Before NoViolet Bulawayo, the most prominent writer from the city of Bulawayo was Yvonne Vera whose ideas of home and homecoming were central to her writing practice. In this imaginary interview, stitched from various sources, Vera explains her connection to Zimbabwe’s second city. It is a city of under two million people. Multiple historical traumas are sedimented in its landscape, writes Tsitsi Jaji, while raising the attendant challenges to its representation in contemporary literature. Soon after independence in 1980, Bulawayo, was a site of Gukurahundi, a genocide where more than 20 000 people were massacred, their blood paving way for the brutal reign of Robert Mugabe. For Vera, situating herself in Bulawayo, and writing the city in most of her fiction was an act of dissidence, to destabilise the geography of our imagining of a country. She spent a decade in Canada, moved back to Zimbabwe in 1995 to pursue a full-time career as a novelist. She died on 7 April 2005. 

In your novel Butterfly Burning, you write, ‘Bulawayo is not a city for idleness. The idea is to live within the cracks. Unnoticed and unnoticeable.’ When did you know Bulawayo was where you could be the writer you wanted to be?

I was born and raised in Bulawayo. It is the second city, so to speak, in Zimbabwe. Each of the inhabitants here feels a certain marginal identity, and therefore an irrational and fierce love for being here. Bulawayo people have always shaped their identities around the notion of being peripheral, of being drought stricken for example, and at different times, of political secondariness. The landscape is very distinct, flat for distances, and the thorn bushes scattered everywhere in their sparse vegetation, blooming when they can. And anthills. The sky is so low you could lick it. Very blue in winter. In all my time in Canada, I never lost its heartbeat, and I was never complete. I felt I was in transit, even more marginal there, than I could ever be, though Canada is lovely and peaceful. It is almost true that I could never find my vocation without my residence there. Finally, I had to be me, no longer in transit under another sky. I have always loved Bulawayo in a complete manner. The weather is beautiful all year, very high temperatures in October, but good weather. I missed my home and knew I had to return. Perhaps none of it would work and I would have to set off again, to some other land. I have never wanted to be a writer in exile — I hope never to have to make a decision to leave Zimbabwe, for whatever reason. I hope to continue in this small town, with its gentle and unhurried pace.

Exile can be physically limiting in what it enables the writer to see and conceive but it is also an enriching experience that expands our creative and imaginative horizons. Where are you most at home?

I have a strong fear of living in exile, personally, to be honest with you. I spent almost 10 years living in Canada, and I don’t really wish to go back because I have already spent 10 years of what…a human life is really quite short. I can go back to Canada. It doesn’t seem like a very creative use of my lifespan. 

So, what did homecoming mean to you?

When a writer changes climate and geography, the process of differing light is even more apparent, more visible. Let me recount, after years of Canadian winters, dim light and endless months of writing and reading under a fluorescent heaven, I have begun to write with the substance of a natural light which bristles on my pen, even in winter. A Zimbabwean winter. The light collects on the edges of my eye with details of rain, of swallows gathering insects and drizzling in the air. […] Here in Zimbabwe I write with the scent of light turning the surface of the sky into hides of brown skin.

The year 2000 signalled a shift in the politics of Zimbabwe: violent land invasions, record high inflation, a downward spiralling of the economy, and yet you chose to stay, when you could have left. Why was your job at the National Gallery in Bulawayo so important?

There were so many pressures pressing on me. The economy, as you are aware, in Zimbabwe has really gone down. The departure of artists left the community so small. The community of artists as well as the viewers and friends of the gallery were reduced dramatically. So you had to try and adjust to that kind of phenomena, and it was very difficult and traumatic for me because this was my gallery family. So every day, somebody is coming to say goodbye to you. So I found that especially to be very, very hard. And then it meant you could prepare exhibitions but to exhibit means to show. And you want to show with the voice of a community that is together in doing something, in celebrating the art, building your dreams. And you cannot do this on your own because an exhibition is a showing. And so who was I going to show to and with? So it aged me. It just suddenly felt a sense of collapse, and something in the country itself that surrounded the gallery seemed to be and still is on its knees. So I felt that I was in a tragic moment in Zimbabwe, more tragic than even the moment of armed struggle for independence.

References

Eric Beauchemin, ‘In Conversation with Yvonne Vera’ Radio Netherlands Archives, 28 August 2003.

Tsitsi Jaji, ‘The Bulawayo Novel: In praise of the parochial,’ Modern Fiction Studies, 2021, Vol 67 (2), p.292 – 319.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu and Nontsikelelo Mutiti (2019) Some Writers Can Give You Two Heartbeats, Richmond and Harare: Black Chalk & Co.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a Junior Research Fellow in African & Comparative Literature at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford.