By Madeleine Thien
In 1988, at the age of twenty-eight, Tsitsi Dangarembga published her first novel, Nervous Conditions
.
Immediately acclaimed by Alice Walker and Doris Lessing, the book has
come to be considered one of Africa’s most important novels of the
twentieth century. Lessing wrote: “This is the novel we have all been
waiting for . . . it will become a classic.” Set in Rhodesia in the
1960s, almost twenty years before Zimbabwe won independence and ended
white minority rule, the novel’s heroine, Tambudzai Sigauke, embarks on
her education. On her shoulders rest the economic hopes of her parents,
siblings, and extended family, and within her burns the desire for
“personhood,” to no longer be part of such an “undistinguished
humanity.” Nervous Conditions
borrows its title from Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
,
in which Sartre evokes the “disassociated self” created by colonialism:
“Our enemy betrays his brothers and becomes our accomplice; his
brothers do the same thing. The status of ‘native’ is a nervous
condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized
people with their consent
.”
Nervous Conditions
was the first book in what would become a
trilogy. However, eighteen years would pass before Dangarembga published
her second novel, The Book of Not
. With its searing
observations, devastating exploration of the state of “not being,”
wicked humour, and astonishing immersion into the mind of a young woman
growing up and growing old before her time, the novel is a masterpiece.
Dangarembga is almost alone in mining the psychological “nervous
condition” in African women and the relationship between this troubled
inner landscape and the current crisis in contemporary Zimbabwe. In the
last decades, she has chosen film as her medium and founded the
International Images Film Festival for Women in Zimbabwe, which is now
in its twelfth year. In 2006, the Independent
named Dangarembga one of the fifty greatest artists shaping the African continent. Last year, she completed the final book, Chronicle of an Indomitable Daughter
, which will be published in Zimbabwe in 2013.
I first met Tsitsi Dangarembga in Nigeria in 2010, where we taught a
workshop organized by Helon Habila. Habila had never met Dangarembga
before, but he told me that his experience of reading Nervous Conditions
decades
ago had marked and changed him. When I met Tsitsi, Zimbabwe was moving
forward from a disastrous 2008 election that saw the opposition Movement
for Democratic Change pull out of the second round of the presidential
vote in the wake of widespread and horrific violence. At the same time,
the economy had collapsed: between 2007 and 2008, the rate of inflation
was seven sextillion percent. As much of the world knows, a
power-sharing agreement was reached between Robert Mugabe and Morgan
Tsvangirai in 2008, and Zimbabwe retreated from the news headlines. In
the fall of 2012, Tsitsi invited me to come and teach in Harare. She
envisioned a workshop called Breaking the Silence, which would gather
testimonies from across Zimbabwe on political and domestic violence.
These testimonies, which could be submitted anonymously, would form the
basis of our reading material. Any Zimbabwean interested in writing
could come into the workshop, read the collected testimonies, and,
informed by these stories (more than one hundred were collected), write
fiction. Tsitsi asked these writers to think not only about the victims
but also about the lives and histories of the perpetrators. She also
asked each of us to consider our own acts of violence or aggression,
including instances when we used our authority or status for purposes of
intimidation or personal gain. She wanted writers to claim these
stories, wrestle with and interrogate them, and, finally, bring them
back to the communities from which they came. As someone from outside, I
did not know if what Tsitsi imagined was possible; I must admit, I was
stunned and moved to find that it was.
We had this conversation in early December 2012, on the balcony of
Tsitsi’s home in Harare, at sunset, just before I caught my flight home.
Thien: I wanted to ask you about the few years you spent
overseas in the 1960s, when you were a child. Outside of Rhodesia and
white minority rule, what was it like?
Dangarembga: In England?
Thien: Yes. I’m wondering about your first experience of race.
Dangarembga: The racism in England was not so
institutionalized. Well, it was institutionalized, but then it was so
efficiently realized that it didn’t need institutions, if you understand
what I mean. In England, it was much easier
notto be affected by it to that extent because my parents were students and people were somewhat respectful.
Thien: And you were six when you returned to Rhodesia.
Dangarembga: Coming back here . . . you know, it was such a
shock. Everywhere we’d been before, my parents were so well respected.
But in Rhodesia, the fact that we were black meant that once we walked
into that society, all of that meant nothing. It was really a blow.
You might actually say that white people in this part of the world were
so insecure, I suppose about having so many black people around, that
they had to make their institutions into very obvious apartheid
structures. But the whole internalized attitude, that’s been going on
for centuries, these are attitudes that we have.
