The Corporeality of Silence: Dispossession of Person-and-Selfhood in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning (2000)

Abstract

Set in a context of colonization, Butterfly Burning is a fictional work that digs out the colonized"s mind to illustrate the brutality and unfairness of a ruthless system that gangrenes a whole community"s reason of existence. This paper which finds ground on the theory of "the paradox of silence" as it is defined by Maurice Zundel, highlights a reflexion based on the social and political meaning of the praxis of silence among men and women who are deprived of the backbone of their raison d'être. It focuses on the built-in meaning attached to framework, sex and music in an ambient world silenced by the readable and audible voice of voicelessness.