The Stone Virgins
Review of The Stone Virgins - Liberation (French)
From: "emmanuelvaslin"
Littérature étrangère
Ce qu'a vu Vera
A travers la relation sensuelle et poétique d'un amour fou, trente ans de violences au Zimbabwe .
Par James ROSE Sean
jeudi 11 décembre 2003
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Mahlathini a été écorché vif puis brûlé avec son magasin. YVONNE VERA
Les Vierges de Pierre Traduit de l'anglais (Zimbabwe) par Geneviève Doze. Fayard, 234 pp., 17 €.
a veille de l'indépendance : tout est à faire, à rêver. Pour l'heure, le Zimbabwe est encore la Rhodésie du Sud, le régime de Ian Smith pratique la ségrégation. A Bulawayo, deuxième ville du pays après Salisbury, au Sud-Ouest, dans le Matabéléland, même les rues portent le nom de poètes anglais. Le grand hôtel est interdit aux Noirs, comme les autres immeubles. Ne reste que l'extérieur, le coin de la rue, ekoneni. «L'angle d'un bâtiment se tâte avec les doigts : du ciment grossier, ébréché. Vous vous approchez du coin, vous le contournez. Ce mouvement définit le corps, l'informe d'une façon brusque et miraculeuse. Il pourrait y avoir n'importe quoi après le coin. Un tournant, et une lumière nouvelle vous éclaire, rien n'est obscurci. Vous êtes aussi grand que ces immeubles qui jaillissent du sol. Vous êtes aussi présent que le temps, compact et entier. Le coeur qui bat est le vôtre, le souffle qui tiédit vos lèvres est aussi vivant que cet instant, aussi vrai et paisible. Ekoneni. Une perspective, et Selborne Avenue s'étire depuis votre front jusqu'aux étoiles. Votre peur remonte à la surface de la peau, comme le toucher.»
En établissant une topographie des lieux, Yvonne Vera trace la carte des coeurs, elle décrit les objets pour mieux capter le regard qui les enveloppe. La romancière zimbabwéenne, née en 1964 (on se souvient de Papillon brûle, Fayard, 2002), part du sensible, tactile, pour atteindre cet autre sensible, impalpable - sensibilité discrète qui aime mieux s'exprimer dans le scintillement des étoiles, les gestes des amants. C'est en racontant la petite histoire, c'est-à-dire la grande tragédie personnelle (celle de deux soeurs, Thenjiwe et Nonceba) que Vera dit les meurtrissures de tout un pays.
Bientôt l'indépendance, et l'homme de la situation s'appelle Robert Mugabe (il est toujours en place), tout reste à faire et Mugabe s'apprête déjà à défaire. Son parti, le Zanu (Zimbabwe African National Union), va se venger du parti rival Zapu (Zimbabwe African People's Union). C'est sans doute aussi affaire d'ethnie : les Mashonas, majoritaires, ont longtemps été assujettis par les Ndébélés du Matabéléland (15 % de la population) qui se retrouvent plutôt dans la seconde formation politique. Le roi Lobengula à la fin du XIXe siècle n'avait pas été un tendre. Les racines de l'histoire sont amères. Au début des années quatre-vingt, ont lieu les représailles contre les «dissidents» du Matabéléland. C'est de cet épisode que traite les Vierges de pierre. La littérature zimbabwéenne contemporaine est traversée par le thème de la colonisation et de la guerre d'indépendance. Dans Ossuaire (Actes Sud, 1997) notamment, Chenjerai Hove a évoqué les souffrances du monde rural dans le Zimbabwe post-colonial ; Ici, Vera rompt le silence sur cette guerre, de manière singulière, avec le souffle de la poésie.
Nulle mention de parti, aucun nom lâché. C'est encore plus brutal. Les blessures saignent sans connaître les raisons, seules les plaies témoignent. Kezi, enclave rurale non loin de Bulawayo, devient le théâtre de l'atrocité. Il y a un avant et un après. Dans les Vierges de pierre, une première partie courte, condensée (1950-1980) : trente années qui correspondent à l'espoir d'un pays libre, et un amour fou. Thenjiwe, femme de trente ans, rencontre un inconnu originaire des hautes régions orientales. Tout est possible. Il est de passage. Les cigarettes sont à moitié prix à Kezi. Ils s'aiment. Elle voudrait qu'il attende avec elle son unique soeur Nonceba, de retour de pension. Mais l'homme repart, laisse en souvenir la graine d'un fruit. De cette graine rien ne poussera.
