Butterfly Burning is a remarkable novel. Set in what was colonized as Southern Rhodesia, the time is the 1940s, the place the urban landscape of city and township. The novel opens with a scene of men scything grass at the roadside. The writing, here as elsewhere, is keen, vivid. The author's political sense, her critique of colonialism, is intrinsic, never intrusive. "In the air is the sound of a sickle cutting grass along the roadside where black men bend their backs in the sun and hum a tune, and fume, and lullaby."

Music plays throughout Butterfly Burning. Music, a saving grace, escape, away from the extremities of life, the gaze of police patrols. Within the four walls of a township dwelling, an asbestos cell constructed for Africans—men mostly, who have come from the country to find work, without wives, families—within these walls at night men and women gather, and the room becomes music. "They dance with a joy that is free, that has no other urgency but the sheer truth of living, the not-being here of this here-place."

In the township is the foundation of a structure to be called Success Stores. The state intrudes: Conscription into World War II to fight for king and country stops the would-be African entrepreneur in his tracks. No success story he. The veteran returns to a place where he has no say, where the very pavements are off-limits to him. This legal restriction is repeated in the novel as a motif, a reminder of where we are, where the writer has situated herself.

Children play amid the rubbish of colonialism. "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." The township children are struck by the beauty of oil rainbows, the mystery inside gasoline drums, and are drawn to the edge of a refinery where suddenly there is an explosion and men vanish before their eyes "in a cloud of violent and impeccable flame."

Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera writes gracefully, depicting with extraordinary elegance the chaos and disorder of township life, the surreal conditions of existence imposed by colonial authority upon the residents.

One of the most powerful chapters of the novel begins, "Nothing has more music in it than trains." The chapter describes the journeys of township dwellers into the city. They come from all over, and the reader hears the noise of trains against the noise of human language, as "accent rubs against accent, word upon word, dialect upon dialect, till the restless sound clears like smoke, the collision of words, tones, rhythms, and meanings more present than the trains beating past." There is a sort of triumph here. Of human expression, African origins, transcending the noise of the Cape to Cairo Railroad, Cecil Rhodes's masterpiece.

The triumph is short-lived. The township dwellers are unable to negotiate the metropolis, and for many their journey ends in the waiting room, "where people linger for months with nowhere to lodge. With no direction."

This is background. Foregrounded is a love story, one which begins with the passion between a man and a woman, a cocooned space of tenderness, and moves outward as the female protagonist ventures to become an individual in the wider world.

Two writers to whom I would compare Yvonne Vera are also African: the Algerian Assia Djebar and the South African Bessie Head. Each writes a prose that is spiraling, complex, as the best of so-called postcolonial writing is. Each is an outlaw, in matters of form as well as content. All three write within female experience, within a colonized context, exploring the limits placed on women by the colonizer, as well as by tradition, describing the consequences of breaching those limits. The violence, both psychic and physical, which the female rebel may endure.

Such a character is Deliwe in Butterfly Burning. She is a routine outlaw, breaking laws she judges absurd, running a liquor establishment in her home for the benefit of township dwellers. Her home becomes a refuge.

Deliwe had once been locked up for a whole night in a police cell for selling alcohol and moreover in a dwelling. She threw her head back and laughed like a madwoman when she was told that this square shelter with its falling roof, its colorless weak walls, and nowhere to make love to a man, was a house. That was when the policeman slapped her. . . . She never explained that the deafness in her right ear was caused by the beating she received during her detention.

Butterfly Burning By Yvonne Vera Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 151 pp., $12 paper Buy this book

Her response when asked if she does not fear the police is "Everyone is allowed to have visitors." And indeed that commonplace is at the center of this novel. The longing for company, for visitors, in the bounds of a system determined to isolate and disempower. Deliwe creates a home away from home. She is a heroine, and her heroics have a direct effect on the female protagonist of Butterfly Burning.

Phephelaphi is the female protagonist. She is at first associated with water, emerging from the river, a gift for the man who will become her lover.

He, Fumbatha, is associated with the earth, the land "which he longed for," and for which longing his father was hanged, among 17 resisters, at the edge of this very river.

The men are left up in the tree all day and night. The moon gives them a living light that rises like a soft layer of smoke from their bodies, a spiraling mist in which their skin melts off. The tree itself is veiled, then its strong branches emerge, denying secrecy, and reveal the broken figures weighing down upon their arms. The branches bend down. High up off the ground, some lower. Seventeen male bodies blown into the branches by a ruthless wind.

This is Fumbatha's birthright.

Phephelaphi has been raised by a woman who was murdered, "who had the foolishness to trust a man knocking on her door. At midnight."

At first the lovers cleave to one another. Later, as Fumbatha is away, Phephelaphi moves into the world, into the adventure of her own life. She rejects, against her lover's wishes, the safety of their relationship, and goes forth into Deliwe's other world.

What becomes of her is described in some of the most powerful and evocative writing of the novel. Like Head and Djebar, Vera explodes myths of womanhood and romance, and realistically and unsentimentally depicts the price women may pay for their longing to become someone, to decolonize themselves.

Phephelaphi begins as water, gift from the river. She finds she is pregnant, and knowing her ambition to become a nurse—one of the first black nurses in Southern Rhodesia—will be thwarted because of her condition, performs a self-abortion, written in searing tones. She is now earth: "She spreads smooth soil over the dotted spots which are going round and round on the ground where an animal, wounded, has performed a lonely rite. . . . Phephelaphi closes her eyes and pours her sorrow down. She adds more and more of the soil till she had formed a high mound around her and then she collapses to the ground. She has built a solid mound of earth smooth like ash."

She ends as fire. The butterfly of the title, burning.

Michelle Cliff's most recent book is The Store of a Million Items.

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