★ 11/28/2022
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.)
A compelling collection. . . . Black and Female . . . [yokes] the personal and political to demonstrate how the experience of race and gender depends not on overarching essentialism but on local histories that are written on the body.”—Ismail Muhammad, New York Times Book Review
“Dangarembga’s style is meticulous, an immersive realism full of a fluency of detail.”—Darryl Pinckney, The New York Review of Books
“A groundbreaking essay collection on feminism in Black skin. . . . [Dangarembga urges] us to study the past if we intend to fix what ails us now—not just in her country but around the world.”—Wadzanai Mhute, Oprah Daily
“Incisive, impassioned essays. . . . 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.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Dangarembga deftly lays out the colonial history which her writing both springs from and exists in opposition to. . . . It's a tall order, but Dangarembga achieves it with grace, through a clear-eyed analysis of both her familial and national pasts. . . . Poetic and powerful.”—Shannon Gibney, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A well-informed, biting analysis of the legacy of empire.”—Kirkus Reviews
“A powerful account of systemic injustice. . . . Dangarembga’s collection is an essential addition to academic collections on race and gender.”—Library Journal
“Dangarembga offers visions of what could be possible, woven together with historical analysis and precise, clear-eyed criticism. Black and Female is as slim and sharp as a knife.”—Maggie Lange, Bustle
The personal and political commingle (because, as all feminists know, they’re one and the same) as Dangarembga excavates her own history and the history of her nation. The result is a clear-eyed look at what navigating life and art-making as a woman in Zimbabwe has taught her.”—The Millions, “Most Anticipated Books of 2023”
“With her own experiences as testimony, Dangarembga deftly illustrates how Black feminists might just end the white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy once and for all.”—Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine
“Black and Female . . . represents a rallying cry for the transformative power of writing; not only to help us make sense of our place in the world . . . but to lend us the imagination and courage to change it.”—The Guardian
“A celebration of artistic creation at the same time as an acknowledgment of unjust worldly realities. [Dangarembga] has a talent for taking activist buzzwords, around women’s agency or the importance of decolonizing the canon, and examining how powerful yet difficult it is to pull up the deep structural and psychological roots of patriarchy and empire.”—The Observer
“From foster care in England to colonialism’s legacy in Zimbabwe, this set of essays on race, feminism and identity is searingly honest, yet hopeful.”—The World Today
“Thoughtful, challenging, and incredibly insightful”—Black Ballad
“Urgent, compelling, blisteringly brilliant. This timely and elegant collection should be essential reading for anyone who cares about the aftermath of Empire – and that should be all of us. Tsitsi Dangarembga is one of the most powerful writers working today.”—Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton
“In these moving and necessary essays, Tsitsi Dangarembga insists that ‘the best writing opens the lesion again and again and cleanses.’ She is exactly as good as her word.”—Andrew Motion
“Tsitsi Dangarembga's essential new essay collection blazes with her characteristic intellectual prowess, unstinting honesty, and commitment to personal and political acts of resistance and reclamation.”—Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks
“Poignant, profound, essential. The human cost of colonization laid bare.”—Audrey Magee, author of The Colony
01/01/2023
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
2022-10-26
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.