Au lumineux érotisme de la première partie s'oppose la seconde (1981-86), faite de nuit. Viol de Nonceba, décapitation de Thenjiwe, sac du village. Les soldats forcent une femme à trancher la gorge de son mari à la hache, le prix à payer pour sauver la vie de leurs fils. Le commerçant Mahlathini a été écorché vif puis brûlé avec son magasin.
Au coeur des cendres, l'écriture d'Yvonne Vera touche à la subjectivité de la douleur mais tente de s'échapper par l'ellipse : «Il pose la main sur mon épaule. Je m'appuie sur le sol, poignet plié, paume ouverte. Mon bras érafle la terre tandis qu'il me traîne pour me lever, m'attirer dans son corps. Des ailes se déploient là-haut, un oiseau dans le ciel.» Le bourreau a la parole, c'est un homme ordinaire, un «mangeur de pattes d'araignée». Lui a une voix. C'est la victime qui a du mal à la recouvrer. Nonceba a eu les lèvres mutilées. Et tout le roman de fonctionner comme la cicatrisation de cette bouche, un refus du silence.
Review of The Stone Virgins - Financial Gazette
Review: The Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera
Financial Gazette: 9th May 2002
Lifestyle
The Stone Virgins: life better not remembered
Review by the Arts Editor Grace Mutandwa
Title: The Stone Virgins
Author: Yvonne Vera
Publishers: Weaver Press 2002
Pages: 165
ONCE a quiet place of peace, in just a few months and for the next few years it was to be transformed into a place of betrayal and a naked cemetery where no one is buried ˜ bodies were left to rot where they fell.
From 1982 to 1987, birds stopped singing songs of hope and happiness, young men felt cursed, young girls were violently turned into bitter young women and the whole community which turned against each other shrivelled and withdrew into shells.
This, the darkest period in the political history of Zimbabwe, will forever be etched in the minds of the people of Kezi in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland South province.
It was an era of violent deaths, of rape and of general mayhem. It was a time that turned the government against its own people and built a great wall of distrust between the ruled and the rulers.
Yvonne Vera, in her latest and award-winning novel The Stone Virgins, tells in a disarming turn of phrase the story of two sisters, Thenjiwe and Nonceba, caught up in the dissident war of the early 1980s.
But well before that, the two sisters had lived through the 1970s war of liberation, going through troubled years but hoping for a better future under a new political dispensation.
At independence in 1980, Thenjiwe and Nonceba ˜like everyone else in the country ˜were filled with hope and excitement of freedom.
But then soon after all hell breaks loose as turmoil brews within the ranks of freedom fighters who came back from the bush as heroes but are unhappy with the government of the day.
Suddenly the people of Kezi are wildly thrown into the centre of a bitter and murderous feud that sweeps through every home like a veldt fire. Every family stares death in the face and everyone is left scarred for life.
But even in war, people have to live but what kind of life do they lead? How much pain can one endure and still love and trust? What happens to those left behind, those left with the memories of murder, abandonment, betrayal and unfulfilled love?
Vera, an accomplished storyteller, explores these questions and speaks in the voices of the two sisters with pain and passion.
As she walks the reader back and forth from Thandabantu store in Kezi, which seems to be the heart of all developments, she makes you a part of the life that is now better not remembered.
The dissident era is a period politicians in government would like to forget and many people have tried to push to the back of their minds. But those who went through it learnt to live with brutal death, betrayal and sub-human treatment. It was and it remains an uneasy walk back to normalcy.
A prolific writer, Vera marries the lives of her subjects to the environment and even when she writes about a wild fruit it takes on a life of its own and merges finely with that of her human subjects.
This is a must-read: a book that will help many to deal with the turmoil of the independence struggle, the dissident war and the current political violence.
It is a book of pain but it is also a book of hope.
The Stone Virgins, which is just hot off the presses, recently won the Macmillan Writers‚ Prize for Africa, a new award for unpublished works of fiction.
Vera has also authored Butterfly Burning, Under the Tongue, Without a Name and Nehanda. Her books, which have won her Zimbabwean and international awards, have been translated into many languages throughout the world.
Vera is the director of the National Gallery in Bulawayo, who has also made an invaluable contribution to promoting the city’s visual arts culture.
