Tsitsi Dangarembga Turns From Fiction to Polemic
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Loading... - Deborah Korir
- 26 Jan 2023
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The essays in “Black and Female” recount the Zimbabwean novelist and filmmaker’s life in the context of colonialism and its aftermaths.
The Zimbabwean novelist and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga’s oeuvre has been defined by her unwillingness to render her characters — citizens of newly independent nations, wandering through the unmapped expanse of the post-colonial moment — as unknowing innocents or foundering victims. Tambudzai — the protagonist of Dangarembga’s 1988 debut, “Nervous Conditions,” its 2006 sequel, “The Book of Not,” and the excellent and acerbic “This Mournable Body” (2018) — wants to make a respectable life for herself amid the experiment of a now self-governing Zimbabwe. At every turn she is foiled, most often by the noxious combination of racism and capitalist accumulation, and the distorted relations it produces between the novels’ characters.
But Dangarembga does not reduce Tambudzai to a passive sufferer; she can be meanspirited, Dangarembga forcing readers to walk in her jealousy-prone shoes via second-person narration. In other words, Dangarembga’s achievement has been to show the violence colonialism inflicts on human minds.
Last September the novelist, now in her early 60s, was found guilty of “promoting public violence” in the capital city of Harare, where she peacefully protested state corruption back in 2020. Perhaps her persecution (she was given a suspended prison sentence), and the political climate that surrounds it, at least partly inspired her new essay collection, “Black and Female.” In it the author turns her withering attention more acutely upon her nation’s politics via forthright — and sometimes overly broad — polemic. In essays that range from an account of her writing life to an examination of the reasons feminism has failed to win victories for Zimbabwean women, Dangarembga weaves personal and material histories to explain how race and gender are lived in her country. The result is a compelling collection that sometimes stumbles, leaving this reader pining for her trademark exactitude.
Though at times Dangarembga feints toward a Frantz Fanon-inspired, phenomenological account of Black experience (“I am an existential refugee. I have been in flight since I left the womb”), these essays are mostly about a particular experience of Blackness that is grounded in the history of Zimbabwe. Born in an American Methodist Episcopal mission hospital in northeast Zimbabwe, she ties these origins to colonial history: Her parents worked hundreds of miles from the hospital, but chose it because they were “staunch members” of the United Methodist Church, in what was then the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. Read More…
