Under the tongue

by Yvonne Vera

In Under the Tongue (1996), the adolescent Zhizha has lost the will to speak. In lyrical fragments, Vera relates the story of Zhizha's parents, and the horrifying events that led to her mother's imprisonment and her father's death. With this novel Vera became the first Zimbabwean writer ever to deal frankly with incest. With these surprising, at times shocking novels Vera shows herself to be a writer of great potential.

Genres: Africa, Fiction

114 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Yvonne Vera (September 19, 1964 – April 7, 2005) was an award-winning author from Zimbabwe. Her novels are known for their poetic prose, difficult subject-matter, and their strong women characters, and are firmly rooted in Zimbabwe's difficult past. For these reasons, she has been widely studied and appreciated by those studying postcolonial African literature.

Vera was born in Bulawayo, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, to Jerry Vera and Ericah Gwetai. At the age of eight, she worked as a cotton-picker near Hartley. She attended Mzilikazi High School and then taught English literature at Njube High School, both in Bulawayo. In 1987 she travelled to Canada and she married John Jose, a Canadian whom she had met while he was teaching at Njube. At York University, Toronto, she completed an undergraduate degree, a master's and a PhD, and taught literature.

In 1995, Vera returned to Zimbabwe and in 1997 became director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo, a gallery that showcases local talent ranging from that of professional artists to school children. In 2004 she went back to Canada, where she died on April 7, 2005, of AIDS-related meningitis.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Bjorn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yvonne Vera's tale isn't a pretty one - accomplished novelist by 30, considered one of the most promising African writers, and dead from AIDS at 40. Once you know something like that about a writer, it's difficult to separate her from the books she wrote; it looks too symbolic, too depressing.

Much like Under the Tongue, in other words. Her third novel (and the first of hers I've read) is at the same time graceful and deeply unsettling, hard-hitting and willfully opaque. This is obviously intentional; after all, this tale of three generations of Zimbabwean women living around the time of the war for independence is centered around the idea that there are some things you cannot say, some things that are too horrible, too traumatizing or too taboo to speak out loud - yet will kill you from within if you don't express them; a history of accusations of witchcraft, of grief, of violence and rape. Let your women keep silence etc. How the very things you fight for can end up crushing you - or leading to you crushing others. It tries to understand, to connect, but optimistic it ain't.

Alternating between a first-person account by the young grand-daughter Zhizha and a third-person history of her family, the novel paints a picture where the reader has to fill in a lot him/herself - especially for Zhizha's chapters, which get very poetic and symbolic; too much so, IMO. While the imagery is sometimes very striking, it also frequently gets both too impenetrable and far too repetitive. The entire novel, but especially the first-person bits, has an almost nightmarish quality - and anyone who's ever tried their hand at dream interpretation know how frustrating it can be. "Oh, another reference to rivers flowing somewhere but roots tying you down?"

I'm sure there is a good, possibly great, novel to be found in here if you're willing to do the work. A story that's both compassionate and painful, furious and forgiving. If your tastes run towards the abstractly allegorical, you might like it a lot; personally, I find myself playing connect-the-dots a little too often to appreciate the whole picture.

[Andy Mejía · Rating 4 out of 5]

The obscurity of the language in the novel conveys the inability of Zhiza, the narrator and protagonist, to express the depth of the sorrow and the atrocity that marked herself and her family. Through the use of symbols and metaphors, the narrator tells us the events that sealed her soul as an attempt to heal herself and not succumb to the silence that characterizes the dead. Words in this novel are a means of catharsis.

[Rita · Rating 4 out of 5]

1996. Vera [1964-2005, born in Bulawayo]
See more reviews on a later combined edition "WIthout a Name and Under the Tongue".

Remarkable, amazing book, it reads like poetry. Juxtaposes sights and sounds and smells and touch. Only sometimes do the sentences make any 'sense', most often they are contradictory, cryptic, mysterious. Somehow the words do succeed in conveying an atmosphere of fear and violence and danger.

Marlene bought her copy in Zimbabwe soon after it came out and got the author's signature in it.

