Post Colonial
...[This interview was conducted at the African Writers Festival, Brown Univ., Nov. 1991]
Excerpt from Introduction: "Written when the author was twenty-five, Nervous Conditions put Dangarembga at the forefront of the younger generation of African writers producing literature in English today....Nervous Conditions highlights that which is often effaced in postcolonial African literature in English--the representation of young African girls and women as worthy subjects of literature....While the critical reception of this novel has focused mainly on the author's feminist agenda, in [this] interview...Dangarembga stresses that she has moved from a somewhat singular consideration of gender politics to an appreciation of the complexities of the politics of postcolonial subjecthood" (309).
Full text also available from EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite, Article No. 9312270407.
Veit-Wild, Flora. [Interview with Dangarembga] "Women Write about Things that Move Them." Matatu: Zeitschrift fur afrikanische Kultur und Gesellschaft 3.6(1989): 101-108.
Wilkinson, Jane. "Tsitsi Dangarembga." Talking with African Writers: Interviews with African Poets, Playwrights and Novelists. London: James Currey, 1992. 189-198.
Tsitsi Dangarembga (b. 1959) was interviewed 4 Sept. 1989 in London by Jane Wilkinson, and I here highlight some points made in that interview. There seem to be many autobiographical parallels between Tsitsi's and Tambu's lives, although Tambudzai (supposed to be 13 in 1968 in the novel) would be slightly older than Dangarembga (who was 9 in 1968). Dangarembga says that she wrote of "things I had observed and had had direct experience with," but "larger than any one person's own tragediesÂ…[with] a wider implication and origin and therefore were things that needed to be told" (190).
One important theme in Nervous Conditions is that of remembering...
View Full Essay
