Novel
Butterfly Burning
Yvonne Vera · 1998
Synopsis
At the end of the forties, in Makokoba, the black township of Bulawayo, Fumbatha, a building worker who is building the white people's city, sees Phephelaphi, much younger than himself, come out of the river, and loves her at once. She comes to live with him in his single room, but what drew him to her, her taste for independence, soon drives her away: she wants to become a nurse, and at the moment she gets a place at the neighbourhood nursing school, she discovers that she is pregnant.
Context
The novel appeared in Harare in 1998 with Baobab Books, then in New York with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2000. It is set in a neighbourhood where the workers who build the colonial city cross paths with the regulars of Deliwe's shebeen, and from which the heroine cannot escape alone. Critics have placed it at the heart of the body of work, from Michelle Cliff to Obi Nwakanma, who reads in it in 2013 the condition of subalterns in the nation. Fayard published the French translation by Geneviève Doze in 2002, under the title Papillon brûle.
Who it is for
In English, a short novel in very imagistic prose, which advances by repetitions and calls for a patient reader.
Prizes and reception
German literary prize LiBeraturpreis in 2002; selected the same year among the hundred best African books of the twentieth century.
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