THE artist and activist elaborates on her work and the intricate, necessary relationship between her artistic production and political action in Zimbabwe. The last week of July 2020 was one of extreme paradoxes for Tsitsi Dangarembga. Three days after her novel This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize, the Zimbabwean writer, playwright and filmmaker found herself in prison after her arrest in Harare. Dangarembga, part of a two-women protest, was standing next to a highway, silently holding a placard protesting against State corruption and the imprisonment of journalist Hopewell Chin’ono. Dangarembga and her friend, Julie Barnes, were charged with incitement to participate in public violence and breaching anti-coronavirus regulations, even though they wore masks and maintained a sizable distance from each other. Dangarembga was released on bail after a night in jail. With the charges still pending against her despite an international outcry against her arrest, the writer received the PEN International Award for Freedom of Expression in January 2021. An international advocacy group concerned with the safety and freedom of expression of writers, PEN awarded the prize for Dangarembga’s “brave work as a writer, filmmaker and activist”, in response to her arrest. In an online interview, Dangarembga welcomed the award as a “positive recognition of some of the work that I do in Zimbabwe, not only in the literary field but also the work that I do on the ground as a concerned citizen”. Though she regards her core work as artistic production, she feels compelled to do what she calls “on-the-ground” activism, as it is her duty as a citizen. The pull to activism comes, however, at a price, siphoning off the energy she would normally expend on writing and film making into the day-to-day struggles against corruption, unconstitutional arrests and a lack of service delivery. The PEN award also presents a conundrum. She admits to being “a little bit conflicted” about it channelling attention away from her artistic production to her political action, leaving a gap in which the important work of storytelling gets lost. Yet looking the other way is not an option for the writer, who describes the injustices of her home country as a powerful “prompt to engagement”. Her lived experience as a Zimbabwean woman and the activism that springs from this position fuel her writing. She concedes that while there is a tension between the artistic work she wants to do and the activism she is forced to do, the two arenas dovetail. “The two go hand in hand because the issues that I take up with my body, as a concerned citizen, are the same issues that I weave into my narrative production,” Dangarembga said. An enduring theme Justice, or the miscarriage thereof, has been an enduring theme of Dangarembga’s fiction. This Mournable Body is the last in a trilogy that follows the life of an impoverished rural girl, Tambudzai, who has to fight — first gender discrimination in colonial Rhodesia and then racism in the newly independen