Postcolonialism and literature: empathy instead of enjoyment of art

Wars don’t end. They have eaten their way into people’s souls and minds to such an extent that, for generations to come, they continue to determine and damage the lives of those who only hear about them in school. This is indeed a rush. But one that doesn’t have too many supporters, especially in Germany – a country that considers itself a world champion when it comes to coming to terms with its own past.

A look at other literature helps to understand what is being talked about when people talk about war and peace. “The Gravity of Being,” for example, tells stories from post-colonial Zimbabwe and also talks about the impossibility of understanding and processing these stories. But one after anonther.

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In November 2012, a handful of writers met for a workshop in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. They wanted to find out what Zimbabwean society was like. Their assessment was based on 60 letters that they had received from the population, all of which revolved around the topic of violence. In her foreword, Madeleine Thien repeatedly gives brief insights into these documents, which were then sorted to finally coagulate into seven stories, the anthology “The Gravity of Being”. The strongest sentence is in the preface, naked and inescapable: “He beat my daughter with a brick until she was dead.” The letter surrounding this sentence is only ten lines long.

Tsitsi Dangarembga wrote the story and used similar literary methods as the other authors in this anthology: imagination, speculation and empathy. These stories are not backgrounds, not reports, not even analyzes, but an attempt to follow Orhan Pamuk’s demand that writers must “have the skill to tell their own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and the stories of others People as if they were your own.”

In times of “true crime” and escalating crime reports, the approach of foregoing any authenticity and imagining the horror initially seems naive. But this is a conscious naivety that aims not to protect itself with documents and witnesses; The texts do not look for the scandalous abnormality of the act, but on the contrary ask the question: What is actually wrong with us? And in doing so, they sketch – in small detail – the picture of a post-colonial society in which the war still lives on and still claims its victims.

Some stories (like the one about the brick) end in a shockingly tragic way, while others end in a more conciliatory way: for example, the one about the rape of a young woman, which is initially supposed to be covered up, but where some justice is restored in the end thanks to the mother’s resolute demeanor.

The slim volume, of course, does not achieve the depth and artistry that Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Tambubzai trilogy (and here in particular the first part “Breaking Up”, a work of the century) has to offer; Some things seem helpless and sometimes a bit awkward. To speak, says Madeleine Thien in the foreword, is an immeasurable risk, and in some of the texts you can sense this burden; However, this opens up a completely new way of reading, namely an empathetic one that does not strive for artistic enjoyment. Anyone who can and likes it will enjoy reading the book.

Tsitsi Dangarembga (ed.): The gravity of being. Postcolonial narratives from Zimbabwe. Orlanda Verlag, 128 pages, br., 21 €.

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