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Tag: Zimbabwe

Listening to the Flesh: For Tsitsi Dangarembga

Panashe Chigumadzi on Tsitsi Dangarembga, commissioned to celebrate Dangarembga winning the 2021 PEN Pinter Prize.

PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

‘I was not sorry when my brother died.’ Have you ever read a more compelling opening line? Immediately, we need to know what kind of existence – what kind of circumstance, what kind of history – would lead someone to feel this way.

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions of course takes its title from Satre’s introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. It’s an unflinching witness to settler colonialism’s psycho-somatic effects on black women like Nyasha, Maiguru, Mai and Tambudzai, who comes to believe the price of a life worth living is her brother’s death. If it’s one thing to live the double consciousness of a black minority in white dominated society, it’s quite another to live the double consciousness of a minoritised black majority. As I reread the Tambudzai trilogy, I was struck by how bodily, how fleshy, Dangarembga’s exploration of black women’s existence under settler rule is. It struck me: if Frantz Fanon ends his phenomenology of black-being-in-the-world in Black Skin, White Masks by calling out in prayer ‘O my body, make of me always a man who questions!’, Dangarembga’s trilogy provides us with the black feminist response: O my body, make of me always a woman who questions!

Listening to the Flesh

Labouring side by side with Tambu at Mainini Lucia’s security company, Christine, the war veteran, remarks:

your education is not only in your head anymore […] your knowledge is now also in your body, every bit of it.

Tambudzai Sigauke – who, since we first met her in Nervous Conditions as a precocious girl who is not sorry when her brother dies, has come full circle in This Mournable Body’sclosing lines. Having spent years running away from the hard labouring life of the body to which her mother is condemned, to kuma ruzevha, and towards the life of the mind Babamunini enjoys at the mission school, it is the body to which Tambu returns.

~

Re-reading Tambu’s return to her body, I recall my father’s weekend ritual.

“Ndichambo terera nyama,” he announces.

“I’m going to listen to the flesh.”

He’s going to lie down, be still, and listen to the rumblings of his flesh after the week’s labour at his surgery.

I’ve always found this listening to the flesh a curious statement. What is it that our flesh might have to tell us?

~

What Christine gestures Tambu and us towards is that there is a bodily archive of knowledge that we carry in the flesh.

Through our educations – as it was in Tambu’s miseducation at Babamunini’s mission school and the Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart – we are taught to unlearn and distrust our embodied experiences, histories, knowledges, and imaginations of the world, to make disembodied pronouncements on it. This is to say: we are taught to stop listening to the flesh.

Labouring side by side with her, Christine sees that Tambu has stopped trying to eat books. Tambu is now listening to the flesh.

Kuterera nyama.

As Hortense Spillers teaches, there’s a historic distinction between the flesh and the body. Slavery and colonisation’s economies of violence transformed our African flesh into bodies of labour and property stripped of our personhood.

And yet, in our mother tongue chiShona (and many African languages as Kholeka Shange teaches), Tambu would never have referred to herself as a ‘black female body’. She might try to refer to herself as ‘muviri we mukadzi mutema’, but chiShona doesn’t conceive of muviri – the body – as separate from the spirit, soul and mind. To speak of muviri is to invoke the person who lives inside the body. To speak of a body outside the person whom it belongs to is to speak of chitunha – the body of dead person; in other words, a corpse.

To speak then of nyama, the flesh of a person’s body, is to invoke the most corporeal site of a living person – the site of living, breathing, feeling, through which the world is experienced, encountered and absorbed. The flesh, then, is a site of re-memory, and re-remembering what Toni Morrison called“a knowing so deep.”

To return to the flesh we must be alive to what has happened to our bodies. After all, our bodies are, to borrow from Bessie Head, a question of power.

If Fanon calls out ‘O my body, make of me always a man who questions!’, Dangarembga responds: “O my body, make of me always a woman who questions!”

Over the trilogy – Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not, This Mournable Body – Dangarembga explores black women’s bodies as questions of power.

Tambu, whose body marks her unfit for the same education as her brother.

Nyasha, who refused to eat and threw up when she did.

Netsai, whose leg is blown off at the Pungwe.

