This study reframes Yvonne Vera's novel, "The Stone Virgins" as a potential secondary school literature text in the Zimbabwean curriculum through which a pedagogy of expiation could be re-imagined. The argument is that the traumatic experiences that Zimbabwe has gone through as a nation require open re-engagement and debate. The study thus employs the notion of "difficult knowledge" as a heuristic to engage with harrowing past events represented in "The Stone Virgins" in ways that may console and provoke students and teachers into acknowledging collective guilt. Thus, the study advocates for the inclusion of the text in the school syllabus so as to provide space for critical re-engagement with the nation's unhealed wounds in order to promote expiation and healing.