Silenced Voices, Resuscitated Memory, and the Problematization of State Historiography in Yvonne Vera’s Novel The Stone Virgins

In Zimbabwe (like in most post-colonial African nations), history holds a critical place in discourses on constructions and reconstructions of national identity. The history of the Gukurahundi (the massacre of civilians in Matabeleland and Midlands regions of Zimbabwe in the early to late 1980s) continues to dominate debates on the politics of ethnic exclusion in contemporary Zimbabwe. This article explores the place of creative fiction in this political discourse. The article contends that Yvonne Vera’s novel The Stone Virgins (which is set in the Gukurahundi era) is a historically situated narrative of murder, rape, and trauma that powerfully challenges and renegotiates state power premised on hegemonic inscriptions and re-inscriptions of national history. The article focuses on the subtlety with which the psychic impact of rape and violence, especially as manifested in the suppression of the female victim’s voice and memory, can be read in turn (and paradoxically so) as the novel’s complex attempt at speaking back to the political stifling of debate about the Gukurahundi. The focus on the political significance of representations of a woman’s voice and memory in The Stone Virgins is informed by the pervasive politicization and masculinization of voice and expression in post-2000 Zimbabwean politics.