March Meeting

Zenzele: A Letter To My Daughter

by J. Nozipo Maraire
Thursday, March 3rd
7:30 PM at Trish's House

In an extraordinary literary debut - written as a letter from a Zimbabwean mother to her daughter, a student at Harvard - J. Nozipo Maraire transforms the lessons of life into a lyrical narrative. Interweaving history and memories, disappointments and dreams, like the tales of the traditional village storyteller, this letter is a gift from one generation to the next. As her daughter enters a new world, a mother shares the riches of her own through stories of her personal experiences and those of her generation. She writes of Zimbabwe's struggle for independence, and of the men and women who shaped it: Zenzele's father, an outspoken activist lawyer; her aunt, a schoolteacher by day and a secret guerrilla fighter by night; and her cousin, a maid and spy. Each parable is a shrewd and quite often humorous tale interwoven to form a compelling and powerful story. Every character is a revelation and each story a revolution. Zenzele is for anyone who has ever loved and lost, fought and won. It is a complex tale wherein lies a simple truth: Respect the individual but understand what is vital to the whole.

Nozipo Maraire is a Zimbabwean doctor and writer. She is the author of Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter. She is a practicing neurosurgeon. She got her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and then attended The Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. Soon after she entered a neurosurgery internship at Yale. She currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Critics Say. . .

The vision is entirely that of the mother, which is, of course, the point of it all, but also a constriction. There is a didactic quality here, and the reader, standing in for Zenzele, feels a trifle cornered. The wisdoms and warnings sometimes sit uneasily alongside the more telling immediacy of the events that are the core of the book

That grumble out of the way, let it be said that there are plenty of rewards here too -- a rich impression of the warmth and color of Zimbabwean family life, a view of the traumas of the struggle for independence through a series of sharp vignettes, and, above all, a sense of the mother's passionate conviction that "Africa needs the hearts and minds of its sons and daughters. ... The address to Zenzele is not a plea for the retention of traditional values, though it is a sturdy defense of the importance of recognizing and cherishing your roots.

Penelope Lively - New York Times Book Review

Until we begin to put our pen to paper, we historically do not exist." This first novel by a Harvard-educated Zimbabwean writer takes the form of a dramatic monologue delivered in several epistolary reminiscences by an ailing Zimbabwean mother for the benefit of her daughter, who has gone off to study at Harvard. Mostly the monologue is a meditation on "what or who is the African woman," as observed by a member of an elder African generation that fought against colonialists for independence. But the passion of the book also comes from the urge to endow and complete written language with a sense of oral gravity and vividness. How to do this without betraying or compromising an oral culture? Elegiac stress lends power to the story, resulting in a humane antiminimalism that may owe some of its richness to the work of authenticating in writing a largely unwritten experience. Although Maraire yields at times to rhetorical overflow, she mainly imbues the novel with the complexities of the mother's rural life as it undergoes political transformation in the world of the city. Molly McQuade.

Booklist

Maraire, a Harvard-educated native of Zimbabwe now living in the United States, has written a beautifully poignant first novel about what it means to be a woman in Africa. The novel is written in the form of a letter from a mother to her daughter, Zenzele, who is just beginning her studies at Harvard. The mother writes of her girlhood in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe's colonial name), the struggle for Zimbabwe's independence, and her hopes and fears for the next generation. She has watched villagers send the best of her generation to Europe or America for an education, with the hope that they would return with their newly learned skills to better the lives of their compatriots. Instead, she is saddened when they do not return home to live but come back only for visits, seeming to have lost all remnants of African culture. The mother offers her own stories in hopes that her daughter, while creating herself, will never forget whence she came. Highly recommended for women's studies collections and to general readers seeking an intimate view of another life.-Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati Technical Coll.

Library Journal