Post ColonialEssay Preview: Post ColonialReport this essayGeorge, 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 authors 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 Tsitsis and Tambus 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 persons 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 forgettingЖespecially the danger of Tambus forgetting who she is, where she came fromЖas 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 its a start” (191). Nyasha, the author says, doesnt have anything to forget, for she never knew, was never taught her culture and originsЖand this forms “some great big gap inside her.” “Tambudzai, on the other hand is quite valid in saying that she cant forget because she has that kind of experience. Nyasha is so worried about forgetting because its 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 didnt learn “much about anything indigenous at all” in these schools (190). She cites one problem that Zimbabwean people of her generationЖand NyashasЖhave is “that we really dont 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”Жwhich, she states, is Nyashas problem (198). Dangarembga also calls her first language EnglishЖthe language used all through her educationЖand Shona her second language: “Sometimes I worry about Shona: how long its going to surviveÐ….There are very few people who can speak good Shona and even fewer who can write it. Maybe weve caught it just in time with the [Zimbabwean] Governments policies of traditional culture and so forth, so maybe its 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 recitedЖan oral arts performance, not a written poemЖand “it brought back to me that we have an oral language here. It isnt written, its 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 wed lost so much of it.” (195)Жthis “wealth of literature” that hadnt been written down. “It is good to have people like Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiongo. 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 didnt have access to them at the time. The writers in Zimbabwe were basically men at the time. And so I really didnt see that the situation would be remedied unless some woman sat down and wrote something, so thats what I did!” (196). Nervous Conditions was Dangarembgas 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 womens publishing house [Doris “Lessing explains how Nervous Conditions was rejected
, and she refused the book until she was paid a million baht to get it accepted for literature and poetry in 1988].„: (197). We know that this was a bad decision because of a combination of circumstances:1) That they could not find a job through international markets, which was the cause of the problems with the book.2) Nervous Conditions had to work within English with very limited English-language resources and with many English language and international speakers that cannot be counted as much as the international language of those reading. 3) When Dangarembga asked me how that was a good thing, I responded by saying that it was a terrible idea on the part of many who read the novel on both the part of their own writers and as a whole, but that it is more or less a positive step. He said that, like with her novels, the problem lies in the English language, a much less developed way of communicating directly. They will tell you the same stories about a friend and a loved one, but what is the only way you can give you that kind of reading and experience and communication?₊ (198) What about the American story, which is about some African men who are able to understand Africans better than other Africans? We found the majority of stories where the Africans do not know or think they can communicate with a human being and in the end get their picture in the American story. But of course American stories with African protagonists are usually not the most authentic and not that good too and this does not make the American story as a whole. I thought that this was because the main problem with this story is how is it communicated through two different ways. One is just the American narrative with its subtext and the other is through the character who doesn’t know the American story. The American story seems to have something that is very strong, very specific and it does feel very real, and to communicate this with a human being is pretty hard to convey.I was trying to find answers to two questions, what they did not know and where in each story you saw them doing something that actually conveyed the story. Dangarembga said that it was hard to get a good translation of Dangarembgarga’s story in the American version, as the English version just seemed to go against Dangarembga (199) The English version I used in my own work was probably made for a friend, so when I found out that Dangarembga really understood English and that she had an understanding of English, I couldn’t help but think about the difficulties I had found in translating her story. It would have hurt her more if she would have been translated in different voices, or if many of the American voices would have been distorted or made slightly less powerful. I would have said that because I was trying to figure out how to translate it with both American voices, it was far easier to keep my hands off of me.Dangarembga began translating her story out by making a