I won’t die.” These are modest ambitions, and it says a lot about the lives of young black women in Rhodesia circa 1970 that they were objectives maddeningly hard to achieve.įast-forward 30 tumultuous years from that startling debut. Nevertheless, she declares, “I won’t grovel. Toward the end of the novel, Nyasha, Tambu’s cousin, also desperate for the liberation that education promised, has something of a breakdown. Or hear it straight from the authors: Check out these seven memoirs.Five biographies dive into the lives of Pablo Picasso, Oscar Wilde and more.Six new books take up the pandemic, #MeToo and other timely topics.Get to know your favorite actors and artists with these titles.Prefer nonfiction? Look for these essay collections, an exploration of the Marvel Comics universe and more.New novels from Jonathan Franzen, Tiphanie Yanique and Gary Shteyngart are on the way.Whether you want biographies, novels or essay collections, we can help you find your next book to read. It recounts Tambu’s determination to get an education and to escape the poverty she was born into. Narrated by a restless teenager, Tambudzai (“Tambu”), “Nervous Conditions” takes place in civil war-ravaged Rhodesia during the 1960s and ’70s, on an impoverished homestead and at a mission school near the border town of Umtali (now Mutare), close to the farm on which I’d been raised. “Nervous Conditions” made clear that the systematic racism and sexism - the violent facts of my own white settler childhood in pre-independence Rhodesia - weren’t accidents but arrangements, structures that we’d all built together: the whites flogging the blacks, the near slave-labor wages.ĭangarembga’s novel wasn’t just an urgent story beautifully told it was also a work of demolition. I lay on my thin bed in that hostel, which reeked of boiled cabbage, and read and reread that novel as if my life depended on it, which in a way it did, if life is who you are and what you do with the possibilities available to you. Into that depressed season came this brilliant gem: A school friend lent me a copy of “Nervous Conditions” it’d been published in London and, although Dangarembga is a Zimbabwean writer, it wasn’t yet available in Harare. The misery of that hostel, the crushing sexism implicit in that secretarial course - I was feeling it all. I’d never be a writer, my father said, but I may as well learn to type. In 1988, when Tsitsi Dangarembga’s acclaimed novel, “Nervous Conditions,” came out, I was 19 and living in a woman’s youth hostel in Harare, Zimbabwe, while attending secretarial college. THIS MOURNABLE BODY By Tsitsi Dangarembga 284 pp.

Tsitsi dangarembga biography