ABSTRACT
This paper addresses Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera's choice not to disclose her HIV-positive status and suggests that the posthumous context presses us to reconfigure her thematic exploration and pre-occupation with silence, absence, naming, and not-naming in important ways. Vera's texts offer an important theorization of silence and the unspeakable by complicating the linear and positivist movement from silence to speaking that characterizes therapeutic economies of narrative. Reading Vera's treatment of silence in her twin novellas Under the Tongue and Without a Name, I trace an ethical biography of Vera's fictional worlds that is attentive to her choice not to disclose her HIV status and to the economies of speaking that govern our interpretations of her silence. I read the literary as a complex cultural and social site that responds to confessional and instrumental economies of life storytelling in global circulation in order to usher her figurations of silence into the archive of narratives about HIV/AIDS in the Southern African context.
