Butterfly Burning

Set in the late 1940s in Makokoba, a segregated Black township on the outskirts of Bulawayo in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), the novel opens on Sidojiwe E2, the township's longest street. Black men cut grass along roadsides in the sun, their labor summoned and their time seized. They are banned from city pavements, required to move invisibly through Bulawayo while maintaining its infrastructure for white residents. Their solace is Kwela, a musical form whose name means to climb into waiting police Jeeps but which has been transformed into an expression of desire, loss, and survival.

The narrative reaches back to April 1896, when 17 Black men who resisted the white settlers were hanged from a large tree near the Umguza River. Their bodies were left hanging for days while the women who mourned below were forbidden to touch them. Among the 17 was the father of Fumbatha, the novel's male protagonist. Born the same year his father died, Fumbatha's name means to hold tightly, as a child born with fingers clenched over an invisible truth. When Fumbatha is 14, his mother walks him to the hanging tree and whispers his name into the wind, expecting him to understand his link to the past. By 1946, he lives on Sidojiwe E2, haunted nightly by dreams of the 17 deaths, his father's name unknown to him.

Fumbatha has spent nearly 20 years as a construction laborer, building Bulawayo brick by brick. Near the Umguza River one day, he finds an ancient bracelet and decides to give it to Phephelaphi, the novel's female protagonist, whom he met at this same river in 1946. In a flashback, Phephelaphi emerges breathless from the water beneath his feet, having swum toward him from the opposite shore. She tells him her mother, Getrude, is dead, and she now lives with Zandile, a woman close to Getrude, in Makokoba. Her name means "where to seek refuge," given by her mother after years of raising a child alone. Fumbatha, much older, is deeply stirred; he has never wanted to possess anything except the land from which colonialism severed him, and Phephelaphi transforms him, making him relax his guarded hands.

Phephelaphi recounts Getrude's death: A stranger shot her mother at the doorway of their room in the middle of the night. Phephelaphi watched the arm fall slowly from the doorway, followed by the collapse of Getrude's body. A white policeman later returned the dress Getrude died in, marked with the name "Emelda," which Phephelaphi does not recognize. On the official paperwork, she wrote "Emelda" as her mother's name and signed her own name as "Getrude," separating herself from the event. She burned the dress and waited seven days for an invitation to the burial that never came.

The narrative turns to Zandile, who took Phephelaphi in after Getrude's death. Zandile has navigated Makokoba through cunning and fierce independence. By 1945, she has settled with her partner, Boyidi, and partitions their one room with a wardrobe to make space for Phephelaphi. As Zandile and Boyidi made love on one side, Phephelaphi lay awake on the other, wondering where hope begins.

Phephelaphi and Fumbatha soon decide to live together on Sidojiwe E2. Their love is consuming. They share a single room with thin walls and a sagging bed, their intimacy audible to neighbors. They walk the street together, buy oranges, and hide in hedges after midnight to avoid patrolling police vans. The narrative foreshadows devastation: One day Fumbatha will open the door and find Phephelaphi gone, in flight like a bird, in the middle of 1948.

Phephelaphi grows restless and visits the shebeen, or unlicensed bar, of Deliwe, a 50-year-old woman on Sidojiwe E2 whose defiance fascinates her. Deliwe was beaten and partially deafened by a policeman during a detention for selling alcohol and continues to brew illegal liquor despite repeated arrests. Fumbatha dislikes Deliwe, but Phephelaphi is drawn to her fearlessness. One night, Phephelaphi enters Deliwe's shebeen, a room dense with smoke and Kwela music, and as a musician plays a mournful tune, grief overwhelms her. The music forces her to relive her mother's death, and she finally mourns and forgives the woman named Emelda.

Phephelaphi's inner longing intensifies. She tells Fumbatha she wants to train as a nurse at the hospital, having heard from a teacher at United School that Black applicants would soon be accepted. Fumbatha forbids it, insisting his work provides for them both. This disagreement marks a central tension: her desire for selfhood against his need to keep her close and unchanged.

By 1948, a young Black woman in a starched white dress walks down Sidojiwe E2 and enters the General Mission Hospital as the first Black nurse accepted for training. Two weeks after her own acceptance, Phephelaphi realizes she is pregnant. Her admission conditions forbid pregnancy. She reads her acceptance letter until her eyes are blind with tears and goes to Deliwe in distress, but Deliwe cannot help.

Phephelaphi walks to the dry land beyond Makokoba and performs a self-induced abortion using the longest thorn she can find as a needle. The pain is cutting and bottomless. She slips in and out of consciousness, weaves a crude cradle from thorn branches with bleeding fingers, and the unborn child is released. She buries the remains beneath mounds of soft soil, then collapses.

Fumbatha is away for weeks. When he returns, Phephelaphi is a changed woman, walking in a stupor, receiving him physically but with empty eyes and weeping. Two months before her June Intake, she realizes Fumbatha knows about the pregnancy and the abortion. His knowledge shows through withdrawal: He offers her only one word at a time, stops whistling her favorite song, and fixes the broken window without asking how it shattered. Phephelaphi also senses he has been with another woman, and this knowing without being told is agony.

Deliwe reveals to Phephelaphi that she has been intimate with Fumbatha, proving the affair with details only a lover would know, including knowledge of a scar on his body and the secret of his father's hanging. Deliwe told Fumbatha what Phephelaphi confided in her about the pregnancy, which is how he learned about the abortion. When Phephelaphi confronts Fumbatha, he deflects by asking whether she killed their child and unleashes devastating revelations: Getrude was killed by her white policeman lover, who shot her after finding her talking to another man; Zandile once poured boiling oil on Boyidi's first wife and burned Boyidi's arm with boiling water; and Fumbatha claims he saved Phephelaphi from Zandile, who would have killed her. As his words overwhelm her, Phephelaphi's consciousness fractures. She arrives at the most devastating truth: Zandile is her biological mother, who gave birth to her by cesarean section, did not want the child, and handed the infant to Getrude to raise. Phephelaphi lies still, shattered, her body hollow.

Fumbatha leaves. The narrative shifts to Phephelaphi's first-person voice as she discovers she is pregnant again and must abandon the June Intake. She feels she is nothing, that Fumbatha has broken her stem and left her for Deliwe. In an interior monologue, she contemplates death, imagining the beauty of small sounds: eggshells crushed between palms, wind between raindrops.

Phephelaphi soaks her body in paraffin in their room on Sidojiwe E2 and sets herself on fire. Fumbatha opens the door and walks in whistling a careless tune to find her engulfed in flames. She turns her arms over, watching them burn, raising them above her head like a bird with wings spread. She is described as finally loving her own body, her own eyebrows, her own knees, by embracing each part of herself with flame. She whispers to Fumbatha about their unburied child, the second one still inside her burning body, now free and weightless. Her wings fold.