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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Petina Gappah Quotes

If I truly had the courage of my convictions, I would be a full-blown comic novelist.

– Petina Gappah

The first thing I remember when I moved to a school in the suburbs was, ‘My gosh, all these books!’ The classroom and school had a library; I’d never seen so many books in my life! It was something we didn’t have in the township.

– Petina Gappah

I’m not even sure that I want to go back… The Zimbabwe that I really loved, the Zimbabwe that I grew up in, just isn’t there anymore, and I’m not sure about the country that has replaced it.

– Petina Gappah

I get irritated by the term ‘African writer’, because it doesn’t mean anything to me.

– Petina Gappah

Only al-Jazeera is allowed to report from Zimbabwe, but it is unwatchable. Their Zimbabwean reporter Supa Mandiwanzira was one of Zanu-PF’s praise-singers at the reviled Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation.

– Petina Gappah

On April 18, 1980, the last outpost of empire in Africa died. From Rhodesia’s ashes rose a country that would take its place among the free nations as Zimbabwe, the last among equals. And men and women leapt to embrace this dream called Zimbabwe.

– Petina Gappah

People always ask me how I manage to find humor in so much bleakness. I think this is almost a necessary skill to have.

– Petina Gappah

I was eight when independence happened. I remember my mum and dad getting dressed up to go to the independence concert to go listen to Bob Marley. Independence was such a wonderful time; we had so many expectations of the kind of country we would become. The vision of the government then was a wonderful vision.

– Petina Gappah

What we are trying to do now, this new generation of African writers, is to write about what it is to be a human being living in a particular African country. These are stories that resonate with anyone, anywhere.

– Petina Gappah

Ian Smith thought his Rhodesia would last 1,000 years: it lasted less than 15.

– Petina Gappah

A novelist, poet and playwright who writes equally well in Shona and English, Charles Mungoshi is Zimbabwe’s finest and most versatile writer. His life project has been to interrogate the notion of family.

– Petina Gappah

These are the kinds of names that Zimbabweans like: names that have positive qualities. Like, Praise is a very popular name; Loveness is a very popular name.

– Petina Gappah

You could have names like Hatred; you could have names that mean something like Suffering or Poverty. So names are not just names: names have real meaning, and they tend to tell the world about the circumstances of your parents at the time that you were born.

– Petina Gappah

It was one of those early mid-life crises, really. I started asking myself, ‘What is it that I want from my life?’ This question kept haunting me: ‘Do I want to be a lawyer who always wanted to be a writer, or do I actually want to be a writer?

– Petina Gappah

My grandfather was a polygamous man, and he had two wives, and between him and his two wives, we are about 200 or so in our family.

– Petina Gappah

The struggle for Zimbabwe lit up the imagination of people around the world. In London, New York, Accra and Lagos, bell-bottomed men and women with big hair and towering platform shoes sang the dream of Zimbabwe in the words of the eponymous song by Bob Marley: Every man has the right to decide his own destiny.

– Petina Gappah

There’s a Shona saying: ‘chakafukidza dzimba matenga’ – ‘What covers the home is the roof,’ or ‘Every home has its secrets.’

– Petina Gappah

For the first years of my life, I went to school in Rhodesia. My memory of living in the townships is that they were actually really happy places.

– Petina Gappah

There are some people who are happy to be African writers. They are pan-Africanists. I’m not a pan-Africanist. I think African countries have a lot in common. But we are also very different.

– Petina Gappah

The painful truth may be that Zimbabwe, the youngest of Africa’s former colonies, has simply followed where the continent has led, treading the well-worn path beaten out of the lie that taking power from the colonialists and delivering democracy to the people are one and the same.

– Petina Gappah

I don’t want to write because I have to; I want to write because I want to. Sometimes, when writers write because they have to, the results are disastrous.

– Petina Gappah

I always say to people that Zimbabweans are the funniest people in Africa; we even laugh at funerals. And it’s true. I mean, there are so many jokes about funerals. There are so many jokes about AIDS. We find ways of coping with pain by laughing at it and by laughing at ourselves.

– Petina Gappah

I speak English. I dream in it. I cannot separate my English from my Shona; I see the world with those two languages.

– Petina Gappah

Zimbabweans, I’ve come to believe, we are very passive-aggressive people. We don’t like conflict; we don’t like confrontation, so we find all sorts of ways of avoiding that conflict and confrontation. We are not allowed to talk about bad things that go on in families.

– Petina Gappah

I guess you could say I’m lucky because I’ve known a Zimbabwe that didn’t have Robert Mugabe leading it. One of the saddest things about Zimbabwe is there are so many hidden casualties of the Mugabe government’s misrule. They’re not just casualties that you immediately see.

– Petina Gappah

‘Authentic’ is one of my least favourite words because in such a diverse country, whose authenticity are you talking about?

– Petina Gappah