Tsitsi Ella Jaji is a poet at heart and a scholar in mind. I was about to introduce myself during our first meeting when she said, “I know who you are.” Since then, she has reminded me more than once to call her Tsitsi, but the Nigerian in me prefers Dr Jaji. Occasionally, I surprise myself by calling her Tsitsi.

What motivates Jaji’s work in African literature and culture is an abiding love for and commitment to the modernity of the continent. In her roles as poet and scholar, she demonstrates that Zimbabwe’s lifeblood can run in the narrative of an American daughter, that America’s history can emerge in the poetry of a Zimbabwean daughter. The rhythms and lyrics of the Shona and the African American music inspire Jaji’s scholarly devotion to the cultural and ideological connections between Africa and its diaspora. But beyond her intellectual interest in music and the soulful presence of music in her poetry, Jaji is a musician and pianist. And what a pleasure it must have been—and a history it is—that her mother was her first piano teacher.

Jaji has other mothers and mentors: Dr Micere Mugo, her mother’s colleague at the University of Zimbabwe, who first read her poetry and encouraged her to continue writing, and Ama Ata Aidoo, who taught her African women’s writing at Oberlin College in Ohio, and whose seriousness as a teacher of the literary and cultural productions of a prejudiced continent made her realize the importance and urgency of centering African ideas. The voices and visions of the poets Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Tanure Ojaide, David Diop, Ladan Osman, TJ Dema, Tariro Ndoro, and Chris Abani help Jaji to better discover the Africa she writes about.

You will read about Jaji’s poetry books Beating the Graves and Mother Tongues in this conversation and experience the cultural and intellectual background that shape her work.

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Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

Hi Tsitsi, how are you?

Tsitsi Jaji

I’m fine, Darlington. Good to have you here.

Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

Thank you. Your bio is striking: “a Zimbabwean poet and American academic.”  It must feel so urgent to embody these cultural and intellectual identities. I suppose everything begins with and often returns to the home. How would you describe your background and what impact does it have on you?

Tsitsi Jaji

I was raised in Harare during the early years of Zimbabwe’s independence. My parents, both mathematics teachers, met teaching in a Methodist mission station. My mother had moved there from Ohio in 1970 and they believed that education and faith were essential to personal and collective freedom. I believe poetry is a lot like algebra. In both systems, symbols stand in for other variables and one can express abstract thoughts with elegance and precision. So, I think my home shaped me in this way. We had a lot of books around but also often one of my grandparents would be staying with us, so we heard stories. I remember these most vividly from my grandfather.

My mother influenced me to think in structured ways and to identify my emotions, and she also ensured that I could study music formally. In fact, she was my first piano teacher. On the other hand, my father always had a poetic way of speaking and, like my grandfather, challenged a lot of patriarchal norms. For example, I was given my own cattle when I was a child even though this was normally only for male children who would use the cattle later in life to pay bride wealth. I was close to relatives in my Zimbabwean family, which included the family that first embraced my mom and helped her learn Shona when she moved there, and to my American relatives. I still love spending time with them. As the eldest in my generation on my father’s side I have an important role to play in holding my cousins, for in Shona kinship, I am their junior mother. Because my parents eventually taught at the University of Zimbabwe, I also interacted with many of their colleagues as aunties and uncles. The most significant influence in this context was getting to know Dr Micere Mugo, whose office was on the same hallway as my mum’s. Dr Mugo was the first person to take me seriously as a poet, reading and critiquing my work when I was in secondary school.

Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

You have a delightful family story, Tsitsi. It is now clear to me how you are both Zimbabwe and American and why each identity is important to you. And many thanks to Dr Mugo for nurturing your talent. Do you have other childhood memories of reading and writing? I mean, are there defining moments from your formative years that you always carry with you?

Tsitsi Jaji

I was not an early reader, but my parents read many books out loud to my brother and me, including some by Dr Seuss and Shel Silverstein who are American children’s books writers with sharp poetics. I mostly read Western literature as I matured. I loved Jane Eyre and the like, and was even into some fantasy. It wasn’t until my second year in secondary school that I remember reading African authors. Those who made the deepest impression on me were Bessie Head, Wole Soyinka, and Tsitsi Dangarembga. I was born in the same tiny mission hospital as Dangarembga, in Nyadire, Zimbabwe and we come from the same United Methodist milieu, and I attended the same secondary school as she did, so I remember reading her name on the honors board. I never imagined I would become a writer, which is sort of funny considering that I knew I loved books enough I would like to teach literature.

Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

It’s amazing how much you share with Tsitsi Dangarembga, especially her love of Zimbabwe. And, back to books, you must have been a nerd as a child.

Tsitsi Jaji

I was nerdy. Very nerdy. I loved ballet and piano more than anything. At the time I was born, I was often the first non-white person in these types of activities, but we didn’t discuss this much at home. As an interracial family, it wasn’t interesting to dwell on race, difference was just a fact of life. In the ballet context, the first dance I performed in was a Nativity show the year Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, and of course, I was cast as the boy Jesus.

Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

You were baby Jesus? Interesting.

Tsitsi Jaji

I know, Darlington. It was a literal symbol of racial reconciliation. My own teacher was wonderful, but the Harare ballet scene was quite racist, and I had some difficult experiences in secondary school that made me quit dancing in that style. It was great to explore other movement traditions as an adult. Piano was and still is a mode of almost unmediated expression for me. Sometimes I joke that my most consistent spiritual practice is playing the music of Bach. I was lucky that my school choir embraced musicianship and two of my most memorable experiences were having the choir perform a setting of Psalm 23 that I wrote and having the school sing the Anglican service music I composed. Even though I was shy and awkward, I had confidence as a musician.

Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

And that confidence still shines today, in the musicality of your poetry and in your work as a scholar of expressive cultures that include music.

Tsitsi Jaji

Thank you.

Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

You seem to have enjoyed learning so much as a young person.

Tsitsi Jaji

I was never someone who focused on a single thing well. I have always thrived from variety and thinking laterally. I was terrible at sports, and academics came easily. Since I was a “scholarship girl”, I had to maintain good marks to stay in school, but I enjoyed it a lot. I loved reading. My favorite subject was physics, and I started university intending to major in mathematics to carry on the family tradition.

Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

What changed?

Tsitsi Jaji

Ama Ata Aidoo happened. I took a class with her on contemporary African women writers in my first year at Oberlin College in Ohio, and that changed my life. After reading so many British writers, that was my first experience reading a whole syllabus of books that spoke to my background.

Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

How do you remember the class with Ama Ata Aidoo?

Tsitsi Jaji

It is astonishing to realize that it has been thirty years since I studied with her, and I share these recollections recognizing that memory can be a wily editor. But this is what I recall: as a teacher, Ama Ata Aidoo did not suffer fools lightly. The same wonderfully liberated directness, critical analysis, sarcasm, and disarming tenderness we find in her plays and fiction was there in the classroom. She was also very, very kind, but I will first try to recall her persona in the classroom.

To be honest, I was always afraid I would say something that made her think I was a fool. With limited and distorted information about Africa, many of the American students in the class had misperceptions which she was quick to correct, and not gently. This isn’t to say she was mean-spirited, but she was not interested in cushioning the delivery of knowledge or prefacing it for any presumed innocence in ignorance. I think she paid special attention to the two African women in the room, a Ghanaian-British student and myself. We were certainly held to the same rather terrifying standards, but in retrospect, I think that, as a teacher, she probably saw how this knowledge was impacting the two of us on a deeply personal level, giving us insights into how ideology and lived experience intersect and that literature allows us to imagine other possible worlds.

What I didn’t grasp at the time was that the writers we studied in class were her comrades, the truly pioneering African feminist voices who had to invent their own language. And many were her friends. That’s something that comes through in her poetry, where there are many poems addressed to fellow writers and even family members – Dr Mugo, and her daughter Mumbi, for example.

One question she couldn’t stand was “Who are you writing for?” And it always seemed to me that the fundamental answer for any writer is for oneself. I still hear her voice in my inner ear when I think about audience and the importance of trusting your readers to rise to the occasion rather than pandering.

Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

This is a total experience.

Tsitsi Jaji

That’s because Ama Ata Aidoo was one of a kind. She knew it and reveled in it. Because she had spent time in Zimbabwe after leaving Ghana under difficult political circumstances, we shared an understanding of what life in this tiny cold town in Ohio felt like. She used to bring a thermos with hot porridge with her to her office, and I just love how practical and quirky that was. We laughed at how delicious porridge becomes with the seasoning of nostalgia. I will always remember how warmly she welcomed my parents when they visited the campus. These were ways she lived an African life, and played the role of auntie, even in that U.S. institutional context.

