Gender and Class Issues in the Postcolonial Zimbabwean Novel
1.
Maurice Taonezvi Vambe, BA 1990 BA 1991 MA D.Phil 1995-, Department of English,
University of Zimbabwe
The truths of a nation are in the first place its realities. (F. Fanon, 1963, p 181).
Postcolonial Politics and Shifting Identities in Africa
A useful starting point for this essay is Frantz Fanon's understanding of the troubled existence of identity in a
colonial society. In his often under-discussed chapter titled, "On National Culture," (Fanon; 1963, pp 166199) Fanon analyses the psychology of colonialism and shows how under it nothing is left to chance.
Colonialism does not only control the material resources of a country it subjugates but that it turns to the past
of the oppressed people, distorts, disfigures and tries to destroy it. Fanon is, here alluding to that process of
the devaluation of the African past in which it was, and still is, represented by apologetic scholars of
colonialism as one long night of barbarism, static and therefore needful of European technology, forms of
political governance and cultural organisations to pull it out of its supposed inertia. This notion of "African
reality" is an artificially constructed "truth". Contained in it is the image by colonialism portraying the
identity of Africans as marginally its OTHER - an inferior race the colonizer had come to redeem and protect
from self-destruction.
If, for Fanon, the colonial period was less stable and incoherent because it was itself defined by the binary
divisions of colonizer and colonized, black and white -- signifiers whose coded meanings have continued to
thrive into the period after direct colonial rule, the "post- colonial" stage in the history of Africa is an "after"
period of deepening contradictory complexities.The socio-economic and political conditions under which the
African writers compose their new stories are changed ones. Political power is now in the hands of a class of
few blacks most whom participate actively in the exploitation of their own people. The political situation of
increased gender and class inequalities after independence not only underpin this decisive rift developing
between the leaders and the poor masses in Africa today.It also compels us to pluralise our way of narrating
the nation. This is a theoretical challenge which will inevitably collide with models of national identity
insisting on a single destiny for Africans themselves.
Our own usage of the controversial term "post-colonial" to analyse the processes by which people or social
'subjects" occupy new positionalities in the period after direct colonial rule should therefore not be taken to
mean that there has been a total break with the structures of colonialism. These structures (economic,
political and cultural) are in the new context of today being contested by emergent power blocks albeit in a
changed environment of more brutal forces of globalization. The latter has seriously weakened and
undermined though not completely destroyed national economies, borders, politics and cultures (S.Hall,
1996, p 2). In other words, that local African political and cultural space upon which global forces play
themselves out in terms of domination and its resistance is one in which new bases of power proclaiming
new truths of the nation are created. In these local spaces defined by common national borders, identities
multiply, are transformed and circulate in a political environment
made up not of one coherent "public space, " nor is it determined by any single organising principle.It is
rather a plurality of spheres and arenas, each having its own separate logic yet nonetheless liable to be
entangled with other logics when operating in certain specific contexts:..Faced with this...the postcolonial
'subject" mobilizes not a single "’dentity, " but several fluid identities which, by their very nature, must be
constantly "revised" in order to achieve maximum instrumentality and efficacy as and when required (A.
Mbembe, 1992, p 5).
Postcolonial Zimbabwean literature is a part of the dynamic mainstream of African literature. It shares with
the continental literature a concern to illuminate the direction for social change.This essay examines the
ways in which Nervous Conditions (1988) and Victory (1992) characterise the new "truths" of the nation
after independence in Zimbabwe. The essay will argue that the two novels refuse to minimise the impact of
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settler politics in Southern Rhodesia in shaping the processes of post-colonial identity re-alignments.As such
the two novels" settings span from the days of colonialism right into the post-colonial era. This maintains the
link between the two periods without falsely placing a break where none may exist (Werber, 1996, p 5). The
depiction of the fracturing of the nationalist front in the two novels reveal how new centres of power vie for
political space as they interrogate the notion of fixed "truths" of the nation.
Writers and Politics in Postcolonial Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain in 1980 after a protracted war of liberation that dragged for
fourteen years and claimed more than thirty five thousand lives (D.Martin & P Johnson, 1981, p 188). This
struggle is celebrated by the country's literature both in indigenous languages (Shona and Ndebele ) as well
as in English, the official language. Popular titles in English include And Now the Poets Speak (1981), A
Fighter for Freedom (1983), and Bones (1987) by Chenjerai Hove, probably the leading poet of the
country. In the late eighties Zimbabwean fiction in English which celebrated the united efforts of the African
people against colonialism seemed to have run its full course. New titles critical of the black nationalist
government began to emerge. Freedom T.V Nyamubaya's book of poetry titled, On the Road Again (1985)
was followed by Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988) and then George Mujajati's Victory
(1992).
2.
Disempowering Women in Postcolonial Zimbabwe
Maurice Taonezvi Vambe, BA 1990 BA 1991 MA D.Phil 1995-, Department of English, University of
Zimbabwe
Although more than fifty percent of the votes which pushed Robert Mugabe's nationalist Zimbabwe African
National Union (ZANU) party into office in 1980 came from women, this was however, not reflected in their
actual representation by women in parliament. The few women in parliament were political appointees meant
to window-dress the male-dominated august house. The nationalist government's commitment to equality
and justice for all irrespective of sex, was put to test in 1984 when the regimes" security forces swooped
down on the women travelling alone at night, arresting and detaining them for imagined offences of
prostitution deemed to bring disrepute to the country. This incident reveals that despite waging a war in
which women participated as equals, Zimbabwean law makers and enforcers still operate from the
assumption that women are dirty, loose and dangerous. The patriarchal conception of women as mothers
whose age-old role is to reproduce the community was further confirmed by the conspicuous absence of the
voice of women at the centre of the male politicians who negotiated for the 1987 UNITY ACCORD between
ZANU and ZAPU. Coming in 1988, the publication of Nervous Conditions can be seen as a crucial political
intervention aimed at revising the marginal roles which women have been assigned under colonialism and
continue to perform in the new dispensation of independence.
3.
Subverting Traditional Images of Women in the Postcolonial Zimbabwean Novel
Maurice Taonezvi Vambe, BA 1990 BA 1991 MA D.Phil 1995-, Department of English, University of
Zimbabwe
Nervous Conditions tells the story of Tambudzayi Sigauke's struggle to acquire an education. The title of
the novel identifies as its provenance Jean Paule Sartre's comment in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The
Wretched of the Earth (1963) that "The status of "native" is a nervous condition introduced and maintained
by the settler among the colonized people with their consent" (Fanon, 1963, p17). Whereas Fanon's book
concentrated on the states of alienation and deprivations experienced by the African people under a brutal
colonial regime, Dangarembgwa incorporates the sense that the margin which is the lot of Africans under the
colonial system is also a physical, intellectual and psychological space with its own dynamics tensions and
contradictions. In this squeezed space, black women live a life of sexual discrimination from their men and
as a result black women find themselves collaborating with black men against colonialism even as the
women fight their own men. And of course, the state of "Nervous Conditions" will also denote the powerful
and circumscribing gaze of the reader/critic usually male, which often compels the African women writers"
to negotiate the creation of their fictional characters.
2
Five black women in Nervous Conditions help Tambudzayi to escape from the "burden of womanhood" (p
16) imposed by the interface between colonialism and the traditional Shona patriarchy. In the novel, it is the
grandmother who passes on to Tambudzayi the historical awareness of the colonial assault on the African
communal mode of production.In actual fact, Tambudzayi learns that the African people were deprived of
their fertile lands by the white settlers after a bloody war of 1896. With this loss of political independence,
also went the African men's ability to provide for their families.The immediate alternative was to seek work
in the sprouting European farms and mines, a development which left African women in control of rural
cultivation, the raising of school-fees for the their families and the general upkeep of the homestead. For the
heroine, the "history lessons" (p 17), which she goes through with the grandmother provide an alternative
source of knowledge which, as Tambudzayi herself acknowledges, could not be found in the colonial schools
textsbooks. It turns out that for Tambudzayi, the tutorials on the history of the dispossessed black people is
the first stage in the process of understanding the social forces that cause the "entrapment" (p1) of the
female-kind. The power of the grandmother to remember is a crucial reference point for Tambudzayi to tap
from, in her journey towards creating a new sense of the self she announces at the end of the novel.
The theme of "remembering" is central to Tambudzayi's growth into a young woman who can reconstruct
her history, and in the process re-inscribe herself as a speaking subject. In a wide ranging interview with Jane
Wilkinson, Tsitsi Dangarembgwa emphasised history, myth and story-telling as the means for Tambudzayi
as a woman to reclaim her identity:
Perhaps Tambudzayi, given the kind of her background that she had, was more at home with what could be
termed myth or romance or fairy tales with all the stories that her grandmother told her about her actual
family and her like myth (Dangarembga in J.Wilkinson, 1992, p. 191).
But Tambudzayi has more than the collective memory bank from which to derive the validation of her quest
for self-improvement.She gets financial help from Babamukuru who is Tambudzayi's father's brother. As the
erstwhile head of the Sigauke family, Babamukuru is the centre from which meanings concerned with the
direction of the family development must originate and radiate around. For example, his social gesture of
sending Jeremiah's (Tambudzayi's father's) children to school, stems from and is validated by the African
social institution of the extended family.
Tambudzai sees Babamukuru's gesture as "oceanic" (p4). In other words the survival and continuity of this
institution which emphasizes a collective approach to solving social problems among Africans amidst the
assaults from colonial forces measuring individual success in terms of incorporation into the dominant
colonial culture, not only underlines its resilience but that the extended family ties provide the bedrock for an
alliance of African people in the creation of a nationalist front in the 1960's in the country. What becomes
obvious is that inspite of his education or because of it, Babamukuru is still guided by African traditional
modes of behaviour. This way, he links with the popular aspirations of his race.
The potential for a nationalist narrative is deeply embodied in Tambudzayi's mother's understanding of the
position of the Africans under colonialism. She endorses the truism that the "poverty of blackness" (p 16) has
reconstituted the identity of African women in ways that have rendered her vulnerable to the forces of
history; "This business of womanhood, " she says, "is a heavy burden...And these days it is worse, with the
poverty of blackness on one side and the weight of womanhood on the other, Aiwa!" (p 16).In this selfconscious act of linking race and gender as interlocking systems of the exploitation of women, Tambudzayi's
mother is moving towards the reading of the African society along lines suggested by nationalism. It is a
point of view that privileges the polar opposites of the colonized set against the colonizer, black men versus
black women, all levels of "nervous conditions" very much alive in the novel. But Tambudzayi's mother is a
janus-faced figure who, while desiring freedom from colonial relations will on the other hand, advise her
daughter to be content with an inferior status to that of African men and "carry (her) burdens with strength"
(p 16). The self-denying tendencies implicit in the mother-role played out by Tambudzayi's mother reveals
how female characters are made to feel incomplete without children or men as husbands.
In other words, the traditional image of women as mothers invite suggestions of origins - birth, hearth, home,
roots and umbilical cord - and rests upon the frequent, and some might say, "natural, " identification of the
mother with the beloved earth, the national territory and even the first spoken language, the mother tongue.
3
As Elleke Boehmer (1992) points out in an essay on "Mother- lands, Mothers and Nationalist Sons;
Representation of Women in African Literature" (1992, pp. 229-247), symbolically women are ranged above
men while in reality they are kept below them. A case in point in Zimbabwe is Yvonne Vera's novel,
Nehanda (1993). In it, Nehanda is portrayed as a mythical mother figure who presides over the vast land.
The well-known role of Nehanda as the central force which directed the first Chimurenga (war) in the 1890s"
against the colonial settlers is underplayed. In the novel, Nehanda can only achieve spiritual greatness when
she is possessed by a male ancestral spirit! It is important to recall that in the nationalist iconographies the
images of mothers and men occupy different spaces. Where women's assigned roles appear in the form of
inviolable ideals, emblematic and therefore sacrosanct -- if they do not feature as a subversive quantity and
threat - male roles in nationalism may be characterised as metonymic: as author and subject of nationalism,
the male is part of the nation, or contiguos with it; his place is alongside his brother citizens.
4.
Contrasting Views of Narrating the Nation in Mujajati's "Victory"
Maurice Taonezvi Vambe, BA 1990 BA 1991 MA D.Phil 1995-, title, Department of English,
University of Zimbabwe
If, in Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembgwa is concerned with the minute details of tensions between
peasant women and their husbands, the educated African women and their men in colonial Zimbabwe of the
1960's, it is George Mujajati's novel, Victory (1992), which actually takes the reader through the liberation
struggle, right into the period after independence in the country. Victory problematizes the postcolonial
period in Zimbabwe as a continuation of colonialism under the guise of national independence.
The stylistic marker of Victory's shift of tone from a progress-oriented, linear national romance is signalled
by Mujajati's break of linear time in his narration and his adoption of a multiple-point of view for his
characters. At independence, new voices competing in narrating the nation emerge. The voice representing
the officially approved version of history which still insists on a unisonant view of decolonization is, in the
novel, captured through a folktale about how elephant was defeated by ant:
Then, storytellers called upon on all the children that had survived and told them to sit down and listen to this
story of the ant that conquered an elephant."Once upon a time...the ant having suffered long under the
ruthless hoove of the elephant, challenged the elephant to the battlefield.While the elephant was still
laughing, its wide and gigantic nose wide open, the ant entered into the elephant's giant nose and started to
eat the elephant from within. The elephant sneezed an elephantine giant sneeze, but it could not dislodge the
well-anchored ant. Irritated beyond endurance, the elephant ran amok, smashing its nose onto rocks and trees
but still it could not dislodge the well-positioned ant. The giant elephant finally crumbled to its knees due to
hunger and exhaustion.Thus the giant elephant died and the ant emerged from the nose into the splendour
and glory of Victory (p 82).
The participation of imaginative narrative in nation building which the above"national allegory" points to,
suggests that the written word is important in the process of self-legitimation of the new nationalist
government. During the struggle for independence, the national interest was very clear. African writers
committed to the struggle believed that their works of art would harmonize the national ideals with the
deepest aspirations of the people for land. Writers were unanimous about the role of art in the new
dispensation. Chinua Achebe, just like Wole Soyinka believed that writers, as sensitive points of their
communities, were teachers whose duty was to be that of a "visionary, a warning voice and a builder of the
future" (Per Wastberg, p. 18 in K.H.Petersen, 1986). Even Ngugi wa Thiongo who was writing plays and
novels critical of racism in the colonial system was praised and his books were put on secondary school
syllabus in Kenya. But this "honeymoon" between the writers and the new leaders was to last briefly.
In the neocolonial period, the present sense of a collective destiny for Africans which the tale quoted above
emphasizes is rudely undercut by the poverty of a large section of Africans amidst the consolidated riches of
a few whites and blacks. In Victory, as Zuze Jairos lies in bed at a hospital in Harare, convalescing from a
bout of Tuberculosis, he reflects that it is 1984 in Zimbabwe and "nothing much has changed at Little
England Farm, because the white owners, "are still stealing our sweat and blood under the cover of broad
daylight and poverty has become the very soul of our freedom (p 93). What Zuze is bemoaning here, is the
4
glaring fact that when independence is granted in 1980, the path of continuity with colonialism on the crucial
issue of land is chosen: the squatter peasant's dream of owning her/his plot of land is bypassed in favour of
the retention of foreign -owned farms under the black directorship and the purchase of farms, a tactic that is
most benefiting to wealthier black families. When Zuze is finally released from the hospital, he has not a
home to go to. As a result he, together with other displaced blacks - Fanon's "the wretched of the earth" begins to comb the streets of Harare in search of food. Meanwhile, white fortune-seekers like Marlowe
(recalling Joseph Conrad's character in Heart of Darkness), gets new licence to prospect for more gold. The
lushness of green in European farms, the bodily health of the children of well-to-do black families and the
general superfluity of the city people contrasts sharply with Zuze's flourish of want. It is as if, at this point in
the narrative, "Victory" ironically refers to the triumph of colonial injustice over the aspirations of the
people that are pushed aside in the new dispensation. Witness how Zuze wonders whether he will ever have a
home of his own;
Yes, free to go anywhere you want, free to drift like the wind.Go, then like the wind, scattering yourself into
the depth of oblivion...Blowing on and on like the homeless wind, into the depth of valleys, aloft the great
heights of high mountains. Is the ocean not the home for the moist particles of water? Is the anthill not the
home for the dry mote of the sand?...Is the air below the sky not the home of the fyling birds? (p 102).