Review of The Stone Virgins - Journal of Southern African Studies
Journal of Southern African Studies
Yvonne Vera, The Stone Virgins (Harare, Weaver Press 2002), 165 pp.,
ISBN 1-77922-002-2
Reviewed by Ranka Primorac/
Source: Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 29. no. 4. December 2003 pp. 995-97.
Yvonne Vera is one of the most prolific and important creative writers to emerge from post-independence Zimbabwe. Since 1992, she has published six volumes of fiction: a short story collection (Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals, 1992) and five novels - Nehanda (1993), Without a Name (1994), Under the Tongue (1996), Butterfly Burning (1998) and The Stone Virgins (2002). Her texts (novels in particular) are marked by their women-centred subject matter, their ‘difficult,’ lyrical style and their deliberate breaking of thematic taboos (they deal, unflinchingly yet compassionately, with violent and traumatic events such as rape, incest, abortion and infanticide). In all of these respects, Vera’s latest novel, The Stone Virgins, is typical of her opus. However, there are also several senses in which this novel represents a new departure for its author and an important benchmark for Zimbabwean fiction in English. I would argue that The Stone Virgins is Vera’s most accomplished and powerful work so far.
Unlike any of Vera’s other novels, The Stone Virgins spans the pre- and post-independence periods of Zimbabwe’s history. (Nehanda is set in the 1890s, Butterfly Burning in the 1940s, Without a Name and Under the Tongue in the 1970s.) The novel is divided into two parts - one entitled ‘1950-1980,’ the other ‘1981-1986’ – and it starts and finishes with chapters containing descriptions of Bulawayo, the capital of Zimbabwe’s southern province of Matabeleland. The colonial Bulawayo described in chapter one is a city of sharp edges and divides, where black men and women are seen meeting literally underground, dreaming of freedoms that they do not possess: ‘All they want is to come and go as they please. At independence, they just want to go in there, and leave, as they please, not to sneak or peep, but to come, and go, as they please.’ (p. 9) In the novel’s final chapter, on the other hand, a black woman wonders freely among the city’s streets. There are flowers everywhere; there are also, after independence, black mannequins in department-store windows, ‘recently employed black bank tellers and trainee managers’ (p. 149) and black residents in apartment blocks with colonial names such as ‘Kensington Flats.’ The Stone Virgins makes it clear that independence has brought about an irreversible social advancement. It has, however, also brought suffering, tragedy and trauma.
Most of the novel’s narrative (framed by the descriptions of the city) does not take place in Bulawayo. It is set, instead, in a rural enclave called Kezi, some two hundred kilometres away, and focuses on the kind of people and places that are normally considered peripheral. ‘In truth, the bus drives from Bulawayo to Kezi, then back to Bulawayo. But (…) in the minds of the residents of Kezi, of course, Kezi comes first: the bus, therefore, is seen as driving from Kezi to Bulawayo to Kezi during the entire week.’ (p. 17) (In emphasising her narrative’s potential function as an alternative, unofficial history, as in matters of style, Vera owes a significant debt to the Zimbabwean novelist Chenjerai Hove.) The story that unfolds in Kezi comprises four narrative strands. The first is about the love between Cephas, a young man from a distant part of the country, and Thenjiwe, a Kezi woman ‘more beautiful than rain’ (p. 30). The second is the story of Sibaso, a former nationalist guerrilla who has, after independence, become one of the ‘dissidents’ – armed men unhappy with the new dispensation who roamed rural Matabeleland in the 1980s. The novel’s third narrative strand tells of how Sibaso murders Thenjiwe (spectacularly, by beheading her), then violates and mutilates her younger sister Nonceba, whom Cephas later befriends and takes to the safety of Bulawayo. The fourth strand narrates the destruction of the social centre of Kezi – the Thandabantu (literally ‘love-people’) general store, and the torture and murder of its owner Mahlathini by the soldiers of the new, independent government.
