Tsitsi Dangarembga

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Tsitsi Dangarembga (2006)

Tsitsi Dangarembga (born February 14, 1959 in Mutoko ) is a Zimbabwean author and filmmaker. It is considered a major director of the younger African cinema and was the 2020 100-Women-list of the BBC added.

Life

Early years

Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in the British crown colony of Southern Rhodesia . Her mother Susan (1926–2019) was the first black woman in Rhodesia to graduate with a bachelor's degree in 1953 . She spent her early childhood, between the ages of two and six, in England , where she also began her schooling. During this time she spoke English and almost completely forgot about her Shona , the language with which she first came into contact. In 1965, the year of Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence , she returned to Africa with her parents and began speaking Shona again. Nevertheless, she describes English as her mother tongue. The family initially lived in Mutare , where Tsitsi attended the Marymount Mission School. Her training was completed at the Arundel School, an elite school in Salisbury (now Harare ), which was attended almost exclusively by white girls.

First dramatic work

In 1977 Dangarembga began studying medicine at Cambridge University , but returned to her home country after three years. She had felt isolated and homesick at university. In Zimbabwe she worked for a short time as a teacher and then started studying psychology at the University of Zimbabwe . She also worked as a copywriter. She became a member of the university's theater company and wrote her first three plays, including The Lost of the Soil . She also joined a theater group called Zambuko and was involved in the development of plays here ( Katshaa ; Mavambo ). She later said, “There just weren't any plays with roles for black women, or at least we didn't have access to them at the time. The writers in Zimbabwe at the time were mostly men. I really didn't see that the situation was going to change unless a woman sat down and wrote something, so I did! ”It was during this period that Dangarembga began reading African American literature after reading it predominantly in her youth consisted of English classics.

Nervous Conditions and Free Sequels

In 1985 Dangarembga published the short story The Letter , which won second place in a competition organized by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and was published in the anthology Whispering Land . In 1987 the piece She Does Not Weep followed in Harare.

At the age of 25 she had a great success with the novel Nervous Conditions . The book, the original title of which goes back to a quote by Jean-Paul Sartre , was initially rejected by four publishers in Zimbabwe. It first appeared on The Women's Press in London , and later in the US and Zimbabwe. Nervous Conditions tells the partly autobiographical story of the young Tambu, who experiences double oppression: through the patriarchal Shona structures and the dominance of the whites. The girl lives on an impoverished farm in Rhodesia in the late 1960s; her family struggles to raise the school fees only for her brother. When he suddenly dies of mumps , 14-year-old Tambu has the chance to go to the mission school run by her uncle Babamukuru instead of her brother. He was educated in England and represents the first generation of the Christian-African elite. Although she is burdened by major conflicts within the family, Tambu sees the possibility of receiving a good education. She has great ambitions despite the barriers that stand in her way: skin color, class, and gender. With this book, Dangarembga was the first black Zimbabwean woman to publish a novel. It has been translated into many languages, including German. In 1992 Tsitsi Dangarembga was included in the renowned anthology Daughters of Africa .

Her novels The Book of Not (2006) and This Mournable Body (2018) are independent sequels to their debut, with which they form a trilogy .

Film studies and film work

In 1989 Tsitsi Dangarembga went to Germany, where she studied film directing at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin and realized her first projects. In 1992 she founded the production company Nyerai Films in Harare and wrote the screenplay for Neria , which is still the best-grossing film in Zimbabwean history. Her 1996 film Everyone's Child , the first film made by a black woman in Zimbabwe, has been shown in several countries, including the Dublin International Film Festival . The film, which was shot in Harare and in the province of Mashonaland East , follows the tragic story of four siblings whose parents died of AIDS .

Since 2000

Since 2000, Dangarembga has lived with her German husband, the film editor Olaf Koschke, and their children, mostly in Zimbabwe. There she founded, among other things, the International Images Film Festival and went public with other film works. Dangarembga is working on a dissertation on African film that is being produced at the Humboldt University in Berlin . Together with Virginia Phiri , among others , she received a scholarship in 2008 at the Künstlerhaus Villa Waldberta in the city of Munich . Financing her life and film projects turned out to be difficult at times. In 2015 she told the weekly newspaper Der Freitag : “I have my office in my own house. Five young people, my husband and I, we all work in a garage that my husband converted. It's difficult to get the funds to pay my young people. One source is my royalties. "

In 2013 she was Writer in Residence at Northwestern University in Illinois . From 2015 she worked on the project Breaking Silence , which deals with violence in Zimbabwe. People across the country were asked about their experiences, and their stories are to be written down later. After calling for an anti-corruption demonstration in July 2020, she was briefly detained and released on parole.

Honourings and prices

For the novel Nervous Conditions , Tsitsi Dangarembga received the African Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989 .

Her debut novel was recognized by the BBC as one of the 100 best African books to mark the world in 2018 . Her novel This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the UK Booker Prize in 2020 . In 2021 she received the PEN Pinter Prize and the PEN International Award for Freedom of Expression .

