Novelists From Zimbabwe

"Even Africa has something to offer. We can offer love, and we can offer from the little we have, even as the story of the widow’s mite tells us, how she gave out of the abundance of her heart."

"It is still the same— Exactly the same. Take up arms and wage war Let your spear be education Let your shield be knowledge Let “truth at all times” be your motto Let your will be the determination to work hard For sisters illiterate still abound. Fight it to enlighten them Fight it by solidarity of purpose Without your participation Grandma fought it Mama fought it I still fight it You have to fight it Your daughters will have to fight it Fight on!"

"Your language is your fountain of knowledge."

"In Africa, about 65 percent of the population is young people, and they are not despairing. Africa's hope lies in the young people of the continent who are embracing education and the gospel."

"...Irene Sabatini created two unforgettable fictional characters who leapt off the page.—Bernardine Evaristo"

"Allow this book to take you on a journey that will capture both your head and your heart."

"But that’s what’s great about books- they carry you up, out and away, lifting you away from the mundane to the extra ordinary."

"I think that literature, when it’s good, as opposed to journalism, gives you the freedom to be the characters, to enter into their lives, their psyche and so their experiences become, in a way, yours."

"The writing seemed to just spiral out of me, and if I had to pick a time when I really started this journey it would be that wonderful quiet morning on a verandah so many years ago in the Colombian countryside..."

"How my imagination soared — the moon seemed so close that I felt I could reach out and touch it. And then my mind wandered: what are those noises outside?"

"Meeting her opened my eyes. I realised that the most important thing when it comes to opportunity is not the actual opportunity, but your readiness."

"Everyone was emulating white culture from fashion, hairstyles and language. Because of the fad at the time, it would have been pretty normal for Barbara to choose English as the language of her novels. Not only was this going to make her appear more sophisticated but it would have boosted her profile, internationally. She, however, chose to use her mother tongue, becoming the second woman to publish in her native language after Lassie Ndondo."

"A loved elder of literature."

"I am immersed in culture and try to speak it into my Ndebele novels ... These are things that make you who you are, although, of course, modernity is working to erase that. Children are coming along when broader family structures have been broken by urban life and individualism. Our languages themselves are slowly disappearing. These days you may meet a child who cannot speak her mother tongue while also lacking a natural relationship with the English they want to be identified with."

"I think I am a better writer for being a lawyer. My mind is pretty chaotic because I am interested in so much, but it has been disciplined through my legal studies. I want to believe I am more measured in my responses to events, and that I am more analytical of my own motivations and self-justification. I am strongly opinionated but I have learned the gift of dispassion…"

"I think it’s become clear to people what my motivation is. I am not simply anti-government, and I’m not in opposition to any one person; I want to write about all the things that I think are making us into an unkind society…"

"Authentic is one of my least favourite words because in such a diverse country, whose authenticity are you talking about?"

"A lot of my writing is triggered by something true, either something I read in the papers, something I overheard—I am an inveterate eavesdropper—or something that happened in my very large, and very extended, family. And yet it is precisely those things that no one believes are real."

"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."

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

"“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.”"

"“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.”"

"“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.”"

"“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.”"

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

"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."

"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,"

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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 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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"’They are a very great boon to mankind, dentists,’ said Isabel. ‘And I’m not sure that we are grateful enough to them. I’m not sure that we even bother to thank them.’ She paused. Were there any statues of dentists? She thought not. And yet there should be."

"Every small wrong, every minor act of cruelty, every act of petty bullying was symbolic of a greater wrong. And if we ignored these small things, then did it not blunt our outrage over the larger wrongs?"

"Any extreme political creed brought only darkness in the long run; it lit up nothing. The best politics were those of caution, tolerance and moderation, Angus maintained, but such politics were, alas, also very dull, and certainly moved nobody to poetry."

"Old friends, like old shoes, are comfortable. But old shoes, unlike old friends, tend not to be supportive: it is easier to stumble and sprain an ankle while wearing a pair of old shoes than it is in new shoes, with their less yielding leather."

"It’s very important to be able to accept things, you know. Gracious acceptance is an art – an art which most of never bother to cultivate. We think that we have to learn how to give, but we forget about accepting things, which can be much harder than giving."

"Things can end badly, as they sometimes do in life. But if they do, then we know that something is wrong, just as we know it when a piece of music doesn’t resolve itself properly at the end. We know that. We just do. And so we prefer harmony."

"But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn’t it? – and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever."

"And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice – based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom – how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!"

"One might expect bad behaviour from existentialists – indeed that was what existentialism was all about, was it not? – but to find this happening on one’s own doorstep was a shock."

"The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us. And of course they never admit to their childish practices, their moments of weakness or absurdity, and then the rest of us think that’s how it should be."