Yvonne Vera

"I must be in touch with the earth. I can never mistake the source of inspiration and energy to be gender, it is something we all share. It is true, however, that one best writes on themes, feelings, and sentiments one is more closely connected with. In this regard I like to think that I am writing. I am a woman. I am writing."

"She cried, and the women sang her back to sleep, willing a silence onto her. She defied them with her tiny speech-seeking voice and cried all day and all night until her mother fell asleep."

"I doubt that the natives can listen to an old woman like her. What can she tell them? This society has no respect for women, whom they treat like children. A woman has nothing to say in the life of the natives. Nothing at all."

"The dare was a large clearing in the center of the village. Those who were admitted to the dare knew the power of words. The midwife was also among the shapers of wisdom, who determined the future of the village."

"Our people know the power of words. It is because of this that they desire to have words continuously spoken and kept alive. We do not believe that words can become independent of the speech that bore them, of the humans who controlled and gave birth to them. [... ] The paper is the stranger’s own peculiar custom. Among ourselves, speech is not like the rock. Words cannot be taken from the people who create them. People are their words."

"Nehanda came out of me like a dream. It has the feeling of a dream when I look at it now. And that suited it, because it concerned a myth, a legend. It was a story of spirituality, of ancestors, a mystic consciousness and a history ... so it was much better to write it almost intuitively, out of my consciousness of being an African, as though I were myself a spirit medium, and I was just transferring or conveying the feelings, symbols and images of that. I wrote it at a time when I could write it, the way one might write a folk-song... I wrote it from remembrance, as a witness to my own spiritual history."

"How can words be made still [in writing], without turning into silence? Silence is more to be feared than the agitation of voices."

"If speaking is still difficult to negotiate, then writing has created a free space for most women -much freer than speech. The book is bound, circulated, read. It retains its autonomy much more than a woman is allowed in the oral situation."

"Time is as necessary for remembering as it is for forgetting. Even the smallest embrace of pain needs time larger than a pause; the greatest pause requires an eternity, the greatest hurt a lifetime. A lifetime is longer than eternity: an eternity can exist without human presence."

"I always need to be anchored in such a way that I am inside a character."

"I wanted to write beyond the photograph, you know, that frozen image, beyond the date, beyond the fact of her dying. If anything in my book she doesn't die, she departs."

"needed to enter [Nehanda's] mythic consciousness to really be part of it, to share it and to claim it as my own history and my own identity"

"What were our lives compared to the survival of the earth on which we stood?"

"Nehanda holds her silence all day, offering it with the palm of her hand as though it were something solid. She shouts.... closed out the earthly sounds that try to penetrate and disturb her silence."

"The land cannot be owned. We cannot give him any land because the land does not belong to the living."

"carrying the current of a roar that reminds them of who they have been in the past, but it is also the comforting voice of a woman, of their mothers whom they trust. Her voice throws them into the future."

"I would love to be remembered as a writer who had no fear for words and who had an intense love for her nation"

"I was asked by the publisher if I had more stories. I said 'yes' haphazardly, though I had none. He asked for them. Therefore I set out to write them"

"I would not write if I weren’t in search of beauty, if I was doing it only to advance a cause. I care deeply about my subjects, but I want to be consumed by figures of beauty, by story and character. It must be about perfection. Like a basket-maker or a weaver or a hair-plaiter, you are aware of what you are trying to accomplish from the first sentence"

"I am against silence"

"The books I write try to undo the silent posture African women have endured over so many decades"

"Our forefathers crafted a language that made it difficult to address these contentious issues. In African culture, for example, to talk to my father, I bow. If I am announcing that somebody has died, I use a particular language, a particular tone… so as to convey the message. But for subjects like incest and rape… you are not allowed to mention it. Even to your mother, who must pantomime the news if she tells your aunt"

"An empty box of matches. A single leather shoe with laces still attached… An inkstand says London. A magnificent metal spoon with a dove embossed on it. Selborne Hotel is written along the broken handle of a ceramic pot"

"My tales are tragic, rather than sad, meaning they have a catastrophic force"

"When I am not writing, which is most of the time… it is as though I am fasting. I am preparing myself. In other words, I no longer know what it is not to be consumed by writing. I anticipate sitting down with a story the way certain women anticipate lovers—with my breath held still, my knees shaking, a tidy room, a clean petticoat, and with no idea how the evening will turn out—in this case the book"

"I will have had enough intimacies to acquire a general sketch, a thrill, and a confidence. It is the same with books as it is with lovers. If you cannot feel your whole body move towards a book, then you are mostly doodling, or being quite separate from the act of writing. I spend many months between books fasting. I am meditative and spend many hours on my own, with my hunger growing. I love writing; it is a feast for my senses. I write to share this feast with a reader"

"The work is not their own: it is summoned. The time is not theirs: it is seized. The ordeal is their own."

"If not freedom then rhythm."

"Fumbatha could never be the beginning or end of all her yearning."