Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tsitsi Dangarembga (born February 4, 1959) is a Zimbabwean author and filmmaker.

Quotes

Can you cook books and feed them to your husband? Stay at home with your mother. Learn to cook and clean. Grow vegetables.
The writers in Zimbabwe were also [like the characters in the literature they produced] basically men at the time.
- On the conditions in which she started writing in “An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga” in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction (Spring, 1993)

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.
- On her experiences with racism in England in “An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga: An excerpt” in Brick Magazine (December 2012)

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.
- On the difficulties of being a creative woman in “An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga: An excerpt” in Brick Magazine (December 2012)

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.
- On adjusting to film writing in “An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga: An excerpt” in Brick Magazine (December 2012)

People who fear greatly can sometimes substitute themselves for the thing they fear
- This Mournable Body (2018)

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.
- This Mournable Body (2018)

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.
- On what she had hoped to convey with her first novel Nervous Conditions in “A Crisis of Personhood: Tsitsi Dangarembga by Bhakti Shringarpure” in BOMB Magazine (2019 Sep 27)

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.
- in Talking with African Writers by Jane Wilkinson (1992)

I have seen enough to know that blame does not come in neatly packaged parcels.
- Tambu, Nervous Conditions. Zimbabwe Publishing House. 1988. p. 12. ISBN 978-0-949225-79-5.

Stars below instead of above! I wanted to see them straight away. I prayed for a miracle, for the sun to set.
- Tambu, Nervous Conditions. Zimbabwe Publishing House. 1988. p. 26. ISBN 978-0-949225-79-5.

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.
- Tambu, Nervous Conditions. Zimbabwe Publishing House. 1988. p. 54. ISBN 978-0-949225-79-5.

What I experienced that day was a short cut, a rerouting of everything I had ever defined as me into fast lanes that would speedily lead me to my destination. My horizons were saturated with me, my leaving, my going. There was no room for what I left behind.
- Tambu, Nervous Conditions. Zimbabwe Publishing House. 1988. p. 58. ISBN 978-0-949225-79-5.

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,
- Tambu, Nervous Conditions. Zimbabwe Publishing House. 1988. p. 58. ISBN 978-0-949225-79-5.

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.
- Tambu, Nervous Conditions. Zimbabwe Publishing House. 1988. p. 93. ISBN 978-0-949225-79-5.

You had to know the facts if you were ever going to find the solutions.
- Nyasha, Nervous Conditions. Zimbabwe Publishing House. 1988. p. 93. ISBN 978-0-949225-79-5.

“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.”

“You begin to suspect that Cousin-Brother-in-Law and Nyasha are not being honest, that they found each other because neither possesses the hardiness success requires, so they have dressed discouragement up in the glamour of intellect.”

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

“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.”

“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.