Tsitsi Dangarembga Quotes

Plunging into these books I knew I was being educated and I was filled with gratitude to the authors for introducing me to places where reason and inclination were not at odds. It was a centripetal time, with meat the centre, everything gravitating towards me. It was a time of sublimation with me as the sublimate.

The writers in Zimbabwe were also [like the characters in the literature they produced] basically men at the time.

People who fear greatly can sometimes substitute themselves for the thing they fear

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 not to be affected by it to that extent because my parents were students and people were somewhat respectful.

“What we heard all the time is that you were not working. That's what was said, that that degree of yours was just a piece of paper sitting, silently rotting.

How, with all your education, do you come to be more needy than your mother?

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.

Can you cook books and feed them to your husband? Stay at home with your mother. Learn to cook and clean. Grow vegetables.

He says he wants to go back to Germany, Nyasha confides. As soon as he's finished his doctorate, she goes on, as though both completion of his research and departure are imminent. You realize she does not know Cousin-Brother-in-Law is mulling another thesis because he is no longer interested in his subject. You are surprised your in-law is behaving in the way you expect your own black men to do, first of all by being so indecisive and then by not telling his wife.

I have seen enough to know that blame does not come in neatly packaged parcels.

People who fear greatly can sometimes substitute themselves for the thing they fear.

How about forgetting? you say. Sometimes forgetting is better than remembering when nothing can be done. Forgetting is harder than you think, says Nyasha. Especially when something can be done. And ought to be. It's a question of choices.

It wasn't African literature that I came to first. It was the Afro-American women writers, I found them very helpful. (Such as, for example?) Toni Morrison, who is really incredible. Then I read Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, and of course there are several others I can't remember right now.

Keening. I remember keening that seemed to go on all through the night: shrill, sharp, shiny, needless of sound piercing cleanly and deeply to let the anguish in, not out.

I wrote the book just after Zimbabwe’s independence to encourage young Zimbabweans to develop themselves in spite of the challenges they would face doing so. There was also a lot of talk after independence of going back to one’s cultural roots. I wanted to interrogate that idea by examining aspects of the culture we were being told to go back to that affected women in my environment negatively. I was a newly minted feminist at the time and very eager. I also wanted to look at the ongoing effects of colonialism in the new dispensation. At the same time, I hoped to write a book that would be eminently readable, with recognizable characters.