Novelists From Zimbabwe

"I was asked by the publisher if I had more stories. I said 'yes' haphazardly, though I had none. He asked for them. Therefore I set out to write them"

"I would love to be remembered as a writer who had no fear for words and who had an intense love for her nation"

"carrying the current of a roar that reminds them of who they have been in the past, but it is also the comforting voice of a woman, of their mothers whom they trust. Her voice throws them into the future."

"The land cannot be owned. We cannot give him any land because the land does not belong to the living."

"Nehanda holds her silence all day, offering it with the palm of her hand as though it were something solid. She shouts.... closed out the earthly sounds that try to penetrate and disturb her silence."

"What were our lives compared to the survival of the earth on which we stood?"

"I must be in touch with the earth. I can never mistake the source of inspiration and energy to be gender, it is something we all share. It is true, however, that one best writes on themes, feelings, and sentiments one is more closely connected with. In this regard I like to think that I am writing. I am a woman. I am writing."

"needed to enter [Nehanda's] mythic consciousness to really be part of it, to share it and to claim it as my own history and my own identity"

"I wanted to write beyond the photograph, you know, that frozen image, beyond the date, beyond the fact of her dying. If anything in my book she doesn't die, she departs."

"I always need to be anchored in such a way that I am inside a character."

"Time is as necessary for remembering as it is for forgetting. Even the smallest embrace of pain needs time larger than a pause; the greatest pause requires an eternity, the greatest hurt a lifetime. A lifetime is longer than eternity: an eternity can exist without human presence."

"If speaking is still difficult to negotiate, then writing has created a free space for most women -much freer than speech. The book is bound, circulated, read. It retains its autonomy much more than a woman is allowed in the oral situation."

"How can words be made still [in writing], without turning into silence? Silence is more to be feared than the agitation of voices."

"Nehanda came out of me like a dream. It has the feeling of a dream when I look at it now. And that suited it, because it concerned a myth, a legend. It was a story of spirituality, of ancestors, a mystic consciousness and a history ... so it was much better to write it almost intuitively, out of my consciousness of being an African, as though I were myself a spirit medium, and I was just transferring or conveying the feelings, symbols and images of that. I wrote it at a time when I could write it, the way one might write a folk-song... I wrote it from remembrance, as a witness to my own spiritual history."

"Our people know the power of words. It is because of this that they desire to have words continuously spoken and kept alive. We do not believe that words can become independent of the speech that bore them, of the humans who controlled and gave birth to them. [... ] The paper is the stranger’s own peculiar custom. Among ourselves, speech is not like the rock. Words cannot be taken from the people who create them. People are their words."

"The dare was a large clearing in the center of the village. Those who were admitted to the dare knew the power of words. The midwife was also among the shapers of wisdom, who determined the future of the village."

"She cried, and the women sang her back to sleep, willing a silence onto her. She defied them with her tiny speech-seeking voice and cried all day and all night until her mother fell asleep."

"I doubt that the natives can listen to an old woman like her. What can she tell them? This society has no respect for women, whom they treat like children. A woman has nothing to say in the life of the natives. Nothing at all."

"Fumbatha could never be the beginning or end of all her yearning."

"If not freedom then rhythm."

"The work is not their own: it is summoned. The time is not theirs: it is seized. The ordeal is their own."

"I will have had enough intimacies to acquire a general sketch, a thrill, and a confidence. It is the same with books as it is with lovers. If you cannot feel your whole body move towards a book, then you are mostly doodling, or being quite separate from the act of writing. I spend many months between books fasting. I am meditative and spend many hours on my own, with my hunger growing. I love writing; it is a feast for my senses. I write to share this feast with a reader"

"As for the coldness, I have never seen it like this. I mean, coldness that makes like it wants to kill you, like it's telling you, with its snow, that you should go back to where you came from."

"“When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky.”"

"I am starting to talk fast now, and I have to remember to slow down because when I get excited, I start to sound like myself and my American accent goes away."

"“The problem with English is this: You usually can't open your mouth and it comes out just like that--first you have to think what you want to say. Then you have to find the words. Then you have to carefully arrange those words in your head. Then you have to say the words quietly to yourself, to make sure you got them okay. And finally, the last step, which is to say the words out loud and have them sound just right.”"