Sacred Heart’s black girls, punished for taking a shit in the white girls’ toilets and having no place to dispose their soiled pads.

Gertrude’s breasts and buttocks, exposed to the jeering crowd.

MaiTaka’s leg, broken by her husband.

Tambu, who faints, hallucinates and, like Nyasha, ends up in psychiatric care.

Through Dangarembga’s unflinching witness, the word is made flesh, the flesh is made word.

In this inseparability between body and language, Dangarembga has shown us that hers is more than a textual vision of enfleshing freedom. In 2020, alive to the cries, the sufferings and the yearnings of her people, Dangarembga took her physical person out onto Harare’s streets, and posed her own body as a question to power.

Placing her physical and textual bodies in the line of fire, Dangarembga returns to the flesh so that we, like Tambu, might re-member ourselves and our worlds.

Panashe Chigumadzi is an essayist and novelist, born in Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa. Her debut novel Sweet Medicine (Blackbird Books, 2015) won the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award. Her second book, These Bones Will Rise Again, a historical memoir reflecting on Robert Mugabe’s ouster, was shortlisted for the 2019 Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction. Acolumnist for The New York Times, and contributing editor of the Johannesburg Review of Books, her work has featured in titles including The Guardian, Chimurenga, Boston Review, Africa is A Country, Transition, Washington Post and Die Ziet. Prior to this, Chigumadzi was the founding editor of Vanguard Magazine, a platform for young black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa. She gained media experience both as a journalist for CNBC Africa and columnist for Forbes Woman Africa, and as a project executive for the Africa Business News Group. In 2015, Chigumadzi was a Ruth First Fellow, delivering the annual memorial lecture in honour of the anti-apartheid activist. The following year, Chigumadzi, was the curator of Soweto’s inaugural Abantu Book Festival, South Africa’s most important gathering for black readers and writers. Having completed her masters degree in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, she is now a doctoral candidate at Harvard University’s Department of African and African American Studies.

October 28, 2021
When an Hour Stretched into A Day

Tsitsi Dangarembga, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, writes on demonstrating, writing, and being arrested.

PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

On 31 July 2020, I went out, intending to demonstrate for an hour or two, and then return home to work on the young adult dystopian fiction I’m writing. The demonstration had been called by Jacob Ngarivhume, the leader of a small opposition political party, in response to the staggering amount of corruption that high-ranking officials in the ZanuPf governing party practice in one of the poorest countries in the world.

I had demonstrated several times in the months before. The first was in May, when the government granted a business associate of President Mnangagwa billions of local dollars to upgrade a private hospital into a COVID-19 facility. Seriously ill, and in respiratory distress, I was referred to the facility by my doctor, a couple of months after the grant was effected. I arrived to find it closed to the public – although nurses and other staff meandered or sat around. On asking when the hospital would open, I was referred to the Ministry of Health.

When I arrived home, I made a call for like-minded citizens to join me in a protest at the hospital. A couple of dozen people responded. My demonstration strategy was to substitute running round my garden with running up and down in front of the hospital, with a placard hung from my neck. As we debated protest messages and built consensus on social media, the COVID-19 lockdown was enforced. Amidst movement restrictions enforced jointly by the police and the military, I ended up demonstrating on my own.

This was not surprising. ZanuPf intimidation and violence – following over a century of identity- and wealth-destroying colonialism – have left many people fearful, devoid of initiative. Government mismanagement and abuse of the economy have resulted in an unemployment rate of over 80%. The UN World Food programme predicts that 8 million Zimbabweans – that’s half the population – will face severe hunger this year if food aid is not provided. We resent, and suffer a degree of shame at, our reputation for our being amongst the most educated population on the continent not translating into wellbeing and prosperity.

Against this background, Ngarivhume’s call for a demonstration was inspiring. It was hard to believe there was a person amongst us brave enough to suggest a public expression of discontent with ZanuPf. The call was made on social media, several weeks before the demonstration was to take place, giving people time to organise. The response was immediate and passionate, with lively discussions on how best to conduct the demonstration in Zimbabwe’s repressive environment.

There being a couple of dozen riot police in the back of the truck, I thought better of exhibiting my screenshot of the Constitution.

