You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Zainab Badawi.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program and I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Zayna Badawi. My guest is the writer, filmmaker and activist Titsi Denguehremba. She's one of Zimbabwe's most influential and acclaimed cultural figures.

Arrested for her political activism, she says her art gives her a platform to call for change.

What are the prospects for better days in Zimbabwe when everyday life is a struggle?

Sitsi Dangareemba in Harari, welcome to Hard Talk.

Your latest book, This Murnable Body,

centres on a female character, Tambu.

Is it a personal story,

or is it a history of modern Zimbabwe?

Zainab, I find that my work generally intersects between the personal

and the national and the historical, because the national and the historical have a lot to do

in determining what the person can do, what a character can do, whether this is in real life or in a novel.

I do want my work to be realistic, or at least I have done up until now,

because I have wanted people in Zimbabwe and on the continent to engage from a perspective of recognition

to be able to say, yes, this is us.

And I also wanted to present characters like the people I meet in everyday life to the rest of the world.

So there you have Tamboo, your main character.

It's actually a trilogy of books, which you've written over 30 years.

This is the third one.

And she fights prejudice in all sorts of ways against race, gender discrimination, and all the rest of it.

But in this book, you've brought Tambu's story up to Zimbabwe in the 1990s when Robert Mugabe, of course, was in power.

How do you see that period in Zimbabwe's history?

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