Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning (1998) is a poignant, ironic account of the thwarted dreams of a people trapped in the harsh confines of a colonised society where men (as labourers) and women (as prostitutes) acquire precarious accommodation in the urban economy of Bulawayo. Set in the 1940s, the text evokes the textures of township life, exploring the initially coinciding but eventually tragically divergent aspirations of a couple: fifty-year-old Fumbatha, whose father was hanged for participating in the first freedom struggle against the invading colonists, and Phephelaphi, barely twenty, who saw her adored mother gunned down by her illicit lover, a white policeman. Initially their passionate and tender relationship proves to be the refuge they both need, but the love and hope of a family life which to Fumbatha is the only available compensation for the loss of land to the colonists become the constrictions preventing Phephelaphi from achieving the hoped-for escape that the first-ever intake of black nursing trainees offers.
I explore how Vera ‘excavates’ the different forms of “buried hurt” experienced by male and female; older and younger black Rhodesians to educate the postcolonial gaze—how she recognizes the hunger for land and dignity [in older, colonised males] painfully suppressed during the “pause” before protest politics resumes, and the pain caused by thwarting roles available to colonised females. My paper examines the affective archeology of the colonised condition that conventional historiography erases or ignores as it becomes accessible through Vera’s postcolonial reimagining—a rendition that reconceives the gendered complications of resistance to subjugation.