As noted a couple of days ago, I visited the Seattle Public Library last month looking for books by authors of color. Specifically I was looking for the book by Suzan-Lori Parks and anything by Octavia Butler. But while heading to the fiction stacks from the catalog computers, I passed a display for writers from Africa. (And when the library puts up an endcap or a display, it isn’t because publishers paid them for it.) Fortuitous! The Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera came from that display.
The first two thirds of The Stone Virgins consists mostly of poetic description of Bulawayo and Kezi, Zimbabwe, and their environs. Extended descriptions of the marula tree, marula fruit, and marula nuts (a pit inside the fruit), their smell and substance, and the air after the fruit falls from the trees. Pages of sweet nothings between one character Thenjiwe and an unnamed lover who debarks from the Bulawayo to Kezi bus before following her home. Soldiers hiding in ancestral caves. Description description description. Beautiful description.
But I found all that very hard to read. It’s not that there is no plot, or no characters whatsoever. But they are hard to anchor to as individuals. They appear very much as portions of a texture. I couldn’t really back away and see the whole picture, so I couldn’t hold on to that either. Nevertheless, I really liked these descriptions. Very evocative.
If it was just the descriptions though, I’d not have enough. The two main characters are the sisters Thenjiwe and Noncebe. The region around Bulawayo where they live was mired in guerrilla fighting around Zimbabwean independence. Vera seems careful to avoid naming the sides that ravage Kezi. Thenjiwe’s erstwhile lover reads of Noncebe in the hospital after an attack. Perhaps as penance for not saving Thenjiwe he resolves to rescue Noncebe from her dangerous position in the countryside.
I’m glad I read it, but I probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone except a lit major.
Title: The Stone Virgins
Author: Yvonne Vera
Cover creator: Lynn Buckley (designer) / Paige Deponte (photographer)
Imprint / publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Format: Hardcover
Length: 184 p.
Publication date: 2003
ISBN-10: 0-374-27008-2
I read quite a few African authors last year, but not Vera. Despite your review, and the fact that I’m not a lit major, I’m curious about this one! :)
I certainly isn’t just another “isn’t war crappy” novel even though war features prominently. I’m told by Aaron Bady that Butterfly Burning is the book by Vera that he recommends, and he’s quite fluent in African authors.
Sounds like something I’d like. :-)
I have read The Stone Virgins and I have found that it is a story of at the same time love and war.