playwrights-from-zimbabwe

"At the time when I did my course it was attached to a Theatre Studies Foundation Degree at Leeds College. I needed to do a top up year to get a BA. The previous course has been more traditional theatre and the year at Beckett introduced me to performance art."

"I recently became a Lecturer in Scriptwriting at Manchester Metropolitan University. Previously, I worked at the University of Manchester (Drama), Warwick University (Poetry) and guest lectured at Leeds Beckett (Performance). My teaching is attached to my work as a poet, screenwriter, playwright, dramaturg and director. I have been working as a freelancer for 15 years. I have performed poetry and competed in international poetry slams. My theatre work has been produced across the UK, France, Germany, South Africa, Zimbabwe and USA. I have made short films and produced radio plays. I have purposely worked on multidisciplinary projects to challenge myself as a writer and grow my skills."

"Where possible, I took part in various development programmes and workshops. These helped me move through various mediums and build networks over the years. As a result of my industry experience, I'd be invited to lead workshops for arts organisations, theatres, schools and universities. I built a teaching portfolio while simultaneously continuing to do my vocation. When the position at MMU came up, it welcomed applicants who had industry experience where a PhD was missing. I knew I was qualified for the job."

"The course introduced me to new performance principles and techniques. It gave me an appreciation for performance art. However, it crucially highlighted that as much as I enjoyed performing work, writing was where I thrived more. Researching and creating scripts is a genuine passion."

"I've had many proud moments over the years. When I was 17, I represented the UK with Leeds Young Authors at Brave New Voices International Poetry Slam in New York."

"In 2014, my first play BOI BOI IS DEAD won the Channel 4 Playwrights Scheme and was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize."

"My plays are published by Bloomsbury. My first narrative short, THE ANCESTORS premiered at the Pan African Film Festival in LA in February 2023."

"This month, the spin off anime Castlevania: Nocturne premiered on Netflix. I am one of the screenwriters on the series."

"The performance of my final project, HOME HAS DIED was my favourite memory. The project was a tribute to family members who had passed away. It touched on migration, disconnection, grief and healing. It was my first ever solo show. My mum joined me on stage. She played the drum and sang."

"The notion of discovery is very important to hold on to. Sometimes we think we know who we are or what an idea is; or we are debilitated by what it isn't or what we aren't. But by remaining in a space of discovery you'll be open to experiment, to ask for help, to throw things out and receive the unknown, to collaborate with other practitioners and to put yourself forward for opportunities. You'll be scared, but still do it and discover what comes."

"Stars below instead of above! I wanted to see them straight away. I prayed for a miracle, for the sun to set."

"Keening. I remember keening that seemed to go on all through the night: shrill, sharp, shiny, needless of sound piercing cleanly and deeply to let the anguish in, not out."

"What I experienced that day was a short cut, a rerouting of everything I had ever defined as me into fast lanes that would speedily lead me to my destination. My horizons were saturated with me, my leaving, my going. There was no room for what I left behind."

"As for my sisters, well, they were there. They were watching me climb into Babamukuru's car to be whisked away to limitless horizons. It was up to them to learn the important lesson that circumstances were not immutable, no burden so binding that it could not be dropped,"

"Plunging into these books I knew I was being educated and I was filled with gratitude to the authors for introducing me to places where reason and inclination were not at odds. It was a centripetal time, with meat the centre, everything gravitating towards me. It was a time of sublimation with me as the sublimate."

"You had to know the facts if you were ever going to find the solutions."

"Can you cook books and feed them to your husband? Stay at home with your mother. Learn to cook and clean. Grow vegetables."

"“You feel you are creeping up over the edge of a precipice and that this cliff beckons you; worse, that you have a secret desire to fall over its edge into oblivion and that there is no way to stop that fall because you are the precipice.”"

"“You begin to suspect that Cousin-Brother-in-Law and Nyasha are not being honest, that they found each other because neither possesses the hardiness success requires, so they have dressed discouragement up in the glamour of intellect.”"

"“He says he wants to go back to Germany,' Nyasha confides. 'As soon as he's finished his doctorate,' she goes on, as though both completion of his research and departure are imminent. You realize she does not know Cousin-Brother-in-Law is mulling another thesis because he is no longer interested in his subject. You are surprised your in-law is behaving in the way you expect your own black men to do, first of all by being so indecisive and then by not telling his wife.”"

"“How, with all your education, do you come to be more needy than your mother?”"

"“What we heard all the time is that you were not working. That's what was said, that that degree of yours was just a piece of paper sitting, silently rotting."

"“How about forgetting?" you say. "Sometimes forgetting is better than remembering when nothing can be done." "Forgetting is harder than you think," says Nyasha. "Especially when something can be done. And ought to be. It's a question of choices.”"

"The writers in Zimbabwe were also [like the characters in the literature they produced] basically men at the time."

"The racism in England was not so institutionalized. Well, it was institutionalized, but then it was so efficiently realized that it didn’t need institutions, if you understand what I mean. In England, it was much easier not to be affected by it to that extent because my parents were students and people were somewhat respectful."

"I realize that creative women often do not fit easily into certain paradigms. I think to myself, Then where do they go? Where do they go? Because I feel that these women have so much to contribute, that they just see things in a different way. Every society has people like that and marginalizes them in some way. So it’s a very difficult situation."

"The skills I had learned for prose didn’t work in film. Those telling details, they’re completely different. Or the fact of these inner monologues in which you can write a whole book. Whereas prose is teasing out, film is stripping down, concentrating and compacting. I found I could not learn the one while doing the other. So it was a big struggle, actually. It took me years."

"People who fear greatly can sometimes substitute themselves for the thing they fear"

"Christine has that layer under her skin that cuts off her outside from her inside and allows no communication between the person she once believed she could be and the person she has in fact become. The one does not acknowledge the other's existence."

"I wrote the book just after Zimbabwe’s independence to encourage young Zimbabweans to develop themselves in spite of the challenges they would face doing so. There was also a lot of talk after independence of going back to one’s cultural roots. I wanted to interrogate that idea by examining aspects of the culture we were being told to go back to that affected women in my environment negatively. I was a newly minted feminist at the time and very eager. I also wanted to look at the ongoing effects of colonialism in the new dispensation. At the same time, I hoped to write a book that would be eminently readable, with recognizable characters."

"It wasn't African literature that I came to first. It was the Afro-American women writers, I found them very helpful. (Such as, for example?) Toni Morrison, who is really incredible. Then I read Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, and of course there are several others I can't remember right now."

"I have seen enough to know that blame does not come in neatly packaged parcels."