Zuze is the unaccommodated man. Which is why he is an exile in the land of his birth. His desperate search
for "home" represents the quest for spiritual anchorage in the postcolonial period. Both home and family are
no longer providing systems of meaningful existence to the individual. This reveals the yawning gap
between individual dreams of fulfilment and official rhetoric on national unity and collective destiny.
6.
Struggle and the Vision of Social Reconstruction
Maurice Taonezvi Vambe, BA 1990 BA 1991 MA D.Phil 1995-, Department of English, University of
Zimbabwe
ln Victory, the hungry crowd made up of beggars and unemployed youths surges forward towards shops
breaking to loot goods while singing "...war songs of hope and crushed hopes (p 117). What is being
underlined as significant here is the lively spirit of a fight-back culture in the ranks of the dispossessed
masses in postcolonial Zimbabwe. In a way, the beggar's strike suggests the birth of something new, and
whose potential to shift the base from below is yet to unravel with time. The upheaval in social relations
which characterize the ending of Victory is a thematic experience common in African fiction of the
seventies. For example, Ngugi wa Thiongo's masses in Petals of Blood (1977) pelt the local Kenyan
bourgeoisie with stones for failing to rescue the peasants of Ilmorog from a devastating drought. In other
words, in Africa, the process of re-creating newly hatched class identities is one typified by resistance to
domination from local ruling elites. The fundamental question is how these new social forces will not only
consolidate themselves as alternative centres of power around which popular alliances against oppression are
forming, but also whether they will be able to sustain the discourse of oppositional politics in the face of
increasing repression from those in power.
7.
Gender and Class Issues in the Postcolonial Zimbabwean Novel: Summary and Conclusions
Maurice Taonezvi Vambe, BA 1990 BA 1991 MA D.Phil 1995-, Department of English, University of
Zimbabwe
To re-state the thesis of this paper, African literature in English has been dominated by the historical and
hence nationalist themes. In the fiction's early phase of development in the 1950's, thematic emphasis was
placed on writing works of art whose function was to refute the colonialist view that prior to the contact with
the outside world, Africa did not have history and culture worth speaking of. In reality, artistic works by
Chinua Achebe and other African writers of the period prove that Africa had advanced systems of economic
organisation, quasi-democratic political arrangements and well-developed cultural institutions.
Once this cultural nationalist theme was dispensed with, African literature of the late fifties and early sixties
began to expose the disastrous socio-economic and cultural effects of colonialism on the African psyche. It is
5
important to note that the participation of imaginative narrative in nation-building in Africa underscores the
significance of the written word in legitimating the claims to nationhood. But, as Nervous Conditions and
Victory have shown, the nation is a source of identities and, paradoxically, the entity that represses their
formation. It is however, to the credit of both Tsitsi Dangarembgwa and George Mujajati that they created
fictional characters who refuse to consent to but rather would fight social oppression. This last point unites
the critical vision of postcolonial writers of Zimbabwe with those of the rest of Africa which is predicated on
the recognition that whether nationalism speaks the language of dream, desire or the satisfaction of collective
aspirations, the codification of these "national ideals" is not only gendered but that the nationalist ideology
actually masks the real or potential class interests of different sections of a society sharing common skies. In
this regard, postcolonial fiction in Zimbabwe and, by extension, Africa seeks to go beyond the binary
divisions maintained by the ideology of nationalism because the "seething pot" from which the learning of
the future is emerging is shifting towards gender and class politics.
The Postcolonial Woman as a Terminological Problem
George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University
The term postcolonial in the phrase "postcolonial women" turns out to be just as problematic as the
metaphoric uses of other words related to colonialism. "The coupling of postcolonial with woman," as Sara
Suleri points out, almost "inevitably leads to the simplicities that underlie unthinking celebrations of
oppression, elevating the racially female voice into a metaphor for 'the good.' Such metaphoricity cannot be
called exactly essentialist, but it certainly functions as an impediment to a reading that attempts to look
beyond obvious questions of good and evil" and provides "an iconicity that is altogether too good to be true."
What Suleri calls this "rectitude" -- this too easy certainty of the speaker or writer's moral and political
superiority -- provides the "theoretical undoing" of such terminology and argument on several grounds. First,
its tends to empty the word postcolonialism of its historical force and value: "Where the term once referred
exclusively to the discursive practices produced by the historical fact of prior colonization in certain
geographically specific segments of the world, it is now more of an abstraction." And this abstraction comes
at a great cost:
this reimaging of the postcolonial closes as many epistemological possibilities as it opens. On the one hand,
it allows for a vocabulary of cultural migrancy, which helpfully derails the postcolonial condition from the
strictures of national histories, and thus makes way for the theoretical articulations best typified by Homi
Bhabha's recent anthology, Nation and Narration (1990). On the other hand, the current metaphorization of
postcolonialism threatens to become so amorphous as to repudiate any locality for cultural thickness. A
symptom of the terminological and theoretical dilemma is astutely read in Kwame Anthony Appiah's essay,
"Is the Post- in Postmodernisms" 1989: 28). The acute embarrassment generated by such an idiom could
possibly be regarded as a radical rhetorical strategy designed to induce racial discomfort in its audience, but
it more frequently registers as black feminism's failure to move beyond the proprietary rights that can be
claimed by any oppressed discourse.
One reason for such metaphorization of the term postcolonial, like that of the term colonize, lies in its
convenience as a way of assigning values and establishing the moral superiority of both the critic and the
critic's topic. A second appears in the almost necessary ignorance of most of us involved in working with
postcolonial texts: after working for three decades with Victorian English literature, art, and culture, I have a
sense of what I do and do not know about them. In contrast, like most contemporary students of
postcoloniality, I have no such detailed knowledge of the individual cultures that produced the postcolonial
texts I read and teach -- in part because I do not know the indigenous languages that rival and shape texts in
English and in part because these texts come from so many different countries. Unfortunately, having grown
up within a former colony does not help all that much, since although one can speak with more authority (!)
about one's own country, one cannot do so about the experience of colonialism and postcolonialism in
general. Nigerian poets and critics cannot, in other words, speak for those from India and Australia.
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What practical and theoretical approaches, then, must (or can) the student of postcolonial texts in English
take? What does the reader's purpose have to do with this problem?
Western Experiences: Education and "Third World Women" in the Fictions of Tsitsi Dangarembga
and Meena Alexander
Rahul Krishna Gairola, Rhode Island College
1. Perhaps one of the most ironic elements of postcolonial literary analysis is the fact that readers and
critics alike must access and interact with the English language, the imperial tongue of many
postcolonial nations, to write about its hegemonizing force on a global level. When combined with
the codifying problems of culture and tradition in given pre-independence contexts, it is no wonder
that a number of postcolonial feminists have questioned the relationship between the woman and the
postcolonial, one subaltern subject with another. In her essay "A Feminist Approach to African
Literature," Kristen Holt Petersen asks, "which is the more important, which comes first, the fight for
female equality or the fight against Western cultural imperialism?" (252). This question is further
problematized when education and language are mixed into the complexity of identities and their
constructed hierarchies as channeled and/or policed by colonial discourse, which transforms into the
norm and thus generates stereotypes, alliances and biases within the native community.
2. In this sense, women's positionings in the colonial and postcolonial worlds and subsequently
produced texts are riddled with the polemics of subaltern identity, and are doubly difficult to break
away from. Thomas Macauley's call to create a race of brown-skinned Englishmen in his notorious
"Minute on Indian Education," insult though it was to Indian men, appropriated even less agency to
the role of Indian women in the discourse of British colonial culture. For even when women in the
East are reluctantly allowed a voice in the patriarchal dialogism of the West, notes Chandra Talpade
Mohanty, they are marked by the modifier "third world," which carries with it an implicit stigma of
"less than" (172). Subsequently, as noted by British scholar Terry Eagleton, "the plight of women in
such societies, forced as they are to assume many of its most wretched burdens, has resulted in a
peculiarly fruitful alliance between feminism and postcolonialism" (205). It is no wonder then that
many prominent postcolonial theorists are women, and most discussions of the subaltern subject
inextricably involve a discussion of the (dis)placement of women in
colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial contexts.
3. This is perhaps one of the primary reasons that systems of epistemology and language acquisition
must be historicized in the context of the Third World women's experience. Hence, education and the
English language are popular reflective themes in fictions in English written by Third World women,
partly since this knowledge of English has become a vehicle for narrating personal histories, be they
through memoir, poetry, or fiction, to a world whose ears are already pricked up and familiar with
the English language. And though some felt and may feel that subscribing to this "bastard tongue,"
as termed by Salman Rushdie, was, in a sense, a kind of linguistic betrayal of the mother tongue, it
was one of the only ways colonized people could rise economically, socially, and politically under
colonialism. This case is especially true for women -- the knowledge of English translated into a new
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tier in paradigms of social stratification that automatically rendered status to the speaker of the
colonizer's tongue in the colonized homeland.
4. Certainly Africa and India shared this experience, for in the context of the English language,
hegemonic linguistic discourse creates the space for a new kind of feminist culture to be born. In
other words, the linguistic domination of English has created a new set of (dis)comforts: proficiency
in English and/or British schooling enables colonial men and women to be a rung above their
subaltern counterparts in pre-independent colonial nations already problematized with stringent class
and sex stratification. "Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and
literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the
world," observes Ngugi Wa Thiong'o in "The Language of African Literature" (16). Language, in
other words, gives socio-political agency to the self. Following the hegemonic discourse induced by
language shift, native Indians and Africans (to name only two peoples) have given a bourgeois status
to English which indigenous, regional languages are not privileged with.
5. When we compare these (dis)positions of the Third World women in relation to Tsisti
Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988) and Meena Alexander's Manhattan Music (1997), we
experience, as critical readers, a transcendence through history and literary space that reveals an
interesting study. What makes these two novels an interesting comparison is not their likeness, but
conversely, their difference, which raises polemical questions concerned not only with the binary of
Europeans vs. native peoples, but man vs. woman, India vs. Africa, and English vs. native tongue.
Though the books are set in differing time periods and geographies of empire (Dangarembga's novel
unfolds in colonial Southern Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe]of the late 1960s while Alexander's novel is
set in today's Indian diasporic communities of New York City) these two narratives reflect similar
life discourses and survival tactics for postcolonial woman under the whip of the imperial tongue.
British education, for these characters, is a necessity, not an option. It is one of the most important
facets of life, for being able to speak English constitutes the utterance of intelligence -- both within
and outside of the colonized country.
6. Though the narratives and fictional structures of both novels differ, the protagonists -Dangarembga's Tambu and Alexander's Sandhya -- are conscious of Britain, conscious of language,
and are aware of its power and potential to let women imagine they are transcending from the
teeming pool of subaltern subjects to the elite patriarchy of the Crown. English is like an elitist drug,
an antidote for the Third World Blues. As noted by Braj B. Kachru, "The alchemy of English
(present and future), then, does not only provide social status, it also gives access to attitudinally and
materially desirable domains of power and knowledge" (295). This "alchemy" thus is an elixer for
postcolonial women to gain agency and visibility, to gain an ideological voice as questioned by
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her seminal essay,"Can the Subaltern Speak," in relation to both
native and postcolonial worlds.
7. Kachru's claim that the English language somewhat magically gives people of the Third World a
socio-political agency in the global marketplace illustrates not only the power of linguistic
hegemony but also its dissemination. Where once upon a time knowledge of English was a cultural
commodity, it is now a literary necessity for reading texts, even those written in countries formerly
colonized by Britain. Our very interpretation of Dangarembga and Alexander's novels is facilitated
through the "Western filter" of the English language, and these authors utilize the dissemination of
the colonial language to expose the pains as well as the privileges of being proficient in the language
of one's ruler. But there is ambivalence concerning this practice -- the characters of Tambu and
8
Sandhya live experiences with education and language that are bittersweet, even caustic, and their
stories in some ways reflect the personal histories of their authors. Hence, these novels strive to
make political moves by using personal history as inspiration, and, as Spivak puts it, "world the
world" through marginalized voices and narratives (243-44). Dangarembga and Alexander do this in
writing their narratives and criticisms, using their female protagonists as textual mediums through
which their own subalterned voices are funneled.
8. In Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, Tambu is a meticulously constructed character who speaks
in the first person narrative, which draws readers into a more personalized sense of her oppressed
history. The novel opens with Tambu's assertion that she does not mourn her brother's death -- a
harsh reflection and illustration of her own eventual conditioning into colonialist capitalism.
Kachru's "alchemy of English" is metaphorically presented by Dangarembga in her novel: Tambu
tells us that "white wizards" from the south who were "well versed in treachery and black magic"
educated her uncle Babamukuru (18-9). In this way, the narrative of Nervous Conditions comes full
circle as we witness Westernization and its impact on a number of characters, including Tambu, her
brother Nhamo, her cousin Nyasha and her uncle Babamukuru. For Tambu, the pursuit of a British
education is her only hope of escaping her two biological, subaltern roles - blackness and
womanhood. Her internal interactions between her own culture and colonial culture induce within
her a cultural schizophrenia characteristic of what Elleke Boehmer describes as "a process of both
'reincarnation' and self-splitting, in which she [Tambu] is forced to inhabit borderlines, at one and
the same time losing, and yet retaining loyalty to, the traditions of the Shona home" (228).
9. This cultural schizophrenia, this "nervous condition," is exacerbated throughout the novel's narrative
discourse when Tambu interacts with others. There exists a tension between the members of Tambu's
family that is parallel to the tension between the Shona and British cultures, most explicitly with her
mother. In this sense, Tambu is in some ways allegorical of colonial education while her mother is
represented as its antithesis. Though Tambu takes over her dead brother's place (the privilege and
responsibility of being educated in the family is usually reserved for the eldest son), her mother
experiences a heartfelt backlash when the familial patriarchy decides to send Tambu to a Western
school after Nhamo's death. While this is an invaluable opportunity for Tambu, her mother views it
as a dangerous, insidious move towards Western assimilation and loss of Shona culture (as
exemplified by Nyasha after her stay in England), and she viciously compares herself to her sisterin-law Maiguru:
'I am poor and ignorant, that's me, but I have a mouth and it will keep on talking, it won't keep quiet .
. . Oh yes, Tambudzai. Do you think I haven't seen the way you follow her [Maiguru] around,' she
spat at me fiercely, 'doing all her dirty work for her, anything she says? You think your mother is so
stupid she won't see Maiguru has turned you against me with her money and her white ways? You
think I am dirt, me, your mother.' (140)
10. There are a number of points to note in the previous passage. Tambu's mother's use of the Shona
language when speaking to her daughter and referring to her by her full name in the tirade seems a
gesture to conjure some Shona "authenticity." If we consider Tambu's mother's cold sentiment an
opposition to Western education, we see how the inclusion/exclusion of women from this institution
created a tense stratification among Shona women that multiplied the many kinds of
marginalizations experienced by them. This is perhaps why Dangarembga so carefully constructs
each of her female characters as literary foils to one another - Nyasha and Maiguru, who succumb to
colonial education like Tambu, are isolated by other Shona women for being educated and rich.