It was very interesting for me to have a character like Tambudzai, who
understands the lack of respect because of poverty but not because of
blackness. When she is taken into her uncle’s house, she feels
everything is now okay because the poverty factor is no longer
effective. Then she moves into the school [the elite Young Ladies’
College of the Sacred Heart, a convent school attended by mostly white
students], where she’s doing everything as well as everyone else. The
only issue is her blackness. She has an experience, a different kind of
movement, into that position. Because if you have always been aware of
racism, I think that you develop ways of dealing with it. I think it was
Ama Ata Aidoo who said she didn’t even know there was such a thing as
racism until she came to Germany. That’s where she learned she was
black. So it was a bit the same for Tambudzai. She knew she was poor,
and she knew she was uneducated because she could see the poverty of her
home and she could see the differences with her relatives who were
educated. But then she had to learn that she was black.
Thien: Yet
Nervous Conditions begins as a very
hopeful book. Does this hope come because she sees her freedom in
relatively straightforward terms, that education will equal
emancipation?
Dangarembga: Tambudzai starts off as a typical gifted child.
She achieves a lot through her own initiative, and she sees the world as
an arena in which she can act and succeed, no matter what comes. In a
childish way, she thinks of herself as a kind of superwoman, but she
cannot succeed on those terms because there never has been such a
person, there has never been a superman or a superwoman. Sometimes what
one perceives as freedom binds you more tightly.
There was so much invested during the Rhodesian era in educating
Africans only up to a certain level and for certain tasks. An illusion
had to be created, however, that there was some sort of mobility and
fairness in the system. People like Tambudzai were swept up in that
illusion. She had to find her own painful way out of it.
Thien: At the beginning, she also looks for freedom through selfhood, and the concept of
unhu. The traditional greeting is “How are you?” “I am well if you are well too.” Can you describe
unhu?
Dangarembga: This is a very interesting concept. In South Africa,
ubuntu is
exactly the same kind of philosophy, which is “I am because you are” or
“I am because we are.” This is the kind of philosophy that used to bind
villages and communities together until other forces interrupted those
communities. So now I feel that this idea of “I am because you
are”—meaning there is no great difference between you and me, so if you
need something I can give it to you because I know you’re just like me,
and when I need it you will also give it to me—has been disconnected
from its material, physical base because of the way the world has
progressed. Yet people retain the psychological emotion of it. So here
we have a whole nation of Zimbabweans thinking we’re so wonderful
because we have this
unhu. We believe in “I am because we are,”
and certainly, symbolically, we know that’s part of our framework and
our reference, but on the ground it’s not happening anymore because all
the conditions have changed and do not support that notion. And so this
is why there is so much questioning in that book. Is this really the
unhu that
I believe in, that I came from? People are not behaving in that way
anymore. Tambudzai does not resolve it for herself, but I think that
there is a kind of a metanarrative there that shows the complexities,
that actually the society has moved away from
unhu even if they think they haven’t.
Thien: I was fascinated by the idea that personhood, or wholeness, requires reciprocity. But
unhu was completely incompatible with the Rhodesian political structure, wasn’t it?
Dangarembga: Absolutely, I would say so. But I would not only
say that it’s not reciprocated. For sure, when you come out of the
confines of a society that had
unhu, you kind of expect to find
it elsewhere, which was baffling to Tambudzai in the beginning. But
also, once you’ve gone outside and you’ve come back, the question is, do
you also experience that from your own people? Or will they now see you
as somebody outside the whole
unhu construct? I feel that she
has become an outsider, especially with her mother. You know, the mother
should have been really happy for her daughter, and then that relation
would have been reciprocal. But then Tambudzai is denied the comforts of
home, and the mother is also denied the benefits of associating with a
daughter who has some education and some access to the exterior world.
Even if the construct doesn’t transfer outside, does it persist when the
person comes back? If not, then the person coming back also becomes
part of the fragmentation, as we see in the third book.
Thien: In the end, the pragmatic ones who accept the status
quo, which is white rule, seem to flourish. Halfway through the trilogy,
Tambu has refused to accept society as it is, and she nearly loses
herself. Why?
Dangarembga: When I write, I try not to put messages in but to
say, Are we here or are we there? You’ll find people who are willing to
accept what happens at the advertising agency, thinking, Well okay, the
money I’m getting is better than sweeping floors somewhere. So they
protect their position. And then there are the type of people who will
talk about it at parties or when they’re with their friends and just
shake their heads and laugh. But can that be said to be emancipation?
It’s this internalization of your own inferiority that Tambudzai has to
struggle against. The question becomes, Do you identify with the sector
of society that has money and business opportunities? That’s what people
aspired to before. Or do you identify with other women like yourself?
Where do you place yourself?
I realize that creative women often do not fit easily into certain
paradigms. I think to myself, Then where do they go? Where do they go?
Because I feel that these women have so much to contribute, that they
just see things in a different way. Every society has people like that
and marginalizes them in some way. So it’s a very difficult situation.
Thien: Can I detour here and ask how you left medicine? You
were at Cambridge and you came home and went in an entirely different
direction.