I am glad now to read some helpful reviews and Kopf's good article about the book so I can follow it a little bit better. I can re-read a sentence or paragraph or page half a dozen times and still not grasp what it is about, though the words always manage to convey feelings [fear, hurt].

Kopf examines the book as a story about trauma, a story that helps us FEEL the trauma, and shows a long and arduous process of healing.

What does the name 'Zhizha' mean? pp 15, 32, 97. "the secret in my name" p 104.
What does the word Tonderayi mean? It is often mentioned, esp. by the grandmother. pp. 10, 32, 44. "one who remembers" p 72.

mother of Zhizha is Runyararo
father of Zhizha is Muroyiwa
father of Muroyiwa is VaGomba
mother of Muroyiwa is VaMirika
brother of Muroyiwa is Tachivey

The sound of a knife on rock --- symbolizes what?

Several chapters feature butterflies, esp. chapters about Muroyiwa. Pp 35-36 has a gorgeous description of a whole 'troupe' of butterflies, wonderful poetry. Maybe the only part of the book with no suggestion of violence?

=======================
"Under the Tongue chronicles adolescent Zhizha's search for identity through a complicated relationship with her family. The tongue-tied girl cryptically reveals her family's secrets—why she has come to embrace her grandmother as her mother; why her mother has been jailed; how her father has died. Zhizha is caught between the desire to remember and to forget. Again, the characters are amorphous and often seem merely vehicles for language that would be better suited to a volume of poetry than a work of fiction. These stark tales explore the painful scars left by incest, murder, dislocation and war..." ---Publishers Weekly
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-...
==========

excerpts from Martina Kopf's excellent article on ResearchGate:
"Narrative witnessing in Under the Tongue.
Yvonne Vera’s novel contains a succession of individual chapters that alternate in a constant rhythm between first- and third-person narration. The first-person passages lead us into the “hidden places” of Zhizha, the young protagonist. Close to her narration, an auctorial voice unfolds a second narrative trail, following the story of Zhizha’s family: the origins of her father Muroyiwa, his path to the township of Umtali where he met Zhizha’s mother, Runyararo, and where the three of them lived together. As we learn in the end, Zhizha was born ten years before the cease-fire. The third-person narration thus fills in the gaps of Zhizha’s narration; it accompanies and backs her and unravels her story from another angle. The auctorial voice mediates between Zhizha’s mental language and the reader, introducing a certain distance and adding an outside perspective to the interior drama we are led to witness. Zhizha, the ‘I’ of the narration, presents herself as landscape, as an open territory. Her body language is translated into metaphors of water and stone. Her body/soul/spirit landscape is mainly shaped by a river, her tongue, which hides beneath the rock her belly has turned into in fear and defense.

"A tongue which no longer lives, no longer weeps. It is buried beneath rock. My tongue is a river. I touch my tongue in search of the places of my growing. My tongue is heavy with sleep. I know a stone is buried in my mouth, carried under my tongue. My voice has forgotten me."

