An Interview With Tsitsi Dangarembga

George, 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 author's feminist agenda, in [this] interview...Dangarembga stresses

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 didn’t learn "much about anything indigenous at all" in these schools (190). She cites one problem that Zimbabwean people of her generation—and Nyasha’s—have is "that we really don’t 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"—which, she states, is Nyasha’s problem (198). Dangarembga also calls her first language English—the language used all through her education—and Shona her second language: "Sometimes I worry about Shona: how long it’s going to survive….There are very few people who can speak good Shona and even fewer who can write it. Maybe we’ve caught it just in time with the [Zimbabwean] Government’s policies of traditional culture and so forth, so maybe it’s not as sad as it seems" (196). Later on when Dangarembga was working in a publishing house, Zimbabwean historians were beginning to "rewrite

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 didn’t have access to them at the time. The writers in Zimbabwe were basically men at the time. And so I really didn’t see that the situation would be remedied unless some woman sat down and wrote something, so that’s what I did!" (196). Nervous Conditions was Dangarembga’s 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 women’s publishing house [Doris "Lessing explains how Nervous Conditions was rejected by four Zimbabwe publishers, and was not published within the country until Women's Press in London first published it. According to Lessing, it was "criticized by male critics as being 'negative,' and presenting an unfair picture of the lives of black women" (423; cited in Saliba n.