Best 14 quotes of Tsitsi Dangarembga on MyQuotes

Can you cook books and feed them to your husband? Stay at home with your mother. Learn to cook and clean. Grow vegetables.

Everything about her spoke of alternatives and possibilities that if considered too deeply would wreak havoc with the neat plan I had laid out for my life.

I was not sorry when my brother died.

This business of womanhood is a heavy burden.

You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your perception...you see what is, where most people see what they expect.

He says he wants to go back to Germany,' Nyasha confides. 'As soon as he's finished his doctorate,' she goes on, as though both completion of his research and departure are imminent. You realize she does not know Cousin-Brother-in-Law is mulling another thesis because he is no longer interested in his subject. You are surprised your in-law is behaving in the way you expect your own black men to do, first of all by being so indecisive and then by not telling his wife.

I knew, for instance, that rooms where people slept exuded peculiarly human smells just as the goat pen smelt goaty and the cattle kraal bovine. It was common knowledge among the younger girls at school that the older girls menstruated into sundry old rags which they washed and reused and washed again. I knew, too, that the fact of menstruation was a shamefully unclean secret that should not be allowed to contaminate immaculate male ears by indiscreet reference to this type of first in their presence.

In the city Maiguru's brother immediately made an appointment with a psychiatrist. We felt better—help was at hand. But the psychiatrist said that Nyasha could not be ill, that Africans did not suffer in the way we had described. She was making a scene. We should take her home and be firm with her.

It’s bad enough . . . when a country gets colonized, but when the people do as well! That’s the end, really, that’s the end.

Now why [...] should I worry about what people say when my own father call me a whore?

She thinks she is white,' they used to sneer, and that was as bad as a curse.

We co-existed in peaceful detachment

What it is,” she sighed, “to have to choose between self and security.

What I wanted was to get away. But the moon was too far beyond, and there were white bits under me, where the flesh was shredded off and the bone gleamed that famed ivory, and those below cowered and, if they were not quick enough, were spattered in blood. Then came the jolt, as of a fall, and I saw the leg was caught in an ungainly way in the smaller branches of a mutamba tree, the foot hooked, long like that infamous fruit.