Painful Encounters in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins

Abstract

Yvonne Vera’s novels carry within them an insidious sense of sadness, a feeling for the tragedy of people frustrated by surroundings and circumstance. As the quotation above suggests, in Vera’s writing pain pervades women’s daily existence. It extends from the workings of the imagination to the daily process of living. Here, as elsewhere, Vera examines how individual and collective suffering is experienced as a result of curtailed dreams, social inequalities and violent conflict. Known for her linguistic brilliance and poetic complexity, Vera nonetheless uses the term ‘pain’ repeatedly, in many different contexts. Why does she return to this word? And how does she embed it conceptually and aesthetically within her texts to produce such a myriad of different meanings? Such questions tie into key themes that will run throughout this book: the role of literature in representing aversive emotions and sensations; the use of language in probing experiences of suffering; and the search for appropriate critical approaches that attempt to capture the nuances of pain descriptions so aptly personalised through fiction.

Grandmother says that a woman cannot point to the source of her pain, saying, it is here and there. A woman finds her sorrow in her dream and everywhere.

Yvonne Vera (Under 162)