Post Colonial

George, Rosemary Marangoly, and Helen Scott. "An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga." Novel (Spring 1993):309-319. [This interview was conducted at the African Writers Festival, Brown Univ., Nov. 1991]

Excerpt from Introduction: "Written when the author was twenty-five, Nervous Conditions put Dangarembga at the forefront of the younger generation of African writers producing literature in English today....Nervous Conditions highlights that which is often effaced in postcolonial African literature in English--the representation of young African girls and women as worthy subjects of literature....While the critical reception of this novel has focused mainly on the author's feminist agenda, in [this] interview...Dangarembga stresses that she has moved from a somewhat singular consideration of gender politics to an appreciation of the complexities of the politics of postcolonial subjecthood" (309).

Full text also available from EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite, Article No. 9312270407.

Veit-Wild, Flora. [Interview with Dangarembga] "Women Write about Things that Move Them." Matatu: Zeitschrift fur afrikanische Kultur und Gesellschaft 3.6(1989): 101-108.

Wilkinson, Jane. "Tsitsi Dangarembga." Talking with African Writers: Interviews with African Poets, Playwrights and Novelists. London: James Currey, 1992. 189-198.

Tsitsi Dangarembga (b. 1959) was interviewed 4 Sept. 1989 in London by Jane Wilkinson, and I here highlight some points made in that interview. There seem to be many autobiographical parallels between Tsitsi's and Tambu's lives, although Tambudzai (supposed to be 13 in 1968 in the novel) would be slightly older than Dangarembga (who was 9 in 1968). Dangarembga says that she wrote of "things I had observed and had had direct experience with," but "larger than any one person's own tragediesÐ'...[with] a wider implication and origin and therefore were things that needed to be told" (190).

One important theme in Nervous Conditions is that of remembering and forgettingÐ'--especially the danger of Tambu's forgetting who she is, where she came fromÐ'--as her brother Nhamo did. Dangarembga acknowledges this in the interview (191). "I personally do not have a fund of our cultural tradition or oral history to draw from, but I really did feel that if I am able to put down the little I know then it's a start" (191). Nyasha, the author says, doesn't have anything to forget, for she never knew, was never taught her culture and originsÐ'--and this forms "some great big gap inside her." "Tambudzai, on the other hand is quite valid in saying that she can't forget because she has that kind of experience. Nyasha is so worried about forgetting because it's not there for her to remember. Tambudzai is so sure that this is the framework of her very being that there is no way that she would be able to forget it" (191-192).

Dangarembga was born in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), spent ages 2-6 in Britain where she began her schooling. She notes that she and her brother began to speak English there "as a matter of course and forgot most of the Shona that we had learnt" (196). When they returned to Zimbabwe, when she was six, she learned Shona again and later attended mission school in Mutare and then a private American convent school. Dangarembga notes that she didn't learn "much about anything indigenous at all" in these schools (190). She cites one problem that Zimbabwean people of her generationÐ'--and Nyasha'sÐ'--have is "that we really don't have a tangible history that we can relate to" (191); "that was the [colonized] system we were living under. Even the history was written in such a way that a child who did not want to accept that had to reject it and have nothing"Ð'--which, she states, is Nyasha's problem (198). Dangarembga also calls her first language EnglishÐ'--the language used all through her educationÐ'--and Shona her second language: "Sometimes I worry about Shona: how long it's going to surviveÐ'....There are very few people who can speak good Shona and even fewer who can write it. Maybe we've caught it just in time with the [Zimbabwean] Government's policies of traditional culture and so forth, so maybe it's not as sad as it seems" (196). Later on when Dangarembga was working in a publishing house, Zimbabwean historians were beginning to "rewrite the history. I was editing this Grade Seven text and I can remember saying to my editor that, if I had read that particular version of history when I had been at school, I would have been a much more integrated person" (197-198).

Dangarembga went back to England, to Cambridge Univ. in 1977, to study medicine, but returned to Zimbabwe in 1980, just before independence (earned after some 15 years of warfare). It was then, Dangarembga says in the interview, that she "began to feel the need for an African literature that I could read and identify with," first through reading "Afro-American women writers" (194-195). During independence celebrations, she heard a beautiful Shona poem recitedÐ'--an oral arts performance, not a written poemÐ'--and "it brought back to me that we have an oral language here. It isn't written, it's oral, and when it is reproduced in the medium in which it is meant to be, it is absolutely astounding. But it was also a painful experience: to think we'd lost so much of it." (195)Ð'--this "wealth of literature" that hadn't been written down. "It is good to have people like Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. They were the people I think who really pointed me in the direction of African literature as such as opposed to Afro-American literature" (195).

She worked in an ad agency, studied psychology at the Univ. of Zimbabwe, then enrolled in a drama group, found an outlet for her creative leanings, and wrote 3 plays, including She No Longer Weeps (1987). Dangarembga notes that "There were simply no plays with roles for black women, or at least we didn't have access to them at the time. The writers in Zimbabwe were basically men at the time. 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!" (196). Nervous Conditions was Dangarembga's first novel, written in 1985 and published in 1988. Dangarembga had some trouble getting her novel accepted for publication until she took it to a women's publishing house [Doris "Lessing explains how Nervous Conditions was rejected