Freelance journalist Hopewell Chin’ono took up the call to protest. Reporting on corruption involving COVID-19 relief, Chin’ono had publicly alleged that the First Family, including President Mnangagwa’s wife and some of his children, were central figures in the double-dealing. With Chin’ono’s influential support, it looked as though nothing could stop the demonstration, and that, for the first time since the military-incited public demonstrations of 18 November 2017, which were part of the process that deposed then-President Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans were going to demand an end to our government’s excesses.

The authorities moved swiftly to stop the momentum. Ngarivhume tweeted that state agents were searching for him; he and Chin’ono were arrested on 20 July. Then, two days before the demonstration, Minister of Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage, Kazembe Kazembe, announced that the protest was illegal. And next, President Mnangagwa denounced it as an insurrection.

I was outraged by this assault on civil liberties. There were no signs of a deteriorating security situation in the streets. Instead, rumours that factions within ZanuPf intended to use the demonstration as cover for an inside job against President Mnangagwa intensified. I didn’t see why squabbles inside the governing party should reduce my and other Zimbabwean’s constitutional rights. In the runup to 31 July – encouraged, by my solo demonstration at the hospital, that some civil protest space still existed – I carried out several more solo demonstrations. On these occasions, I often passed police officers, who did not interfere with my right to demonstrate peacefully. So, in spite of warnings from the governing party, I resolved to continue to demonstrate. Meanwhile, on social media, the consensus was that the new context made a traditional demonstration suicidal, and that people should therefore demonstrate in their neighbourhoods, in small groups. On 30 July, I put out a call for women to demonstrate at the corners of their streets.

Their world is hermetically sealed to any contrary ideas.

On the day of the demonstration, armed with a screenshot of the relevant section of the Constitution on my cell phone and carrying my placards, I left my yard to meet a friend at a shopping centre. There was a deathly silence in the streets, where neither cars nor pedestrians moved. There were no groups of demonstrators. Although people in Zimbabwe want change, we do not yet have the capacity, material or psychological, to create it. It is a predicament portrayed in my novel This Mournable Body, shortlisted this week for the 2020 Booker Prize, which follows the devastating journey of university graduate Tambudzai Sigauke. She tries, wholly unsuccessfully, to build a dignified life for herself in post-independence Zimbabwe.

My friend and I walked down the road towards town. Only a few cars drove by. To be more visible to a greater number of people, we stopped at an intersection, where we could catch traffic travelling in all four directions. A strange man came up and filmed our placards without asking our permission. Later, a state-owned vehicle passed by, did a U-turn up the road, and returned to stop in front of my friend. A few minutes after that vehicle left, a riot vehicle came. A state agent in black riot gear stepped out to tell us: ‘What you are doing is illegal’. There being a couple of dozen riot police in the back of the truck, I thought better of exhibiting my screenshot of the Constitution. My friend and I climbed into the vehicle. Minutes later, we were sitting on a concrete floor in Borrowdale police station.

After a couple of hours, we were moved to Harare Central Police Station. We were driven there in a large, white double cab, with three police officers for company. The windows were up. The stridently cheerful voice of a DJ on a state radio channel was followed by up-tempo music. In that moment, I realised how Zimbabweans who have no access to social media – or to news other than the state media, or the few so-called independent newspapers compromised by their dependence on state licences to operate – believe that ZanuPf is acting in the name of the people to meet the nation’s challenges. Their world is hermetically sealed to any contrary ideas.

I was detained for a night, before being granted bail the following evening.

I came out more determined than ever to work on my forthcoming book. In it, a group of young people exist in a post-apocalypse, totalitarian Africa. There, they take on an ancestral mission to save their world.

Tsitsi Dangarembga is the author of three novels, including Nervous Conditions, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and This Mournable Body, currently shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. She is also a filmmaker, playwright, and the director of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa Trust. She lives in Harare, Zimbabwe.

September 18, 2020
#PICTURE MY LIFE

In Zimbabwe, sexual harrassment and assault are rife. A group of women filmmakers is responding with a project to give victims a voice. Yandani Mlilo reports.

A friend of mine used to say being born a woman is hard, and being born an African woman is an assigned curse in itself. With time and experience, I now look at the plight of women in my country and I wonder whether her statement was completely accurate.

