Author Tsitsi Dangarembga has joined the Future Library, offering a work that won’t be read for 100 years.
There are many ways artists can highlight how global warming is hurting the planet. Katie Paterson, for example, once created an installation that allowed people to listen in on the sound of glaciers melting. Now she has come up with the idea of a Future Library in hopes that it will still exist in 100 years so that people can read the works of the celebrated authors who have joined the project.
Alison Flood reports on one such author at the Guardian. “Tsitsi Dangarembga made the Booker shortlist for her most recent novel, This Mournable Body, the story of a girl trying to make a life in post-colonial Zimbabwe which was praised as ‘magnificent’ and ‘sublime.’ Her next work, however, is likely to receive fewer accolades: it will not be revealed to the world until 2114.
“The Zimbabwean writer is the eighth author selected for the Future Library project, an organic artwork dreamed up by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson. It began in 2014 with the planting of 1,000 Norwegian spruces in a patch of forest outside Oslo. Paterson is asking one writer a year to contribute a manuscript to the project – ‘the length of the piece is entirely for the author to decide’ – with Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong and Karl Ove Knausgård already signed up. The works, unseen by anyone but the writers themselves, will be kept in a room lined with wood from the forest in the Deichman library in Oslo. One hundred years after Future Library was launched, in 2114, the trees will be felled, and the manuscripts printed for the first time.
“The artwork ‘perfectly expresses my yearning for a human culture that centres the earth’s sustainability,’ said Dangarembga. ‘I share with many other dwellers of our beautiful planet a deep sense of concern for our home’s wellbeing.’ …
“The author, whose acclaimed debut Nervous Conditions (1988) was the first novel written in English by a black woman from Zimbabwe, said she was already “settling on the story” she would tell. She was not worried about the fact that she will never know how her writing is received.
‘I’m always my first audience. … A lot of my life has been writing into the void. So I’m used to writing into the void.’
“Paterson said that Future Library was ‘honoured’ to include Dangarembga. … ‘Tsitsi Dangarembga’s words have shaped the world. Praised for her ability to capture and communicate vital truths, the Zimbabwean novelist is admired worldwide as a voice of hope,’ said Paterson. ‘She examines oppression, discrimination, and systemic racism, through writing that is brave and unforgettable.’ …
” ‘I don’t think of myself in those terms,’ Dangarembga said. ‘So it’s really a great honour, I’m very pleased about it.’
“Nervous Conditions, to which This Mournable Body is a sequel, was named by the BBC as one of the 100 books that shaped the world. Currently in Harare, the Zimbabwean author is working on a piece of non-fiction, and a speculative young adult novel. She is also awaiting a trial date after she was arrested during anti-corruption protests in Harare last year, and charged with intention to incite public violence. Authors and free speech organisations have called for the charges to be dropped, describing them as an outrage.”
More at the Guardian, here.
Novelist Margaret Atwood with artist Katie Paterson at the inauguration of the Future Library forest in Norway.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
This is such a selfless artistic act that it left me numb. I’m still considering if I would be able to forfeit the (eventual) lifetime gratification, since it takes me on the average about two years to write a book and they made a decision to burry theirs for 100 years.
They have a choice of how big a thing to write, so it could be a short story. And maybe they have things to say that they can never allow themselves to say in their lifetime.
One hundred years! Quite the project.
Well, you know, time flies.