Professor Sam Durrant from Leeds University delivers seminar "'Livable Places’: Women, Land and Animism in Yvonne Vera’s 'The Stone Virgins'" at the Master's Degree in Advanced English Studies at the University of Alicante

Yvonne Vera's novel The Stone Virgins is a female-centred and innovative take on the Matabeleland massacres that took place in post-independence Zimbabwe in the 1980s.  The atrocities still cast a long shadow in contemporary Zimbabwean society. In his  exploration of Vera's novel, Professor Durrant advocates a dis-enclosed form of animism as key to reconciliation in post-conflict societies. As Achille Mbembe has argued, decolonisation involves the disenclosure not only of property but also of identity, a breaking free from the enclosures of race, gender and species that divide humans from each other and the world. Animism, as an inter-species mode of relationality, potentially offers itself as a model of disenclosed, non-hierarchical  community, but only when it has itself been disentangled from the history of property and settlement. The novel’s title refers to a cave painting of women about to be sacrificed at the funeral of a king. At the level of history, animism thus appears as a form of enclosure that naturalises violence against women and legitimates in advance the Matabeland massacres. However, at the level of style, Vera’s prose recovers/reinvents animism as an ethics of corporeal care designed to secure non-violent forms of co-habitation.