The most helpful things she ever said to me as a writer were to consider my writing as an onion that was peeling layer after layer away, and to keep going toward that inner core. It’s only now that I realize that it is from this center that new growth sprouts. And when, 12 years after studying with her, I met her again in Accra during my doctoral studies, she listened to my account of some very trying experiences I had with medical and psychiatric care and urged me to write a memoir. Although I have not done that in a conventional way, I think that my use of autobiographical material in my poetry is a way of answering that call. Or perhaps what resonates with me when I remember that conversation—at Mbaasem women’s writing center, a space she created in Accra to support women’s creative labor—is simply the idea that one’s own experience is worth writing about.

Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

I am thrilled by your journey. But ironically, you had to leave Africa to encounter African writing. Did it worry you at the time?

Tsitsi Jaji

I was very troubled by the fact that it was only when I left Zimbabwe and came to that small town in Ohio that I had an opportunity to learn about African writers in a substantive way. It speaks to colonialism on such a deep level. There are Zimbabweans of my generation who had much more exposure to African literature; people like Petina Gappah talk about this. But the school I attended was still oriented around colonial values. We were required to study French for four years, but Shona for only two, for example. The national syllabus included Bessie Head, Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, as set books, but African writers were not included in the non-exam readings. On the other hand, it was in the school library that I found Nervous Conditions, and I am grateful that we had those resources.

But there is also an important distinction between individual books and literature as an intellectual and cultural matrix. Had I had better insight at the time I could have sought out some of the writers I first encountered at Oberlin. But having guidance and more importantly scholarly insight into the goals, context, aesthetic values, and political urgency that made the literature coherent made such a difference. Another factor that enriched my learning was I had the chance to study Francophone African literature, with a wonderful scholar of Amina Sow Fall named Médoune Guèye, and Caribbean literature. I was so interested in this comparative perspective on colonialism that I learned Spanish to read writers like Alejo Carpentiér and Nicolás Guillén in the original.

My motivation for going to graduate school was that I was so angry I hadn’t learned more of this material as a highschooler in Zimbabwe and I wanted to change that for younger people. It is a sad irony that I have spent my career in the U.S., perhaps reproducing this very dynamic. These days there are so many fantastic scholars of African literature on the continent, but as Carli Coetzee noted several years ago in the Journal of African Cultural Studies, uneven resources too often suppress the impact of these scholars, whether it is because of where they are published, the tremendously large numbers of students they are teaching at under-resourced institutions, or simply the provincialism of the global North. So, it’s wrong-headed to suppose that one has to leave the continent to know the continent. But it is the case that literature is a unique way of knowing, one that equips us to inhabit the world, in the sense of the surroundings and in the sense of the globe, in a rich and multi-dimensional way. I would say that only literature allows one to know Africa in such a multi-dimensional, generative way. The imagination is at the epicenter of what has always made Africa modern.

Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

I agree with you that the imagination is central in the establishment of Africa’s modernity. How would you assess your role in the project of sustaining that modernity?

Tsitsi Jaji

I try to write about the contradictory position in diaspora, and to stay as honest as possible about my own subject position and the limits of my claim on speaking as an African writer. But I really hope that my research is useful in a rippling way and I’m grateful that being a scholar allows me to write in relationship with other writers. I am only an African poet because I am a reader of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Tanure Ojaide, David Diop, Ladan Osman, TJ Dema, Tariro Ndoro, and so on. I am learning from them on both conscious and unconscious levels all the time. Ensuring broader access to African literature for Africa-based readers is really urgent. I am not an expert in publishing, distribution or reading cultures, but I see people like my compatriot Samantha Vazhure doing vital work by using their resources in diaspora—in her case the UK—to publish books in African languages that are difficult to publish locally because of economic precarity. And I see people like another compatriot, Tendai Rinos Mwanaka, who are just prolific editors as well as writers. We follow different models, and there is so much to say about the differences and about resources, but I think that the complicated, global ecology of publishing African literature depends upon this variety.

Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

Thank you for your contributions, Tsitsi. How has work as a poet writing about and for Africa impacted your life?

