ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the female body as a site of conceptualisation of female freedom and desire in the work of Yvonne Vera. An academic, one time director of Bulawayo’s national gallery, and prolific writer – she published five novels and a short story collection in nine years – Vera’s writing has been described as poetic, taboo breaking ‘feats of the imagination’ that grapple with ‘the weight of the past and how to bear it’. Her work offers salutary ‘celebrations of freedom and space [through] a new spiritual and psychological cartography of female consciousness’. Despite women characters’ presence in African writing from its very genesis, it was a while before narratives celebrating the erotics of Black female bodies and their aspirations as legitimate modes of subject formation became normalised. Two factors account for this: firstly, in male writing, women’s erotic desires and their dreams of freedom were considered coincident with hetero-patriarchal male desire and nationalist freedom dreams respectively.