The Stone Virgins presents this narrative material with unprecedented compositional balance and clarity, and in a style that is more measured and controlled than in any of Vera’s previous novels. Her usual deluge of ‘poetic’ images and figures of speech (which has, on occasion, given free reign to less-than-disciplined critical outpourings) is here carefully restrained. Images are embedded within the text with greater precision (see, for example, the recurrence of the word ‘bone,’ or the references to the African continent); one of the most shocking events in the novel – the murder of Thenjiwe – is told with extraordinary grace and economy of language. A further dimension of the uniqueness of The Stone Virgins is the presence in it of a male character who makes no attempts to appropriate or control a woman’s body, and who is allowed access to the intimate circle of healing, reserved in Vera’s other work for women alone. In addition to that, Cephas is by profession a historian; and although he has come to Kezi from Mashonaland, he is, at the novel’s end, working on restoring kwoBulawayo, the seat of the pre-colonial Ndebele state. ‘A new nation needs to restore its past.’ (p. 165) The novel may therefore be said to associate him with the kind of nationalism that is positive and emancipatory because it is non-violent and pluralistic. Nationalism’s dark, violent and destructive face is in part embodied by Sibaso.
The Stone Virgins is not the first novel to refer to the post-independence war that ravaged Matabeleland in the 1980s. The conflict between the ‘dissidents’ (the Ndebele former guerrillas unhappy with the way they were treated after independence) and government forces is also represented in Chenjerai Hove’s 1991 novel Shadows, and Alexander Kanengoni’s Echoing Silences, published in 1997. Kanengoni’s text sees the post-independence violence in Matabeleland as an extension of the ethnic clashes between the two African nationalist armies that fought the liberation war. Hove’s novel, on the other hand, highlights the plight of rural peasants who, after all the hardships of the war of independence, find themselves at the mercy of further, dissident-inflicted violence. In as much as it does not analyse the political causes of Sibaso’s discontent, but concentrates instead on the harm he causes to civilians, Vera novel is written in Hove’s wake. (Unlike Shadows, however, The Stone Virgins enters a dissident’s psychological world: Sibaso has, during his time as a guerrilla, turned inwardly into stone. He sleeps in, and desecrates, a sacred hillside cave decorated with ancient paintings, ‘the stone virgins.’) But it also takes a step further: to my knowledge, it is the first Zimbabwean novel in English to refer to and openly condemn the violence against civilians sponsored by the government of independent Zimbabwe.
The novel draws a parallel between the destruction of Mahlathni and the Thandabantu store, and Sibaso’s act of mindless brutality. The store had functioned as the social heart of Kezi: a place where people met to trade and talk, and where, as a sign of social change brought about by independence, female freedom fighters had won the right to sit on the veranda on upturned empty crates - something previously reserved for men only. It is precisely because it was a place of meeting and dialogue that the store was destroyed, its owner accused of providing a space ‘where anything could be spoken, planned and allowed to happen.’ (p. 121) At the time of ‘dissident’ revolt, the Zimbabwean government sent to Matabeleland a specially trained military unit (the Fifth Brigade) which wiped out countless civilian families. Written in an equally violent historical moment, Vera’s text has the courage to assert that such acts were deliberately executed and planned, then just as deliberately deleted from the nation’s official memory. ‘The team of soldiers who congregated on Thandabantu store had demonstrated that anything which had happened so far had not been random or unplanned. Atrocious, yes, but purposeful.’ (p. 124) ‘Mahlathini’s death would not be registered. There would be no memory desired of it. It was such a time; such a death.’ (p. 122) After independence, rather than being liberated, the rural space of Kezi becomes ‘a naked cemetery.’ (p. 143)
When I met and interviewed her in Bulawayo in 2001, Vera was working on The Stone Virgins. Speaking of the transformative effect of writing on her life, she said:
You must feel it and experience it as something which transforms you. I always feel, with each paragraph I write, I have to be at a new threshold. Either in my own mental state, or in the voice and the language, in what I have discovered about the character, about the moment, about the art of writing, the act of writing. Paragraph by paragraph. I feel transformed. And I always feel at the end of the day, when I manage to write, I panic, my heart beats, and I think, if I had not written today, I would not be where I am right now, right now, this moment.
With this brave and balanced novel, Vera has transformed the present moment of Zimbabwean fiction.
Ranka Primorac, Nottingham Trent University
Review of The Stone Virgins - Heather Hewett
A country in fragments
The Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera.
Reviewed by Heather Hewett
IN A NATION WHERE FEAR has ruled for decades, Yvonne Vera has consistently spoken out against injustice and violence. Vera, the author of four novels and one collection of short stories, has built a writing career out of criticizing Zimbabwe's shortcomings--no small feat in a country where outspoken journalists, writers and artists have been imprisoned and opposition party members have routinely disappeared. Even more remarkable is that Vera, who earned a doctorate in literature from York University in Ontario, still lives and publishes in the country of her birth. Unlike the many African writers who have been forced into exile, she continues to explore her deep love of Zimbabwe from her home in Bulawayo.
