Tsitsi Dangaermbga is the great lady in Zimbabwean letters. She became famous by publishing in 1988 her first novel “Nervous conditions”. “The book we have been waiting for so long and which we should all read,” said Doris Lessing about this first novel by the Zimbabwean novelist. Tsitsi Dangarembga is also a filmmaker and feminist and political activist.
“I do not know … I really could not tell you why I write. I have always loved telling stories, even as a child. I also enjoyed reading it. Through my reading, I think I understood how important stories were to create society. Therefore, I feel that I contribute to something constructive when I write. “So says the Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga. She is the author of the famous “Nervous conditions”, a novel published in 1988 and considered one of the emblematic texts in feminist and postcolonial literature. The latest book written by the Zimbabwean “This Unmournable Body” (1) was one of the books nominated this year for the Booker Prize 2020, one of the most prestigious awards in the English-speaking world. This novel is the third volume of Tambudzai’s trilogy, inaugurated by “Nervous Conditions”.
En fleur de peau (2) in French, this introductory novel depicts the struggle of a teenage girl named Tambudzai to escape the oppressive traditional laws and gain access to Western education in colonial Zimbabwe, then called Southern Rhodesia. “When my brother Nhamo died, I felt no remorse”, thus begins the novel, told in the first person. The debut caused a scandal in Zimbabwe when the novel came out because it attracted the oppression of women in the patriarchal Zimbabwean society.
A strong and free woman
Suffering from his brother, Tambudzai or Tambu, regrets his death nonetheless because this disappearance will open the door to the mission school that this younger brother attended. Thanks to the Western education she now receives, Tambudzai will be able to escape the bondage of traditional society and establish herself as a strong and free woman. A freedom that the young woman will unfortunately not have full access to, because in colonial Rhodesia where the novel’s plot is based, a black woman, even educated, is subject to a thousand discrimination. The dehumanization of the colonized is the theme of the second volume of the trilogy, “The Book of Not”, published in 2006 and which has never been translated into French.
Like her character, Tsitsi Dangarembga, born in 1959, grew up in a colonial society. Her parents were both teachers, but it is her mother, the first black Zimbabwean woman who received the baccalaureate that she owes her taste to studies and literature. “I read Camara Laye’s black children, the novelist remembers when I was young, I must have been ten years old. It was the first time I read a novel that told the story of a young girl who looked like me, African like me and who lived in Africa. Her name was Fanta. It was the first novel that really touched me. Much later I read “Beloved” by Toni Morrison. It was a very important read because it helped me understand that pain can be beautiful and a source of hope. ”
Transforming pain into hope is what TsitsiDangarembga does in his novels and more specifically in the third volume of his trilogy that tells the rest of his hero’s journey. We are in postcolonial Zimbabwe in the 1990s, where “This Mournable Body” takes place. Despite her qualifications and talents, Tambudzai is marginalized, without money or employment. It is reduced to fighting for its survival, just like the Zimbabwean nation where the economy is in order and promises of independence cannot be kept. It is difficult not to read the heroine’s career as a metaphor for the future of postcolonial Zimbabwe, except that the novel ends on an optimistic note.
“I wanted Tambudzai’s path to lead to something positive,” the author explains. Her return to the village at the end should not be interpreted as a return to virginity, but as a desire to leave the front despite the difficulties of life. It was important for me to let the readers glimpse the human dimension ”.
Autofictional del
According to specialists in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s work, there is an autofictional part of his novels. The quest for a humanity in solidarity with her character is also the novelist who, after a long stay in Britain and Germany, settled in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s and it is at the twilight of the years Mugabe that she wrote the last volume of her trilogy . She is politically engaged, but it is in the field of fantasy and fiction rather than ideological activism that she explores the ideas that plague her, such as the extent and limits of resistance. individual embodied in his novels by his ingenious heroine.
This agreement between reality and fiction, which forms the basis of literature, renewed by Tsitsi Dangarembga according to her conditions and her sensitivity, is without a doubt the most fascinating dimension of this author’s singular.
(1) This inevitable body, by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Faber, 2018, 363 pages (currently translated into French)
(2) A flower of the skin, by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Translated from English by Etienne Galle, Albin Michel, 1992, 266 pages.
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