Paulina Chiziane

Paulina Chiziane (2008)

Paulina Chiziane (born June 4, 1955 in Manjacaze , Gaza Province , Mozambique ) is a Mozambican writer .

Life

Paulina Chiziane was born on June 4, 1955 in the small town of Manjacaze in the Gaza Province of the then Portuguese colony of Mozambique. At the age of six, she and her family moved to a suburb of the capital Lourenço Marques (now Maputo). Her father, who had to do forced labor ( xibalo ) prescribed by the Portuguese colonial administration since his youth , worked as a day laborer and later as a street cutter . Chiziane's mother was a farmer. Chiziane grew up in a strongly anti-colonial household, her father forbade her to speak her Portuguese, only the local language XiChope was allowed as a slang .

Chiziane attended a primary school at one of the many Catholic mission stations before she went on to secondary school. She managed to graduate from the Lourenço Marques Commercial School, which enabled her to work as a secretary for several years. At the time she married and had two children, but separated from her husband a little later.

After Mozambique gained independence, she began to study at the newly founded University of Maputo, the Eduardo Mondlane University . Shortly after Mozambique's independence, a civil war broke out between the ruling FRELIMO, which describes itself as Marxist-socialist, and the RENAMO rebel force, which was built up and financed by the South Rhodesian and South African secret service. Chiziane began working for the International Red Cross to support the civilian population in the areas particularly hard hit by the war.

After the end of the civil war in 1992, Chiziane began to work for the women's organization Nucleo de Associações Femininas da Zambézia (NAFEZA), which supported women's organizations in the Zambézia province. She later worked as a consultant for foreign agencies involved in international development cooperation, particularly in the areas of conflict prevention and women's rights.

Literary work

Chiziane is counted among a second generation of authors in Mozambique who tried to differentiate themselves from the post-independence authors, who processed FRELIMO's goals in a particularly idealistic and propagandistic way. In her works, Chiziane portrays individuals much more than social movements and addresses the gender relations in her country in different ways. Together with other authors of her generation - Mia Couto , Suleiman Cassamo or João Paulo Borges Coelho - she describes the Mozambican present not only in giving a voice to the urban but rather to the rural population of Mozambique, which has been excluded from political and social discourses.

Paula Chiziane began writing in the 1980s, and in 1984 she published her first stories in Domingo and Tempo magazines . In 1990 Chiziane published her first book entitled Balada de Amor ao Vento (Love Song to the Wind). The book attracted attention not only because it was considered the first novel published by a woman in Mozambique. The particularly intimate portrayal of gender, sexuality and relationships from a female perspective was also considered remarkable.

In 1993 she followed her novel Ventos do apocalipse (Wind of the Apocalypse), in which she dealt with the Mozambican civil war . O Sétimo Juramento (The Seventh Vow ) followed in 2000 . However, Chiziane achieved her literary breakthrough with her novel Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia (Niketche: A History of Polygamia), published in 2002 , for which she received the most famous Mozambican literature prize, the Prémio José Craveirinha , of the Mozambican Writers' Association in 2003 . In the work, Chiziane described the strong emotional and economic dependence that women experience on men in Mozambique, often reinforced by polygamous structures .

In 2008, Chiziane published another work with a controversial topic: In O alegre canto da perdiz (The happy song of the partridge), Chiziane addressed racism in Mozambique. Also in 2008 Chiziane published a trilogy called As Andorinhas , in which she portrayed three heroes of Mozambican historiography: the Gaza king Gungunhana , the independence fighter and first FRELIMO chairman Eduardo Mondlane , and the Olympic athlete Maria de Lurdes Mutola .

Publications

Works

• Balada de Amor ao Vento (1990)
• Ventos de Apocalipse (1993)
• O Setimo Juramento (2000)
• Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia (2002)
• O Alegre Canto da Perdiz (2008)
• As Andorinhas (2008)

Translations into German

• Wind of the Apocalypse , translated by Elisa Fuchs, Brandes & Apsel, 1997
• Love song to the wind , translated by Claudia Stein and Michael Kegler , Brandes & Apsel, 2001
• The Seventh Vow , translated by Michael Kegler, Brandes & Apsel, 2003

literature

• Elke Schmitter: Paulina Chiziane: Tides in War , in: Passions. 99 women authors of world literature , Munich 2009 ISBN 978-3-570-01048-8 pp. 102-107
• Manfred Loimeier : Africando. Literary journey through a continent Frankfurt 2010 ISBN 978-3-86099-625-6

Web links

• Literature by and about Paulina Chiziane in the catalog of the German National Library
• The black feminism of Paulina Chiziane (Portuguese)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Livia Apa: Chiziane, Paulina . In: Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr (Eds.): Dictionary of African Biography . tape 2 . Oxford Press, Oxford 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-538207-5 , pp. 88 f .