Without a Name at once shocks with its violence and astounds with its beauty. In prose that reads like poetry, Yvonne Vera charts the course of a young woman, Mazvita, as she journeys from rural Mubaira to the chaos of late 1970s Harare, a hotbed of violent political action and revolutionary social change. After collapsing from mental and physical exhaustion, Mazvita moves in with a young man, who, when it becomes evident that she is pregnant, turns Mazvita out of his home. Destitute, she is led by fear and desperation to commit an unthinkable act.<BR>With Under the Tongue, Vera became the first Zimbabwean writer to deal frankly with the problem of incest that plagued the country. When Zhizha is raped by her father, a self-styled war hero, she loses all desire and ability to speak. Her relationships with her mother - jailed for killing her husband after discovering his brutal acts - and her grandmother evoke profound meditations on the nature and necessity of language and expression, and on the affinity between silence and sorrow: "A word does not rot unless it is carried in the mouth for too long, under the tongue."