For Further Research
Coundouriotis, Eleni. “Self-Inflicted Wounds in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning.” World Literature Today 79.3/4 (2005): 64-67.
In this article, Coundouriotis argues that Butterfly Burning is a transitional novel in Vera’s body of work in that she begins a “new engagement with history” (64). Terence Ranger claimed that Vera’s last novel, The Stone Virgins, marks Vera’s confrontation with “the reality of history” (64). Coundouriotis disagrees and sees this happening earlier, in her second-to-the last novel, Butterfly Burning. Coundouriotis reads Vera’s use of land as a portrayal of true historical events, namely the violence of colonialism. Her short article supports her argument by exploring the two main scenes of the novel, the abortion and death of Phephelaphi, with evidence tying those events to the landscape. |
Musila, Grace. “Embodying Experience and Agency in Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name
and Butterfly Burning.” Research in African Literatures 38.2 (2007): 49-63. In this article, Musila argues that Vera’s two novels, Without a Name and Butterfly Burning, show the black female body as a site of oppression and liberation. She states her thesis on page 50: “In the two texts, the body emerges as a highly ambivalent site of both oppression and agency, as it negotiates its way around experiences which seek to limit its scope of action and freedom.” |
Gagiano, Annie. “Buried Hurts and Colliding Dreams in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning.” Acta Scientiarum Language and Culture 31.1 (2009): 41-52. Contending that Vera challenges the Eurocentric accounts of the beginnings of colonial urbanization in Butterfly Burning, Gagiano argues that the past, namely the family heritage of Fumbatha and Phephelaphi, influences their divergent desires for the future. |
Shaw, Carolyn Martin. “Turning Her Back on the Moon: Virginity, Sexuality, and Mothering in the Works of Yvonne Vera.” Africa Today 51.2 (2004): 35-51.
Discussing Yvonne Vera’s five novels, Shaw argues “Vera consistently returns to a concern with the mother-daughter connection or disconnection, loss of the mother, rejection or abandonment of the child, and denial of motherhood” (35). The article is divided into five sections: Introduction, “Generation and Sexuality in Yvonne Vera’s Novels,” “Insubstantial Connections, Extraordinary Births, and Strange Mothering,” “Sexuality and the Rejection of Motherhood,” and “We Met in Water.” In these sections, Shaw examines how the theme of unhealthy motherhood is depicted in Nehanda, Butterfly Burning, Under the Tongue, Without a Name, and The Stone Virgins. Section 4 discusses Butterfly Burning in some length. |
Zeleza, Paul. “Colonial Fictions: Memory and History in Yvonne Vera’s Imagination.” Research in African Literatures 38.2 (2007): 9-21.
Friend of Vera, Zeleza argues that history was important to Vera’s writing. He discusses all five of her novels, with particular attention to Nehanda and Butterfly Burning because they cover struggles with colonialism before the war of Zimbabwe’s independence and inform that other three novels. He states his argument and outline of page 11: “History was central to Vera; it animated her imagination, framed her stories, her characters, her literary vision. Before analyzing how her novels engage and reconstruct history, let me briefly discuss, in rather broad strokes, the close but complicated connections between history and literature, a relationship I grapple with in my own personal and professional life as a historian and a creative writer. The rest of the essay will examine what I call Vera’s poetic histories, that is, the way her five novels engage and reconstruct Zimbabwean history through one of the most fertile and creative imaginations to grace African literature in recent years. Later, I will focus on two novels in particular, Nehanda and Butterfly Burning, that interrogate the colonial encounter long before the outbreak of the war of national liberation that constitutes the backdrop of her other three novels, Without a Name, Under the Tongue, and The Stone Virgins.” |