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Under The Tongue Analysis

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The most consistently productive among Zimbabwean authors in English, Yvonne Vera (September 19, 1964 - April 7, 2005), has won national and international prizes, and her works have been translated into several languages.The article focuses on the subtlety with which the psychic impact of rape and violence depicted in Vera’s novelUnder the Tongue, especially as manifested in the suppression of the female victim’s voice and memory. It attempts to depict some of the paradoxes creativewriting of sexual violence has to encounter and demonstrate the ways Vera integrates these into thenarrative composition of Under the Tongue. The articlediscusses the role literary fiction can play as a bridge between individual experience and collectivememory and …show more content…

Yvonne Vera (1964-2005), an award-winning novelist and innovative museum director was the winner of the first Macmillan Writer’s Prize for The Stone Virgins. In 1999, Vera was the recipient of Sweden’s ‘Voice of Africa’ award. In 1997, her novel Under the Tongue won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, African Region. She was awarded the Zimbabwean Publisher’s Literary Award for the best novel in 1996 and 1997. She is the author of a collection of short stories 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).Vera’s writings work against the silencing imposed on women by patriarchy and colonialism, and all her novels stress that to write is to banish …show more content…

The first part of the paper dwells upon the concept of trauma and the antagonism between traumaticexperience and narrative memory.
The second part of the paper discusses the role literary fiction can play as a bridge between individual experience and collectivememory. The third part presents a reading of Under the Tongue with respect to the novel’s abilityboth to perform the effects of trauma by mimetically reproducing them and to transform them intonarrative processes by creative choices.I have attempted to depict some of the paradoxes creativewriting of sexual violence has to encounter and demonstrate the ways Vera integrates these into thenarrative composition of Under the Tongue(UTT).
One of the main characteristics of trauma is its resistance to narrative representation, revealingitself more in a language of symptoms than in a language of words and sentences. Speaking abouttrauma we find ourselves in the paradoxical situation of speaking about the unspeakable, to look forwords for what originally surpassed the signifying power of

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