In June 2021 it was announced that she would receive the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade . The jury's reasoning stated: “In her trilogy of novels, Tsitsi Dangarembga uses the example of an adolescent woman to describe the struggle for the right to a decent life and female self-determination in Zimbabwe. In doing so, she shows social and moral conflicts that go far beyond the regional context and open up resonance spaces for global questions of justice. In her films she addresses problems that arise from the clash of tradition and modernity. Your messages are successfully addressed to a wide audience both in Zimbabwe and in neighboring countries. "

Works

Original editions and translations

  • The Third One (Acting)
  • Lost of the Soil (drama), 1983
  • The Letter (short story), 1985, published in the Swedish anthology Whispering Land
  • She No Longer Weeps (acting), 1987
  • Nervous Conditions (Roman), 1988 ISBN 9781919772288
  • German: The price of freedom . Translated by Ilija Trojanow . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1991
  • German: break up . Translated by Ilija Trojanow. Orlanda, Hamburg / Berlin 2019 (new German title)
  • German: survival . Translated by Anette Gruber. Orlanda, Hamburg / Berlin 2021

Movies

  • Neria , 1993 (screenplay)
  • The Great Beauty Conspiracy , 1994
  • Passport to Kill , 1994
  • Black Market [original title], 1995
  • Everyone's Child , 1996
  • The Puppeteer , 1996
  • Zimbabwe Birds , 1998
  • On the Border , 2000
  • Hard Earth - Land Rights in Zimbabwe , 2001
  • Ivory , 2001
  • Elephant People , 2002
  • Mother's Day , 2004
  • High Hopes , 2004
  • At the Water , 2005
  • Growing Stronger , 2005
  • Kare Kare Zvako , 2005
  • Peretera Maneta , 2006
  • The Sharing Day , 2008
  • I Want a Wedding Dress , 2010
  • Ungochani , 2010
  • Nyami Nyami Amaji Abulozi , 2011

literature

  • Michelle Vizzard: Of Mimicry and Woman 'Hysteria and Anti-colonial Feminism in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions . In: Journal of the South Pacific Association for the Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies , H. 36, 1992, pp. 202-210 ( online version ).
  • Gilian Gorle: Fighting the Good Fight: What Tsitsi Dangarembga's 'Nervous Conditions' Says about Language and Power , in: The Yearbook of English Studies 27 (1997), pp. 179-192.
  • Ann Elizabeth Willey, Jeanette Driver (Ed.): Negotiating the Postcolonial emerging perspectives on Tsitsi Dangarembga . Trenton: Africa World Press 2002 ISBN 0-86543-933-8 .
  • Hena Ahmad: Postnational Feminisms. Postcolonial identities and cosmopolitanism in the works of Kamala Markandaya, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Anita Desai (American university studies 27, Feminist studies 8). New York et al .: Lang 2010, ISBN 978-0-8204-5247-0 .
  • Laura Morgan Green: Literary identification in women's novels of formation from Charlotte Brontë to Tsitsi Dangarembga . Columbus: The Ohio State University Press 2012.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Peace Prize 2021: Tsitsi Dangarembga , Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (accessed on June 21, 2021).
  2. ↑ Elizabeth Ofosuah Johnson: Celebrating Susan Dangarembga, Zimbabwe's first black woman to earn a degree in 1953 , in: Face 2 Face Africa from June 6, 2019, accessed on June 21, 2021.
  3. ^ A b African Authors: Tsitsi Dangarembga , Central Oregon Community College (accessed June 21, 2021).
  4. ↑ a b Literary portrait: Tsitsi Dangarembga , Marabout (accessed June 21, 2021).
  5. ↑ Know Your Author: Dangarembga , The Herald, May 20, 2012.
  6. ^ Rebecca Grady, Dangarembga, Tsitsi , Postcolonial Studies, Emory University, Fall 1997 (accessed June 21, 2021).
  7. ↑ From Neria to Zollywood: The State of Zimbabwean Film , Ezimbabwe, September 7, 2013 (accessed June 21, 2021).
  8. ↑ And greetings from the Künstlerhaus , Rathaus Umschau, August 13, 2008.
  9. ↑ a b Sabine Kebir, Harare Reloaded , freitag.de, June 24, 2015.
  10. ↑ a b Excellent self-determination , Die Tageszeitung, June 21, 2021.
  11. ↑ The 100 stories that shaped the world , in: BBC – Culture of May 22, 2018, accessed on June 21, 2021.
  12. ↑ Review by Alexandra Fuller: 30 Years After Her Acclaimed Debut, a Zimbabwean Novelist Returns to Her Heroine in a Sequel , in: New York Times, August 30, 2018, accessed June 21, 2021.
  13. ↑ Review by Sheila McClear: One determined woman's fight to succeed in Zimbabwe - no matter what , in: Washington Post of August 7, 2018, accessed on June 21, 2021.
  14. ^ Peace Prize for author Tsitsi Dangarembga from Zimbabwe. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. June 21, 2021, accessed June 21, 2021 .
personal data
SURNAME Dangarembga, Tsitsi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Zimbabwean author and filmmaker
DATE OF BIRTH February 14, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH Mutoko