Simultaneously, they carry status, as exemplified when Babamakuru invites Maiguru into a
patriarchal council meeting concerning a local dispute.
9
11. Hence, the colonial woman of Southern Rhodesia occupies an ambivalent position in which
education is both a liberating yet stifling entity in the context of Nervous Conditions. The cultural
schizophrenia experienced by Tambu and other women in the novel brings them closer to a desirable
economic status necessary to maintain a successful life that will support the family, yet
simultaneously further displace them from the Shona culture and formidable connections with other
Shona women. For Tambu, Westernization is a necessity, even after she witnesses the mental demise
of Nyasha and, early in the novel, is disgusted by the fact that Nhamo has forgotten Shona. This
reflects Biman Basu's claim that "literacy as a technology provokes a violent reaction on the site of
its implantation" (14). Language thus operates like a sweeping industry upon the landscape, an
assimilation machine which re-marks the other in terms of Western society's perceptions and his/her
own self-perceptions.
12. This concept of literacy as a transcendental technology manifests itself when, after noting the
loss/transformation of Shona culture into the hegemonic colonial agenda, Tambu says she could no
longer be sure of Shona cultural practices after attending the British school. She claims, "And I was
quite proud of this fact, because the more I saw of worlds beyond the homestead the more I was
convinced that the further we left the old ways behind the closer we came to progress" (147). It is
interesting that Tambu's concept of progress involves the loss of language rather than an integration
of languages, and that she becomes a very product of what she dislikes in Nhamo and Nyasha (it
may be presumptive to claim she doesn't realize self-assimilation - Tambu in fact seems to accept
and crave it). Hence, we witness throughout the novel the reversal of Tambu's allegorical roles under
the powerful influence of colonialism from being an upholder of Shona culture to suppliant of
hegemonic Western discourses.
13. Perhaps this is because colonial education "seduces" Tambu with merit that creates a punishmentreward system that enforces and encourages a self-generated, "natural" desire for Western
assimilation. We experience a sense of this when Tambu describes her impression of the Young
Ladies College of the Sacred Heart:
A prestigious private school that manufactured guaranteed young ladies. At that convent, which was
just outside town but on the other side, to the south, you wore pleated terylene skirts to school
everyday and on Sundays a tailor-made-two-piece linen suit with gloves, yes, even with gloves! We
all wanted to go. That was only natural. But only two places were on offer, two places for all the
African Grade Seven girls in the country. (178)
14. What constitutes naturalness as described by Tambu is a function of British imperialism that is not
only unnatural, but instituted through an intricate, manipulative web of the four distinct power
relations imposed on colonies outlined by Edward Said in Orientalism - power political (colonial
establishment); power intellectual (reigning educational discourses); power cultural (orthodoxies
and canons of taste); and power moral (ideas about what "we" do and what "they" cannot do or
understand as "we" do) (12). The power political (British government, in this case) administers the
power cultural entity of the convent, which inevitably institutes a power moral that exercises partial
control via the ideology of god - combined, the power cultural is formed and imposed on African
youths like Tambu who are convinced their aspirations must be achieved by assimilating to and
eventually revering English ways.
15. Tambu's character is further complicated by her complimentary literary foil, Nyasha, who has
suffered from her own (dis)positioning in colonial discourses and subsequent "nervous conditions."
Again, allegorical figures swap their symbolisms. Nyasha transforms into the embodiment of anti10
colonial English language/education, advising Tambu that her departure to the convent would give
her the "opportunity" to "forget who you were, what you were and why you were that. The process,
she [Nyasha] said, was called assimilation, and that was intended for the precocious few who might
prove a nuisance if left to themselves, whereas the others - well really, who cared about the others?"
(179). Where Dangamremba illustrates Nyasha's mental and spiritual breakdown, her case of cultural
schizophrenia, we are left wondering at the end of the novel how Tambu will fare in the grips of the
colonial agenda. In these many ways, Dangarembga weaves together a vivid novel of the destruction
and rejuvenation of two young women as they interact with family and colonial educational
institutions in Nervous Conditions, illustrating that there isn't anything so "natural" or even
meritable of the devastation wreaked by colonialism in the African continent. Each addition of a
Western cultural element in Tambu's life equals a subtraction of a Shona cultural element, and hence
her "learning" of English is subversively a necessary "unlearning" of Shona culture and language.
16. In The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon writes "The colonial world is a world divided into
compartments . . . this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species. The originality of the
colonial context is that economic reality, inequality and the immense difference of ways of life never
come to mask human realities" (32). While we explicitly see this in Dangarembga's Nervous
Condition, the "colonial world" in a postcolonial context takes on an updated version problematized
and complicated by the life-jarring process of American immigration in Meena Alexander's
Manhattan Music. We are no longer dealing only with the discourse of women's education in the
native country, hence postcolonial ideology changes face for both the experiencer of the
geographical shift and his/her new homeland. As Rosemary Marangoly George has observed, writers
in the immigrant genre always view the present in terms of its distance from the past and future,
while never forgetting the experience of "homelessness" (171). As such, Alexander's character
Sandhya is vexed by her removal from India, marriage to a Jewish man and subsequent cultural
schizophrenia that leads to an attempted suicide.
17. The female experience in relation to the English language is one that leaves the residue of violence
upon the characters of Manhattan Music as experienced by the author. As an immigrant, Alexander
has struggled with the processes of coming to terms with the English language while also trying to
retain other languages that were de-emphasized by the Crown. She documents this experience in The
Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience, writing "It was a shock to me, a crisis
in my writing life, if not in all the rest of what goes on under that phrase -- my life, as if it were an
elixir I possessed and might drink to the full or spit out as I chose -- to realise that the machine of the
colonial, technically postcolonial education I had received and, indeed, had fostered, was cutting my
words off from the very wellsprings of desire. Suddenly, I felt that even the memory would be
impossible if I did not turn my attention to the violence very close at hand, attendant, in fact, upon
the procedures of my own writing" (4).
18. The construction of Alexander's female characters can be traced back into the history of the author's
own life growing up in Kerala, a southern Indian state, as documented in Fault Lines: A Memoir, in
which she narrates her childhood encounters with many tongues including Malayalam, English,
Hindi and Arabic (41). To demonstrate the intense influence that knowledge of the English language
had on her, Alexander metaphorically speaks of her learning of English to the erasing of a
blackboard - a mental tabula rasa (clean slate) -- in which hegemony via language and culture is
inscribed in her psyche. She writes, "Sometimes I think I have to write myself into being. Write in
order not to be erased" (93). Ironically, this process of writing oneself into being is achieved through
the medium of English as the threat of erasure is perhaps a function of the author writing in her
native language. Alexander tells us:
11
I could never figure out those scrawls on the blackboard, the names and dates I had to learn, all taken
out of the old first-form textbooks. The books had faded, tobacco-colored covers. Imported from
Britain, they were stored in the corner of the school library. I had nothing but mistrust for the facts
and dates contained in those bound volumes - information about Bodicea, Julius Caesar, the history
of the Britons and Celts, the Crusades, even Suleiman the Magnificent. It never struck me, how
curious it was that in an independent Sudan, Sith Samia, fresh out of Teacher's Training College in
Omdurman, would have to plod through these old British colonial textbooks. What I had as
protection was a stubborn skepticism. (93)
19. The above passage exemplifies a number of biographical facets of Alexander's life that illustrate the
impact of a British education on a young woman: 1) the "scrawls on the blackboard" imply an
inscription of language and culture upon the colored tabula rasa; 2) the books are "imported from
Britain," and include only a list of Western writers - this illustrates not only literary hegemony, an
"importation" of education, but a racist educational discourse as well; and 3) like Tambu's school
that "manufactured guaranteed young ladies," the same kind of assimilation is encouraged and
instituted for teachers. Alexander sums up the devastation impacted upon her by the colonial
linguistic agenda in two simple yet powerful sentences: "Sometimes I think of the English language
as a pale skin that has covered up my flesh, the broken parts of my world. In order to free my face, in
order to appear, I have had to use my teeth and nails, I have had to tear that fine skin, to speak out
my discrepant otherness" (73).
20. We are challenged with an interesting question when we move beyond the colonial homestead of
Kerala into the postcolonial, immigrant nation where Alexander's fiction unfolds: how does this
"neo"postcolonial deal with geographical difference in relation to native experience? Unlike
Dangarembga, Alexander creates a feminist space where characters are given a voice in the havens
of fiction and new nationality, yet there are problems in the promised land as well. As noted by
George, displacement literatures are actually an integral part of postcolonial literature: "For the
immigrant genre, like the social phenomenon from which it takes its name, is born of a history of
global colonialism and is therefore an undeniable part of postcolonialism and of decolonizing
discourses"(278).
21. If we examine Alexander's assignment of allegory to the two female protagonists in Manhattan
Music, we may assume that Sandhya is the representative female postcolonial immigrant straddled
between two homelands. Draupadi, her friend, contrasts by being constructed as an intense, streetsmart woman born in the United States who wonders what kind of female power it takes Sandhya to
wrap the six yards of sari around herself (Alexander 50). Here, as suggested in Deepa Mehta's
critically acclaimed film Fire, the sari is an allegorical body wrap that confines the Indian woman to
traditional cultural and gender roles. Sandhya and Draupadi, like Tambu and Nyasha, are literary
foils to one another, and are allegorical in similar ways. Draupadi, not a first-generation immigrant,
embodies the essence of the second generation ethnic while Sandhya is more symbolic of her former
nation, her former homeland. There seems, however, in Draupadi a need to connect to India though
she is US-born and has been exposed to Western literature in school. In one part of the novel, Jay,
Sandhya's cousin, questions Draupadi's ostensibly nostalgic and self-constructed bond with India.
While Alexander writes "India owed her [Draupadi] and she would draw what she wished from that
world, rework the language, pack it with lore," Jay asks Draupadi:
"But is this your past?"
"I want to make it up," she argued.
"But why call the Mahabharata your heritage?" he quizzed her. "Why not the Iliad and Odyssey
also?"
12
And for once she had no answer. The shreds of memory she got from her grandmother didn't add up
to the wild glory of the epic. All she had were whispers, shards of songs, torn phrases, and could
they add up to a heritage? Still, as a human being, she felt she had a right to anything out there. And
what came from India was closer. (52)
22. The above passage illustrates a number of problems in the construction of Draupadi's identity, which
is a continuum rather than a static reflection of US life. As noted by the editors in their introduction
to Memory, Narrative & Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures, during
immigration, "identity instead of being seen as fixed, becomes a dynamic construction that adjusts
continually to the changes experienced within and surrounding the self" (Singh et al. 17). Draupadi
is Indian in physical attributes but American in cultural upbringing, which induces within her a
craving to relate to Indian culture - this yearning, this "cultural cry" for an intimacy with the Indian
culture characterizes the cultural schizophrenia experienced by a number of NRIs (Non-resident
Indians). We later witness a schism between the postcolonial native of India and the US-born
neocolonial -- Jay's questioning of Draupadi's "authentic" past almost seems to be a criticism of her
attempt to connect to a past she did not experience firsthand. And for Draupadi, American
nationality doesn't comprise her whole self for it doesn't include her Indian ancestry. This problem of
Alexander's character reflects Edward Said's assertion in "Invention, Memory, and Place" that
though a national identity always involves itself with narratives of the host country, such identities
are "never undisputed or merely a matter of the neutral recital of facts" (177).
23. Ironically, the Greek texts Jay thinks should be part of Draupadi's American heritage are the same
texts he, Sandhya and other immigrants would have been studying in India. That Jay thinks he has
the insight and/or right to direct Draupadi's connection to the past stems from an assumption that he,
as a man from India, has experienced something more authentic or valid - as if the experience of the
NRI isn't itself as traumatic as that of immigration. Draupadi tells us, "Columbus struck America and
called it India. It was India to him till the very end, when mad, bound raving to the bottom of his
boat, he was shipped in chains to Spain . . . I stopped, shut my eyes, took in the applause, stepped
back, dizzy as if India were all around" (122). Draupadi embodies a narrative discourse in ethnic
American literature in which memory is the political gauge to the past and must be reconsidered in
the context of history and the act of forgetting, for she experiences an amnesia of a country in which
she wasn't even born.
24. Paradoxically, the India imagined by Draupadi where the Mahabarata is hailed as a gilded epic is
not the India experienced by Sandhya, who cannot even read her mother tongue of Malayalam
though she is prolific in English. The narrator tells us, "she [Sandhya] had been brought up within
the boundaries of a new India, where regional divisions were not considered overly important. She
had fallen back on the Hindi of her school days and the English that people of her class mixed in
with whatever they spoke, the polyglot nature of their sentences a sign of breeding" (69). It is ironic
in this passage that the common bond between the persons in Sandhya's class are polyglot sentences
which are unified by bits and pieces of English - the English language is the linguistic glue that
connects together her several "native" tongues. Not only do we understand here the pervasiveness of
English as a sign of a hegemonic discourse, but also its ability to serve as a root of these polyglot
languages rather than incidents within them. In the context of South Asian languages, English
establishes itself as a linguistic root as did Latin among the Romance Languages. This process of
"Englishization," claims Braj B. Kachru, has "thus caused a transmutation of languages, equipping
them in the process for new societal, scientific and technological demands" (295).
13
25. Unlike Draupadi, Sandhya also experiences cultural schizophrenia, and her own trials and
tribulations send her to the edge of her mind where she closes her eyes and melts into her thoughts
while voices in Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and English call out to her (Alexander
226). For Sandhya, this is a side effect of what Deepika Bahri calls the "promise of America . . . the
promise of a fresh start in a new world" (51). Because Sandhya is immersed in the immigrant
country, her cultural schizophrenia delves to a deeper level than that experienced by Draupadi, who
retains a sort of American identity comfort having never directly experienced life in India, only the
same exotic and spiritualized perceptions of most white Westerners. Though it is clear that both
women are molded by Said's four distinct hegemonic power discourses previously outlined, national
context in the narrative creates the ground for the vast differences between the younger, beatnik
Draupadi and her older, immigrant counterpart Sandhya.
26. Yet unlike Dangarembga's Tambu, the realization of linguistic hegemony and assimilation to
American ideals induces a stronger sense of connection to the ancestral homeland for Alexander's
female protagonists. In trying to convey to her readers the isolation of the self and homeland her
characters experience, Alexander writes: "She [Sandhya] felt nothing of the guilt so many of her
compatriots bore in switching passports, as if they were mortgaging one world for another. She was
Indian, she would live and die that way. No one could changer her skin, or say to her: your parents
are not buried in the churchyard in Tiruvella; your in-laws never lived in Nagercoil. Nor have you
ever spoken Malayalam. Surely it is the greatest of illusions that it is your mother tongue. None of
that would happen" (132). Hence, in Manhattan Music, the female postcolonial subject experiences
through the learning of English and Americanization, something similar to the malaise pervasive
among NRIs - a spiritual displacement that results in an enforced allegiance to the Indian ancestral
homeland. And for both the female immigrant and the NRI living in New York City, a certain sense
of cultural schizophrenia pervades the psyche as a result of geographical and cultural displacement.