"“There are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find the food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix that.”"

"“Further and further we go, and the sun keeps ironing us and ironing us and ironing us.”"

"“Aunt Fostalina says when she first came to America she went to school during the day and worked nights at Eliot’s hotels, cleaning hotel rooms together with people from countries like Senegal, Cameroon, Tibet, the Philippines, Ethiopia, and so on. It was like the damn United Nations there, she likes to say.”"

"“...and the women spread their ntsaroz and sit on one side, the men on the other, like they are two different rivers that are not supposed to meet.”"

"“Now when the men talk, their voices burn in the air, making smoke all over the place. We hear about change, about new country, about democracy, about elections and what-what."

"“If Messenger would be to open his mouth right now, his voice would be a terrible wound.”"

"“We're hungry but we're together and we're at home and everything is sweeter than dessert.”"

"“I think the reason they are my relatives now is they are from my country too - it's like the country has become a real family since we are in America, which is not our country.”"

"“I used to be very afraid of graveyards and death and such things, but not anymore. There is just no sense of being afraid when you live so near the graves; it would be like the tongue fearing the teeth.”"

"NoViolet Bulawayo has created a world that lives and breathes – and fights, kicks, screams, and scratches, too. She has clothed it in words and given it a voice at once dissonant and melodic, utterly distinct.""

"Look at the children of the land leaving in droves, leaving their own land with bleeding wounds on their bodies and shock on their faces and blood in their hearts and hunger in their stomachs and grief in their footsteps. Leaving their mothers and fathers and children behind, leaving their umbilical cords underneath the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth, leaving everything that makes them who and what they are, leaving because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same."

"Zimbabweans and Nigerians are famous for just having PhDs PhDs, but that really opened my eyes to the importance of teaching, right, and not just teaching fiction, the craft of fiction but art is also a way to think together to build empathy, diversity, right? I think the humanities are really good at that and cultivating stewardship, citizenship, and that’s really what I’m interested in in the classroom"

"Fiction allows me to make up events that happened but feel emotionally true…House of Stone took me six years to write, about 17 drafts. My aim was to fail spectacularly rather than succeed safely"

"Relaying ordinary narratives was a way to reclaim that space in the national identity for ordinary citizens and born-frees. If I’m going to do Zimbabwean history some justice, I need as many perspectives as possible"

"Even though there was no petrol, people were driving. Even though the country was experiencing hyperinflation, my mother was able to secure chicken portions with her whole salary, without doing anything illegal"

"I heard the stories from my father, passed down to him by his father, my grandfather, and which I shall one day pass down to my children."

"And now, the valour of our people and the glory of the Mthwakazi Nation lives on not in any history book, or in any official account, where we are nothing but savages without culture, without history or glory or anything worth mentioning or passing on"

"And though he beat the boy, it wasn’t really the boy he wanted to beat, but, it seemed to me, himself…"

"You know you will disappear. Like you’re causing trouble. You can’t go to the village and start asking these sorts of questions without causing trouble. Many activists in Zimbabwe have, you know, disappeared or paid the price. But for me the structure of House of Stone mirrors exactly what you’re talking about… the difficulty of excavating history"

"I think we also underestimate just how difficult it is to talk about this history and work through it. We need structures, we need state support. It cannot just be people looking through history. We need help as to how to look at that history and how to heal from that history"

"I remember during my writing of House of Stone, I went to therapy, and I took the book for therapy, I needed to also make sense and work through what excavation this issue was doing to me, to my psyche, to my body, my emotions"

"The massacres are horrible when you read the transcripts. They speak of torture, starvation, families being forced to kill their family members, bury them, dance on their graves, it’s really atrocious. What’s really horrible is that there’s been no reckoning with that. The victims have gone unacknowledged. They did not receive any help, any social… and I’m thinking of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa as a comparison. So we have a lot of wounds. So that’s really what I wanted to sit with. And make sense of and try and understand"

"One must find a way of not destroying the spirit in the process of trying to help"

"Read! Write! Tomorrow's leader."