Moored Bodies, Travelling Spirits: Contested Mobilities in Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s The Theory of Flight and Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning

Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning and Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s The Theory of Flight unsettle normative conceptions of agency by foregrounding heroines who often resort to unconventional modes of pushback against environmental constraints. The heroines conjure up unfamiliar geographies of freedom as they realise mobility and transcendence in otherwise immobilising circumstances. In these scenarios of contested mobility, even death becomes a reaffirmation of life, an act of transcendence and the ultimate face of beauty. Through a close reading, this article explores how Vera and Ndlovu deploy symbolic enablement to narrate the ethics and politics of transcendence adopted by a cross-section of female characters in defiance of patriarchal surveillance and policing. The article argues that the two novels open vistas into the political dimensions of mobility in society’s margins and, in the process, underscore how beauty and self-affirmation can be realised even in the most dehumanising circumstances. This situates the novels within the broader politics of refusal in African literature and cultural production.