Zimbabwe’s leading novelist writes about her country in a starkly realist vein. This has made Tsitsi Dangarembga an outcast in her own land. evefairbanks reports
wo years ago on a winter morning in Harare, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Zimbabwe’s most acclaimed living novelist, rose at dawn. She climbed the stairs to her second-floor writing studio and retrieved a handwritten sign. For weeks, she had been mounting a solo campaign for the release of Hopewell Chin’ono, an investigative journalist, and, more generally, for the government to take its responsibilities more seriously. Zimbabweans were suffering. The majority of them were not formally employed.
But since the publication of Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s “Half a Yellow Sun” in 2006, global interest in African fiction has surged. Works by Yaa Gyasi, who was born in Ghana, and Tomi Adeyemi, a Nigerian-American fantasy author, have recently made thebestseller list. The Booker has also begun to recognise black African writing. Both of Chigozie Obioma’s novels, parables set in Nigeria, have been shortlisted for the prize.
But her choice to bear witness hasn’t altogether impressed her own countrymen. When I went to Harare a year and a half ago, the newspapermen and novelists I met – many of whom were themselves struggling with poverty and government threats to free speech – considered Dangarembga’s decision to live in Zimbabwe, even her anti-government protest, to count against her. They argue that her vision is warped by the very morally degrading conditions that she purports to document uncompromisingly.
When she was a teenager, Dangarembga loved to act and sing, and Koschke encourages her to play the piano – to cultivate any hobbies, really. But he also told me she is ferociously competitive and abandons activities when she realises she might not excel at them. Dangarembga believes she has suppressed some of her memories from the period. She is uncertain about whether her parents suffered from financial constraints and regretted shipping her off, or if they thought that living with a white family would do her good. In “Black and Female”, a book of essays published in August, she writes only that when she was dropped off, “I don’t remember whether [I] cried.
But her second-class status became starkly apparent. The drama club at her school staged “The Merchant of Venice”, which has a character of colour, the Prince of Morocco. A white girl was cast in the role and Dangarembga played one of her mute slaves. The terror made her “cave in emotionally”, she told me, and she developed an eating disorder. At that point the administrators relented and allowed her to stay over holidays in university accommodation. “I had to fall lower than them. Then their attitude became, ‘Oh, you poor thing. Now we’ll do you a favour.’”
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