This Fiction Friday, read an excerpt from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s forthcoming novel, Chronicle of an Indomitable Daughter, the third in the “Tambudzai Trilogy” that began with Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not.
Dangarembga was born in Zimbabwe in 1959. She studied medicine at Cambridge University in the UK, but returned to Zimbabwe the year it was recognised as an independent nation, in 1980. She was 25 when Nervous Conditions – the first English-language novel by a black Zimbabwean woman – was published.
Nervous Conditions won the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize and was named in the top 12 in a project to establish Africa’s 100 best books of the 20th Century. But fans had a while to wait for Dangarembga’s second novel, which was published 18 years later. In the intervening years Dangarembga turned to theatre and film, and founded the International Images Film Festival for Women in Zimbabwe.
According to Dangarembga’s 2015 BEYOND Film Festival author biography, Chronicle of an Indomitable Daughter is to be published “shortly”.
Last year, Dangarembga shared an excerpt from the book on TriQuarterly:
You know you have made the wrong decision when you move in and the room smells worse.
Your landlady hovers around. She says to your wrinkled nose, “Yes, Ms. Sigauke, your God is good to you. You are home now, and see what I have done for you!”
A leak in the roof has dripped onto the mattress, causing fungus to grow on the cloth and over the ceiling.
“It is nice and fresh now,” observes the widow expansively, stepping enthusiastically past the clothes rail. She puts out a finger and pulls down the remains of the spider webs.
“There was just a little hole, one like that up there in the roof. Just tiles that had moved like that because of the wind, but as soon as I decided and I knew someone was coming to sleep in this room, you can see I fixed it.
“You know, Miss Sigauke,” she goes on, “I am still looking for a decent girl to help me. There were some things I didn’t do, over there in my cottage, that I wanted to, because I have been saying tomorrow and tomorrow for so long! But that’s my cottage! Here I aired this room and opened the windows every day myself since you stood in this doorway with me. And I came in to close them myself at night, because you know when you have something that is good, all the time people are thinking of robbing!”
Your landlady details removing the satin curtains and washing them herself.
“I did that for you, to make sure you feel at home!” she smiles under her headdress of pink and yellow, and flinging a hand out toward the window.
“You can see, can’t you, everything is much better, is beautiful and ready for you, Miss Sigauke!
“You can take them to the dry cleaners or do them by hand if you want them cleaned henceforth, but if you spoil them, the value will be added to your debit,” she concludes.
Your lack of choices confronts you angrily. But once more you tell yourself on oath you will not succumb to more bad energy than you already have.
You spend most of the time in your new room. You venture out for air in the garden or to sit under the jacaranda by the gate infrequently. You are still against bad energy when you do, so you nod to passers-by, volunteering, “Hello, how has your day been! How is everything, is it all right where you are from!”
This is how you go on. When your housemates go off to catch combis to work after distant cocks from rougher yards have stopped crowing, you cannot sleep anymore. Their preparations wake you up. Your brain is foamy and slippery like sisal thrashed on rocks. You torture it to a gel-like consistency by making lists and plans.
Once a week you go shopping. You walk to the little shopping center down the road. You force yourself to walk jauntily, while you are out. Returning, you look, discouraged, at the bag swinging by your thigh. Mealie meal. Salt. Cooking oil. Candles and matches in case of a blackout.
From this bag, which you keep in a corner of the cupboard below the counter, away from the other residents, you prepare your breakfast, a slush of mealie meal cooked on the stove that neither simmers nor boils dishes properly because of the area’s low but sometimes surging voltages.
Your second meal is the same mealie meal stirred thicker. You need what has gradually come to be called relish. You begin, a few leaves at a time, picking what is necessary from the widow’s neglected garden.
The rest of the time you sit by your window, staring through the drooping and yellowing pink net over your landlady’s brown lawn, and over the slab she and VaManyanga put down to assist the students. You do not think of death, because on the Sunday after your arrival a squat, battered blue Toyota crunches up the drive. With a puff of exhaust, it stops in front of the empty carport in precisely the spot to prevent any other vehicle from entering.
You look up from the magazine you brought with you from the advertising agency. You are reading it for the hundredth time. You see a long, muscular arm snake out of the back passenger window and open the door.
Half a dozen children leap out of the vehicle, hollering, “Mbuya! Mbuya!”
They dance over the earth. They do their utmost to avoid trampling the widow’s vegetable garden. Ridges crumble. Vines snap. Ripe tomatoes explode. You observe the children with a smile that is almost gentle.
“Watch it! Hey, just watch out! Wait until somebody sees that!” the driver puts his head out of the window and yells.
He goes on, “You’ll get the thrashing of your life! If your grandmother doesn’t want to, be sure I will be the one to do it!”
This makes the children giggle and shriek as they charge off to hammer on the widow’s cottage door.
A weight as heavy as lead, as unassailable as poison, pulls you down. You wonder again whether you should be ashamed of anything. You decide you should not, for one man threatening to abuse a carload of children is not your story. Your only disgrace has been to end up in your predicament. But the new lodging is a gift from somewhere. You are moving forward. And now there is also a new gift of gentlemen.
Book details
- Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
EAN: 9780954702335
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- The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga
EAN: 9780954702373
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Image courtesy of Freitag