27. If we consider Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and Alexander's Manhattan Music as novels
that illustrate English as a "metalanguage," that is, a transcendental linguistic discourse used by the
characters to facilitate their relationship to other languages, we can categorize both novels as metanarratives of cultural schizophrenia. Terry Eagleton has noted, "Questions of 'meta-narrative' no
longer concern just literary works, but the terms in which the post-Enlightenment West has
traditionally couched its own imperial project. The decentering and deconstruction of categories and
identities assume fresh urgency in a context of racism, ethnic conflict, neo-colonial domination; The
'other' is no longer merely a theoretical concept but groups and peoples written out of history,
subjected to slavery, insult, mystification, genocide" (205). The narratives of Tambu and Sandhya
are not only consequences of all these aspects of colonial discourse noted by Eagleton, but are also
related to one of the most important aspects of American and post-colonial cultures left out by
Eagleton - the reign of the patriarchal superstructure and how it merges with other ideologies to
shape the status and experiences of (dis)placed Third World women.
28. Hence, "the other" and her experience of cultural schizophrenia delicately waver not only on sex and
nationality, but also on the varying ways in which these elements of identity interact with one
another and form new political discourses on identity. In the different cases of Tambu and Sandhya,
we witness personal alliances toward either western or eastern hegemonic trends that are primarily
created and enforced on nationality. The initiatives of writers like Tsitsi Dangarembga and Meena
Alexander are important in understanding postcolonial identities as continuously metamorphosing
identities depending on the various contexts (e.g. sex, gender, sexuality, nationality, etc.) within
which they are combined. For once we understand the fluid dynamics of postcolonial identities, we
come a step closer to finding a stable discourse that resists the totalizing agenda of essentialized
14
identity or a dominant body of theory (like postmodernism) that first "others" the Third World
economically, and subsequently racially.
29. However, Western education and hegemony cannot be demoted simply as the attempt of the West to
taint the ancient cultures of the East with its perversity. While Tambu gravitates toward Western
education in the colonial homeland as necessity, Sandhya gravitates toward facets of Indian culture
to recover what has almost been erased within her. Defying any neat stack of cultural identities,
Draupadi, in this case study of women and colonial education, is an anomalous NRI who has been
cultivated in the US tradition but who constantly imagines herself as a more "authentic" product of
the Indian culture. Her very consciousness thus becomes a multi-faceted reflection of the
postmodern society she lives in, resisting set definitions that try to stabilize her identity by centering
it but inversely fling it into the margins by trying to do so.
30. Perhaps the trend of postcolonialism in literary studies is historically just - it may well be high time
for the East to colonize the West, at least theoretically. Aren't we, after all, academics who advocate
and encourage the global tug-of-war of intellect that creates new polemical discourses? This is
currently happening within postcolonial studies as a colonizing force in academia trying to document
the experiences of peoples written out of history. For most of us, the stories of women like Tambu,
Sandhya and Draupadi are extraordinary since we cannot grasp their full identities in the same ways
that their literary foils and other characters do, nor can we easily understand the différance that
sutures the experience of colonialism. In these many ways, the differences themselves between
novels like Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and Meena Alexander's Manhattan Music
should be appreciated and studied, for the narrative polemics instilled in such fictions about Third
World women give agency to the many levels of being and becoming a subaltern subject - even in
one's former and/or current "homeland."
Representation and Resistance: A Cultural, Social, and Political Perplexity in Post-Colonial Literature
John Yang, English 119, Brown University, 1999
Overview: The Problem of Representation and Resistance in Post-Colonial Literature
Many problems surround the terms post-colonial and post-colonial literature. In its most literal definition,
post-colonial literature is simply a classification: a body of work or works produced by a previously
colonized nation. If one accepts post-colonial literature only at its simplest definition, he leaves the term too
broad and without coherency. One defines a literary movement not only by the era and location in which the
movement occurred but also by the style of the writing and its political and social impact on society. For
example, Romantic literature in Great Britain was produced from the mid to late eighteenth century to the
early nineteenth, and some of the themes that emerged from British Romanticism were the glorification of
nature and the omnipresence of love through class boundaries. Similarly, Victorian literature of the
nineteenth century possessed qualities of the Age of Enlightenment, a movement that ran parallel to Queen
Victoria's reign.
Therefore, to accept post-colonial literature only by its temporal and political designation does not give
justice to the artist whose intentions may subsequently be ignored. If a reader credits or disparages a work
strictly for its literary value, that is a choice that he makes. However, if the same reader states that this
method is the only means by which one should value literature, he ignores the possible intentions of the
author. Indeed a novel defined as post-colonial intends to have a greater impact than simply its plot. What
are the implications of political independence from a so-called "empire?" What does it mean to write either
as a voice, a representative, or a citizen of the post-colonial country? What are the political, social, and
economic implications of the literature he produces?
15
If a post-colonial work manages to escape the valueless fate of many novels of the late 20th century, it is
then subjected to more problems within the theoretical genre of post-colonial studies. The issues I will
discuss are such: how a post-colonial novel acts as a representative of its respective nation and how it serves
as a symbol of resistance against its colonizer. Within these categories, authors depict the life of a newly
independent nation, speak out against the oppression of its colonizers, express a desire for an ideal "precolonial" society, or extol the beneficial consequences of empire. How can such widely varying ideas
singularly define post-colonial literature?
It is important to note the differences among Romantic, Victorian, and post-colonial literature. First, the
political and social implications differ greatly among them. In addition, Romantic and Victorian literature
were labeled as such in hindsight, while post-colonial authors and scholars are self-aware of the existing
style and movement that is labeled post-colonial. Post-colonial literature and post-colonial studies have the
ability then to control self-consciously the direction and definition of its label. In other words, "postcolonialism" is a definition in progress. This definition in progress further problematizes post-colonial
literature because without a solid source, scholars can debate forever what constitutes a post-colonial work
and if that work gives justice to post-colonial literature as a whole.
Representation and Resistance: An Examination
Two ideas that surface repeatedly in post-colonial literature and theory are representation and resistance.
Inevitably, scholars will judge a novel or poem by how adequately it represents an indigenous people or by
how it reacts to the oppressing colonizers. Does Philip Jeyaretnam's Abraham's Promise serve as a
statement against the remnants of a colonized Singapore or does it perpetuate the colonizing institutions of
modern Singapore? This is one of the numerous questions scholars may ask when applying a theoretical
study of post-colonial literature. Edward Said uses the term "Orientalism" in one aspect of post-colonial
theory. He states that the idea of post-colonialism needs the dynamic between itself and its colonizers in
order to define its existence:
The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and
represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions,
vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. (87)
The dynamic between the colonizer and the colonized may impose an intellectual rather than a political
domination over the post-colonial nation. While political freedom may exist, the intellectual independence is
far from reality. Said goes on to state "it [Orientalism] is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to
understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or
alternative and novel) world." (90) Thus, choosing to represent an indigenous culture with the language of
the empire serves as another form of colonization.
Resistance theory in post-colonial literature refutes the very notion that idea of representation also connotes
further subjugation. Resistance literature uses the language of empire to rebut its dominant ideologies. In
other words, the colonized nation is "writing back," speaking either of the oppression and racism of the
colonizers or the inherent cultural "better-ness" of the indigenous people. Helen Tiffin expresses this point
best in her essay "Post-colonial Literatures and Counter-discourse": "Post-colonial literatures/cultures are
thus constituted in counter-discursive rather than homologous practices, and they offer Ôfields' or counterdiscursive strategies to the dominant discourse." (96) Thus the counter-discursive nature constitutes postcolonial literatures rather than a unifying style or theme.
Counter-discourse fails to recognize that by existing simply to react against or to resist dominant ideology, it
is marginalized into an idea that cannot stand on its own. As Tiffin states, counter-discourse exists only "in
its determining relations with its material situation." (96) The concept of "other" cannot exist without its
relationship to its reference point. Could this then be the fate of post-colonial literature? Is post-colonial
literature only a subset, corollary, or a reaction to the already existing dominant discourse of English
Literature?
16
The paradox of marginalization and empowerment seem to coexist in the ideas of representation and
resistance. How does one then resolve this paradox? Tiffin offers another idea in the study and assessment of
post-colonial literature. This idea involves a compromise between complete separation from the empire and
the complete dependence upon the empire for its existence. She states "[p]ost-colonial cultures are inevitably
hybridised, involving a dialectical relationship between European ontology and epistemology and the
impulse to create or recreate independent local identity." (95) Using Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and
J.M. Coetzee's Foe as examples, she states that "neither writer is simply Ôwriting back' to an English
canonical text, but to the whole of the discursive field within which such a text operated and continues to
operate in post-colonial worlds." (98) It seems as though colonial institutions in literature such as language
and narrative style are necessary for a body of work to reach an academic audience. However, by potentially
being able to reach a larger audience, an author enables himself to voice the emotions, frustrations, and the
triumphs of his people to a group of scholars or students not yet exposed to his nation or race.
In the following essays, I will examine how four novels exemplify different aspects of representation and
resistance theory. Philip Jeyaretnam's Abraham's Promise depicts the lack of social and political direction
of a post-colonial world. Gopal Baratham's A Candle or the Sun explores the reactionary nature of local
government immediately after its political independence. Yvonne Vera's Nehanda portrays the heroic tale of
a young woman chosen to resist her colonial oppressors. Finally, Uncle Babamukuru in Tsitsi
Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions explores Jenny Sharpe's notion of the mimic man in her essay "Figures
of Colonial Resistance." All the novels serve to represent the indigenous lifestyle, resist colonial acts of
authority and oppression through their textual transmission, or they accomplish both.
Babamukuru as the Mimic Man: A Post-colonial : An Examination of Tsitsi Dangaremba's Nervous
Conditions
John Yang, English 119, Brown University, 1999
Part 5 of "Representation and Resistance: A Cultural, Social, and Political Perplexity in Post-Colonial
Literature"
The ultimate dilemma in applying representation and resistance theory to post-colonial literature rests in the
notion that a novel, a literary form that arises in the western world of print culture, may challenge as well as
perpetuate colonial institutions. It seems an unlikely paradox, yet the paradox is very real and very present in
post-colonial literature. In "Figures of Colonial Resistance," Jenny Sharpe uses the term mimic man to
describe a figure who represents this paradox: "The mimic is a contradictory figure who simultaneously
reinforces colonial authority and disturbs it" (99). The mimic man can be a character in a novel or even an
author himself.
The mimic man represents a byproduct of colonial civilization, not a entity separate from the colonial sphere.
As result, the fact that he was produced with the colonial voice relegates the seemingly more important issue
of whether the mimic speaks for or against colonial authority. Sharpe continues along this line of argument
stating, "To think of the relation between the discourse centering on the production of the colonial subject
[mimic man] and what it occludes as an eclipse is to see that the subaltern classes are not situated outside the
civilizing project but are caught in the path of its trajectory" (100).
In Dangaremba's Nervous Conditions, Uncle Babamukuru represents this colonial subject or mimic man.
Babamukuru, although Shona in ethnicity and heritage, is ultimately a product of Western education and
Western means of success. His family reveres him not because he is high on the Shona cultural ladder of
respect but because he possesses the gift of the white man's voice and uses it to achieve success. From
protagonist Tambudzai's point-of-view, Babamukuru represents all that she could possibly achieve and more:
Then I discovered that Nhamo had not been lying. Babamukuru was indeed a man of consequence however
you measured him . . . Nhamo's chorus sang in my head and now it sounded ominous. Its phrases told me
something I did not though he was. He was wealthier than I had though possible. He was educated beyond
books. And he had done it alone. He has pushed up from under the weight of the white man with no strong
relative to help him. How had he done it? Having done it, what had he become? A deep valley cracked open.
17
There was no bridge; at the bottom, spiked crags as sharp of as spears. I felt separated forever from my
uncle. (64)
This passage depicts both the awe Tambudzai felt upon first seeing her uncle's house and the ultimate
disappointment she experienced when she realized her uncle's wealth and status separated him from her.
Do family members revere Babamukuru for the wrong reasons? Why does Babamukuru not use his
financials means to improve the local education system of his village instead of adopting one child at a time?
Are his lavish gifts a sign of true altruism or one of condescension, a condescension paralleled by the white
man upon the indigenous people?
Babamukuru cannot exist without his Western education. Without it, he suffers the fate of his brother
Jeremiah, being a nobody with absolutely no importance. Babamukuru seems genuinely vested in the social
and financial improvement of his family, notions which serve to infuse pride into the indigenous people.
However, he must also use his identity of a Western educated scholar as the means for improvement. In fact,
the mimic man is the only means of improvement in Tambudzai's family. Therefore, Babamukuru reinforces
the dominance of colonial institutions and disturbs it at the same time. He uses Western ideas of success to
garner respect and worship from Shona people.
While Babamukuru's vested interest in his family makes it difficult for readers to condemn him, his
dependence on colonial institutions prevents him from receiving the full glory he may deserve. He is indeed
a paradox, belonging to both Western and indigenous culture and at the same time being forever separated
from both as Tambudzai observes. Perhaps the sacrifice that one pays for becoming a voice or a symbol for a
certain people or nation is the ultimate alienation from both his people and his audience.
The Most Nervous of Conditions: The Implications of Nyasha's eating Disorder in Nervous Conditions
Valerie Braman
Nyasha grew weaker by the day. She weaved when she walked and every night was the same. Although we
were on vacation she studied fourteen hours a day to make sure that she passed her "O" levels. She worked
late into the night to wake me up regularly and punctually at three o'clock with a problem -- a chemical
equation to balance, the number of amperes in a circuit to be calculated or an irregular Latin verb to be
conjugated, although I was only in Form One and could not often help her. "I have to get it right," she would
whisper with an apologetic smile. It was truly alarming, but nobody commented, nobody acted; we were all
very frightened. One evening, at supper, she passed out into her plate. . . .
The next morning she was calm, but she assured me it was an illusion, the eye of the storm. "There's a whole
lot more,' she said. "I've tried to keep it in but it's powerful. It ought to be. There's nearly a century of it," she
added, with a shadow of her wry grin. "But I'm afraid," she told me apologetically. "It upsets people. So I
need to go somewhere where it's safe. You know what I mean? Somewhere where people won't mind." [ pp.
200-201]
These passages, and the quite violent and disturbing scenes that precede and follow then, may come as a
surprise to the reader of Dangarembga's Nervous conditions. However, clues as to the development of the
eating disorder that plagues Nyasha are present throughout the text in each mention that the young woman
makes of her figure, or of how the day's meals will affect her stomach and rear. These comments stand out
even more in contrast to the attitudes of most of the other Shona women, including Tambudzai, towards their
bodies and towards food. Yet more telling is the situation in which Nyasha finds herself, as she remarks to
her mother, "I am not one of them but I'm not one of you." (p. 201)
This in-between space that Nyasha occupies, neither Shona nor English, accepted neither by her peers nor
her family because she cannot and will not submit to the established patterns and traditions of subjugation,
seeking affirmation in her attention to her studies and to her figure (the only things that she feels she can
truly own and control), makes her the perfect candidate for the eating disorder, which, in and of itself, is an
English import to her homeland. In turn, Nyasha's self-induced wasting away is strikingly and harshly
18
symbolic of the issues and burdens that eat away at the other women and men in the novel. Even the official
name of Nyasha's illness, "Anorexia Nervosa," recalls the title of the novel, and the predicament in which the
"native" finds herself.