#PICTURE MY LIFE: a woman in a country where poverty has married unemployment and birthed a shrinking economy and hyper-inflation. Where the streets are filled with women with toddlers, selling goods on the side streets for their daily bread, playing cat and mouse with the authorities just to secure the few dimes they make. When the cat (always a man in power) catches the mouse, he will demand sexual favours from the mouse. If the mouse says no, she will either be forced to pay a bribe or get arrested – for they both know the undesignated trade, and the area the mouse was selling from, are illegal.

Now when we look at this picture let’s take note that this is not only the fate of the women vendors but also of women entrepreneurs, women in media, in the film and arts industry and other social sectors. They are all facing this abuse, complemented by the downturn of the economy.

In this chaotic misery, a breeding ground to abuse and take advantage of women is strategically created. These cases go unreported and ignored as if it’s all a fallacy.

We, a group of women filmmakers of Zimbabwe developed a project that will help to generate conversations about the magnitude of sexual violence perpetrated against women in the public space, with the aim of challenging all forms of sexual harassment. We call these films #PICTUREMYLIFE – ME TOO SPOTS. They are recorded and screened in different places.
There is a need to acknowledge and address the abuse of women rights and how it has been normalized in Zimbabwe. It is heart-wrenching that women and men of all ages still find it difficult to open up and actually start talking about sexual abuse… a depressing reality.

During one of the talks we organised, one woman pointed out that ‘it’s hard to report rape cases because at the police station they will probe you with questions like, what were you wearing, why were you there, are you sure you were raped because you do not look like the type that can be raped, and that in itself causes one to internalise these cases.’

The interrogations are taunting and dehumanising: as if to say that when someone is sexually abused, it’s something they go looking for.
This is what happened to Tabetha, who fell prey to the same perpetrator twice. Only now that her children are grown and only through this project has she found her voice. One wonders how many souls like Tabetha take their trauma to the grave, how many perpetrators walk scot-free. It is about time to build a community of advocates, driven by survivors, in order to create solutions which actually fight sexual violence in their communities and work spaces.

Whilst it’s important to create conversations and disrupt systems that allow for the global proliferation of sexual violence, we must not forget the survivors who are still finding their pathways to healing. Having gotten the stories straight from the horse’s mouth, I can say that it takes so much courage to speak out in such a challenging society. Imagine, having had to carry and suppress pain for a long time, to then have an opportunity present itself, a platform where one just unloads all that’s within. The feeling is therapeutic. Although most are reluctant to retell their story after the first release out of fear of stigma and discrimination, and also in order to avoid the ordeal of re-narrating the story which evokes the trauma all over again, still a profound impact on the victims mental health is evident from finally voicing their ordeal.

As Tarana Burke, the originator of #metoo, stated, ‘On one side, it’s a bold declarative statement that “I’m not ashamed” and “I’m not alone.” On the other side, it’s a statement from survivor to survivor that says, “I see you, I hear you, I understand you and I’m here for you or I get it.”‘

We have a rather oppressive proverb in African culture which says that a child is to be seen and not to be heard. In Zimbabwe, this also applies to the cases of women: in this patriarchal society women are still equated to children. The sacredness of rape culture is a notion that needs to be shattered. We need to stop beating about the bush and labelling it a female problem. Within our society we have a pride of lions known as the ‘gatekeepers’ who go to extreme lengths to bury the truth under the guise of social preservation. But what preservation is there when an 11-year-old gets raped and the system supposedly protecting her takes ages to deliver justice to her… if ever? What about the psychological scars on her and her mother which have no guarantee of healing? The whispers on every street wall spotlighting her as the ‘child raped in the year xxxx’? These are the walls we are working on breaking down.

We are in the process of creating a ripple effect where as Zimbabwean women our voices echo as one to STOP sexual abuse against women. We might not be at a place of privilege compared to the rest of the women in the world, but we have tolerated being victims long enough. Now I can confidently go back to my friend and say ‘I guess it’s not a bad thing being born an African female because we have the ability to create and influence change around us.’

