Quotes from Tsitsi Dangarembga

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

Everything about her spoke of alternatives and possibilities that if considered too deeply would wreak havoc with the neat plan I had laid out for my life.

You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your perception...you see what is, where most people see what they expect.

This business of womanhood is a heavy burden.

It's bad enough . . . when a country gets colonized, but when the people do as well! That's the end, really, that's the end.

You can't go on all the time being whatever's necessary. Youve got to have some conviction, and I'm convinced I don't want to be anyone's underdog.

We co-existed in peaceful detachment

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

You can't go on all the time being whatever's necessary. You've got to have some conviction, and I'm convinced I don't want to be anyone's underdog. It's not right for anyone to be that. But once you get used to it, well, it just seems natural and you just carry on. And that's the end of you. You're trapped.

I was not sorry when my brother died

Nyasha knew nothing about leaving. She had only been taken to places - to the mission, to England, back to the mission. She did not know what essential parts of you stayed behind no matter how violently you tried to dislodge them in order to take them with you.

Now why [...] should I worry about what people say when my own father call me a whore?

The victimisation, I saw, was universal. It didn't depend on poverty, on lack of education or on tradition. It didn't depend on any of the things I had thought it depended on. Men took it everywhere with them.

Marriage. I had nothing against it in principle. In an abstract way, I thought it was a very good idea. But it was irritating the way it always cropped up in one form or another, stretching its tentacles back to bind me before I had even begun to think about it seriously, threatening to disrupt my life before I could even call it my own.

What I wanted was to get away. But the moon was too far beyond, and there were white bits under me, where the flesh was shredded off and the bone gleamed that famed ivory, and those below cowered and, if they were not quick enough, were spattered in blood. Then came the jolt, as of a fall, and I saw the leg was caught in an ungainly way in the smaller branches of a mutamba tree, the foot hooked, long like that infamous fruit.

How does a daughter know that she feels appropriately towards the woman who is her mother? Yes, it was difficult to know what to do with Mai, how to conceive her. I thought I hated her fawning, but what I see I hated is the degree of it. If she was fawning, she was not fawning enough. She diluted it with her spitefulness, the hopeless clawing of a small cornered spirit towards what was beyond it. And if she had spirit, it was not great enough, being shrunk by the bitterness of her temper.

She sighed. 'But it's not that simple, you know, really it isn't. It's not really him, you know. I mean not really the person. It's everything, it's everywhere. So where do you break out to? You're just one person and it's everywhere. So where do you break out to? I don't know, Tambu, really I don't know. So what do you do? I don't know.

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.

if someone smiles at you it does not mean they're happy. It just means "I think that if I smile I might get out of this alive!" [ http://brickmag.com/interview-tsitsi-... ]

The victimization, I saw, was universal. It didn't depend on poverty, on lack of education or on tradition. It didn't depend on any of the things I had thought it depended on. Men took it everywhere with them. Even heroes like Babamukuru did it. And that was the problem. . . . all the conflicts came back to this question of femaleness. Femaleness as opposed and inferior to maleness.

when you've seen different things you want to be sure you're adjusting to the right thing.

Nyasha . . . became quite annoyed and delivered a lecture on the dangers of assuming that Christian ways were progressive ways. 'It's bad enough, she said severely, 'when a country gets colonised, but when the people do as well! That's the end, really, that's the end.

Words like 'always' and 'never' were meaningful to my father, who thought in absolutes and whose mind consequently made great leaps in antagonistic directions when it leapt at all.

She thinks she is white,' they used to sneer, and that was as bad as a curse.