Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera

Yvonne Vera's Nehanda (1993) signalled the presence of new and remarkable writing in Zimbabwe, and her four subsequent novels have confirmed her stature as one of the most important African novelists of the 1990s. Her art is alert to public life; and manifests the decisive moments of Zimbabwe's anti-colonial resistance, the growth of the township culture and the competing demands of the city and the rural home. This work brings together critics from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Britain, the Caribbean and the United States, demonstrating through a diversity of approaches the complex beauty of Vera's work. It shows how Vera expanded the formal possibilities of the African novel by placing the experiences of women at the centre of literature, and in so doing, retold and recreated Zimbabwe's history and imaginative life.