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Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959-) | |
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Zimbabwean writer, whose novel NERVOUS CONDITIONS (1988) has become a modern African classic. It was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1989. Tsitsi Dangarembga has dealt in her works with the oppressive nature of a patriarchal family structure and a woman's coming-of-age. "My soul is African," she has said, "it is from there that springs the fountain of my creative being." "This morning I received a letter from my husband, the first in twelve years. Can you imagine such a thing? As has been my custom during all this time that I have been waiting, I opened my eyes at four o'clock when the first cock crowed, and lay remembering the day that he left, without bitterness and without anger or sorrow, simply remembering what it was like to be with him one day and without him the next." (from 'The Letter', 1985) Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in Mutoko in colonial Rhodesia, but at the age of two she moved with her parents to England. She has called her first language English - it was used all through her education and she forgot most of the Shona that she had learnt. In 1965 she returned to Rhodesia and entered a mission school in Mutare. She learned Shona again and completed her secondary education at an American convent school. In 1977 Dangarembga went to Cambridge to study medicine. After three years she abandoned her studies and returned to Zimbabwe, where amongst other things she worked for some time at an advertising agency, and started to study psychology at the University of Zimbabwe. During these years she became involved with the Drama Club and wrote and staged three plays, She No Longer Weeps (pub. 1987), The Lost of the Soil, and The Third One. "The writers in Zimbabwe were basically men at the time," she said in an interview. "And so I really didn't see that the situation would be remedied unless some woman sat down and wrote something, so that's what I did!" After graduation she worked as a teacher, but finding it difficult to combine an academic career and literature, then devoted herself entirely to writing. Her short story, 'The Letter' won a price in a writing competition arranged by SIDA, the Swedish International Development Authority, and was published in the anthology Whispering Land (1985). In it Dangarembga drew a parallel between broken family ties under South African apartheid with national disintegration. The narrator, a woman, receives the first letter from her husband - after twelve years. He had been considered a security risk but manages to escape before being arrested. Her mother tells her to destroy the letter, but she wants to save it. Soldiers raid her house and she is taken to a police station. The story ends with a brutal conclusion: "As for myself, well, I have already told you that I became a political person twelve years ago in the Township. Therefore I have been ample time to get used to the aberrations of people in the grip of totalitarian fervour. I do not know what is going to happen to me. I may be charged with an act of treason plotted in Pretoria, or they may hold me here to abuse me physically and mentally for a while before conceding that my desire to be with my husband is not grounds for indictment." As a novelist Dangarembga made her debut with Nervous Conditions, a partially autobiographical work which appeared in Great Britain in 1988 and the next year in the United States. She had already started to write in her childhood, and read mostly the English classics, but the period following Zimbabwean independence inspired her to read contemporary African literature and the writings of Afro-American women. "I personally do not have a fund of our cultural tradition or oral history to draw from," she once confessed, "but I really did feel that if I am able to put down the little I know then it's a start." After her first success Dangarembga turned her attention to film. She studied at the Deutsche Film und Fernseh Akademie and wrote the story for Neria, which became the highest-grossing film in Zimbabwean history. The protagonist is a widowed woman, whose brother-in-law uses her difficult situation for his own advantage. Neria loses her material possessions and her child, but gets then help from her female friend against her former husband's family. "...if at the age of twenty-six somebody has a story to tell it's likely to be about growing up! Also I'm always conscious at the back of my mind that there is very little that a woman in Zimbabwe can pick up - in Zimbabwe today - and say yes, I know, that's me….Because I know I felt that gap so dreadfully..." (from 'Tsitsi Dangarembga' by Jane Wilkinson in Talking with African Writers, 1992) With Everyone's Child (1996) Tsitsi Dangarembga made film history in her country. It was the first feature film directed by a black Zimbabwean woman. The story followed the tragic fates of four siblings, after their parents die of AIDS. The soundtrack featured songs by Zimbabwe's most popular musicians, including Thomas Mapfumo, Leonard Zhakata and Andy "Tomato Sauce" Brown. The title of Nervous Conditions is borrowed from Jean-Paul Sartre's introduction to Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth. The 'nervous condition' of the native is, according to Sartre, a function of mutually reinforcing attitudes between colonizer and colonized that condemn the colonized to what amounts to a psychological disorder. The narrator of the story is Tambudzayi Sigauke, who looks back on her childhood in colonial Rhodesia of the sixties and seventies. Her brother is sent to a mission school, but the family don't have money for Tambu's education. Tambu grows maize to earn her own school fees, only to have her brother steal her produce. Also her father attempts to claim the money because he doesn't believe that the education of women is important. When his brother dies Tambu enters the school - the family does not have any other sons. She becomes friends with her cousin Nyasha, who has spent five years in England and who refuses to conform to society's expectations for women. Gradually Tambu leaves behind those parts of her family, herself and her culture that she cannot accept - an analogue of the independence process of Zimbabwe. She also rejects her highly educated uncle, Babamukuru, who believes that Tambu's education will enable her to marry well. When Babamakuru's authority becomes increasingly irrational, Tambu sees that she must free herself from the dichotomy between tradition and modernity: the struggles women face are similar, regardless of their class. - "Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when l can set down this story. It was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion. It was a process whose events stretched over many years and would fill another volume, but the story I have told here, is my own story, the story of four women whom I loved, and our men, this is how it all began..." - For further reading: Talking with African Writers, ed. by Jane Wilkinson (1990); Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions by Sally McWilliams (World Literature Today, 31.1.1991); An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga (Novel, 26.3. 1993); Postcolonial African Writers, ed by Pushpa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne (1998) - For further information: African authors: Tsitsi Dangarembga (b. 1959) Selected works:
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