From a young age, the writer and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbaue, 1959) perceived that her brothers were allowed things that not. He soon understood that these differences were marked by his body, by his identity as a woman and as black. But he found in artistic creation and in the reflection on his barriers a powerful tool to transcend those limitations.
According to the same Dangarembga, his release began trying to imagine liberty scenarios. Reading fed his inventive capacity and revealed that he could redraw the borders through writing. “That was the beginning of my career and what I am today,” he explained on Wednesday in a meeting with journalists at the CCCB of Barcelona, where he starts a three -month creative residence.
Dangarembga was born when Zimbabue was still the British colony of South Rodesia. He spent part of his childhood in England, in a host family. He later trained in Medicine in Cambridge, in Psychology in Harare and in Cinema in Berlin, a career that led her to become the first black woman’s film director of Zimbaue. His works, awarded and internationally recognized, reflect the heterogeneous social reality of the African continent and explore the traces of colonialism.
“I grew up in a context of armed conflict in Zimbabue, in full fight against English settlers, in a stage defined by war and apartheid,” he acknowledges. “The lack of representation in the media was evident, so I started writing because I didn’t see bodies with as much melanin as mine.”
The novel Nervous conditionsS (Icaria, 2010; originally published in English in 1988) placed it as an outstanding voice of African literature and began a semi -autobiographic trilogy. The protagonist, as Dangarembga, belongs to the generation that lived the end of the struggles against the white minority dominated by Zimbaue and the formation of the first black government. The protagonist struggles to guarantee her right to education while fighting the uncertainties that the end of colonization leaves for a people that are debated between tradition and modernity. Dangarembga closed his trilogy in 2021 with the titleThis Mournable Body (Faber & Faber).
For his last book he has left fiction behind and has entered the essay with Woman and black (Plankton Press, 2024), with whom he resorts, in part, to the autobiography to count the wounds that remain in the identity of a racialized woman who has lived the last rales of the colony and has had to move to the United Kingdom – the home of the settler- to prosper.
Despite the barriers he has had to overcome to make a name in the cultural sector, this thinker recognizes the fate and privilege that has allowed him to initiate and sustain this career. “It is a huge luck to have been able to write these novels. It is a turning point to be able to recognize in a story, ”he says.
He points out that her maximum inspiration was the African -American writer Toni Morrison, author of The blue eyesa novel that tells the life of a black girl in Ohio. “That book gave me permission to tell my own story,” he adds. “I felt that I could do it too.” Therefore, now one of its main objectives as a creator is not to lose sight of the impact it can generate on people who do not feel represented. “I like to encourage young people to believe,” he admits. And he assures that he writes thinking about all those silent voices, giving them permission to tell their history and feel that it is valid.
Break barriers
Although Dagarembga became strong in the literature, over the years he also understood the power of cinema as a tool to challenge barriers. “All the technology used in the cinema had been at the service of the show, and racialized people were treated as part of that show. There was no talk of them, but about them, ”he explains.
The thinker tells how the colonizers used cinema to perpetuate their story, limiting the representation of black people to narratives on slavery and colonization, without showing their lives and experiences from their own perspective. “The moving images are a connection form that reaches many people. Our first reaction to an image is to accept it as true, as truth, ”he admits. “Only later, through a cognitive process, we can question it.”
Therefore, according to Dangerembga, it is essential that certain narratives can be represented through cinema, because the images have the power to define how we understand the world. But also to challenge the structures of power and make visible ways of thinking that have been historically marginalized. “I realized the need to connect our ways of thinking with the way we act and produce,” he reflects.
Therefore, Dangerembga considers that the diversity of thought in the cultural scene is an essential element. “I understood that diversity is our only hope as humanity, because if we had all evolved under the same ideas in northern Europe, we would think the same and we would not find different solutions,” he admits.
In that sense, it encourages the consumer of cultural products to move away from hegemony and introduce productions of the global south, made and thought by people with alternative narratives in its catalog. “The ways of thinking that do not follow the current European model are fundamental to achieve knowledge,” he concludes.
She herself set an example of this premise and managed to erect himself as the first woman and black film director in Zimbaue, which has allowed her to talk about realities that had never been explored before. Dangarembga, after more than thirty years after the cameras, has managed to leave a mark in the audiovisual field with films such as Neria (1993) or Everyone’s Child (1996), considered milestones in the history of Zimbabue’s cinema.
Both treat social problems such as poverty or uprooting from a point of view away from common places and manage to connect with protagonists that are not usually seen on the big screen. Dangarembga is also the founder of the International Images Film Festival For Women (IIFF) and leads the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa Trust (Icapa) and the audiovisual producer Nyerai Films.
The writer, thinker and filmmaker will reside in the city for the next three months, welcomed by the CCCB, during which she will participate in conferences, seminars and meetings with students. In addition, he has invited Akuol de Mabior and Milisuthando Bongngela, two of the most vibrant vibrant vibrant of contemporary African cinema, to present his raw operas in the Catalan capital and dialogue on the imaginary and languages of the cinema made in the continent.
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