Yandani Mlilo is an artist, creative writer, feminist and LGBT activist from Zimbabwe. She has published a number of articles of note. She published a short story anthology titled Family Portrait. She also holds a Diploma in Social Work from the Women’s University in Africa (WUA). Her journey has inspired her to form a trust known as VUTIVI (knowledge) initiative Trust which uses art as a human rights advocacy tool.

For more information on on Picture My Life – #metoo Zimbabwe, log on to
www.icapatrust.org and leave us a message.

June 26, 2019
On Translating Orwell's Animal Farm

In February this year, I started what I call the ‘Orwell Project’. The project will see George Orwell’s beloved Animal Farm translated and published in all the indigenous languages that are taught in Zimbabwe’s schools. Animal Farm has long been one of my favourite novels. I have a vivid memory of first reading it. I was a skinny and lonely girl at a boarding school in Chishawasha, Zimbabwe. I was 13 years old and my best friends were the characters in the books that I read. I lived in my books.

Moving between the innocence of childhood and the cynicism of adulthood, the early teenage years are the years of discovery. In those crucial years, you find out not only that the social order you are part of is deeply unjust, but that adults will kill and tell all sorts of lies to maintain, support and justify that injustice. At the same time, you are keenly sensitive to beauty, to virtue, to truth and to justice. You see the world in black and white, in purely Manichean terms; it is about good versus evil and you long for good to prevail.

It was in this frame of mind that I came across Animal Farm. Like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which I read in that same year, Animal Farm gave me a clear-sighted understanding of the difference between what the world is like and how the world should be. The animals’ revolution against man was so pure, so noble, and so right. Then for that revolution to be betrayed in such a callous manner by their own comrades was just so wrong and so unjust. My 13-year-old self found the end of the novel almost unbearable. I finished it and burst into tears. But the sort of school I went to did not encourage that sort of reaction to fiction. So I kept my dismay to myself and read it again. Later that year, when we studied the history of Soviet Russia, I came to understand that Animal Farm was an allegory for that tainted revolution. Over the years, I have come to see that this touchstone novel is about all manner of revolutions, including the one in my own country.

Zimbabwe was born out of a revolution against an unjust white minority government which oppressed its black citizens, who made up the majority. Black people could not vote unless they met certain property-related conditions. Black people could not participate in political life outside narrowly defined ‘native’ affairs. Black people could not own land in defined areas. They were doomed never to rise beyond lowly stations: education was bottlenecked to allow only a limited number of black people to qualify for the jobs that were necessary for running the country. Like that of the animals in Animal Farm, the revolution of Zimbabwe’s black majority was a just one.

But in the 35 years since independence, the architects of Zimbabwe’s revolution, chief among them the country’s first leader President Robert Mugabe, have used this very fact to justify perpetrating the kind of abuses they had fought against. Like the pigs in Animal Farm, Zimbabwe’s leaders have hijacked a revolution rooted in righteous outrage, not only for personal gain but also to remain in power with no accountability to the suffering people who put them in power.

The novel’s relevance to Zimbabwe is what inspired me to work on a Shona translation of Animal Farm. The term of copyright in Zimbabwe expires 50 years after the death of the author. When Animal Farm was serialised in English by a Zimbabwean newspaper in 2005, it was a smashing success. It has never been published in any of Zimbabwe’s indigenous languages. Working with a group of Orwell enthusiasts, I have started the project of translating the novel into my native Shona language. Initially an internal academic exercise, the Orwell Project is now fired by a passionate determination within the group to ensure that Animal Farm is published in all the taught languages of Zimbabwe. I am particularly pleased that we will produce a version in Tonga, a minority language that has been woefully neglected, as well as in the Ndebele language. We have the blessing of the Orwell estate, who are delighted to see Orwell’s work appear in three previously unpublished languages.

By the beginning of 2016, I am hoping that many Zimbabweans, even those who enjoyed Animal Farm in English, will love reading in their own language a universal novel that speaks with prescient eloquence about what went wrong in their beautiful country.

Credit: Marina Cavazza

Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean lawyer who lives and works in Geneva. Her first book, the critically acclaimed shorts story collection An Elegy for Easterly, won the Guardian First Book Award in 2009 and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2010. Her most recent book, The Book of Memory, a novel, was published in September 2015.

