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Summary
Summary
A short, staggering collection of essays from 'one of the most remarkable people the Booker Prize has ever celebrated' (New Statesman).
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
These incisive, impassioned essays by novelist Dangarembga (Nervous Conditions) confront the lingering effects of imperialism in Zimbabwe. She examines empire, racism, and misogyny through personal stories about growing up in what was then called Rhodesia and contrasts her experiences there with a stint she spent living with a foster family in Dover, England. In "Writing While Black and Female," Dangarembga remembers learning the power of language from its ability to produce action ("After adults spoke to each other, things happened: little children were left"), and relates how writing allows her to transcend racial and gender categories by building and affirming an identity independent of them. She examines Zimbabwe's pre- and post-colonial history of gender inequality, noting that colonial legislation treated adult women as minors and lamenting how as a child, her brother once felt compelled to ally himself with the "toxic masculinity" of their father by offering his belt to beat her with. Calling for "mental decolonisation," the author argues that Black feminists must play a crucial role in building a more just future because they "have experienced the more repressive edge of most demographic categories and not succumbed." Dangarembga's candid reflections and lyrical prose bring urgency to this thought-provoking argument for political and social equality. Readers won't want to miss this. (Jan.)
Guardian Review
I read Tsitsi Dangarembga's debut novel Nervous Conditions in 2016, nearly 30 years after it was first published. I was 23 and hungry for literature that reflected my reality as a black woman. I found it a compelling but deeply uncomfortable read, and was shocked by the almost violent emotions it inspired. I put it on my bookshelf and tried to forget about it, but, like great literature always does, it stayed with me. The story, set in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the turbulent 1960s and 70s, follows teenager Tambu's desperate attempts to escape her family's poverty and get an education. Motivated by the belief that if she works hard she will be able to realise her potential, she ends up both isolated from her family and rejected by the western millieu she is desperate to join. This state of affairs leads to her complete unravelling. As I prepared to enter the workforce, knowing that I would also have to navigate the expectations of two cultures, Tambu's fate struck me as a cautionary tale. Dangarembga, who is also a playwright and film-maker, went on to write two sequels. The final book in the trilogy earned her this year's Windham-Campbell prize. Black and Female is her first work of nonfiction, and represents a rallying cry for the transformative power of writing; not only to help us make sense of our place in the world, as Nervous Conditions did for me, but to lend us the imagination and courage to change it. The first of the three essays, an examination of what it is like to write as a black woman, feels the most relevant for our times. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, demonstrators across the world held placards carrying the slogan "silence is violence". Dangarembga similarly notes that it is through silence that the destructive legacy of empire is perpetuated. When the victim speaks, points to where they are in pain and indicates who has caused it, they find space for healing. "Through writing, I cultivate my being to bring forth forests that replenish our depleted humanity." Dangarembga understood the power of words from a young age. When she and her brother were taken from Zimbabwe to England, they were forced to stay in a foster home while their parents worked and studied. It was an experience that "sliced her in two", leaving her with a "never-ending emptiness". In the midst of powerlessness, words were a way of regaining agency. She wrote a diary as a teenager, and gradually began to think more seriously about the narratives she wove. "With words I could do things. I could make good what was no more. Then perhaps I could bind the things that mattered to me with words and not experience their loss. I could beat the nameless things that sharpened the guillotine and came for me after I was tucked into bed." Though writing helped her process what was happening to her, she initially struggled to place her own life at the centre of her work. There was no significant black female character in her first play. This changed once she became more involved in feminist activism at the University of Zimbabwe, at which she enrolled shortly after independence. It was then that she was able to recognise the pervasive "pressures on me to not be myself, but to stand in for something else". Revolutionary literature that glorified the struggle for independence was the order of the day - few "were concerned with the individual personhood of young black Zimbabwean girls". Nervous Conditions struggled to find a publisher in Zimbabwe and was eventually taken on by a small feminist press in the UK. At the time I read it, I remember thinking that simple representation was enough, but Dangarembga challenges these low expectations. Undistinguished writing merely "raises a scar, puffy, often suppurating, over the damage" of colonisation. She recalls black men encouraging dull work by aspiring female writers in the budding post-independence literary scene by failing to offer constructive criticism. Later, she came across the same modus operandi among