The anorexic looks to her disease, which manifests itself not only in food and body related ways, but also in
extremism and perfectionism of all kinds, as a way to deal with other issues in her life which are too complex
or difficult to truly be taken head on. Instead, she turns to such things as dieting and heightened attention to
schoolwork, as does Nyasha. The purging in which Nyasha engages on two specific occasions in the novel
are significant in that they represent a direct rebellion against the wishes and rule of her father. Babamukuru,
in these instances, not realizing that his daughter's starvation is a refusal to swallow any more dictates, forces
her to clean her plate. Nyasha does so, and immediately purges her stomach of the offensive food, and the
more offensive patriarchal law that produced it.
What is particularly interesting about Nyasha's Anorexia in the context of Rhodesia is that this is a disease
that even to this day is seen extremely rarely in women of color. Anorexia is primarily a European and
American woman's disease, as it is virtually only in these cultures (and not even consistenly there) that a
woman's worth is based on her appearance, and more specifically, her slimness. Nyasha's female relatives
prize plumpness, delighting in their round hips and recognizing that the heavier one is, the better off her
family is. After all, only one who can afford an abundance of food would be able to put on weight in this
environment of scarcity and constant physical labor.
Nyasha, in contrast, belongs to such a wealthy branch of the family that food is never in short supply. She
has been to England, and has been subject to their fashions, their food, and their neuroses. Once she has
returned to her home at the mission, she is subject once more to the English's colonial legacy, as well as the
male dominated Shona society. She is neither here nor there, neither allowed to foster the values she has
acquired in England, nor to fully embrace those her parents and family embody. Nyasha is confused,
tortured, always struggling to make her way. However, she is a hybrid woman in a hybrid land, and the
competing values and expectations both within and without her are too much for her to navigate. Truly, the
English have engendered this "nervous condition" in Nyasha.
"A Special Kind of White Person"
Maureen Grundy, English 119 Brown University, 1999
Another thing that was different about the mission was that there were many white people there. The Whites
on the mission were a special kind of white person, special in the way that my grandmother had explained to
me, for they were holy. They had not come to take but to give. They were about God's business here in
darkest Africa. They had given up the comforts and security of their own homes to come and lighten our
darkness. It was a big sacrifice missionaries made. It was a sacrifice which made us grateful to them, a
sacrifice that made them superior not only to us but to those Whites as well who were here for adventure and
to help ourselves to our emeralds. The missionaries' self-denial and brotherly love did not go unrewarded.
We treated them like minor deities -- I often ask myself why they come, giving up the comforts and security
of their more advanced homes. Which brings us back to matters of brotherly love, contribution and
lightening of diverse darkness. -- Nervous Conditions , p. 103
Throughout the first half of Dangarembga's novel, Nervous Conditions , we trace Tambudzai's transition
from rural village life to life in her uncle's wealthy missionary home. As readers, we are drawn into
Tambudzai's fascination with the "modern" and "convenient" luxuries she encounters and at times, we are
even amused by her excitement and curiosity about her new surroundings. Yet, it is not until halfway through
the novel that Tambudzai explicitly discusses the whites who live on the mission and are responsible for its
existence. Here, after Tambudzai has already settled into her life at the mission and we have become
acquainted with her adjustment, readers are reminded of the circumstances and motivations of the missionary
school. This passage compels us, as readers, to evaluate the implications of missionary work and to
contemplate the role of the white missionary as a "special kind of white person"to people like Tambudzai.
19
In this passage, Tambudzai clearly depicts significant differences between white colonialists and white
missionaries. In her mind, and seemingly in the minds of her family and other Zimbabweans at the mission,
the white missionary is justified in their presence and even worshipped because they bring knowledge and a
promise of salvation to Africans who are in spiritual darkness. The white missionary's education and
redemption of "darkest Africa" s praised and deemed as an exhibition of sacrifice in the name of " brotherly
love." The deification of the white missionary demonstrates the sense of indebtedness Zimbabweans feel,
while also exacerbating the gap between the inferior African and the superior white.
Learning about Tambudzai's gratitude and awe of the white missionary begs the question: In what ways are
the white missionaries really different from other whites in Zimbabwe? How are their motivations for
coming to Zimbabwe different from white colonialists? Are not both approaches by these two groups of
white settlers exploiting a population and assigning more value to their own system of beliefs and ways of
life? Do they not both devalue the African ways of life, African spirituality, and African traditions? On one
hand, one can regard those whites that Tambudzai's seems to deem as "bad"or less "brotherly" as cruel
strangers who have trespassed Zimbabwean land to exploit its resources and to oppress its people. One can
consider these whites as "worse," in a way, because they bring about physical harm and suffering to the
African, whereas the white missionary devotes his life to teaching these same people about the power of
God. It makes sense for Tambudzai to believe this about the difference between the white missionary and
other colonialists because she finds herself embraced and welcomed into this missionary community.
On the other hand, one can regard this missionary work as an exploitation of the mind, a brain-washing of
people like Tambudzai. Is there a difference between exploitation of the mind versus exploitation of the land
or the body? We see in this passage how, despite the seemingly saintly work of the missionaries, they have
still created a situation that convinces Zimbabweans of their inferiority. While Tambudzai lives in a beautiful
house full of amenities and receives an education, she still alludes to her inferiority to the white missionary.
Not only does she claim this inferiority, but she also pledges her gratitude to these "special" white people.
What is most disturbing about this passage is that because of the lack of violence between Zimbabweans and
the missionaries and because of all the knowledge and material goods they seem to offer, we see the extent to
which the missionaries can alter Zimbabwean thought processes. Can we say that these manipulations of the
mind are just as subject to scrutiny as other manipulations because they impose thoughts and ideologies on a
people; because they take away beliefs and values which may never be discovered again?
The father's failure
Antwan Jefferson
"'If I had your brains," my father used to say to Nhamo by way of encouragement during my brother's early
school years, "I would have been a teacher by now. Or maybe even a doctor. Ya! Maybe even a doctor. Do
you think we would be living the way we are? No! In a brick house with running water, hot and cold, and
lights, just like Mukoma. It would have been good, if only I had the brains.' Nhamo, who believed in filial
obedience, used to agree with my father that indeed it would have been good and to reassure my father that
the intelligence he had been blessed with would not be abused. I was different. I wanted to find out the truth.
Did my father mean that Babamukuru was sharp at his lessons? I asked one day, overhearing one of these
conversations." [p. 5]
"Babamukuru says I am so bright I must be taken away to a good school and be given a chance in life. So I
shall go and live with Babamukuru at the mission. I shall no longer be Jeremiah's son," he boasted, speaking
my father's name in such derogatory tones that for once I was up in arms on my father's behalf. "I shall wear
shoes and socks, and shorts with no holes in them, all brand new, bought for me by Babamukuru. He has the
money. I will even have underwear -- a vest and pants. I shall have a jersey in winter, and probably a blazer
too. I will stop using my hands to eat. I will use a knife and fork." [p. 48]
Throughout the novel's first half, the reader is taken deep into the mind and life of a young girl, Tambudzai.
We are invited to accompany her as she fights against her brother, stands stern against her father, and holds
high regard for her mother ["My mother was too old to be disturbed by my childish nonsense." (p. 16)]. She
20
laughs, she plays, she reminisces. She is the protagonist. Dangarembga paints a youthfully vivid life through
the memory of this young girl. However, there are darker memories as well.
Not only does the reader have the opportunity to see individual family members interact, but the minds of
those same relatives are exposed in this young character as well. What is more, though, is the patriarchal
notion of accomplishment and failure as seen in the novel. A father of four children, Jeremiah is unable to
appreciate a standard of life that has not been accomplished by his elder, more "successful" brother. He has
become so settled with his inevitable, accursed lack, that his children, especially Nhamo, have a similar
attitude toward life Ð garnishing a similar definition of success, and developing a similar attitude toward
Jeremiah.
Throughout the novel, Dangarembga develops Jeremiah as a failure. He is unable to pay for his children's
education more than once, he worships the ground that his older brother walks on because the man has been
delivered from a generational curse, and he resents the attempts of his daughter to fund her education. As
Sigauke is the eldest, and therefore head of the family, Jeremiah understandably respects his brother.
However, the notion of fatherhood is made uncertain, especially when Sigauke speaks to Tamubudzai:
"I felt it necessary, as your father, to take some time off from my work to speak to you as a father should
speak to a child." [p. 87]
Does the title "father" change along with context? Or, is the reader to assume that Sigauke's familial position
makes him father of all? Nhamo states within a context that the title is to change. Yet it is not certain whether
Jeremiah's failure makes his status dependent upon proximal distance, or if it is a relegated to the one who
heads the household within which the child is living.
Climbing the Ladder: The Conflicts of Travelling Forward for the Sake of Where You've Been
Heather Sofield
Set in colonial Rhodesia, Dangarembga's novel Nervous Conditions, tells the coming of age story of young
Tambudzai. Narrated in retrospect, Tambudzai explains the events and forces which shaped her "escape"
from the poverty of her birth. Having grown up with in the traditional family structures which emphasized
patriarchy and familial obligations, Tambudzai is motivated in her quest for education by her sense of
responsibility for her family. She clearly sees her opportunities, and what use she subsequently makes of
them, as being solely for the purpose of lifting the rest of her family from the squalor in which they are
trapped.
Tambudzai is not the first one her family looks to for salvation. Originally this responsibility fell upon the
shoulders of her older brother Nhamo. When funds fell short of what was required for school fees,
Tambudzai was forced to sacrifice her own place in school so that her brother might continue on, at first in
the local school and then at the mission of which her uncle was headmaster. He was a male and the oldest
child. Tambudzai, painfully aware of her own rebuffed potential, is upset but not vanquished. Determinedly
she seeks to provide her own fees, working her way forward, slowly but definitively. She continues on in this
way until the untimely death of her brother. At this time her uncle's sponsorship is transferred to her, and she
assumes a place at the mission school. However, what I wish to explore is not the manner in which
Tambudzai climbed the ladder leading from the poor homestead to a more emancipated and prosperous
future for herself and her family, but the ways in which the climbing affected her views: of self, home and
eventual destination.
Education is seen as being the only way to escape from the impoverished conditions which emerged as a
result of White colonization. But the challenge arises when that educational system is one saturated with
White ideas and influences.
When Tambudzai is young, still living on the homestead with her parents and younger sisters, she is scornful
of Nhamo. Resentful of his education and the effect it seems to have produced, she sees him as transformed
from a caring and responsible member of the family to one who is selfish and lazy. The family, except for
21
Tambudzai's father attributes this to contamination from White ways. She hates the ways in which he
attempts to distance himself from the family, as if his education will be solely for his own betterment and not
that of the entire family as is intended. Frustrated, she tries to remind him,
"You will still be our father's son. You will still be my brother. And Netsai's. Even if you don't like it. So you
had better stop being proud for nothing and be grateful to Babamukuru for helping you." (page 49)
But when Nhamo dies and Tambudzai is allowed to study at the mission, is she able to maintain the same
views? In the course of the novel, we see Tambudzai changing as we all will do in the courses of our
educations. It is certainly impossible to emerge from such experiences unmarked. But Tambudzai embarks
upon her journey with a remarkable amount of resolve, determined to put all she learns to productive use for
the sake of her family. Therefore, her journey forward is propelled by continual looking backward. She must
continually remind herself of where she has come from. Does she succeed where she saw her brother failing?
Is she able to use her education as she plans or does it irrevocably shape her in ways she did not intend?
We can see Tambudzai's transformation as time progresses. At first, she seems to be very aware of what is
happening to her. When she first arrives at the mission she is distressed to discover a change already apparent in the manner which Anna addresses her.
"The worst thing was that she hardly talked at all, said no more than the few words necessary to convey her
message. You have met Anna as she was before she began to behave like this, and I think you will agree with
me that nothing on earth could have changed her so quickly into a quiet, reserved person. The change then
had to do with me. It was very sobering to think that my change of address had changed me into a person
Anna could not talk to." (page 85)
Another important influence to consider in this question of Tambudzai's success in terms of the goals she
sets for herself, is the influence of her cousin Nyasha. Indelibly marked from her early exposure to English
culture, Nyasha struggles with her inability to re-assimilate into her native society. Her rebellious nature
certainly is a factor in Tambudzai's own development. How do Nyasha's ideas about individual emancipation
conflict with the responsibilities Tambudzai shoulders for the liberation of her own family? This conflict of
individual versus family is a recurrent theme. As Tambudzi climbs upwards, she is forced to question all of
the beliefs drilled into her from birth. Is she able to reconcile these views? How is she affected by so many
conflicting desires and ideas?
As Tambudzai discovers that she will be allowed to accept her scholarship to the convent, she reflects upon
her goals and the path she is traveling.
"I was to take another step upwards in the direction of my freedom. Another step away from the flies, the
smells, the fields and the rags; from stomachs which were seldom full, from dirt and disease, from my
father's abject obeisance to Babamukuru and my mother's chronic lethargy." (page 183)
And so, as the narrative comes to a close, Tambudzai has embarked upon a new phase of her journey towards
liberation. She is able to remember the goals which were with her when she began her climb, but has she
been successful in maintaining her character? She was hurt by her brother Nhamo's condescension and
seemed resolved not to fall into a similar trap. Does she do this? How is Tambudzai able to balance her sense
of responsibility with her own desires? Is she able to maintain immunity from White contamination, while
using her exposure to benefit her family? These are all important questions I would like us to consider in our
discussion of Nervous Conditions. The struggles Tambudzai and her family face are representative of the
conflicts of the entire country as it moves forward under colonial oppression. And so by reflecting upon her
personal journey we are better able to understand the experience of the nation.
White Colonists, White Houses
When the heroine of Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions first sees the house of her uncle
Babamukuru where she will live while she goes to school at the mission, her reactions beautifully map the
complex encounters of colonizer and colonized. In particular, as she provides her reaction to this house,
22
which at first seems to her a "palace" or a "mansion," she sets forth fundamental differences between the
architectural aesthetics and social ethos of the British and the Shona.
One of the most notable facts about Babamukuru's home, she tells us -- and to her the oddest -- is its color:
It was painted white. This was one of the less beautiful aspects of that house, one of the less sensible aspects
too. There seemed to be no good reason for wasting time and effort, to say nothing of paint, on painting the
cheerful red brick that I had seen elsewhere on the mission as we drove up to Babamukuru's house this
clinical, antiseptic white. Naturally, though, there was a reason. I found out from Nyasha, who knew all sorts
of things, or glued together facts for herself when knowledge was lacking, that this particular house, the
headmaster's house, had been built in the early days of the mission She said that was around the turn of the
nineteenth century at a time when the missionaries believed that only white houses were cool enough to be
comfortably lived in. Dilgently this belief was translated into action. White houses sprang up all over the
mission. All those white houses must have been very uninspiring for people whose function was to inspire.
Besides, natives were said to respond to colour, so after a while the missionaries began to believe that houses
would not overheat, even when they were not painted white, as long as pastel shades were used. They began
to paint their houses cream, pale pink, pale blue, pale green. Nyasha liked to embellish this point. "Imagine,"
she used to say, "how pretty it must have looked. All those pinks and blues gleaming away among the white.
It must have been so sweet, so very appealing."
Later, much later, as late as the time that I came to the mission, there was a lot of construction going on.
Houses had to be built to shelter the new crop of educated Africans that had been sown in so many Sub A
and Sub B night-school classes and was now being abundantly reaped as old boys returned to the mission to
contribute by becoming teachers in their turn. Possibly because there was no time for finesse, possibly
because the aim was to shelter as many people as quickly as possible, these houses that accommodated the
returning teachers remained dark and ruddy. . . . At the time that I arrived at the mission, missionaries were
living in white houses and in the pale painted houses, but not in the red brick ones. My uncle was the only
African living in a white house. We were all very proud of this fact. [Nervous Conditions, Seattle: Seal
Press, 1989, 62-63.]
