Renaissance à Bulawayo, Zimbabwe : la ville dans The Stone Virgins de Yvonne Vera

In post-independence, violence-ridden Zimbabwe, Yvonne Vera’s main character in The Stone Virgins (2002), Nonceba, slowly returns to life after witnessing her sister’s murder and enduring brutal rape herself in their village. Her physical and mental reconstruction significantly takes place in the me...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Marie-Jeanne Gauffre
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Presses Universitaires du Midi 2009-12-01
Series:Anglophonia
Subjects:
Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/acs/1678
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Summary:In post-independence, violence-ridden Zimbabwe, Yvonne Vera’s main character in The Stone Virgins (2002), Nonceba, slowly returns to life after witnessing her sister’s murder and enduring brutal rape herself in their village. Her physical and mental reconstruction significantly takes place in the metropolis of Bulawayo where she takes refuge. Indeed, both a protective shell and the centre of a network of streets opening out into the outer world, Bulawayo cons trasts with the confinement and paralysis of the main characters, whose injured selves echo outside chaos. Specifically, through Nonceba’s gradual journey out of her abysmal pain and destructive solitude to the welcoming potentiality of the city, the novel, unemphatically combining horror and beauty, testifies to the fragile—yet abiding—power of human bonds, and to the infinite resilience of the Zimbabwean people.
ISSN:1278-3331
2427-0466