, while correspondences with the other two novels are briefly noted in the conclusion.

“A country with land but no habitat”: Women, violent accumulation and negative-value in Yvonne Vera’sThe Stone Virgins

“…Much has been written about Vera's aestheticization of pain, trauma and the body (see, for example, Gagiano 2006;Rooney 2007;Kostelac 2010;Norridge 2012), but less attention has been paid to the socio-ecological imagery and leitmotifs that comprise this aesthetic. These derive, I suggest, from an intertwining of human and extra-human natures that is partly informed by Vera's investment in the animist spiritualism of traditional Zimbabwean cultures, and partly by a Foucauldian understanding of how power operates through the disciplining of bodies and discursive production of "nature" (Samuelson 2007, 23).…”

“…The narrative is focalized through the perspectives of several interrelated characters: two sisters, Thenjiwe and Nonceba, who live and work in Kezi; Thenjiwe's lover Cephas, who becomes Nonceba's companion following the attack; and, their assailant Sibaso, the former guerrilla who hails from Bulawayo but who refuses to demob and harbours in the sacred hills at independence. These alternating perspectives give voice to the previously unspoken violence of the Gukhurahundi: the mass killings and destruction of property and place in Matabeleland -the heartland of Ndebele opposition to the Shona ZANU PF party -wrought by the government's Chinese-trained "Fifth Brigade" in the early 1980s (see Gagiano 2006).…”

“…The titular "stone virgins" are figures carved into the rocks of a cave system in the lands of Gulati -the shrine where Sibaso "steals shelter from the dead" after the war (Vera 2002, 104). Annie Gagiano (2006) has argued that Sibaso seeks to license his attack on Thenjiwe and Nonceba as being in continuum with the sacrifice of virgins depicted in a San cave painting, while Sue Kostelac (2010) suggests that Thenjiwe is sacrificed precisely because she "enjoys a feeling of connectedness with the land, without its associated obligations of fertility and nurturance", arguing that, "in her autonomous attitude she embodies a form of female agency and self-knowledge that is painfully desired, but never fully realized by Mazvita or Phephelaphi" (80). Mazvita is the female protagonist of Vera's 1994 novel, Without a Name, who performs an abortion on herself having been raped by a "freedom fighter" and, notably, both of these traumatic events are described in terms of her body being violated by the land itself (Graham 2009, 113).…”