A survey of the remaining colonial architecture in Rhodesia -- much of it in central Harare is being ripped
down to make way for skyscrapers -- reveals that almost all of it is in fact white -- a color, as the passage
notes, that quickly took on political values. As you read through the previous passage, note that the speaker's
reasons for finding white paint odd include the assumption that devoting effort to coloring one's house is a
waste of time and also that she finds white paint fundamentally unattractive. Her second reason reveals a
sharp difference between British and African (at least Shona) aesthetics: as both domestic architecture and
the grander scale of Great Zimbabwe reveal, indigenous structures seem to emphasize the way they grow out
of the terrain rather than set themselves apart form it. Can you think of any areas of African aesthetics -- or,
rather, of an aesthetics in African cultures where jarring opposition to nature is a desirable aesthetic quality?
Identity in Existence
John Yang
"Exclusion held dreadful horrors for me at that time because it suggested superfluity. Exclusion whispered
that my existence was not necessary, making me no more than an unfortunate by-product of some inexorable
natural process. Or else it mocked that the process had gone wrong and produced me instead of another
Nhamo, another Chido, another Babamukuru-to-be." (39-40)
"It would be a marvellous opportunity, she said sarcastically, to forget. To forget who you were, what you
were and why you were that. The process, she said, was called assimilation, and that was what was intended
for the precocious few who might prove a nuisance if left to themselves, whereas the others well really, who
cared about the others?" (178-179)
Throughout Nervous Conditions, we see Tambu struggling to search for and achieve an identity, but more
importantly a value to place on her life and existence. She struggles to rise above the shadow cast over her by
23
Nhamo, Chido, and to a certain extent, Nyasha. Tambu takes the initiative of her own emancipation by
growing mealies in order to sell them. Eventually, she receives the benefits of her uncle Babamukuru (after
Nhamo's death) to live with him and study at the mission.
While struggling to find a value in her existence and identity, she sometimes undermines the value of her
culture and her familial bonds. She criticizes Chido and Nyasha at first for forgetting to speak their native
Shona, but Tambu relishes in the thought of attending multiracial schools and learning to speak English
fluently as a factor in her emancipation. She apparently does not see the conflict in criticizing her cousin's
lack of respect yet wanting more than ever to break free from the poverty surrounding her family. As the
novel progresses, she becomes more and more hesitant to visit her parents, claiming educated women like
herself had no place on the farm. When Tambu is accepted to Sacred Heart, she gloats in the fact that she
will be receiving a white man's education. She trivializes her uncle and her mother's concern that she will be
losing her Shona culture by assimilating more and more into the "white" ways of life, the same concerns
Tambu herself had of Chido and Nyasha when they first returned from England.
By struggling for identity and importance, is Tambu losing identity? She separates more and more from her
family and is finally ashamed of them when Babamukuru decides to grant her parents a wedding to mask
their sin. Is Tambu willing to relinquish her former self to create a new one that includes money and prestige,
but excludes her family more and more? Is what Nyasha calls "assimilation" a necessary evil for the
"marvellous" education Tambu is about to receive? What does this say about her identity that struggled hard
to find?
Missionary and Colonization in Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions
Maureen Grundy, Class of 2000, English 119, Brown University, 1999
Part 3 of "Religion and the Legacy of Colonialism in Contemporary Zimbabwe"
Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions also portrays the role of missionary work in colonization and in
changing Zimbabwean culture. Chapter Six of the novel opens with the main character, Tambu, explaining
the difference between white people and white missionaries. She depicts the missionary as a "special kind of
white person" since the missionaries come to the country to bring enlightenment, love, and an opportunity
for salvation. In another essay, I argued that this passage is jarring and makes one wonder what the real
difference is between the colonizers and the missionaries. They both travel to foreign places to assert their
superior knowledge and way of life. Both the missionary and the colonizer disrupt the African lifestyle and
impose Western ideologies. Both signify exploitations of a people.
The missionaries Tambu speaks of were indeed different from the white colonizers in that they appeared to
have more respect for her culture and her native language.
"These missionaries, the strange ones, liked to speak Shona much more than they liked to speak English . . .
Most of the missionaries' children, the children of the strange ones, did not speak English at all until they
learnt it at school . . . I often wondered how they would manage when they went back home and had to stop
behaving like Africans."
Their efforts to learn and speak Shona imply a willingness to learn from the Zimbabwean people. However,
this willingness cannot overshadow the way in which the missionary education has so deeply affected the
Zimbabwean consciousness. After all, as Tambu points out, this group of missionaries represents only a
minority of all missionaries. The last statement Tambu makes here reveals her corrupted mentality that her
people are somehow inferior to the whites.
24
"I used to feel guilty and unnatural for not being able to love the Whites as I ought. So it was good to see the
healthy young missionaries and discover that some whites were as beautiful as we were. After that it did not
take long for me to learn that they were in fact more beautiful and then I was able to love them." (104). The
point Dangarembga makes here is not about whether these whites actually were beautiful, kind people, but
rather about the way in which the now established missionary education contributed to the feeling of
inferiority among the Zimbabweans. From the use of her language, her claims of feeling unnatural, her
reference to "learning" that the white people were more beautiful, one can clearly see the way in which the
missionary education contributes to and perpetuates the colonial mentality.
Hilde Arnsten further alludes to the cooperation of missionaries and colonizers in attaining a common goal.
While she asserts that some missionaries did support the indigenous people in fighting for independence,
many were still perceived to be on the side of the oppressors. "It is often arguedŠthat mission education
coincided with the colonisers' interestsŠ'only education could lay the basis for a smooth-functioning colonial
administration.' The missions also had a stake in this, as it was significant for them to communicate with the
people through the written word, and to translate the Bible into indigenous languages. Mission schools in
varying degrees served the interests of the colonizers, the settler regimes, the missions themselves, and,
finally, to some extent the people." (Arnsten ).
Postcolonial Identity in Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and Vera's Nehanda
Heather Sofield, English 119, Brown University, 1999
Part 3 of "Who Am I? : Negotiation of Identity in A Post -Colonial State"
In the novel Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, the character Nyasha aptly describes the quandary
that is postcolonial identity.
"It would be a marvelous opportunity, she said sarcastically, to forget. To forget who you were, what you
were and why you were that. The process, she said, was called assimilation, and that was what was intended
for the precocious few who might prove a nuisance if left to themselves" (178).
For many, assimilation has been the easiest answer. Under pressure to develop and support families, it can
easily seem like the only answer. It is a regrettable mistake to underestimate the importance of economics in
a Third World nation such as Zimbabwe. We would be presumptuous and idealistic to assume everyone has
the leisure to contemplate a sense of identity and subsequently arrive at a conclusion perfectly balanced
between the innumerable political and moral demands. What about carving out a living in a community still
controlled by white land bosses? Sustaining a family on food from fields too often harvested and devoid of
nutrients because the best land was long ago appropriated for colonial plantations?
We can see an example of this dilemma in the novel Nehanda by Yvonne Vera. This story takes place
further in the past, and is therefore somewhat more remote than some of the other pieces that will be
mentioned in this essay. However, the example I will cite clearly illustrates the roots of the above problem of
resisting "civilizing" and assimilation while also being forced to cope with immediate economic pressures.
In Nehanda, Vera tells of an Englishman named Mr. Browning who is causing much local controversy with
his plan to build a missionary school for the Africans. He hires a native man called Mashoko as a servant.
But Mr. Browning has re-dubbed him Moses, for the reason that
the new name is easier to remember, and more importantly, it is a step toward the goal of civilizing the
country... Moses does not yet seem to understand much of what represents progress, but Mr. Browning is
confident that his efforts will bear fruit. (44)
25
So, as he makes plans for his school project, Mr. Browning plots for even Mashoko's civilization -essentially the transition from a "heathen" to a docile imitation of a white man.
And yet as we read on we hear Mashoko speak for himself. He despises his job and the foolish Mr.
Browning. He has only taken the position of servant because of new taxes he cannot afford to pay otherwise.
"Mashoko does not find his work interesting; in fact when he is in the village he feels ashamed of it. If it
were not for the hut taxes that he is being made to pay, he would not accept the work. His cattle will be
confiscated if he fails to pay the money asked of him" (45).
Such concerns are real and legitimate for many Zimbabwean people. But neither should we assume that these
citizens are ignorant of their position and do not query the nature of their identity. On the contrary this
question of identity is at the center of most post-colonial thought and debate. How is it possible to achieve
material success as is defined and required by our rapidly industrializing world community while still
remaining faithful and proud of ancient traditions? How is it possible to advocate nationalism when for the
sake of competition and economic independence, certain concessions to western tradition must be made?
Returning again to the work of Dangarembga, I believe Nervous Conditions to be a remarkable illustration
of these all too real dilemmas. The novel centers upon the girl Tambu who is born into a rural farming
family. She has an uncle, Babamukuru, who was educated first by white missionaries and then at universities
in South Africa and England. He is the patriarch and pride of the entire family. He achieved "success" and
now works as the headmaster of the mission school. He and his family enjoy material privileges, such as
indoor plumbing, that the rest of the clan have only ever heard of. But there is a price. Babamukuru and his
family are different. They do not participate in traditional dancing and singing. Upon their return from
England, his children Chido and Nyasha have forgotten their Shona. They are anomalies fitting into neither
culture. Too African for the English, too English for the Africans.
Tambu is scornful of them. When she discovers her cousins' loss of language she is hurt.
What Maiguru said was bewildering, bewildering and offending. I had not expected my cousins to have
changed, certainly not so radically, simply because they had been away for awhile. Besides, Shona was our
language. What did people mean when they forgot it?" (42)
In the short time that they have been away, her cousins' identities have morphed into something entirely
impossible for Tambu to understand. She cannot imagine losing touch with traditions, especially such an
important one as language.
Not only is Tambu upset at her cousins, but she is equally, if not more, disapproving of her own brother
Nhamo, who in the brief time of his education, forsakes the family life almost entirely in the name of his
own educational pursuits. But the sad irony of her indignation is that it is only too soon that Tambu herself
begins to make choices leading her further away from her roots and the identity she of which she is so
fiercely defensive.
She leaves her homestead and studies at the mission, living with her uncle. Despite the misgivings of her
family, from there she moves on to study at an even more "English" school, Sacred Heart. When her cousin
Nyasha succumbs to an eating disorder, she returns home, disturbed and confused. Her mother's explanation
for Nyasha's illness is too much "Englishness" and it is clear that she does not see the contamination as being
limited to Nyasha.
"She went on like this for quite awhile, going on about how you couldn't expect the ancestors to stomach so
much Englishness. She didn't mention Nhamo, but I was beginning to follow her trend of thought. I knew
she was thinking of him and I could see she considered him a victim too: ŒThe problem is the Englishness,
so you just be careful!'.... Be careful, she had said, and I thought about Nyasha and Chido and Nhamo, who
had all succumbed, and of my own creeping feelings of doom. Was I being careful enough? I wondered. For
I was beginning to have a suspicion, no more than a seed of a suspicion, that I had been too eager to leave the
homestead and embrace the "Englishness" of the Mission; and after that the more concentrated "Englishness"
of Sacred Heart.... But term time was fast approaching and the thought of returning to Sacred Heart filled me
26
with pleasure. The books, the games, the films, the debates - all these things were things that I wanted."
(Dangarembga, p.203)
In this story we see the effects of a "white" education upon personal identity. It has changed Tambu, and
altered her perception of herself in relation to her community. She entered into her education with the clear
goal of achieving success so as to lift her family out of poverty. To succeed where her father had not. But as
she allows herself to be incorporated into the school system she becomes enamored of European culture and
tradition and grows to scorn her shabby African roots. She wants all those "white" things and her original
reason to pursue an education becomes an excuse - a facade behind which she hides her own sometimes
subconscious, but very real, desires.
Is this the travesty of an educational system formed by and focused upon an anglo-society? Is the possibility
of achieving a true sense of identity in a post-colonial state compromised or even lost? Despite the most
resolute of intentions, Tambu has lost sense of herself. She is in love with a society to which she does not
belong, but can no longer find a comfortable niche in the society from whence she came.
Authorizing Women, Women Authoring
Maurice Taonezvi Vambe, BA 1990 BA 1991 MA D.Phil 1995, Department of English, University of
Zimbabwe
In Nervous Conditions, Dangarembgwa uses stereotypes in order to subvert them by providing images of
young black women who refuse to consent and succumb to either the bullying tactics of colonialism or the
black men. Tambudzayi refuses to give in to her father's logic enjoining her to stay at home like her mother,
learning to cook and preparing to reproduce the community through marriage because she will not "cook
books and feed them to (her) husband" (15). From the beginning of the novel -- which is actually its end -Tambudzayi makes it clear that her story is not one of death but "...about my escape and Lucia's; about my
mother's and Maiguru's (Big mother's)entrapment; and about Nyasha's rebellion" (p 1).The first of the
rebellion is Tambudzayi complaining that when her family has to decide who of the children have to be sent
to school, it is the girl-child who has to give way for the brother. When she finally grows maize in order to
supplement money for her school-fees, the father, Jeremiah claims that since Tambudzayi is his daughter
then the money belongs to him. What we have in Jeremiah is a man who has internalized patriarchal
perceptions that women are an extension of male property. This way of treatment women has, so
Tambudzayi points out, negative effects on the women lot;
The needs and sensibilities of the women in my family were not considered a priority, or even
legitimate.That was why l was in Standard Three in the year Nhamo [the brother] died instead of in Standard
Five, as l should have been by that age (p. 12).
The "Nervous Conditions" of Dangarembgwa's novel affects mostly women; the old and the young, the
uneducated and the educated.
Maiguru [Babamukuru's wife] is a black woman who has a masters degree just like Babamukuru. To be able
to have this qualification under colonial conditions is a success story claiming to reverse colonial perceptions
that Africans are congenital simpletons who cannot learn anything. But Maiguru finds out that to acquire a
masters certificate is not enough because even when she is earning her own money, traditional Shona culture
ensures that she cannot use it the way she wants without consulting Babamukuru. In other words, inspite of
her education, Maiguru is still considered answerable to her husband. Which is why even when she protests
by walking out on Babamukuru, she is just going "home" to another patriarchy, this time her brother. Which
means that the condition of being a woman under colonialism is one of double alienation; the woman is
rendered homeless!
Although Tambudzayi admires Maiguru's education, she feels that Maiguru does not fight Babamukuru hard
enough to make him change his way of seeing women. As a result, Tambudzayi gravitates towards Nyasha,
her cousin who is Maiguru's daughter. Nyasha has received a liberally British type of education which
opened her mind to other possibilities of life other than the one suggested by the confines of the hearth.She
27
therefore cannot understand why her father insists that she is not Chido (her brother's) equal. Because
Nyasha refuses to conform to society's image of womanhood, Babamukuru condemns her to whoredom. She
turns against Babamukuru and punches him on the eye (p 115). Nyasha is aware of the psychological
damage inflicted on her by the British type of education; "l am not one of them, but l am not one of you"
(p201).This two-ness of Nyasha's experience of being an educated woman in a social environment offering
limited choices, irreconciliably dogs her black self. But unlike Tambudzayi with a coherent past experience
within which she can root her dreams, aspirations and measure how far she has moved away from the burden
of womanhood, Nyasha is not well-equipped to overcome the mentally unsettling Nervous Conditions
introduced and maintained by the colonial order on the one hand, and the sexual discrimination explicit in
the Shona society on the other. As a result Nyasha loses mental control and contracts anorexia nevosa, a
disease associated with stress, vomiting and general bodily weakness.
