One could dismiss Tsitsi Dangarembga’s assertion that she does not consider herself a writer, at least in the professional sense, as willful arrogance. It is, after all, the success of her novel Nervous Conditions that brought her to the world’s attention in the late 1980s. But it is as a filmmaker that she was trained and provides for her family and she argues that doing something professionally assumes ”you receive a wage for it”.
”My profession is filmmaking … I consider myself a storyteller, a producer of narratives,” she says.
When I point out that Nervous Conditions must have sold more than a million copies, cementing her position as one of the few female writers on the continent able to make a living as a scribe, she shakes her head sadly and explains that after the book’s publisher, the Women’s Press, collapsed it was taken over by a company that short-changed her and did not fully pay her royalties. ”That discouraged me. How can I go on writing for other people to benefit?”
This deep disillusionment colours her view of unequal world relations, the Nigerian filmmaking industry and Zimbabwe, her country of birth. She bemoans the fact that the world has not changed much since her book came to the attention of the world. ”There is still a lot of male chauvinism in my part of the world,” she says. Recalling a gender sensitivity in the media workshop she once held in Harare, she says she was unable to find useable published pictures of women, apart from those of women in beauty pageants.
A lot of the so-called empowerment of women in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, Dangarembga argues, is token. Empowerment, she contends, implies the power to change. But there is a lot of talk and little action and many of the images, signals and narratives that are out there actively, and at a subliminal level, keep women bound. While African society remains patriarchal, she remains optimistic about its potential to change: ”The world can change; the empowerment of one group does not mean the disempowerment of the other group,” she says.
When talk turns to Zimbabwe, Dangarembga is critical of her country people, both white and black. ”What is the Zimbabwean project?” she asks. ”I don’t believe there is a common vision in that country on anything. I would hesitate to call the Zimbabwean people a nation of Zimbabweans.” A nation, she passionately argues, needs common symbols, ”common histories that are rendered acceptable” to all. Furthermore, being Zimbabwean is defined by more than just holding a ZimbabÂÂÂwean passport, she says.
While Dangarembga was making the short film Hard Earth, about the Zimbabwean land invasions, she interviewed a commercial farmer who told her he did not want to do anything that involved moving out of his comfort zone. ”But is a nation going to be built by people who live in comfort zones from where they don’t want to move?” she asks. Part of the Zimbabwe problem, she says, is the reductionist Marxist ideology under which the nationalist struggle was waged. ”Maybe we should start engaging issues intellectually and cease looking at issues without the clichés,” she suggests.
After Nervous Conditions was printed in the late 1980s, she studied filmmaking in Berlin, Germany, where she lived from 1989 to 2000. One upshot of that period was that her latest film, Kare Kare Zvako, was the only short fiction film from Africa chosen for the independent Sundance Film Festival in January 2005.
Dangarembga is ambivalent about the fast-growing Nigerian film industry, accusing it of lacking depth, artistic and technical quality, and range. ”What you see is what you get,” she says. ”I was talking of the need for intellectual exercise, engagement and envisioning the future … and Nollywood falls short of that — which is not that bad, sometimes people need chewing gum for the brain.”
We return to literature. The Book of Not (Ayebia), Dangarembga’s sequel to Nervous Conditions, was published last year. Set against the backdrop of the war of independence it intelligently foregrounds the crisis that has engulfed Zimbabwe. The Book of Not will be followed by a final book in the trilogy, the title for which she is still considering. For the moment it is going under the working title of The River Running Dry, which Dangarembga says comes from an old Rhodesian limerick. Although it is pessimistic in sentiment, she says it echoes some of the themes of transition in The Book of Not.
More significantly, rivers, with their implications of crossings, currents and changes, are inherent in the concept of Bira. Literally, kubira means crossing a river. Bira refers to the Shona ritual in which a dead person’s spirit is brought from the spirit world to commune with the living. Both kubira and Bira inform her nascent third novel which, when it comes out, must surely mean that the name Tsitsi DangarembÂÂÂga will carry the prefix ”writer”.