ABSTRACT
Yvonne Vera, who had published five novels and one collection of short stories before passing away in April 2005, is widely recognized as one of the most original and significant voices in contemporary African literature. Born and brought up in Zimbabwe (previously Southern Rhodesia) during the bloody years of the liberation struggle, in which the indigenous population fought against Ian Smith’s minority-rule regime, Vera later moved to Toronto, Canada, where she wrote and published her first work, the collection of short stories Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals (1992). Upon moving back to Zimbabwe in 1995, having already written and published Nehanda (1994) and Without a Name (1996), which was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa, she subsequently completed three more novels, her final novel, Obedience, remaining unfinished. Vera’s fiction stands out from her contemporaries’ primarily because of its highly lyrical nature. In her novels, barbaric acts and movements are gracefully depicted and the intensity of her prose succeeds in ‘bring[ing] a reader as close as possible to [the] experience’ ( Vera 2002a: 222).