white executives in the film industry, who celebrated "mediocre black narrative". "The best writing opens the lesion again and again and cleanses," she goes on to declare. When done right, the skin, in certain light, looks like it "was never lacerated". The collection includes two other essays, one a sweeping sociopolitical history of Zimbabwean women, the other an examination of Zimbabwe's project of decolonisation, which, she stresses, did not end with independence. In the latter, she shows with painstaking clarity, how the political elite has betrayed her countrymen. She argues that activists must also decolonise how we produce and share knowledge, and how we see ourselves. "No melanated person's capacity to function has escaped being affected in some disruptive way by the white-centred structures of the world they live in," she writes, using a term that will still be unfamiliar to many but that, she asserts, "we black people increasingly call ourselves". She describes blackness as "condition imposed on me, rather than being ¿ experienced". For Dangarembga, it is a political identity that has little to do with colour, but rather with the common experiences black people endure. She continues: "Other melanated people became complicit," in upholding the structures of the empire. Such complicity may be conscious or unconscious ¿ melanated people are often rewarded for their acquiescence to the demands of a white world with economic elevation, or with other things that are valued in that world, such as social stature." For Dangarembga, this complicity may be a rational choice for black people, but it is ultimately a destructive one. "This is how I came not to be for many years, and how my coming into being, past and present, requires filling in a great chasm, which I constantly seek to do with words." The final pages of the book are characterised by a fierce urgency. Dangarembga believes the challenges of climate change, immigration and inequality place the world at a crucial juncture. "If the logic of the Enlightenment was racism, slavery, genocide and colonisation, decolonisation is the only logic that offers hope of future," she writes. The task - to uproot a half-a-millennium-old practice - is immense, but "the trajectory of current and future generations depends on that uprooting."
Kirkus Review
In these probing essays, Zimbabwean novelist and filmmaker Dangarembga examines the impacts of racism, colonialism, and patriarchy on her life and work. Born in the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia, she grew up in "a vicious society that constructed me as essentially lacking full humanity, needing but never able, as a result of being black-embodied, to attain the status of complete human." It was a world still shaped by the slave trade, which wrenched "the strongest and most able-bodied individuals in their communities" and upended traditional social and political structures. Even after gaining independence, the country suffered from the wounds of "imperial lust," including inequality, rule by a racial elite, and an entrenched patriarchal structure "particularly reluctant to recognise the achievement of Zimbabwean women in any sector that it does not control." As a young child, Dangarembga and her brother were left with a White foster family in Dover, while her parents furthered their studies in London. In England, disoriented and lonely, she first became aware of her Blackness. The author recounts her evolution as a feminist, beginning in college in Zimbabwe and the U.K. "Feminist theory," she writes, "showed me how I was constructed as a female person whose content and possibility was predetermined, and how my refusal to occupy that space was a form of rebellion, albeit a powerless one." She felt that powerlessness as she strived to get published and, after studying at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, faced marginalization in the film industry as well. As a Black feminist, Dangarembga feels part of "a small, often embattled group" struggling to be heard in a society that wants to silence her. In her work, she seeks "to raise mountains, hills, escarpments and rocky outcrops over the gouges in my history, my societies and their attendant spirits." A well-informed, biting analysis of the legacy of empire. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This three-essay collection from Zimbabwean novelist Dangarembga (author of Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not, and the Booker-shortlisted This Mournable Body) looks at the legacy of colonialism and its effects on Black bodies. It partners well with fiction from authors such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison on the exploitation of Black girls and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the dangers of a single narrative. The first essay discusses how Dangarembga's writing is an analysis of her personal and national history; the second shows how Zimbabwean society from the colonial to postcolonial has affected the position of women; the third states how decolonization must occur in the imaginary realm before society can actively engage in it. Dangarembga moves from a damage-centered narrative toward one of healing and reclamation. Her position as a scholar in a long line of people also dedicated to this work, whom she cites, paired with her life experience, has led to a powerful account of systemic injustice. VERDICT Dangarembga's collection is an essential addition to academic collections on race and gender. The moments where she shares her crisis over selfhood as a child and how that search for identity carried over into adulthood are some of the most powerful parts of the book.--Paige Pagan