Tsitsi Jaji

When I was younger, I was often confused by how visits to my grandparents’ farm involved singing Methodist hymns together and about why my grandfather often gathered us in the kitchen hut to inform our ancestors of our comings and goings. I have come to understand these as a continuum of practices holding sacred the gifts we encounter in the present and a reminder to try and live in ethical relation not only to those around us but to those who will come later. I will always be profoundly shaped by the faith heritage of my parents, and while I live in the U.S. and see my American family regularly, poetry has become a vital way to stay connected to my Zimbabwean family by writing from the perspective of one living in diaspora, with obligations and privileges that inevitably shape our relationship. I grapple with the ethics of remittances, recognize the value of practices I overlooked, and reimagine in poetry the essence of ideas I cannot express in everyday Shona. Chris Abani, another important mentor, once responded to my lamenting how removed from my cultural and linguistic roots I was by saying I still had more than some had ever had to lose. That freed me and enabled me to create from whatever small bits of material I felt confident in. As my parents are both experiencing dementia as they age, I increasingly understand that it is through my brother and me that their words and insights remain alive and lucid. As teachers, they poured so much into their students.

My mother was known for holding people to high standards, but her office was also a place where students felt safe to share both personal and academic challenges. My father was a person who gave advice to people in a direct way about reconciling when angry, reconsidering the wisdom of how resources were spent, and understanding success as acting with dignity and generosity. I have come to understand that one way the ancestors are always speaking to us is in the layers of language our parents, teachers, and peers enfold us in. I am not formed in Shona spiritual practices and rites and am more likely to orient myself with a walk or a church visit. But I think listening with the mind’s ear, writing but also just thinking in poetry, is a ritual of its own.

Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

I experienced that ritual of being present in one’s culture in your collection Beating the Graves.

Tsitsi Jaji

I’m glad you did. Beating the Graves is the direct translation of the name for a ceremony in Shona culture, kurova guva, which takes place about a year after a person is buried. It is an important rite of transition. I had learned about my ancestral history and the characteristics of my family’s totem from my aunts during a visit home after my grandfather passed away, and that led me to do more research into Shona praise poetry, especially the work of A.C. Hodza, George Fortune, and Alec Pongweni. The “Ankestral” section of Beating the Graves, and many of the poems based on animal imagery and/or honoring elders, are informed by that research. I’ve written about this principle of relating through poetry in an essay “Decolonizing the Poem” in The Cambridge Companion to the Poem. The other long section of Beating the Graves, “Carnaval”, is in fact the first poetry I wrote for that book, and it was originally in the program notes I wrote for a set of 24 piano pieces by the German composer Robert Schumann that I played in my graduation recital for my music degree. Each piece was short and distinctive, and I feel that this exploration of classical music is no less African than, say, a VaNyemba poem, because all my writing is filtered through an African moral education.

Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

Thank you for sharing these details. What inspired your other collection Mother Tongue?

Tsitsi Jaji

In Mother Tongues, I was really trying to come to terms with a certain “impurity” in my relation to language, and to insist upon the right to not have a single or singular voice but rather to let poems take the form their matter demanded. That’s why “tongues” is in the plural. I start with an autobiographical poem about the moment when my relation to language became complicated, an extended visit to the U.S. when I was four, when English replaced Shona as my dominant language without I or my family realizing it until later. There are poems in that collection that I drafted 20 years ago, and others I wrote a couple weeks before I sent the manuscript out to the Cave Canem competition for second books which was how that book came to print. I am so grateful that Matthew Shenoda, the great Egyptian-American poet, selected it for the award.

Some poems in that collection are directly Christological, others lean into the ancestral, and while Beating the Graves mostly drew inspiration from music, there are more poems in Mother Tongues inspired by visual art and photography by Malick Sidibé, Willie Cole, El Greco and others. In both books there are poems that are very explicitly political—about the war in Syria or the murder of Tamir Rice or the dangers faced by migrants in South Africa—and others which may seem less so but there is also a politics to the forms we choose and how much we inhabit the full range of world culture, world literature. I refuse to consider difference as boundary. And I am devoted to the capacity of poetry to say many things at once, to open language to the saturated meanings of any utterance and yet to keep secret—which is to say sacred—what one must through the possibilities of lyrical speech.

Darlington Chibueze Anuonye

May we never undermine the possibility of things. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you, Tsitsi.

Tsitsi Jaji

Thank you, Darlington.

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Buy Beating the Graves here: Amazon

Buy Mother Tongues here: Amazon