Zenzele
Subtitle: A Letter for My Daughter
Edition: 1st ed edition
Publisher: Crown; Crown Publishers
Published: January 16, 1996
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 194
ISBN-13: 9780517702420
Subjects: Women; American First Novelists; Fiction - General; Fiction; Zimbabwe; General; Fiction / General; Domestic fiction; Mothers and daughters
First sentence: Today is the first day of winter, I believe.
Description: In an extraordinary literary debut - written as a letter from a Zimbabwean mother to her daughter, a student at Harvard - J. Nozipo Maraire transforms the lessons of life into a lyrical narrative.

Interweaving history and memories, disappointments and dreams, like the tales of the traditional village storyteller, this letter is a gift from one generation to the next. As her daughter enters a new world, a mother shares the riches of her own through stories of her personal experiences and those of her generation.

She writes of Zimbabwe's struggle for independence, and of the men and women who shaped it: Zenzele's father, an outspoken activist lawyer; her aunt, a schoolteacher by day and a secret guerrilla fighter by night; and her cousin, a maid and spy.

Each parable is a shrewd and quite often humorous tale interwoven to form a compelling and powerful story. Every character is a revelation and each story a revolution. Zenzele is for anyone who has ever loved and lost, fought and won. It is a complex tale wherein lies a simple truth: Respect the individual but understand what is vital to the whole.