With her tongue buried, this landscape seems to be an open territory for the uncontrolled coming and going of voices and memories. Zhizha’s ‘I’ moves to and fro in endless shiftings and displacements, the boundaries of her ‘self’ are indistinct and permeable. At the end of the narrative we learn that she had been literally split open by her father, who ‘entered into her’ while she slept.
In the opening scene, Zhizha does not explicitly say that her father raped her. Her father and the act of sexual abuse are metaphorically represented by her father’s voice, which enters Zhizha’s sleep and haunts her, making her own voice hide, disappear. Right from the beginning, Zhizha’s first-person narrative is abundant with images that show her tongue as an immobile, frozen, and alienated part of her body. But only several chapters later and from the outside perspective of the third-person narrative do we learn that what shows itself as metaphor also literally means that Zhizha does not speak, that she has been muted.
If her soul/body/spirit territory is marked by this forced splitting and opening, it nonetheless displays a willing openness to her grandmother’s voice and words. Grandmother’s voice, which Zhizha recalls and evokes inside her, does not enter or penetrate her. It “remembers” her, “embraces” her, “follows” her. These terms suggest that this other voice respects and tries to re-build the boundaries of Zhizha’s self. The excessive appearance of voices makes us acknowledge right from the beginning that, whatever happened, it is significant on the level of language.
...
Together with Zhizha we find ourselves in a dreamlike state, where we cannot tell imagination from reality, present from past, sleeping from being awake. While reading what happens in her mind, we feel confusion and the urge to find meaning for this confusion. Zhizha searches for a word that can make remembrance, mourning, and living flow again. We follow Zhizha’s repeated efforts to make the narration flow and we meet the obstacles and ruptures that incessantly put a halt to the flow, so that another trail must be explored. While moving in Zhizha’s body/soul/spirit landscape, we get the feeling of ‘flowing on the spot’. Maybe at some points in our wandering we feel impatient, have an urge to break through, to finally find a way out of this confusing landscape. Maybe we do not always understand the signification of the images, sounds, and rhythms we encounter. Maybe we cannot explain this ever-threatening deadly silence, but only acknowledge its persistence. However, whatever irritations we might feel while reading, they are part of the *performance of how trauma works*.
...
Female storytelling is given expression through Zhizha’s grandmother, whose shaping voice is predominant throughout the narrative. Zhizha is an intense and imaginative listener to her grandmother’s own hidden story. In a mutual process of giving and taking words from each other Zhizha brings forth her grandmother’s power to tell, and grows to ‘inherit’ her voice and words.
Once Zhizha’s active witnessing has enabled her grandmother to transmit her own story of loss and hurt, which she had been forced to bury a long time ago, a new flow of remembrance is set into motion. This flow leads Zhizha to rebuild an interior image of her mother as the one who taught her to spell.

"Mother calls to me in a voice just like mine, she grows from inside of me […]. I change into me, and I say a e i o u. I remember all my letters. I tell my mother and she repeats after me and I laugh then I repeat after mother who repeats after me and I after her … I have turned into mother, and she laughs, because she has become me. The letters flow from me to mother. My mother’s voice is resonant and searching. She says we live with our voices rich with remembrance. We live with words.

This passage may be one of the most beautiful parts of the book: mother and daughter in front of a mirror, repeating after one another, letting speech and transmission joyously flow between each other in an endless game of shifts and exchanges.
Finally, the third-person narrator strengthens Zhizha’s narration. She shows herself to be a sympathetic listener to the hidden voice of a girl who grows into too much “avoidable and significant pain and suffering.” The narrator empowers Zhizha’s voice and other hidden voices who have similar stories to tell by writing what she witnesses and communicating it to an outside public. This narration leads us back to the collective level, where empowerment is reenacted with each sympathetic reading of the story. "

above excerpt from Martina Kopf article on ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...

[Mina Widding · Rating 4 out of 5]

Det här är som prosalyrik. Varannat kapitel i ett barnjag-perspektiv, i ett slags tillstånd av flytande förståelse och ihopsättande av den egna världen, som att jaget skapar ett nytt språk. Varannat kapitel i tredje person och mera berättande om jagets far, och sedan hennes mor, hur de möts, det är ett krig etc. I början får man veta att modern dödat fadern och jaget lever med sina morföräldrar. I slutet förstår man, brutalt, varför jaget behöver skapa sitt språk på nytt.
Bitvis upprepande, att det blev tjatigt och förvirrande, med oklarheter över död och liv, över mormoderns sorg över ett barn som dog strax efter födseln, med ord som göms och vad himlen är och en massa saker som skiftar betydelse. Men i slutet läggs pusslet om varför detta sker, och då förstår man. Rent läsupplevelsemässigt alltså lite kämpigt, men det är värt det.
Eftersom det var ett sådant otydligt narrativ och mycket poetiska formuleringar, läste jag först varje kapitel på engelska, och sedan på svenska. Det gav utdelning.

[Moumita Laha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lyrical and moving story.

[Mills College Library]

823 V473u 1996