Vera's commitment to her country has emboldened her to take on controversial subjects in her fiction, most of all the impact of violence on Zimbabwean women. Her central characters are women who suffer from the wars, poverty and patriarchal oppression that have plagued this southern African nation for years. She refuses to offer her reader conventional or tidy resolutions; rather, she weaves fragmented narratives that inexorably build to their tragic endings, wrapping incisive social criticism in impressionistic and elliptical language. One wonders whether her style has protected her from those who might not like what she has to say.
After exploring the conflict between Zimbabwe and Britain during the late nineteenth century in Nehanda (1993), her first novel, Vera moved beyond the concerns of anticolonialism to examine the violence within African communities during the tumultuous twentieth century. Without a Name (1994), a brief but powerful novel that moves between past and present, tells a story centered around rape and infanticide; Under the Tongue (1996), a highly fragmented and poetic narrative, focuses on a young girl's struggle to survive incest, her father's murder and her mother's incarceration. The equally imagistic Butterfly Burning (1998), which marked Vera's US debut two years later, deals with more forbidden topics: abortion and suicide.
Vera aims even higher with The Stone Virgins, a piercing, lyrical novel that takes on another subject surrounded by fear and silence: the massacres of innocent civilians that took place in the 1980s, shortly after the country won its independence. Newly elected president Robert Mugabe, attempting to consolidate his power, sent soldiers to rid the country of black insurgents and dissidents. No one knows precisely how many people were killed, but the numbers run into the thousands. Matabeleland province, where Vera's story takes place, was particularly hard hit. Years of terror silenced many people; now, with her new novel, Vera breaks that silence to give voice to some of the victims of the violence perpetrated under black rule.
Like Vera's previous work, The Stone Virgins tells a story of wounding and trauma. But whereas her earlier work plumbs the traumatized psyches of individual characters, this one ambitiously reaches outward and across time. She interweaves the lives of two sisters with the story of their community, Kezi, a rural town located 120 kilometers west of the city of Bulawayo. Unlike its more urban neighbor with its modern, grid-like streets, Kezi is a forgotten town at the end of a tarred road. Its inhabitants, who live in mud huts and congregate at the small, dusty general store, patiently wait for the arrival of a phone for the town's empty telephone booth and cautiously watch the wars being fought in the nearby hills of Gulati. With this expansive sweep--across the geography of Matebeleland province, over a period of 36 years--the story of an entire nation unfolds.
THE FIRST THIRD of the novel spans the colonial era and the decades-long fight for independence from white rule. It begins in Bulawayo in 1950, when Rhodesian society kept Africans and Europeans separate. Vera evocatively describes how black men and women were forced to conduct their lives within the interstices of the city: "Ekoneni is a rendezvous, a place to meet. You cannot meet inside any of the buildings because this city is divided; entry is forbidden to black men and women; you meet outside buildings, not at doorways, entries, foyers, not beneath arched windows, not under graceful colonnades, balustrades, and cornices, but ekoneni. Here, you linger, ambivalent, permanent as time. You are in transit."
As the story moves to the rural enclave of Kezi, we meet Thenjiwe, a beautiful young woman who has a brief but intense love affair with a man who steps off the bus from Bulawayo. They drift apart and the affair ends; the story hints that words have failed them. With masterful foreshadowing, Vera suggests the unforeseen calamity that lies ahead for Thenjiwe: "She has no idea now, or ever, that some of the harm she has to forget is in the future, not in the past, and that she would not have enough time in the future to forget any of the hurt."
The remainder of the novel records the devastating violence that tore apart the young nation between 1981 and 1986. Vera's characters are not spared: one sister is brutally murdered, the other is raped and mutilated by a black insurgent. Vera captures these excruciating events in images that are simultaneously explicit and metaphorical:
He enters her body like a vacuum. She can do nothing to save herself.... He forces her down. She yields. She is leaning backwards into his body. He holds her body like a bent stem. He draws her waist into the curve of his arm. She is molded into the shape of his waiting arm--a tendril on a hard rock.
He is at the pit of her being. Her anger rises furiously. Her saliva is a sour ferment of bile. She would like to speak, to spit. (p. 68)
The metaphor conveys the victim's vulnerability with an unexpected lyricism, but it does not erase the violence. Rather, Vera's use of metaphor suggests the inadequacy of language in the face of trauma. Again and again, the story returns to the same moments, as repetition suggests how a human consciousness would struggle to grasp the unthinkable. With each new stroke of the pen, the hazy picture becomes a little clearer--or as clear as these unspeakable horrors can become.
