Ekoneni: Yvonne Vera's challenge to ocularcentrism in The stone virgins

Abstract

This essay proposes to discuss the ways in which the ocularcentrism, which remains a key paradigm in western thought, has been questioned by Southern African writers, focusing principally on a reading of the representation of space and the location of the reader in the first chapter of The Stone Virgins (2002) by the Zimbabwean Yvonne Vera. “Writing is a distillation process”, her countrywoman Tsitsi Dangarembga once said. These words are central to my treatment of this complex issue, which lays particular emphasis on the word process, but this is only one part of a greater theme: the ways in which Southern African women writers represent the transition from colonialism to independence. Postcolonial writing foregrounds how the so-called binaries visibility/invisibility and speech/silence are combined in processes that signify movement and instability, instead of static bipolar separation.