"A Great Time to Be a Zimbabwean Writer"A Conversation with Siphiwe Ndlovu Anderson Tepper (bio) and Siphiwe Ndlovu Click for larger view View full resolution If—as Booker Prize–winner Damon Galgut said—2021 was a good year for African writing, 2022 was especially good for Zimbabwean writers. I spoke with novelist Siphiwe Ndlovu, author of The History of Man, about her work, her contemporaries, and Zimbabwe's impressive and deep-rooted literary tradition. Anderson Tepper: This year both you and Tsitsi Dangarembga were awarded the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize for fiction, and NoViolet Bulawayo was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. What do these honors say about the state of Zimbabwean writing today? Siphiwe Ndlovu: I have said it before and I will say it again: this is definitely a great time to be a Zimbabwean writer. There are just so many writers out there telling the story of a country that is often maligned or, worse still, written off as a "failed state." These writers often help us think critically about the overly simplified way that the media tends to write about Zimbabwe. Those of us who come from Zimbabwe understand the complexity, knottiness, and messiness that the many forms of violence and injustice—the product of exploitative and extractive settler colonialism and rampant postcolonial corruption and greed—create. The media narratives and portrayals of Zimbabwe both within the country and internationally tend to be limited and limiting and create the need for alternative narratives—and this is where storytelling comes in. In Zimbabwe's fiction, there is anger, outrage, disappointment, disillusionment, hope (and the loss of it), but most importantly, there is a call for reckoning and change that the politics of the country have failed to successfully address. All this makes for a literature that is concerned with many of the issues that globally plague our twenty-first century: the erosion of civil rights; the rise of a dangerous, exclusionary, and myopically inward-looking populism; and the persistence of racism and other forms of hate. The international recognition of Zimbabwean writers, via such awards as the Windham Campbell Prize and the Booker Prize, shows that we are not simply telling stories about a pariah state but about a world living and fighting its way through various crises and inheritances from the past—stories that, although they are about a country, are really of the world. Tepper: Who were some of the authors who played a role in inspiring you to first write about your country and its history? Ndlovu: Even though I grew up in Zimbabwe and spent all my years of primary and secondary education there, I didn't really encounter Zimbabwean fiction until I was a college student in the US. I remember reading Charles Mungoshi's wonderful collection of short stories, Coming of the Dry Season, in high school for one of the national exams. But I believe that was the sum total of my engagement with local fiction. In college, when I told one of my professors that I had never read Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, she was rightly appalled and aghast that I, a Zimbabwean creative writing student, had never read the book. She [End Page 23] immediately gave me her own copy of the novel to read … and everything changed. I could relate to the experiences of all the characters in that novel—Tambudzai, Nyasha, Babamukuru, Lucia, Takesure. I knew and was related to people just like them. All of a sudden literature became not just something I loved but something that was familiar. That experience led to a journey of discovery that brought me into contact with such brilliant works as Dambudzo Marechera's The House of Hunger, Shimmer Chinodya's Harvest of Thorns, Peter Godwin's Mukiwa, Doris Lessing's The Grass Is Singing—these works helped me understand my country and its history. However, it was not until I devoured Yvonne Vera's entire oeuvre, especially Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins, that I realized that one could write about my city, Bulawayo, a city that I love very much, and make it come alive—make its absolute richness known to the world (see WLT, Sept...
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Apr 10, 2023
Hugo Romero-Toledo 
Open Access
