This paper will focus on four of Yvonne Vera's works to date, 'An Unyeilding Circle' found in her earliest collection of short stories Why Don't You Carve Other Animals (1992), Without a Name (1994), Under the Tongue (1996a), and Butterfly Burning (1998). In Cloth and Human Experience Jane Schneider (1989, 6) writes that 'precisely because it wears thin and disintegrates, cloth becomes an apt medium for communicating the central problem of power: social and political relationships are necessarily fragile in an impermanent, ever-changing world.' Schneider's observation that the nature of cloth reflects the impermanence of social relations is also noted to Carol Cavanaugh, who observes in Japanese literature of the Heian era that 'the structure of cloth suggest a web of exchanges and transactions that the cloth itself enabled' (1996, 599). The production of cloth, its presence on the body, and its role within the home comprise the scope of this paper. It is my reading that in each instance cloth exposes the true nature of the unspoken social relations that occur in its presence.

"The Voice of Cloth" (chapter 5) pp. 57-62 published in Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera (Weaver Press: 2002) edited by Robert Muponde and Mandi Taruvinga