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Set in the late 1940s in Southern Rhodesia, Yvonne Vera's novel Butterfly Burning tells the tragic story of Phephelaphi, a young woman who tries to find her own voice and ends up burning herself. In order to express the feeling of incompleteness of the young woman, the author resorts to a form of writing based on silences, fragments and allusions. Yet what could threaten the coherence of the novel is counterbalanced by a construction that can also be called elliptical in the sense that several motifs and images draw ellipses throughout the text. Meaning is conveyed through a system of repetitions, echoes and variations that prevent it from falling apart. Through the analysis of this elliptical writing, the present paper questions the relationship between gender and postcolonial context.
In a postcolonial context in which many debates centred, until recently, on the supremacy of gender over race and cultural issues, the examination of Yvonne Vera's novel may be of particular relevance. Born in 1964 in Bulawayo, in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), Yvonne Vera is one of the most promising African writers today. Her education was clearly cosmopolitan: she studied fine arts in Canada and travelled across Europe and the United States before returning to Zimbabwe where she now runs Bulawayo' s National Art Gallery. Her works include a collection of short stories Why Don't you Carve Other Animals, 1992)' and five novels, Butterfly Burning being the last but one.
In this novel, she tells the story of Phephelaphi a young woman who lives a beautiful love story with an older man called Fumbatha. In these times of segregation, when life is hard for both black men and women, Phephelaphi longs for a better life. In 1946, for the first time, black women are allowed to become nurses. Phephelaphi is convinced that this will bring her what she yearns for, that is a feeling of completeness, a sense of being that even her relationship with Fumbatha has not brought her. Yet, shortly after being accepted to train as a nurse, she discovers that she is pregnant. This situation destroys all her hopes as the admission paper for the training stipulates that: 'In any case married girls were not admitted as they could get pregnant while being...