Sound Presentation of the Silent History: Orature in Yvonne Vera's The Stone Virgins

Abstract:

In her novel The Stone Virgins, Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera provides a model of orature writing by using sound in the interaction between literature and history as well as literature and politics. This essay will principally draw on the ideas of Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o as well as Roland Barthes’ ideas about listening to analyze this effect. As a medium of oral tradition that carries traditional aesthetic and cultural values throughout the text, sound and its spatiotemporal framework establish an interpretative community among the author, the character, and the reader. In this community, silence—an extreme state of sound—and distorted sound highlight the individual memories of the suppressed people and form a contrast with the collective national memory that is put under the framework of the history of patriotism by official nationalist discourse. To reconstruct the suppressed history of the common people, Vera adopts the performance mechanism of orature by sound and thereby presents the inner monologue of the characters, which helps restore the subjectivity of the oppressed and sends out a call to the reader to participate in the reconstruction of a new history with the people as subjects. Vera’s sound presentation of the silenced Zimbabwean history is an important example of orature writing, showcasing a strong sense of historical responsibility among Zimbabwean writers and contributing to the formation of originality of African Europhone literature.