Tsitsi Dangarembga Quotes

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.

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

As for my sisters, well, they were there. They were watching me climb into Babamukuru's car to be whisked away to limitless horizons. It was up to them to learn the important lesson that circumstances were not immutable, no burden so binding that it could not be dropped,

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.

You feel you are creeping up over the edge of a precipice and that this cliff beckons you; worse, that you have a secret desire to fall over its edge into oblivion and that there is no way to stop that fall because you are the precipice.

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

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.

Christine has that layer under her skin that cuts off her outside from her inside and allows no communication between the person she once believed she could be and the person she has in fact become. The one does not acknowledge the other's existence.