Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga is the much-heralded author of numerous novels, including the Booker-shortlisted This Mournable Body and Nervous Conditions, winner of the Commonwealth writers’ prize. In this short, serious and powerful nonfiction piece, she undertakes a deep dive into the consequences of racism and misogyny on her development as an author, a thinker and a woman in the world. She is inextricably shaped by sex, race, nationality and class – and yet writing also enables her to adjust and transcend these categories, to establish counter-narratives and expanded viewpoints.
She starts with a punchy history of Zimbabwe – formerly called Rhodesia – and follows on to examine the impact of empire, colonisation and patriarchy on her life and that of her nation and generation: “The first wound for all of us who are classified as ‘black’ is empire. This is a truth many of us – whether we are included in that category or not – prefer to avoid. Today, the wounding empire is that of the western nations: the empire that covered more than 80% of the globe at its zenith in the 19th century. It includes the British empire that colonised my country Zimbabwe in the 1890s. I was born into empire: my parents were products of empire, as were their parents before them, and their parents before that, my great-grandparents.”
