Can language heal, can words heal? The peace prize winner Tsitsi Dangarembga recently spoke at a presentation of her new volume of essays “Woman and Black” about the damaged language. She has been struggling to write fictional texts since she was sentenced to six months’ probation in Harare in September, following a show trial against her and Julie Barnes. Because of an alleged “call to violence”: The two had only called for a “better Zimbabwe” at a demonstration.
For fiction, she has to concentrate on her innermost being, says Dangarembga, which is difficult for her now. She is currently living abroad on a Harvard scholarship, but back home she faces immediate jail for any similar protest.
It’s no longer possible: A number of writers are interrupting their work, authors from Ukraine, for example, because of the war. Writing requires intimacy. With the endangerment of physical integrity, the freedom of imagination is also endangered.
Show your wound: Christoph Schlingensief’s famous sentence is also echoed in Tsitsi Dangarembga when the writer, screenwriter, activist and festival organizer uses the metaphor of the wound in her book. “The first wound of all of us to be classified as ‘black’ is ’empire'” – she means the western states, which in the 19th century owned 80 percent of the earth. And she explains that it’s not enough to loudly lament your own pain. It is important to distance yourself from those who inflict it, “and to transform yourself into someone who can no longer be mutilated”.
And one should not allow oneself to be appeased by those who say that things are slowly getting better for women, for people of color, for people in post-colonialism, and that there are now roads, education, hospitals and medicines in Africa too.
It’s actually slowly getting better. But the healing process is an active, long-term process. Healing is sewing together, weaving, according to Dangarembga, also the weaving of words. It includes scars and the painful cleaning of wounds. Human right, human wrong begins with the body.
Each and every one of us has already had some: dressing wounds. A significant double meaning. Wounds can be bandaged better if they are not talked away so quickly. If it doesn’t say so quickly: What do you actually want, we’ll listen to you now and read your books. It can only ever be a beginning.
Christiane Peitz writes here every two weeks about human rights, freedom and cultural politics.
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