Vera's story reminds one of works by Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat and Michael Ondaatje, all of whom similarly grapple with physical and psychological trauma. Like them, she explores how violence affects both body and mind. How can healing take place when wounds cut deep into places that no one can see? What happens to language and to memory? "Only the skin heals," she writes. But "[t]hese are the wounds of war, which no one can heal; bandages and stitches cannot restore a human being with a memory intact and true inside the bone."
Given her earlier work, Vera's preoccupation with trauma is hardly surprising. But what differentiates The Stone Virgins from her previous novels is her willingness to ask more searching questions about the violence that has plagued Zimbabwe. She ventures into entirely different territory--the mind of the killer--as the rest of the novel alternates between a woman's struggle to heal and her attacker's story. Readers who haven't already felt disoriented by the story's shifts in point of view (Vera frequently and unexpectedly switches between first and third person) will certainly feel the shock of experiencing the story through the eyes of the rapist Sibaso. Slowly we come to realize that he, too, is a victim of the war, a wounded man who takes refuge in a Gulati bomb crater filled with dead, dismembered bodies and ancient stone carvings of virgins which exert an enigmatic power.
As Vera plunges into Sibaso's scarred psyche, she takes one of the greatest artistic and psychological risks of her writing career. It is the gamble of a mature and compassionate writer and it succeeds: as the story deepens, we catch a glimpse of the full extent of the war's ravages. Both dissidents and soldiers wreak havoc on the country, destroying Kezi with a systematic, planned brutality. As the violence ricochets from person to person, no woman or man remains untouched.
VERA'S WORK, which combines emotionally difficult subject matter with a dense, poetical writing style, has garnered a great deal of praise and recognition from the literary community in Zimbabwe and internationally. While it's difficult for African writers to receive such attention, it's also professionally crucial. The scarcity of resources for publishing African literature and its typically small readership create a series of hurdles for any aspiring African writer. But Vera has benefited from a close relationship with Harare-based Baobab Books, which published her first four novels and, more recently, the newly established Weaver Press, also in Harare, which published The Stone Virgins in 2002. She has also racked up an impressive number of literary awards. After coming close with her first three titles, she won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Under the Tongue. (Her other awards include the 1999 Voice of Africa Award and the inaugural 2002 Macmillan Writer's Prize for Africa for The Stone Virgins.) Some critics have compared her to Ben Okri, the acclaimed Nigerian writer from an earlier generation.
In spite of all this praise, Vera has continued to develop as a writer, and her latest novel manifests this growth. While in many ways a culmination of her work thus far, The Stone Virgins also represents a departure for a writer who until now has been more comfortable with poetry than plot. Her previous fiction verges on the overly poetical, almost self-indulgently so, at times leaving the reader lost in oblique language. Now, however, Vera hinges poetry to narrative. While her style remains literary, she does not forget her reader, whom she invites into the story at the very beginning. Using the second person, she asks us to behold the beauty of Bulawayo's flower-covered city streets, and in particular Selborne Avenue with its magnificent jacarandas: "you can look down it for miles and miles, with your eyes encountering everything plus blooms."
When the prose disorients the reader, it's usually in service of a greater goal: to reproduce in us the feelings of uncertainty and fear that the characters experience. Yet along with suffering, Vera gives her readers hope--a conspicuous absence in her earlier novels. At the end, some measure of healing comes from a man who, unlike Sibaso, aims to reconstruct history instead of destroy it and believes that a "new nation needs to restore the past." Given all the anguish and terror, the whiff of redemption passes too quickly; I wanted Vera to develop this character and his relationship with the victim. Still, his mission echoes one of the book's central themes: that somehow, in the face of war and destruction, some things endure.
Above all, the landscape provides a source of beauty and strength throughout the novel. The Shona word zimbabwe, which means "house of stone," is most certainly not lost on the author of a novel featuring carved stone virgins which have silently witnessed years of devastation and loss and have outlasted them. So too, The Stone Virgins whispers, Zimbabwe may yet survive. If communities can be restored and history remembered--if fear dissipates and men and women can speak out--then perhaps the seeds of regeneration will sprout in this war- and hunger-torn nation.