Petina Gappah’s novel The Book of Memory is available from Foyles.

Find out more about Petina’s writing and other projects: http://www.theworldaccordingtogappah.com/language/

October 22, 2015
On Translating Orwell’s Animal Farm

In February this year, I started what I call the ‘Orwell Project’. The project will see George Orwell’s beloved Animal Farm translated and published in all the indigenous languages that are taught in Zimbabwe’s schools. Animal Farm has long been one of my favourite novels. I have a vivid memory of first reading it. I was a skinny and lonely girl at a boarding school in Chishawasha, Zimbabwe. I was 13 years old and my best friends were the characters in the books that I read. I lived in my books.

Moving between the innocence of childhood and the cynicism of adulthood, the early teenage years are the years of discovery. In those crucial years, you find out not only that the social order you are part of is deeply unjust, but that adults will kill and tell all sorts of lies to maintain, support and justify that injustice. At the same time, you are keenly sensitive to beauty, to virtue, to truth and to justice. You see the world in black and white, in purely Manichean terms; it is about good versus evil and you long for good to prevail.

It was in this frame of mind that I came across Animal Farm. Like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which I read in that same year, Animal Farm gave me a clear-sighted understanding of the difference between what the world is like and how the world should be. The animals’ revolution against man was so pure, so noble, and so right. Then for that revolution to be betrayed in such a callous manner by their own comrades was just so wrong and so unjust. My 13-year-old self found the end of the novel almost unbearable. I finished it and burst into tears. But the sort of school I went to did not encourage that sort of reaction to fiction. So I kept my dismay to myself and read it again. Later that year, when we studied the history of Soviet Russia, I came to understand that Animal Farm was an allegory for that tainted revolution. Over the years, I have come to see that this touchstone novel is about all manner of revolutions, including the one in my own country.

Zimbabwe was born out of a revolution against an unjust white minority government which oppressed its black citizens, who made up the majority. Black people could not vote unless they met certain property-related conditions. Black people could not participate in political life outside narrowly defined ‘native’ affairs. Black people could not own land in defined areas. They were doomed never to rise beyond lowly stations: education was bottlenecked to allow only a limited number of black people to qualify for the jobs that were necessary for running the country. Like that of the animals in Animal Farm, the revolution of Zimbabwe’s black majority was a just one.

But in the 35 years since independence, the architects of Zimbabwe’s revolution, chief among them the country’s first leader President Robert Mugabe, have used this very fact to justify perpetrating the kind of abuses they had fought against. Like the pigs in Animal Farm, Zimbabwe’s leaders have hijacked a revolution rooted in righteous outrage, not only for personal gain but also to remain in power with no accountability to the suffering people who put them in power.

The novel’s relevance to Zimbabwe is what inspired me to work on a Shona translation of Animal Farm. The term of copyright in Zimbabwe expires 50 years after the death of the author. When Animal Farm was serialised in English by a Zimbabwean newspaper in 2005, it was a smashing success. It has never been published in any of Zimbabwe’s indigenous languages. Working with a group of Orwell enthusiasts, I have started the project of translating the novel into my native Shona language. Initially an internal academic exercise, the Orwell Project is now fired by a passionate determination within the group to ensure that Animal Farm is published in all the taught languages of Zimbabwe. I am particularly pleased that we will produce a version in Tonga, a minority language that has been woefully neglected, as well as in the Ndebele language. We have the blessing of the Orwell estate, who are delighted to see Orwell’s work appear in three previously unpublished languages.

By the beginning of 2016, I am hoping that many Zimbabweans, even those who enjoyed Animal Farm in English, will love reading in their own language a universal novel that speaks with prescient eloquence about what went wrong in their beautiful country.

Credit: Marina Cavazza

Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean lawyer who lives and works in Geneva. Her first book, the critically acclaimed shorts story collection An Elegy for Easterly, won the Guardian First Book Award in 2009 and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2010. Her most recent book, The Book of Memory, a novel, was published in September 2015.

Petina Gappah’s novel The Book of Memory is available from Foyles.

Find out more about Petina’s writing and other projects: http://www.theworldaccordingtogappah.com/language/

October 22, 2015