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Rivers of change
Percy
Zvomuya, Mail & Guardian (SA)
February 09, 2007
http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/2007/2007feb/070208-rivers.html
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 Zimbabwean 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 Dangarembga
will carry the prefix "writer".
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