Most aspiring physicians pursuing a specialty in neurosurgery find that their medical duties keep them too busy to think or do much else. Not so for J. Nozipo Maraire '87, a native of Zimbabwe who managed to write a critically acclaimed novel and run a New Haven art gallery while completing an internship at Yale Medical School.

Maraire's book Zenzele tells the story of a Zimbabwean woman and her daughter, who leaves home to attend college in the United States. Written in the form of a mother's letter to her daughter, Zenzele is "emotionally autobiographical," Maraire says, but better represents a collective biography of her generation

J. Nozipo Maraire '87

of Zimbabweans, supplemented by the stories of her mother, her grandmother, and an aunt who served as a guerilla fighter during her country's war for independence. Written over the course of eight months, during the wee hours of the morning while Maraire was on call in the hospital, Zenzele was such a private endeavor that it came as a complete surprise to Maraire's mother, who did not hear of the book until the day before it was published.

Though Maraire did not originally write Zenzele for publication, she sees the novel as a rare opportunity for readers to glimpse the perspective of a young African woman, and to appreciate the rich culture and promising future of a country and continent too often represented as an abyss of insurmountable problems. "When you open a newspaper or watch television, 99 percent of what you hear about Africa is negative," she says. "You rarely hear about its beautiful art, or about Zimbabwe's excellent educational system, or that it is a very safe place to live." As she wrote Zenzele, though, Maraire says she "was thinking about young Africans and the way in which we are facing our future in light of what has gone before. We have independence as nations, but we haven't yet achieved the cultural and economic independence that we thought would come automatically...It is our responsibility to give back to our countries what we have gained from the opportunities we have had."

It is in this spirit that Maraire plans to return to Zimbabwe once her medical training is complete, to open a neurosurgery center and participate in what she calls "a kind of reverse brain drain," in which young professionals educated abroad are returning to Zimbabwe in large numbers. In the meantime, she runs her African art gallery and writes constantly for her own enjoyment, a habit she developed early in life by keeping a diary. "During residency you are in the hospital all the time, and you are constantly faced with life and death issues," she explains. "It's a lot to sort through, and when you get out, you have this thirst to drink up everything, this desire to really live and do the things that are important to you, like spend time with friends, and to write. I have the luxury to write at my leisure, since it's not my income-generating activity, and that has given me a real sense of balance."