After Nyasha breaks down, the only remaining woman who can provide Tambudzayi with the much needed
spiritual scaffolding is Lucia, her mother's sister who is married to Takesure. Lucia has a raw love for
life.She can give her body to the man she likes as and when she feels so.This earns her the apparitions,
"whore, " and "witch, " both linguistic signifiers deployed in order to control her sexuality. Lucia is the only
woman who can "authoritatively" ask Babamukuru to do what she wants for her. But, the limitation of
Lucia's alternative style of life is that she almost always has to depend on Babamukuru's generousity to find
something or a job for her. Perhaps, through Lucia, Dangarembgwa raises the important question that the
African women's search for a cultural life not choked by traditional customs needs to be complemented by
their struggle for economic empowerment. On this score, Nervous Conditions shows deep ideological
affinities with Their Eyes Were Watching God (1986), and The Color Purple (1983) both novels which
shows deep ideological affinities with African-American women's fiction such as depict female protagonists
fighting black men who stifle their creativity.
Nervous Conditions, deals with the problem of the roles which men and women play both in a colonial
context and after independence in Southern Africa. The novel raises pertinent issues about the social
construction of the identity of the supposed inferiority of women from which they have suffered for a long
time. Such a construction is to the benefit of men, both black and white. Although Nervous Conditions does
not overtly touch on the postcolonial period in Zimbabwe, the writer's complex analysis of the liberation of
the mind implies that there is no facile way of nation-building in Africa in the 1980's and 1990's (F.V Wild,
1993, p338). By the end of the novel Tambudzayi has stood up to narrate her story which is also the story of
many other African women who cannot write for many reasons;
Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things
and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when l can set down this story. lt was a long and
painful process for me, that process of expansion. It was a process whose events stretched over many years
and would fill another volume, but the story I have told here, is my own story, the story of four women
whom l loved, and our men, this is how it all began (p 204).
The analysis of the factors that cause various states of nervous conditions is the first and important step
towards freedom in Nervous Conditions. It is crucial to underline the fact that for Tambudzayi, to write is to
claim a text of one's own and that textuality is an instrument of territorial possession because "the other
confers on us an identity that alienates us from ourselves, narrative is crucial to the discovery of our
selfhood" (S. Gikandi, p. 72 in Boehmer, 1991).
Missionary and Colonization in Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions
Maureen Grundy, Class of 2000, English 119, Brown University, 1999
Part 3 of "Religion and the Legacy of Colonialism in Contemporary Zimbabwe"
28
Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions also portrays the role of missionary work in colonization and in
changing Zimbabwean culture. Chapter Six of the novel opens with the main character, Tambu, explaining
the difference between white people and white missionaries. She depicts the missionary as a "special kind of
white person" since the missionaries come to the country to bring enlightenment, love, and an opportunity
for salvation. In another essay, I argued that this passage is jarring and makes one wonder what the real
difference is between the colonizers and the missionaries. They both travel to foreign places to assert their
superior knowledge and way of life. Both the missionary and the colonizer disrupt the African lifestyle and
impose Western ideologies. Both signify exploitations of a people.
The missionaries Tambu speaks of were indeed different from the white colonizers in that they appeared to
have more respect for her culture and her native language.
"These missionaries, the strange ones, liked to speak Shona much more than they liked to speak English . . .
Most of the missionaries' children, the children of the strange ones, did not speak English at all until they
learnt it at school . . . I often wondered how they would manage when they went back home and had to stop
behaving like Africans."
Their efforts to learn and speak Shona imply a willingness to learn from the Zimbabwean people. However,
this willingness cannot overshadow the way in which the missionary education has so deeply affected the
Zimbabwean consciousness. After all, as Tambu points out, this group of missionaries represents only a
minority of all missionaries. The last statement Tambu makes here reveals her corrupted mentality that her
people are somehow inferior to the whites.
"I used to feel guilty and unnatural for not being able to love the Whites as I ought. So it was good to see the
healthy young missionaries and discover that some whites were as beautiful as we were. After that it did not
take long for me to learn that they were in fact more beautiful and then I was able to love them." (104). The
point Dangarembga makes here is not about whether these whites actually were beautiful, kind people, but
rather about the way in which the now established missionary education contributed to the feeling of
inferiority among the Zimbabweans. From the use of her language, her claims of feeling unnatural, her
reference to "learning" that the white people were more beautiful, one can clearly see the way in which the
missionary education contributes to and perpetuates the colonial mentality.
Hilde Arnsten further alludes to the cooperation of missionaries and colonizers in attaining a common goal.
While she asserts that some missionaries did support the indigenous people in fighting for independence,
many were still perceived to be on the side of the oppressors. "It is often arguedŠthat mission education
coincided with the colonisers' interestsŠ'only education could lay the basis for a smooth-functioning colonial
administration.' The missions also had a stake in this, as it was significant for them to communicate with the
people through the written word, and to translate the Bible into indigenous languages. Mission schools in
varying degrees served the interests of the colonizers, the settler regimes, the missions themselves, and,
finally, to some extent the people." (Arnsten ).
Disembodying The Corpus:
Postcolonial Pathology In Tsitsi Dangarembga's 'Nervous Conditions'
Deepika Bahri
1.
Directing his "attention to the importance of two problems raised by Marxism and by anthropology
concerning the moral and social significance of biological and physical 'things,'" Michael Taussig argues in
The Nervous System that "things such as the signs and symptoms of disease, as much as the technology of
healing, are not 'things-in-themselves,' are not only biological and physical, but are also signs of social
relations disguised as natural things, concealing their roots in human reciprocity" (83). If Taussig's
observation with regard to the cultural analysis of an illness and its treatment in the USA in 1978 is
extrapolated to a very different scene but not so distant time, the machinations of illness in a fictional case
29
study reveal the usually syncopated socio-personal reciprocity Taussig suggests. The scene is Rhodesia on
the brink of its evolution into the nation now named after a ruined city in its southern part. The "subject"
under analysis is Nyasha, the anorexic, teenage deuteragonist of Tsitsi Dangarembga's 1988 novel Nervous
Conditions (a title inspired by Sartre's observation in the preface to The Wretched of the Earth, that the
native's is a nervous condition1). The novel, narrated in the first person by Nyasha's cousin Tambu,
catalogues the struggles of the latter to escape the impoverished and stifling atmosphere of the "homestead"
in search of education and a better life, as well the efforts of other women in her family to negotiate their
circumstances, offering the while a scathing critique of the confused and corrupt social structure they are a
part of. Tambu's movement from her homestead, which symbolizes rural decay, to the prosperous, urban
mission of her uncle introduces us to a cast of characters scarred by encounters with the savagery of
colonialism in the context of an indigenously oppressive socius. One of many characters in the novel
suffering from a nervous condition, young Nyasha demonstrates in dramatic pathological form what appears
to ail an entire socio-economic construct. If "the manifestations of disease are like symbols, and the
diagnostician sees them and interprets them with an eye trained by the social determinants of perception"
(Taussig 87), and if, as Susan Bordo argues in "The Body and Reproduction of Femininity," "the bodies of
disordered women . . . offer themselves as aggressively graphic text for the interpreter--a text that insists,
actually demands, it be read as a cultural statement" (16), Nyasha's diseased self suggests the textualized
female body on whose abject person are writ large the imperial inscriptions of colonization, the intimate
branding of patriarchy, and the battle between native culture, Western narrative, and her complex
relationship with both. Not surprisingly, Nyasha's response to this violence on the body is not only
somatogenic but it is to manifest specifically that illness which will consume that body.
2.
The pathological consequences of colonization, signaled in the heightened synaptic activity which, according
to Fanon, produces violence among colonized peoples, take shape in Nyasha in the need to target herself as
the site on which to launch a terrorist attack upon the produced self. According to Sartre, the violence of the
settlers contaminates the colonized, producing fury; failing to find an outlet, "it turns in a vacuum and
devastates the oppressed creatures themselves" (18). The quest for an outlet takes grotesque forms in Nyasha
through the physical symptomatology of disorder. But it would be entirely too simple to attribute her disease
to the ills of colonization alone: Nyasha responds not only as native and Other, she responds as woman to the
ratification of socially en-gendered native categories which conspire with colonial narratives to ensure her
subjectivity. The implication of precapital and precolonial socio-economic systems in the postcolonial state,
moreover, makes a simplistic oppositionality between colonizer/colonized meaningless. Her response to
Western colonial narratives which enthrall as they distress at a time when she is also contending with her
burgeoning sexuality in a repressed society, further complicate any efforts to understand and explain her
pathology. Living on the edge of a body weakening from anorexia and bulimia, Nyasha's involuntary
reaction to the narratives competing for control over her, I would suggest, appears to be to systematically
evacuate the materials ostensibly intended to sustain her, empty the body of signification and content to
make "a body without organs" (BwO) in Deleuze and Guattari's terminology, and thereby to reveal and
dismantle (although never completely) the self diseased by both patriarchy and colonization. As Tambu's
narrative unfolds, the female body as text itself is being rewritten as protest, attempting to rid itself of the
desires projected on it, even if hybrid subjectivity prevents it from purging them all.2 The "body talk"
invoked in my reading, informed largely by postmodern (despite the "realist" mode of narration) and feminist
concerns, also resonates with postcolonial, social, and psychological ones. Many of these approaches are of
unlike ilk, and none of them can be explained fully within the scope of this essay. Rather, the interplay of
these positions is used to shed light on a case that defies simple theoretical models. Readers will note the use
in this essay of Western and non-Western theorists, often with widely ranging positionings: given the
"hybrid" culture being described in the novel and the range of apparata necessary to understand Nyasha's
condition in terms that were medical as well as socio-political, feminist as well as postcolonial, physical as
well as psychological, it seemed specious to confine the theoretical apparatus to non-Western theory or a
particular feminist or postcolonial perspective. More importantly, it seemed less useful. None of these
perspectives, however, preclude the analysis of body as metaphor and illness as symbol.
30
3.
Nyasha's recourse to a stereotypically Western female pathological condition 3 to empty herself of food, the
physical token of her anomie and a significant preoccupation of African life, is ironic and fitting as
Dangarembga forces a collocation of native and colonial cultural concerns to complicate our ways of reading
the postcolonial. Nyasha's accusatory delirium, kamikaze behavior and oneiroid symptoms are at once
symptomatic of a postcolonial and female disorder whereby the symptom is the cure, both exemplified in her
refusal to occupy the honorary space allotted her by colonial and patriarchal narratives in which she is
required to be but cannot be a good native and a good girl. This entails her rejection of food (metonymic
token of a system that commodifies women's bodies and labor and sustains male authority), of a socio-sexual
code that is designed to prepare her for an unequal marriage market while repressing her sexuality, and of an
educational system which has the potential to emancipate women and natives but functions, instead, to keep
them in their place and even further exacerbate their ills.
4.
In "Killing the Hysteric in the Colonized's House", Sue Thomas has argued for a reading of the novel as a
narra tive of loss of cultural and maternal affiliations, invoking Grosz's suggestion that hysteria is a tragic
self-mutilation that symptomatizes inarticulable resistance (27). Hysterical overcompliance with domination,
she suggests, characterizes all the major characters in the novel. While this is well substantiated in her essay,
I will argue that the female body is a very particular space that is marked in ways that narrativize elaborate
systems of production, cultural and economic. The recoding of these systems in the text, elaborated in the
story of Tambu's introduction into and misgivings about the cycle, the adult women's struggles within it, and
Nyasha's articulation of structural imparities is a staging of these narratives in performative terms that bears
illustrative witness to the violence done to the female body in the successive scenes of pre and postcolonial
Zimbabwe. Nyasha's war with patriarchal and colonial systems is fought on the turf of her own body, both
because it is the scene of enactment of these systems and because it is the only site of resistance available.
This reading suggests that the performativity of female resistance needs to be at the heart of a feminist
postcolonial politics.
5.
It would be well to acknowledge the centrality of Dangarembga's feminist agenda before attempting to
transpose a postcolonial reading on the novel. In an interview with Rosemary Marangoly George and Helen
Scott, the author claimed that her purpose was "to write things about ourselves in our own voices which
other people can pick up to read. And I do think that Nervous Conditions is serving this purpose for young
girls in Zimbabwe" (312). Tambudzai, the young female narrator's missionary education tells only of "Ben
and Betty in Town and Country" (27), not of her own people; Nervous Conditions is an attempt at telling
Zimbabwean girls stories about themselves to counter the lingering narrative in which Zimbabwe remains a
remote control neo-colony administered by toadies like Nyasha's western educated father, Babamukuru and
his ilk who are still "painfully under the evil wizard's spell," and will continue the colonial project (50).
Women's stories do not easily see the light of day in Zimbabwe because, according to Dangarembga, "the
men are the publishers" and "it seems very difficult for men to accept the things that women write and want
to write about" (qtd. in George 311). These stories, however, must be told. Early in the novel, Tambu tells us
that the novel is not about death though it begins with the ironic admission "I was not sorry when my brother
died" (1); rather it is about "my escape and Lucia's; about my mother's and Maiguru's entrapment; and about
Nyasha's rebellion [which] may not in the end have been successful" (1). The postcolonial critic should be
wary that any overarching theory proposed be mediated by Dangarembga's emphasis on the feminist
preoccupations of the story for the novel ends with the reminder: "the story I have told here, is my own story,
the story of four women whom I loved, and our men, this story is how it all began" (204). That the novel
opens with the prefiguring of her brother Nhamo's death to make way for Tambu's tale is a poignant
reminder of the symbolic starting point of female narrative. Far from making a postcolonial reading less
31
tenable, however, Dangarembga's feminist proclivities are useful in explaining the dense nature of power
relations in the postcolonial world in a way that colonial discourse (including western feminist discourse)
typically fails to do.
6.
In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Chandra Talpade Mohanty complains that Western
feminists "homogenize and systematize" third world woman, creating a single dimensional picture. They also
assume a "singular, monolithic notion of patriarchy" which is reductive. Ultimately, "Western feminisms
appropriate and 'colonize' the fundamental complexities and conflicts which characterize the lives of women
of different classes, religions, cultures, races and castes in these countries" (335). Dangarembga's
representation of women of different ages, classes, educational qualifications, and economic capacities,
makes composite and reductive sketches of the third world woman if not impossible, difficult. The women in
this novel are neither simply victims, nor inherently more noble than the men; rather, their stories illustrate
the difficulty of separating problem and solution, perpetrator and victim, cause and effect. That they are
uniquely positioned to bear the brunt of native and colonial oppression, however, is vividly demonstrated:
even issues of class and status are ultimately subservient to and informed by a pervasive but complex
phallocentric order; this Tambu clarifies when she marvels at "the way all the conflicts came back to this
question of femaleness" (116). The patriarchal order is supported by the colonial project, pre and post
capitalist economy, and what we may call, for lack of a better phrase, traditional cultural codes. By layering
gender politics with the atrophying discourse of colonialism, Dangarembga obliges us to recognize that the
power structure is a contradictory amalgam of complicity and helplessness--where colonizer and colonized,
men and women collude to produce their psycho-pathological, in a word, "nervous" conditions. What ails
Nyasha, then, is not simply an eating problem but a rampant disorder in the socio-cultural complex that
determines her fate as woman and native on the eve of the birth of a new nation.
7.
