Filmmakers

"What man did not want a piece of viable land that belonged to him"

"For me, the Quality of Mercy is about what to do with particularly violent histories—when you inherit them"

"What do we do with this inherited state? An eye for an eye or forgiveness?” —and what does that forgiveness (or mercy) even look like"

"The idea of forward movement as progress has become something that I find very problematic. And I think it’s because I bought into it for a very long time in my own life, in my own thinking. That as long as things are forward moving, this is progressive. So I liked the idea of having these people thinking that they were coming here or coming together as a form of progressing, right? The very narrative of progress is so built into the whole colonial narrative that it can’t make sense of itself without that. But I actually liked the idea of realising, maybe, that that forward movement is not necessarily leading anyway. This is something that I think the protagonist of the novel realises by examining her father’s life closely, because he is someone who’s constantly on the move but also very lost and directionless. There are moments in our own histories, both collectively and personally, where, you know, it looked like we were doing this, but actually, we were not moving forward. Maybe, you know, we were stuck or we were moving back, but we were not doing that forward progression"

"I think when we think of the city it’s where people go to work. But in a country that has such little employment, why is the city so busy? Well, it’s because people are employing themselves. So it’s a whole other way of relating to that space"

"For me, Bulawayo is a city of people coming together to build the city. So it’s a very cosmopolitan space. Because we received the city for a very long time as a white people’s place, there’s a way people feel disconnected from it. But your great grandfathers were the ones building the various buildings that you’re looking at. They were the labour. And there’s pride to be had in that. So maybe when you’re there, have that connection to it. Realise that this is actually something that was actively created by people who then also actively created you. I think that connection is missing sometimes because we were not allowed to have that sense of ownership as black people, or people who are not white, of the city. Indian and Coloured people had to live in a very particular place in the city, for example. That segregation led to a very interesting connection to the city, but this is our city, and we should have that sense of communal pride"

"That’s what I love about looking at the history we’ve created, it is messy, it is chaotic. With all the attempts to make it otherwise actually what made the past the past was that it was just people not following the rules that had been put in place. I mean, if the rules had been followed, there wouldn’t have been women in the city, there would not have been the creation of the Coloured races, as it came to be known, there would not have been the creation of a middle class, there’s a lot of things that just were not supposed to happen. It’s people saying, oh, I see you’ve created this law, but I’m still going to do what I want. And I think when we look only at the laws that were in place, we miss the people’s reaction to that. This is why governments and power are afraid of people, because people are very contradictory and very difficult to confine and very difficult to define and they can do anything. I think the reason why, in this part of the world, apartheid and segregation became so violent is because people were told to stay within their boxes and they didn’t necessarily want to"

"But really, we can talk about the violence of apartheid, but what actually made the history was the messiness, was the chaos. Was people. That’s what creates the reality. Not necessarily following the rules, but most definitely breaking them"

"One of the things that makes me particularly unhappy with the way Zimbabwe has dealt with its race issue is that it has invisibilized—we still call them Coloured people—Coloured people. They’re silenced, they don’t have any political agency. And I think people would rather pretend that they don’t exist, because they don’t want to have to face the history of how they came to exist. In many ways I see parallels with the United States, and a lot of that violence, for me, stems from knowing that when someone has your last name and is black, and you’re white, you might share an ancestor. And the reason why you have that last name is something violent. So you’re going to continue that violence to make sure that that kind of relation is erased. But it’s there, and I think we now need to start facing those uncomfortable sides of our histories"

"I came across a lot of Sethekelis when I was reading archival sources. And I think a lot of us women who exist in the country don’t know that such women existed. Or if we know that they existed, we receive them with a very negative narrative that says, oh, they were loose women or they were prostitutes. That power that they had is totally taken away from them. And I think that is, well, more than problematic, and it’s something we need to revisit. We need to be very critical about how certain women were portrayed and continue to be thought about. Because again, we know that powerful women and women who are challenging anything are always considered very threatening, so history doesn’t want to remember them at all"

"we have to be confrontational about the past. We have to learn from it, but also challenge some of what we’ve received as knowledge and truth. I’m not comfortable with just letting the past be the past, because I think there’s so much to learn from it. The adage is that if you don’t learn from it, you’re just going to repeat it, and I think unfortunately we’re living through a period where we’re repeating it, we’re repeating a lot of things. For instance, I think if a lot of women who work at the market in Zimbabwe right now understood that they were continuing a tradition of defiance that started at the very beginning of the colonial era, they would have a very different sense of what they were doing"

"In some ways, living in Bulawayo I’m always aware of what could have been. So I’m always writing both what is and what could have been, or what was and what could have been. Because the potential for something better has always been there. We just never realised it. And I don’t know that we ever will, because we’ve never created the idea of a nation, so maybe we just never will. But I think it’s something to think about. When we read, there’s so much possibility, and then the reality of things is always a bit of a disappointment. But I think if we can imagine it, then we can achieve it. We seem to be able to do that with horrible things, so we should be able to do that with things that are good too"

"I think it is possible to reimagine or imagine something better for ourselves. I think it’s important. And it’s possible to use the past to do that. For me, the tragic thing is that history has always been owned by those in power. So what we receive as history—and this happens everywhere in the world—is already a narrative that is very curated. And I think our true empowerment comes from engaging with that history on our own terms ourselves, and taking what we want from it. And I think that’s a journey that, like you were saying, is just not built into our education systems, for obvious reasons. But it is something that I think if we did, could help people heal, in many different ways, traumas that some of them are not even aware that they have had, you know, historically or even up to today. And part of this bigger project is to show that this moment is very much like this other moment, is very much like this other moment. If we focus too myopically on a particular moment in our history, we lose sight of the fact that these things repeat. So maybe it’s not to question the person in power but to question the type of power itself, or to question the very systems that we have put in place. There’s a way in which we reduce things to people to make it easier, but a person is a person, a system is a whole other thing. And we ourselves are so imbricated in systems that we don’t know how to disentangle them. But we have to start trying to do some of that work"

"I wanted to use my imagination to say, yeah, it was horrible, but look what could also have been possible, right? And that doesn’t mean we can’t achieve it now. I think that’s where most of the hope in my novels comes from. I mean, there’s no denying that what happened in this part of the world was just terrible and horrible and horrific. It doesn’t mean it always has to be that way. It doesn’t mean we always have to relate to each other that way. And I know this sounds idealistic and too optimistic, but I think if we do even a little bit of this work, we will be much better. And leave a better legacy for those who come after. Because there’s no untangling what has already happened, it’s already happened. So what we need to do is figure out how to move on with it"

"I think I’m always finding moments to do that. But also there’s this notion that in this particular moment in history, women just knew how to do this, they were so domesticated and they just followed recipes and cakes came out and they were all fluffy and wonderful. I don’t think that was every woman. I had the very anti-domestication thing going on in the novel because I think that’s also a way of narrowing our own narratives about ourselves, you know, you’re mothers and wives and this is why you were happy and this is how we know you. But what if you were not good at being a mother or wife, what does that mean"