Yvonne Vera (Zimbabwe, 1964-2005)
Yvonne Vera, writer: born 19 June 1964; Director, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Bulawayo 1996-2003; married John Jose; died Toronto, Ontario 7 April 2005.
Yvonne Vera, who has died from meningitis aged 40, was one of Zimbabwe's best known writers. Her latest novel, The Stone Virgins (2002), was described by critics as her most accomplished and accessible work to date.. The most consistently productive among Zimbabwean authors in English, Vera won national and international prizes, and her work has been translated into several languages.
Vera was a writer from whom much was expected and for whom the world was just beginning to open up. In the last three years, she had won a string of international awards, including the Tucholski prize awarded by Swedish PEN (2004) and the Macmillan writer's prize for Africa, for The Stone Virgins in 2002. She was also the 1997 winner of the Commonwealth writer's prize for best novel, Africa region, for Under The Tongue.
Vera left Zimbabwe in 2004 to join her Canadian husband, John Jose, in Toronto. She had held on in her homeland as long as she could before joining the considerable list of Zimbabwean intelligentsia fleeing the unacceptable political climate in their country. She once said: "I would love to be remembered as a writer who had no fear for words and who had an intense love for her nation."
Fearless and courageous are two adjectives that sum up Vera's personality and her writing. Irene Staunton, her editor for 15 years, described her as "an author who dared to voice the unspoken and hidden with a scrupulous sensitivity and courage". It was her confidence that brought her her first book deal. She was a student in Canada, then in her late 20s, and sent a story to a magazine in Toronto: "I was asked by the publisher if I had more stories. I said 'yes' haphazardly, though I had none. He asked for them. Therefore I set out to write them."
Vera was born in Bulawayo, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, to parents who were both teachers. She was educated locally, at Mzilikazi high school, before becoming a teacher of English literature at Njube high school, Bulawayo, where she met her future husband. He first went to Africa in 1977 as a backpacker, kept returning and took a teaching post at Njube high school in 1984. Vera later visited him in Canada, and they married in 1987.
She enrolled at York University, Toronto, and completed her undergraduate and master's degrees in just four years. By then, she had started writing; she earned her doctorate in another four years, as well as publishing her first three books. She also taught literature there.
She returned to Zimbabwe in 1995. From 1997 to 2003, she worked as regional director of the Zimbabwean national gallery in Bulawayo, a position to which she brought enormous enthusiasm and flair, and gave support and direction to many artists.
Vera was obsessive in her writing habit, and she likened time away from writing to "a period of fasting". She wrote for 10 hours daily, broken only by hurried dashes to the fridge to grab a sandwich. She once said that writing was a non-negotiable part of her life, something for which she was willing to sacrifice even the most intimate relationships.
Since 1992, she had published six volumes of fiction: a short story collection, Why Don't You Carve Other Animals? (1992), and five novels - Nehanda (1993), Without A Name (1994), Under The Tongue (1996), Butterfly Burning (1998) and The Stone Virgins (2002)
Vera's first novel, Nehanda (1993), tells the story of the spirit medium who inspired the African uprising against white settlers in 1896, and who became a symbol of anti-colonial resistance during Zimbabwe's struggle for independence. Before she was executed, Nehanda prophesied that her bones would rise again. What constantly rises in Vera's novels is the condition of young women who have to sacrifice themselves, or are sacrificed, again and again. The 15 short stories comprising her first book-length publication, Why Don't You Carve Other Animals (1992), are an accurate indication of Vera's later interests and preoccupations.
Being a critic of the government can be a dangerous vocation in today's Zimbabwe. Vera's last published novel, The Stone Virgins (2002), is an elegantly understated but terrifying and courageous account of the human trauma suffered as a result of Robert Mugabe's persecution of the Ndebele people in western Zimbabwe in the 1980s.
This last book is typical of her opus: a difficult lyrical style that highlights the unequal relationship between men and women before and after the Zimbabwean independence struggle, deliberately breaking thematic taboos and dealing unflinchingly, yet compassionately, with violent and traumatic themes, such as rape, incest, abortion and infanticide.
It is Vera's only novel with a post-independence setting, and almost all the critics agreed it set an important benchmark for Zimbabwean fiction in English. It was her first novel to be published in the United States. She was working on a new novel, Obedience, when she died.