Black and Female

Description

Being categorised as black and female does not constrain my writing. Writing assures me that I am more than merely blackness and femaleness. Writing assures me I am. This paradigm shifting essay collection weaves the personal and political in an illuminating exploration of internationally acclaimed novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga's complex relationship with race and gender. At once philosophical, intimate and urgent, Dangarmebga's landmark essays address the profound cultural and political questions that underpin her novels for the first time. From her experience of life with a foster family in Dover and the difficulty of finding a publisher as a young Zimbabwean novelist, to the ways in which colonialism continues to disrupt the lives and minds of those subjugated by empire, Dangarembga writes to recenter marginalised voices. Black and Female offers a powerful vision toward re-membering - to use Toni Morrison's word - those whose identities and experiences continue to be fractured by the intersections of history, race and gender.

Tsitsi Dangarembga is the author of three novels: Nervous Conditions, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; This Mournable Body, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and The Book of Not. She won the PEN Pinter Prize in 2021 and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Dangarembga is also a filmmaker, playwright, and the director of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa Trust. She lives in Harare, Zimbabwe.

'Urgent, compelling, blisteringly brilliant. This timely and elegant collection should be essential reading for anyone who cares about the aftermath of Empire - and that should be all of us. Tsitsi Dangarembga is one of the most powerful writers working today.' - Sara Collins 'In these moving and necessary essays, Tsitsi Dangarembga insists that 'the best writing opens the lesion again and again and cleanses'. She is exactly as good as her word.' - Andrew Motion 'Poignant, profound, essential. The human cost of colonisation laid bare.' - Audrey Magee 'Dangarambga forces our perspective toward both violence and its humane alternatives. One she has seen the truth, she can't turn away. The rest of us would do well to pause and bear witness.' - Los Angeles Review of Books 'Hers is a maverick voice.' - AIgoni Barrett 'Tsitsi Dangarembga has held a magnifying glass up to the struggles of ordinary people, in so many parts of the world, to lead good lives in the increasingly corrupt and fractured new world order. Hers is a voice we all need to hear and heed.' - Claire Armitstead, English PEN Trustee