Book Review: Nozipo Maraire, Zenzele: 'A Letter for My Daughter'

An African mother as the griot!The case for dialogue between African women and their daughters is made in this debut novel – it’s a necessary read for every woman.

Zenzele is a projection of the future. She is smart, adventurous and ambitious, but also ready to dismiss traditional Shona culture as oppressive and backward. This impressionable young lady is preparing to leave Zimbabwe to study at Harvard, which incidentally is the author’s alma Mata.

Maraire painstakingly paints a picture of traditional culture which valorizes all that Zenzele often misinterprets.

While demonstrating the need for mother and daughter relationships, to be reinterpreted and renegotiated among Zimbabweans; who as a result of independence began adopting Western values.

In her view, the intermingling of Western culture and traditional culture has resulted in the creation of a hybrid generation, which parents have to acknowledge.

In her own reflections of the issues raised, Amai Zenzele concludes “...our children were getting caught in some gray zone that was neither black culture nor truly white, either. We have to acknowledge our dual citizenship. We are urban and rural, old and new.”

This shift in understanding identity constructions was a characteristic of post-colonial Zimbabwe which was set in motion by environments created during the armed struggle where traditional roles, especially for women, where reconfigured.

Amai Zenzele recounts, “They were women of a new generation who wore trousers and like men could aim steady. They were women who killed….

On their backs, they carried not runny-nosed babies but the hope of a different generation in the form of runs of ammunition, maps, codes, and supplies to fuel the battle that ultimately was to lead us to independence.”

It is easy to dismiss the novel as another attempt by an African woman to assert a feminist perspective, but Maraire’s narrator Amai Zenzele did not fight in the war, her family was her life.

Apart from inducing afro centrism, the novel is about the renegotiation of relationships; what Maraire perceives as an inevitable consequence of globalization.

Kizuri