Evénements

Début 08 Mar, 2023




Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences humaines de Sousse
département d'Histoire & AnteSaPer

“Heaven’s Terrible Ecstasy”

 

Flora Veit-Wild, Professor Emerita from Humboldt University, Berlin

 

READS FROM HER MEMOIR: “THEY CALLED YOU DAMBUDZO”

 

 

When? WEDNESDAY, 8^th March 2023, 2-4 p.m.

 

Where? CENTRE D´ANTHROPOLOGIE/FLSH SOUSSE

 

 

 

At the centre of this moving memoir is the author’s relationship with the late Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera, whose award-winning book The House of Hunger marked him as a powerful, disruptive, perhaps prophetic voice in African literature. Flora Veit-Wild is internationally recognised for her significant contribution to preserving Marechera’s legacy. What is less known about Marechera and Veit-Wild is that they had an intense, personal and romantic relationship. This memoir explores this. 

 

 

‘It is a beautiful and very deep book - as an account of a woman’s life, a complex love relationship, an intellectual collaboration and the fine-tuned rendering of a specific historical period.’
Sarah Nuttall, WISER, Johannesburg

 

‘In Veit-Wild’s relationship with Marechera the issues of privilege and colour

are constantly apparent, exploited (at times ruthlessly by Dambudzo and with

acknowledged guilt by Flora), and frequently weaponised. This imbalance in

their relationship is examined with admirable candour. Its relevance continues

to be interesting – particularly in the sense of the white patron/black artist discussion.’

Alison Lowry, writer and editor, Joahnnesburg

 

 

“A transgressive, volatile love story. A memoir that subverts time and geography.

Veit-Wild’s account of her relationship with Dambudzo Marechera – the

greatest African writer of his generation – is both a celebration and a lament.

It is also a bittersweet portrait of the new Zimbabwe, with its fractured

landscape of race, class and privilege.”

Fiona Lloyd, Johannesburg

 

‘Veit-Wild interlaces dialogue, poetry, anecdote and vivid portraiture to achieve something truly

extraordinary. She not only gives the full story of her fraught and passionate relationship with the writer, she also recalls us to the genius and prescience of his work, and of the loss to African literature that his early death represented.’

Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flora Veit-Wild lived in Harare/Zimbabwe from 1983 to 1993 and became known for her work on Zimbabwean literature and as literary executor and biographer of Dambudzo Marechera and a founder member of the Zimbabwe Women Writers. Her numerous publications include studies of body, madness, sexuality and gender in Anglophone and Francophone African writing as well as code-switching and linguistic innovation in Shona literature and a linguistic analysis of prominent Shona novels.

 

www.floraveitwild.de

 

 

 

first published by Jacana Media in 2020

Johannesburg, South Africa

 

2022 published by James Currey, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer

 

SPECIAL OFFER:

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e-book also via Amazon