Portrait ǀ Under nervous conditions – Friday

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When the decision on the Nobel Prize for Literature was made last week, some observers had expected an African prize winner – but no one had the specific one, Abdulrazak Gurnah, on their radar. Similarly, one could expect that the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, which has been awarded since 1950, will again go to a person from Sub-Saharan Africa after 1968 and 2002 – but in this case too, the winner, Tsitsi Dangarembga from Zimbabwe, is obviously less well established when it was Léopold Sédar Senghor and Chinua Achebe at the time of the respective awards ceremony. With a somewhat trite but appropriate phrase: This jury has also shown courage with its decision.

Perhaps the fact that Tsitsi Dangarembga lived temporarily in Germany to study in Berlin at the University of Film and Television played a role; It was there that she probably met the Kenyan Germanist Auma Obama, who will give the laudatory speech at the award ceremony on October 24th. But which German apart from the jury members and their best friends has ever seen one of your films? Only the half-hour film is quickly accessible Long ago Your Time (on Youtube, linked from the Peace Prize page). And how many Germans have already read one of your three novels? The middle, The Book of Not (2006), is still not available in a German translation; the translation of the first, Nervous Conditions (1988), was out of print for a long time and was only reprinted two years ago by the small Orlanda Verlag. There is recently under the title survive also a translation of the third novel This Mournable Body (2018) published. After all, the situation is even better than in the case of Abdulrazak Gurnah, where all German translations are out of print. There is little objection to the translations of Dangarembga’s novels; Their titles, however, translate the original titles into the diffuse general existential: “Nervous conditions” became first The price of freedom, then Break open; “That mournable body” became survive. German readers are not expected to be bulky when it comes to Africa, and the allusions in both original titles to critical discussions with colonialism (by Jean-Paul Sartre and Teju Cole, respectively) are deleted.

But the lyrics by Tsitsi Dangarembga are sometimes bulky. There is no doubt that the author has contributed to the emancipation of women in Zimbabwe, and indeed in larger parts of Africa, with them, as well as with her films, not least with her cultural and political commitment. What concrete form this commitment has, however, can only be fathomed by examining her works. I limit myself to a few remarks Nervous Conditions, a novel that has almost the status of a classic among connoisseurs of African literature – but only in this rather small community, especially small in Germany. Of the two main female characters in the novel, which is set in Rhodesia in the 1960s, the one who tells the story at the same time proves an admirable perseverance in achieving her goals, already planting her own maize at the age of seven in order to earn the school fees that the lethargic father had cannot give her. But they, or at least the adult who talked about themselves as a child, distrusts their all too great ability to adapt to the circumstances in order to get the best that there is in an almost apartheid society. Her hyper-intellectual cousin, on the other hand, who is gradually developing into an anorexic in merciless plain language, cannot be accused of adapting – but she has also simply become annoying under the nervous conditions of late colonialism.

Even if I assumed I was an African woman, I couldn’t imagine identifying unreservedly with either of these two characters. What the novel depicts are the conditions under which an unconditional identification is impossible – no matter how feverish you are for the girls. Linguistically, the interplay of closeness and distance is created by the fact that the narrative voice obviously has sympathy for the narrated, but also never pretends to be the voice of the narrated itself.

In 1968, when the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade was awarded to Senghor, Senegalese President at the time, there were angry, perhaps well-founded protests. Such are neither to be expected this time, nor is there a reason for it. But there is, so to speak, the opposite danger: everyone thinks it’s great that such a likeable black woman is awarded such an important prize, and then you don’t have to worry about it any more. Daniel Cohn-Bendit received a suspended sentence for his protest against the awarding of the award to Senghor – perhaps one should at least read a book or watch a film by her in order to agree to the awarding of the award to Dangarembga?

Read a review here survive

Robert Stockhammer teaches literary studies at the LMU in Munich. 2016 appeared from him African Philology published by Suhrkamp Verlag

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