Tarisai Ngangura finds freedom in fiction with The Ones We Loved

Globe and Mail

08-05-2025

Tarisai Ngangura made her name as a journalist covering music, memory and the movements that shape both. But her debut novel, The Ones We Loved, marks a shift: She's no longer just reporting stories – she's the orchestrator of where this one begins and ends.
Set in a town haunted by catastrophe, the book opens with a girl running – blood on her shirt, headed toward something unnamed. What follows is a story – written in prose that recalls Toni Morrison or Tsitsi Dangarembga – about what grief does to language, how care survives history and the quiet power of refusal. Ngangura's voice seems to arrive fully formed: tender as a bruise and quietly devastating.
What's fascinating about The Ones We Loved isn't just the lyricism – it's the way the novel holds space for rage, grief and refusal. Set in a town haunted by catastrophe, it follows a girl forced to flee after an act of violence, a moment born from the weight of unspoken histories and the limits of survival. What unfolds is both vulnerable and raw: a meditation on how we live with oppression, and what happens when someone, finally, does not.
The Globe spoke with Ngangura about the emotional weight of telling a story so different from those she's told before.
There's a quiet, persistent care in your writing – not just in the relationships, but in the language itself. What does care look like for you on the page?
For me, care is attention. I care about how a sentence begins and ends. Comma placement matters. How words flow matters. My first language is Shona – it's made for storytelling. It holds melodrama, humour and grief. I wanted English to feel that way, too. I wanted the pain to be in the language itself, not just the story.
You write about place so intimately as well. What actually led you to writing?
My dad was a journalist in Zimbabwe. I'd watch him talk to people, gather what I now know was the 'colour' for his stories. Sometimes he'd take us along on his research drives, and I saw the care he took in listening. My mom wrote beautiful short stories in a notebook my sister and I used to read, thinking they were unfinished. We'd ask, 'What happens next?' and she'd go, 'That's it. That's the story.'
So I grew up with storytelling everywhere – writing was how I made sense of the world. Through school, through life. It was how I understood my parents. Journalism gave me the career. Fiction gave me a different kind of freedom.
The novel opens in a moment of violence and grief. Why start there?
I wanted to open with tension – something that immediately outlines the stakes. I didn't know much about the relationship that unfolds in the story yet, but I knew it would involve care and tenderness. That opening moment makes readers ask: How did we get here? Who are these people? Why does it matter?
The book touches on so many themes as well – grief, history, colonialism, survival and faith. How did you think about balancing all that?
Nothing was clear at all. [Laughs.] I didn't sit down with a list of themes like, 'Okay, this is about faith or displacement.' They just emerged as I wrote. Writing the book itself was an act of faith. I had to trust that it would come together, even when I didn't fully know what I was doing.
A lot of the deeper stuff only became clear when early readers pointed it out. There are things I did plan. There are things that surprised me. And then there are things I didn't even notice until someone else saw them.
The two main characters – 'He' and 'She' – are unnamed. There's a universality in that.
You know, honestly? They never told me their names. I waited, but nothing came. It wasn't a deliberate withholding – it was just the way they existed in the story. Which is strange, because I come from a place where names hold so much weight. In the book, everyone else is named very specifically. But 'He' and 'She' insisted on moving differently.
Let's talk about Waterfall – the town the story unfolds in. It feels almost like another character. What inspired that setting?
It's a composite of places. There's a city in Brazil I used to visit a lot – lush, heavy with history and Afro-Brazilian resistance. And there are rural parts of Zimbabwe, where my aunts live. Places I passed through with my parents while driving across the country. I think Waterfall is made up of those memories – places that stayed in my mind.
The book holds so much tension – between resistance and survival, silence and visibility. How do you see that playing out in the world right now?
Every day, someone's world falls apart – and they still have to keep going. What's wild to me is where that desire to rebuild even comes from. Your circumstances can be so violent, so bleak – and still, people reach for joy, for love, for memory.
That kind of hope is soft, so fragile. But it's also unbelievably strong. And it doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from people talking to each other, sharing what they have. That's what the book sits with: how we survive, not just alone, but with each other.
You came to fiction as a culture journalist. On a scale of 1 to 10, how hard was it to write a novel?
[Laughs.] Can I go higher than 10? It was a wordless experience. I've been in this cavernous dungeon for years.
And it's just one of those things where you're a journalist, and you think I can do this, that it's just more words. But it's not. It's also more emotions. Every insecurity as a writer is just heightened.
But it's been fulfilling?
Definitely. I'm proud of this book. It taught me to trust myself. And now I'll go into the next thing with more humility – and a deeper kind of trust.