Dangarembga: I’d been studying psychology at the University of
Zimbabwe, and I became involved in the drama club there and did a
couple films. I started writing seriously, plays and prose, and I just
felt that was really my niche. I was studying industrial psychology at
the time I was seriously writing, but I realized it was going to be a
struggle to make a living out of writing. So I thought, Okay, what other
things can I do that are still within narrative and dealing with
powerful subjects and putting ideas out there? I began to see the
usefulness of film in a country like Zimbabwe. We boast about an 80
percent literacy rate. But if even you’re literate, which means you can
fill in a form, it doesn’t mean you can read a piece of literature and
understand what’s going on. So it seemed to me that film was also a very
important medium for telling the stories that I felt needed to be told.
Thien: But why turn to film at the moment when you had such enormous international success with
Nervous Conditions?
Dangarembga: Oh,
Nervous Conditions was not so
successful in the beginning. I finished it in 1984 and tried to have it
published here, but most of the publishing houses at that time had young
black men who had been outside the country writing and then came back
and became the editors. When I submitted
Nervous Conditions they would never give it respect. I realized they would never engage with a voice like mine.
Thien: Really?
Dangarembga: Yes, it took me four years.
Thien: So it was published outside first, in 1988?
Dangarembga: Yes, the Women’s Press. I actually didn’t know it
was going to be published. So I thought, Let me try to do something
different.
Thien: Were you already in film school in Berlin?
Dangarembga: I’d applied and been accepted. So when I got that
letter I thought, I’m not going to lose this chance. I’m going to take
it. Then what happened is that there was this huge conflict between the
amount of work I was doing in film and in prose. But I just had to do
the work together.
Thien: What was the conflict?
Dangarembga: They were just completely different. The skills I
had learned for prose didn’t work in film. Those telling details,
they’re completely different. Or the fact of these inner monologues in
which you can write a whole book. Whereas prose is teasing out, film is
stripping down, concentrating and compacting. I found I could not learn
the one while doing the other.So it was a big struggle, actually. It
took me years.
Thien: So
The Book of Not was put aside.
Dangarembga: Yes, because I found I couldn’t do the two. Now
that I feel I’m proficient in both, it seems to be working. But at the
time, I really felt that I could not write
The Book of Not while I was learning how to speak in film language.
Thien: Seventeen years, though! How could you keep Tambudzai quiet?
Dangarembga: Oh, my goodness! She was hopping mad. But you know, the point is, about the war and the racism,
Nervous Conditionsends
just as the war intensifies, 1977. So it was a very difficult thing to
want to allow Tambudzai to talk. Because what she had to say is what
happens in
The Book of Not, and it wasn’t something that I
thought at that time would be useful. I thought that with the kinds of
divisions we had, it might be more inflammatory than anything else. The
war might have brought us a little nearer to where we think we want to
be as a people, but what did it consist of? It consisted of lies, forced
abductions, horrible brutality on both sides, and treachery even within
families. Afterwards it was just, Let’s forget, that’s all behind us.
We had slogans like “This is the year of the people’s transformation.” I
was young. I believed it.
So I think it was actually quite good for me to have something else to
do at the time. It was only when other conflicts began again at the end
of the 1990s that I thought, Tambu has this story to tell that is
actually appropriate for what’s happening.
Thien: In what way was it appropriate?
Dangarembga: Because at the end of the 1990s, the whole land
issue came up in Zimbabwe. We were looking at about 80 percent of the
land being owned by about 20 percent of the population, which brought
back the issues of racism, imbalance, and inequality. Zimbabwe had
simply pretended 1890 to 1980 hadn’t happened, and many people had gone
on with the same prejudices as before. It all came up again. And that’s
exactly what Tambudzai was experiencing after
Nervous Conditions.
What resurfaced in the 1990s was in accordance with what she went
through. And so, at that time when the villagers were assembling and
organizing themselves into battalions that were going out into farms, I
felt it was appropriate to look at those issues of race and who owns
what and who has the power to bequeath what to whom in a fairly
innocuous story of a young girl at school. You know, a kind of, “If you
have ears to hear, then you will hear.”
Thien: Tambudzai has so much anger but not against the system
itself. It all goes inward. Do you think it’s her own personhood that
disturbs her most?
Dangarembga: You know, this idea of the happy African is
something I really wanted to interrogate. Because if someone smiles at
you it does not mean they’re happy. It just means “I think that if I
smile I might get out of this alive!” And so I wanted to look into this
notion of the happy African. Who is this person you are saying is the
happy African? Is this person really happy? And if this person is not
happy, then what is likely to be happening in this person’s life? Is
this smiling, this being so complicit with the system, going to benefit
society in the long run? And, of course, from my perspective as the
writer, I thought not. But it was also important for me not to write an
obvious kind of situation where black people are angry with white people
because that doesn’t get us anywhere either. It was much more important
for me to try to show to people what is happening to individuals within
a certain system, and to hope that, after hearing this, people will
understand, and maybe their conscience will become a little more open to
things they were not open to before.
Courtesy of Brickmag
