Tsitsi Dangarembga: Life in an ‘ever-narrowing Zimbabwe’

TSITSI Dangarembga (TD)’s debut novel, Nervous Conditions, released in 1988, has been described as one of the 100 books that “shaped the world”. This year, the latest book by the Zimbabwean novelist, filmmaker and activist, This Mournable Body, has been shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize.

It is the third in a trilogy, following on Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not (2006). The three books examine the sickness of the body politic in Zimbabwe through the eyes of Tambudzai Sigauke (Tambu), a young girl in the first novel and a grown woman in the third. Born in 1959, Dangarembga (pictured) was the first black Zimbabwean woman to publish a novel in English.

On July 31, she was arrested for participating in an anti-corruption protest in the Zimbabwean capital Harare and charged with inciting public violence. She was released on bail the following day. Her next court appearance is scheduled for November 24.

To what extent was the trilogy intended to tell the history of Zimbabwe through the eyes of their central character, Tambu?

TD: The books chronicle the life of an ordinary woman living in Rhodesia [as Zimbabwe was formerly known] and Zimbabwe. To the extent that the situation and changes in the nation impact on her life, the books reflect the history of the country.

My intention was to put characters in a world that Zimbabweans recognise. It was inevitable that there would be this interlinking between the characters in the novel and Zimbabwe as a country.

The political trajectory in Zimbabwe has been so negative. If you have a negative trajectory the space for people to operate shrinks and everybody is pushed into this very narrow tunnel. If the trajectory had been positive there would have been so many possibilities for a character to develop that I could have had many different stories but because everything has shrunk and everyone, one way or the other, is fighting to survive, it meant that was the story that could be told.

I think that people need to choose why they write. I think that politics is meant to serve the person, the individual, human society. If fiction only serves politics then, for me, it would not be doing service to the general society, to the human condition. To me, it really is very important to say something meaningful to people about their lives and how we can negotiate life. But I do not think that is the case for everybody. Everybody is engaged with their environment in some way, including writers. So that is all that writers have to give back. Even if you call it imagination it’s still coming from something that has impinged on you in some way.

It was not my intention to tell the story of Zimbabwe through the eyes of this girl. It was my intention to tell the story of a woman making her way in a particular environment and that particular environment was Zimbabwe and we can see that her options shrink as she goes along because of the nature of society. Zimbabwe is not offering opportunities. Opportunities are shrinking. And that is why it developed this close parallel with Zimbabwe’s history at the end of the novel. If Zimbabwe had been like Germany, for example, you could have had so many different stories that do not really have to do with the politics of the day because your life is not individually everyday determined by repression and poverty. That is the tragedy of Zimbabwean life: that life, the whole greatness of human experience, is really curtailed because of the political microcosm.

In repressive societies people are pressed, literally pressed, into narrowness and narrow spaces. As the society releases that pressure, then you get broader concerns which can also be depicted. We have been compressed into this narrow range of being.

And do you think the curtailment goes beyond the physical and extends to intellectual curtailment?

TD:

Absolutely. You just do not have the mental space to be dealing with things because you get up in the morning and you are worried about water. Will I have water? You are living in the city and you queue up at a borehole that the council has drilled. And this happens even in an affluent neighbourhood. You simply cannot get away from how the situation is impacting on your life.

Our politicians do not understand that their role is not to make life impossible for people. It is meant to be to make life possible. When life is possible for individuals then the nation produces what needs to be produced and we can go on. But the more repressive a State becomes the less we can affirm ourselves in this space. And so the stories shrink.

You have in the past lamented the fact that black women and children do not feature strongly in fiction. Have you seen any changes in that regard?

TD:

There has been a great change in this respect. The world of publishing has opened up to a black narrative. However, this literature has to be produced. Not all communities of black people are resourced to produce literature, so there is still a skew in the characters featured and the kinds of stories that are accepted for publication. While the situation has improved vastly, there is still work to be done.

Which writers do you admire?

TD: Which writers do I admire? There is Novuyo Tshuma, a Zimbabwean. The South African writer who wrote Young Blood, Sifiso Mzobe and Zakes Mda. Thando Mgqolozana is brilliant. There is much good writing coming out of the southern part of the African continent. Going further afield, there are West African writers that are brilliant.

The protagonist in Tshuma’s House of Stone is completely concerned with his identity because he was a child born during the Matabeleland genocide (when more than 20 000 people were massacred by Robert Mugabe’s Fifth Brigade in 1983) and that completely informs his trajectory in the book. If you look at Young Blood, it’s about a young person who gets involved in drugs in South Africa and then has to pull himself out of it. Again, that is the reality on the ground which has political foundations in South Africa. And the protagonist in Zakes Mda’s book, Ways of Dying, faces exactly the same thing.

The 2020 Booker Prize shortlist has been praised for being the most diverse to date. But you are the only shortlisted candidate not based in the US. What is your understanding of diversity?

TD: Three of the shortlisted candidates have non-US backgrounds: one Scottish, one Southeast Asian and one Ethiopian. Coming from a hegemonic literary tradition, we obviously need diversity. We obviously need to talk about diversity in the sense of disrupting hegemonic traditions. Hegemony establishes itself through gatekeeping and deciding who can be included and who cannot. We need to talk about those who are excluded and open up. It is a useful debate at the theoretical and policy level.

How it translates into practice is different. That is when it is instructive to ask: why is everybody but me in the US? It must tell us something about what the US does that enables narratives to be told. How is these peoples’ talent being nurtured in the US in ways that it is not elsewhere? Do they have jobs or grants there? We do not like to talk about the “American dream”. But is there something there? Why did those people not stay where they were? And why is it that the ones who have stayed are not performing at the same level? Do they now, living in the US, have the opportunity and the platform to fulfil their potential?

In general, I prefer to engage with the notion of inclusion. All communities of people need to be included in positive social processes.