Under the Tongue

A line-up of Zimbabwean writers might begin with Doris Lessing, who grew up and began writing in colonial Rhodesia, and would include such authors as Charles Mungoshi, Dambudzo Marechera, Shimmer Chinodya and Tsitsi Dangarembga.

A ‘newer’ author whose prize-winning texts and remarkable stylistic innovations are now attracting attention is Yvonne Vera. Her work covers a wide range, though it could be said that her narratives function as acts of restitution to those whom society forgets, degrades or violates — especially its female victims.

Her work has a quality of visionary power; she adopts a prophetic voice that has the effect of disturbing settled habits of seeing and conventional ranking orders. Vera herself refers to her use of a ‘more suggestive language’.* She is quite aware of having earned the label of ‘taboo breaking’ for her writing, as a recent interview* attests.

The work at which I wish to look today, Under the Tongue, presents the reader with the issue of incest — its main character Zhizha, has been violated by her own father. This is made explicit only late in the novel (p105-110 ), in language that is somehow both harrowing and exalted — the latter, because the ‘holy indignation’ at the vileness of this shattering act is made so evident.

It might be said that Vera’s vision has a ‘maternal’ quality — as a small example I cite her description of new growth: ‘a yellow shoot of maize which has become a breath of fertile tenderness released kindly from the earth’ (19).

Highly socially conscious as she is, the images of infertility in the following description of township life emphasise the degradation that provides the context of the child’s rape: ‘Down on the ground where they stood, there was just the dry clay, the children throwing stones, running naked and splashing in the ditch water where the dead man had been found’ (p66).

The half-buried narrative in Under the Tongue has not only the purpose of exposing a horror whose existence most people prefer not to talk about, but of showing that voicing the agony is the only way a move can be made towards its transcendence. Not to do so is ‘to be conquered by a sorrow which has no name’ (p44).

The novel is not mainly about victimisation, but about healing — about Zhizha’s mother going to jail for killing her incestuous husband and about Zhizha’s wonderful grandmother who mothers her and preserves the memory of the mother who eventually returns to her. Both the dignity of silence and the powerful balm of speech are needed to address the horror. On the one hand, we are told that ‘under the tongue is a healing silence’ (p41) — on the other, that ‘a word does not rot unless it is carried in the mouth for too long, under the tongue’ (p110). Difficult as Vera’s work undoubtedly is, it is extending the boundaries of African writing.

*See the Hunter interview with Vera in Current Writing 10.1 (April 1998): 75-86.Brief quotation from p.84.

FOOTNOTE: According to a report in the Mail and Guardian (May 7-13, 1999; p.8), the Zimbabwean Supreme Court has recently ruled that ‘the nature of African society’ dictates that within the family context women ‘should never be considered adults ... but only as a junior male’.

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