Faculty - Patricia Sithole
Patricia Sithole passed away on April 21, 2011.
Patricia Mercy Mataure-Sithole, a native of Zimbabwe, taught Women’s Studies, Composition and African Literature for the University of Maine from 2004 to April, 2011. She also tutored international students in the Writing Center. Previous to coming to the United States, she taught college composition and literature in Zimbabwe. Patricia was a person of great warmth and dignity who maintained a hopeful spirit even when battling her final illness. At the time of her death she had nearly completed her doctoral thesis, and at the request of her committee members, the Ph.D. was awarded posthumously.
At Patricia’s memorial service, her doctoral thesis advisor Margo Lukens contributed these words:
“Patricia was passionate about her work; in it she found meaning, a way to make a contribution to her homeland from her position in the diaspora, and a way to participate (through her translations of poems into English) in a creative connection with Zimbabwean women poets. I’m so grateful for the chance I had to know Patricia, so sad that she has left us. It is a blessing to know her family, and to have a chance to celebrate her life together.. . .”
Here follows a selection from the introduction to Patricia’s dissertation:
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Opening Chests, Reclaiming Identity: Contemporary Zimbabwean African Women’s poetry in Shona and Ndebele languages
Introduction: The Rule of the Inner Self
“No one outside ourselves can rule us inwardly.
When we know this, we become free.”
The Buddha (c.563-c.483BCE), India
Opening chests is a metaphor that came to me from “kuva nehana” or being able to keep “in the chest,” private or secret, certain knowledge that one is privy to. The chest for me became a woman’s space, handed down from grandmothers through daughters over time. In this space women were empowered because they could conceal or reveal both cultural and personal information in time, or never. This is where they performed the act of “storing,” an important role as the custodians of the knowledge of generations. . . .
Each poem or story to me resembles a treasure trove or chest containing much, and that when searched, yields secrets concealed in words and language devices from the heart of the poet and those that have gone before her. Then there are the literal chests in which women still speak of keeping the most important objects, such as “chinu chamafuta,” the small bottle of oil given to a woman by her female friends and relatives to beautify and groom herself. This was kept secret from men generally, including spouses. Traditional teaching and culture gave women a space of their own; power over aspects of their lives, and respected them as repositories giving them a way of seeing the world through their truth.
. . . traditional Shona and Ndebele women had basically powerful, prestigious, and in any case respectable, well-defined spaces and roles. Those were adversely affected by racist colonial regimes which robbed the African population of their culture. Women were worst affected and found themselves multiply yoked by a colonial government and colonially engineered patriarchal, sexist, racist and classist systems. . . .
My question is: Now that Zimbabwe is independent of colonial rule, are Shona and Ndebele women writers re-imaging themselves differently and have they regained voice in women’s writings from Zimbabwe in the last decade of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries? . . . How have women’s traditional positions of strength contributed in this re-imaging of the “new” Shona and Ndebele woman? If not or if partially achieved, what is the way forward for the empowering of Shona and Ndebele women? Could the role of the feminist translator of these traditional literatures into English be used to help in co-constructing a new reality?
. . . I hope that my work in translation and interpretation for a wider audience will allow many different women to open their chests and tap into the existing cultural treasures, as well as draw from their experiences for those ideas and words that will allow them to carve out spaces, and healthier identities for themselves. Within this space they may allow themselves to believe in their potentials and abilities and they may recreate their own stories and advance the idea and reality of their own value. This is my purpose, my passion and my mission.