Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
These incisive, impassioned essays by novelist Dangarembga (Nervous Conditions) confront the lingering effects of imperialism in Zimbabwe. She examines empire, racism, and misogyny through personal stories about growing up in what was then called Rhodesia and contrasts her experiences there with a stint she spent living with a foster family in Dover, England. In "Writing While Black and Female," Dangarembga remembers learning the power of language from its ability to produce action ("After adults spoke to each other, things happened: little children were left"), and relates how writing allows her to transcend racial and gender categories by building and affirming an identity independent of them. She examines Zimbabwe's pre- and post-colonial history of gender inequality, noting that colonial legislation treated adult women as minors and lamenting how as a child, her brother once felt compelled to ally himself with the "toxic masculinity" of their father by offering his belt to beat her with. Calling for "mental decolonisation," the author argues that Black feminists must play a crucial role in building a more just future because they "have experienced the more repressive edge of most demographic categories and not succumbed." Dangarembga's candid reflections and lyrical prose bring urgency to this thought-provoking argument for political and social equality. Readers won't want to miss this. (Jan.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
This three-essay collection from Zimbabwean novelist Dangarembga (author of Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not, and the Booker-shortlisted This Mournable Body) looks at the legacy of colonialism and its effects on Black bodies. It partners well with fiction from authors such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison on the exploitation of Black girls and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the dangers of a single narrative. The first essay discusses how Dangarembga's writing is an analysis of her personal and national history; the second shows how Zimbabwean society from the colonial to postcolonial has affected the position of women; the third states how decolonization must occur in the imaginary realm before society can actively engage in it. Dangarembga moves from a damage-centered narrative toward one of healing and reclamation. Her position as a scholar in a long line of people also dedicated to this work, whom she cites, paired with her life experience, has led to a powerful account of systemic injustice. VERDICT Dangarembga's collection is an essential addition to academic collections on race and gender. The moments where she shares her crisis over selfhood as a child and how that search for identity carried over into adulthood are some of the most powerful parts of the book.--Paige Pagan
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
In these probing essays, Zimbabwean novelist and filmmaker Dangarembga examines the impacts of racism, colonialism, and patriarchy on her life and work. Born in the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia, she grew up in "a vicious society that constructed me as essentially lacking full humanity, needing but never able, as a result of being black-embodied, to attain the status of complete human." It was a world still shaped by the slave trade, which wrenched "the strongest and most able-bodied individuals in their communities" and upended traditional social and political structures. Even after gaining independence, the country suffered from the wounds of "imperial lust," including inequality, rule by a racial elite, and an entrenched patriarchal structure "particularly reluctant to recognise the achievement of Zimbabwean women in any sector that it does not control." As a young child, Dangarembga and her brother were left with a White foster family in Dover, while her parents furthered their studies in London. In England, disoriented and lonely, she first became aware of her Blackness. The author recounts her evolution as a feminist, beginning in college in Zimbabwe and the U.K. "Feminist theory," she writes, "showed me how I was constructed as a female person whose content and possibility was predetermined, and how my refusal to occupy that space was a form of rebellion, albeit a powerless one." She felt that powerlessness as she strived to get published and, after studying at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, faced marginalization in the film industry as well. As a Black feminist, Dangarembga feels part of "a small, often embattled group" struggling to be heard in a society that wants to silence her. In her work, she seeks "to raise mountains, hills, escarpments and rocky outcrops over the gouges in my history, my societies and their attendant spirits." A well-informed, biting analysis of the legacy of empire. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