The novel dramatizes the intersections of personal and national history on the one hand 4 and the feminist
and postcolonial on the other through Nyasha's attempts to escape her own assigned narrative as woman and
colonized subject. Colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchal national culture conspire to produce an imperiled
Nyasha and a nation in crisis. Symptoms of the latter abound in the repetitive images of rural poverty, female
disempowerment, and continuing colonialism in educational and economic institutions while Nyasha's crisis
is evident in her hysteric, nervous condition and endangered body. Given this, one could read Nyasha's story
as yet another vignette of victimage, but, apart from Dangarembga's own criticism of such a narrative, 5
there are other reasons for reading it as a text of possibilities for survival, agency, and re-creation. Several
third world feminist critics reject the discourse of victimage in feminist and minority discourse. Mohanty
objects in "Under Western Eyes" to the "construction of 'Third World Women' as a homogeneous 'powerless'
group often located as implicit victims of particular socio-economic systems" (338). Spivak complains that
"There is a horrible, horrible thing in minority discourse which is a competition for maximum victimization .
. . . That is absolutely meretricious."6 This is not to say that Nyasha is not victimized but to acknowledge
that it is quite another thing to cast her as victim. Western feminists also recognize this distinction: Naomi
Wolf's recent Fire with Fire, for instance, issues a call to women to eschew the rhetoric of victimage. Nyasha
is conscious of victimization but hardly content to remain a victim; regardless of the caliber or effectiveness
of her methods of opposition, she/her body are the enunciation of protest against and the story of
victimization. A reading of Nyasha as victim fails for another interesting reason: this is because the text
reveals the ways in which she is quite complicit with the oppressive order she so abhors. In this sense, too,
she emerges less as victim than as the mediated product of a conflicted narrative.
8.
32
Reading female praxis as narrative of relative "agency," in The Beauty Myth Naomi Wolf tells us that
anorexia and bulimia begin "as sane and mentally healthy responses to an insane social reality: that most
women can feel good about themselves only in a state of permanent semistarvation" (198), although it is not
the myth of female beauty alone that contaminates Nyasha--she is rejecting the very basic processes, the
business of living in a colonized world where she shares the dual onus of being colonized and female. Wolf
also tells us that "Eating diseases are often interpreted as symptomatic of a neurotic need for control. But
surely it is a sign of mental health to try to control something that is trying to control you" (198). Nyasha
leaves us in no doubt that she is aware of the oppressive forces that seek to bend her to their will. In one of
her many pedagogic moments, she warns Tambu that "when you've seen different things you want to be sure
you're adjusting to the right thing. You can't go on all the time being whatever's necessary. You've got to
have some conviction . . . . Once you get used to it, it's natural to carry on and become trapped" and then it
becomes clear that "they control everything you do" (117). Hardly, it would seem, is this the language or
sensibility of a passive victim. Nyasha's potential for agency cannot be acknowledged until one understands
that the "[body] still remains the threshold for the transcendence of the subject" (Braidotti 151). Through the
diseased female body as text is made visible the violence of history, and through its spontaneous bodily
resistance, the possibilities for rupturing and remaking that text. Control over the body is a gesture of denial
of representative abject/subject status for Nyasha since "the proliferation of discourses about life, the living
organism, and the body is coextensive with the dislocation of the very basis of the human subject's
representation" (151).
9.
The teleology of Nyasha's anorexic and bulimic practices is intimately linked to her revulsion at the mandate
to represent herself as good girl and good native in particular instances of infractions against her sense of self
in the novel. Tambu speaks of the time Babamukuru confiscates Nyasha's copy of D.H. Lawrence's Lady
Chatterley's Lover which is objectionable for its depiction of female sexuality. Appalled at this invasion of
her rights, and what might be seen as a persistent barrier to her development into sexual agent rather than
sexualized commodity, Nyasha, indicating the etiology of her symptoms, refuses to eat for the first time in
the novel (83). Tambu next alerts us to Nyasha's quiet rejection of her meal when she is scolded by her father
for not responding to her primary school headmaster and thereby shaming him; it is Tambu who tells us that
her cousin's behavior stems from her dislike of being spoken in the third person, because "it made her feel
like an object" (99). In preparing for her Standard Six exams, too, Nyasha loses her appetite, signaling the
much greater apotheosis of internal conflict to follow at her O-levels. Her withdrawal from the family and
rejection of food after the confrontation over her late arrival from the school dance, and subsequently on
another later arrival from school where she has stayed to study, then, comes as no surprise. Layered in
between these specific instances are general references to Nyasha's disdain of fatty foods in the interest of
maintaining a more desirable body shape; this quest for "commodification" as an attractive object is not
recognized by her as destructive and, interestingly, is not textually linked directly to starvation or anorexia.
Instead, the usually appearance-centered practices of anorexia and bulimia become narrativized as artful, if
grotesque, protest that will prevent Nyasha's maturation into full fledged commodified "womanhood," even
as she embraces the abjection that comes from seeking a "pre-objectal relationship," becoming separated
from her own body "in order to be" (Kristeva 10).7
10.
The question of control is focal and must be located within the matrix of complex power relations to
understand the significance of Nyasha's rebellion. 8 Patriarchal society, colonial imperialism, and capitalist
economy function by controlling and commodifying the subject's body and labor; the female subject in this
cultural and social economy, well documented in Nervous Conditions, is assessed by the ability to reproduce
(she goes into labor), to provide sexual release (the labors of love), and to work (home, farm, market labor).
Prostitution and pimping are extreme representations of the annexation of female labor while the marital
institution within oppressive narratives is a quotidian, usually sanctioned, appropriation. Female labor in this
novel denotes a woman's exchange value in the socio-familial and matrimonial economy. It is necessary to
understand the role of female labor in the novel and the reason why it is not available as a site of resistance
33
to grasp fully the implications of Nyasha's default choice of the physical body as the locus for rebellion.
Women are not only expected to work and work for men, their value and worth are determined by work,
although it does not make them "valuable" in any intrinsic, meaningful sense. In "Re-examining Patriarchy
as a Mode of Production: The Case of Zimbabwe," Cindy Courville explains that "women's exploitation and
oppression were structured in terms of political, economic, and social relations of the Shona and Ndebele
societies" (34). Under colonial capitalism, however, women became the "'proletariat' of the proletariats,
becoming more subordinated in the new socio-economic schemes, and often losing their old and meaningful
roles within the older production processes" (Ogundipe-Leslie 108).
11.
Tambu reveals that "the needs and sensibilities of the women in my family were not considered a priority, or
even legitimate" (12). Women are intended to enable men to attain value through their labor: Netsai and
Tambu, therefore, must labor so their brother Nhamo can attend school. They may not enjoy the fruits of
their own labor: "under both traditional and colonial law, they [African women] were denied ownership and
control of the land and the goods they produced. It was the unpaid labor of women and children which
subsidized the colonial wage" (Courville 38). Nhamo, in fact, steals Tambu's labor--the maize she has been
growing in a scant spare time to buy an education--and squanders it in gifts to friends, while her father steals
her prospects by keeping the money Babamukuru has sent him for Tambu's school bills.9 Interestingly, while
the maize does serve to keep her in school, 10 and later allows her admission to the mostly White Sacred
Heart Convent, we can assume from her aunt Maiguru's trajectory and her own pursuit of it that she will
continue to be schooled in the ways of a societal economy that will use her labor to support and enable the
colonial and patriarchal order which will deny her, as it has Maiguru, the fruits of that labor. Maiguru, the
most educated woman in the novel, is just as qualified as her husband Babamukuru (a little publicized fact
that surprises Tambu when she learns of it) and just as instrumental in helping to maintain the mission
lifestyle that Nhamo and Tambu find so dazzling, but her knowledge and her labor are never acknowledged:
they have been annexed to serve a societal order which awards the fruits of that knowledge and labor as well
as the associated prestige to Babamukuru, lending him authority, as a result, over the entire extended family,
including his older brother. Babamukuru, in effect, has "stolen" her labor to enhance his position. To the
untrained eye Maiguru appears to be incapable of suffering because she "lived in the best of all possible
circumstances, in the best of all possible worlds" as Tambu says, ironically echoing Candide's unfortunate
and misguided philosopher Pangloss. To this Nyasha replies that "such things could only be seen" (142).
Education, then, which might free women like Maiguru from service to capitalism and patriarchy becomes
yet another token of exchange, further alienating them from the "home" economy of agricultural subsistence
in favor of urban wage service.11 When she and her husband return to their uneducated, struggling relatives,
it is to further heighten the impoverishment of the homestead, and the need to escape from it. It is Nyasha
who points out that the education of solitary family members will not solve the ills of rural poverty: "there'll
always be brothers and mealies and mothers too tired to clean latrines. Whether you go to the convent or not.
There's more to be done than that," she tells Tambu who believes that education will "lighten" their burdens
(179). Near the end of the novel, Tambu herself wonders, "but what use were educated young ladies on the
homestead? Or at the mission?" (199). Admittedly comprehension has only begun to dawn on her at that
stage, but a fuller realization seems to be clearly indicated.
12.
Babamukuru, his young nephew Nhamo, and son Chido, however, embrace colonial capitalism and
education because they are usually compatible with and in fact, uphold traditional patriarchy. Courville tells
us that "the colonial state sanctioned and institutionalized the political and legal status of African women as
minors and/or dependents subject to male control" (37). Educational degrees, in this economy, are fodder for
men's appetites for control. Witness the following scene. On his return from England, Babamukuru is
comically greeted by a rousing chorus of admirers who extol his abilities, while ignoring Maiguru's
comparable achievements: "Our father and benefactor has returned appeased, having devoured English
letters with a ferocious appetite! Did you think degrees were indigestible? If so, look at my brother. He has
digested them" (36). Indeed, men can digest degrees as well as the food prepared by women since both
34
sustain their stature while failing to "nourish" the women. Their lot, educational status notwithstanding, is
defined by service to and for men. Courville claims that while "some social aspects of African patriarchy
were repugnant to European culture . . . colonial authorities recognized the significance of patriarchal power
in mobilizing the labor of women" (38). That none of the women in the novel ever refuse their labor is no
oddity since we learn that female labor may not be and is not withheld for fear of punishment; Netsai's
failure to carry her empty-handed brother's bags at Tambu's suggestion, for instance, results in a sound
thrashing and her conclusion that she should have just done it "in the first place" (10). Nor is Nhamo's
behavior unusual; while Tambu acknowledges that "Nhamo was not interested in being fair," she insists he
was not being obnoxious, merely behaving "in the expected manner" (12). Netsai, needless to say, never
refuses to carry his bags again. Even Tambu, who appears to demonstrate a keen sense of outrage at the
injustice of a patriarchal order while at the homestead, participates in all the labor intensive tasks on the
homestead while the men await service. One of the few instances of her failure to be a "good girl," evident to
her uncle in her refusal to attend the Christian ceremony that is to sanction her parents' otherwise "sinful"
marriage of many years--an embarrassing and humiliating proposition to Tambu, is also, predictably,
punished with a beating and a sentence of domestic labor; interestingly, before she issues an outright refusal,
Tambu confesses to a muscular inability to leave her bed, prompting her uncle to ask if she is "ill" and then
to dismiss Maiguru's affirmative response with injunctions to get the girl dressed; this event is an adroit
linking in the novel of its major themes, revealing the nexus of relations between illness, body, labor,
colonialism, patriarchy, and the female subject.
13.
Nyasha, too, who is seen laboring on the homestead along with the other women, including Maiguru, at the
family's Christmas gathering, is clearly being prepared for a lifetime of service to the men in her life despite
her relatively privileged economic status. Since labor cannot be denied in the phallocratic order--at least not
with impunity, the body then becomes the site of conflict for control. I realize that the dichotomy between
labor and the body here is problematic since it is the body that labors, but in this instance we need to separate
the two to recognize the extent to which Nyasha's body as text is scripted, and how that text might be
reinscribed as protest.
14.
In a certain sense, Nyasha's understanding of bodily dimensions has been shaped, if not determined, by her
brief exposure in England to the Western desire for the "svelte, sensuous" womanly frame (197); she is
preoccupied with her own figure and urges her unofficial pupil Tambu not to eat too much (192). Her sense
of the ideal self, then, has already been appropriated by an aesthetic that does not recognize the wide-hipped,
muscle bound female form as beautiful; this same constitutional African female frame is prized for its
capacity to produce labor and to signal the subject's relatively superior status because it suggests that the
subject is well-fed, a beautiful thing in societies that experience food shortages. Tambu and Nyasha's aunt
Lucia, for instance, "managed somehow to keep herself plump in spite of her tribulations . . . . And Lucia
was strong. She could cultivate a whole acre single-handed without rest"; these twin attributes qualify her as
an "inviting prospect" to Takesure, Tambu's father, and, Dangarembga hints, Babamukuru (127). Nyasha's
attraction to the Western ideal of femininity must be mediated, then, by her understanding of the exploitative
usurpation of the healthy African female body. On a visit to the homestead, Tambu's mother, Mainini,
pinches Nyasha's breast after remarking that "the breasts are already quite large" and then asking when she is
to bring them a son-in-law (130). Nyasha's pathology and her belief that "angles were more attractive than
curves" (135), I would insist, is not simply rooted in her desire for slimness (which it might be) but also in a
rejection of the rounded contours of the adult female body primed for the Shona matrimonial and social
economy.
15.
35
The role of food as a pawn in this struggle for control over the body is a crucial one. Wolf notes that "Food is
the primal symbol of social worth. Whom a society values, it feeds well" and "Publicly apportioning food is
about determining power relations" (189). She concludes that: "Cross-culturally, men receive hot meals,
more protein, and the first helpings of a dish, while women eat the cooling leftovers, often having to use
deceit and cunning to get enough to eat" (190-91). This pattern is made amply clear at the Christmas reunion
at the homestead where Babamukuru and Maiguru provide the victuals. Maiguru jealously guards the meat,
insisting that the rotting meat be cooked and served despite its tell-tale green color, but not to the patriarchy
who are served from meat that has been stored in the somewhat small refrigerator. The able women at the
homestead must cook and serve the dwindling food, eating last and little, typically without complaint. They,
in fact, sleep in the kitchen but their labor produced in their assigned space is not theirs to enjoy, except as
scraps.
16.
In Babamukuru's household, women do not eat least although they must wait till he is served. Even here,
Maiguru replicates the practices of the homestead, fawning over her husband and eating his leftovers.
Babamukuru puts out a token protest at her servility, following it up with a rebuke to Nyasha for helping
herself to the rice before he is quite finished. He, nevertheless, prides himself on his table and would have
been gratified by wide-eyed and poorly-fed Tambu's silent observation that "no one who ate from such a
table could fail to grow fat and healthy" (69). In this case, however, it is important to note that the ability to
provide plentifully gives Babamukuru prestige even though Maiguru's labor is just as important in
accounting for the ample table. Refusal to eat at such a table is tantamount to a direct challenge to his
authority. He repeatedly insists that Nyasha "must eat her food, all of it" or he will "stop providing for her-fees, clothes, food, everything" (189). Given this, it may be somewhat easier to understand Nyasha's inability
to stomach the food intended to "develop" her into a valuable commodity for the market, and to serve as a
token doled out to enhance her father's stature and to exercise his control over her, exhibited in multiple other
ways as well.
17.
Babamukuru is obsessed with control in general, control over women in particular, and control over his girlbecoming-woman daughter, how much she eats, how she dresses and speaks to the elders in the family, how
often and how much she talks with boys, and what she reads, all measures designed to fashion her into a
"decent" woman. Perhaps it might be more accurate to add that he is "pathetically" obsessed, being himself
implicated in a societal system that puts men of means and education in the slot of caretaker and guardian so
he must maintain and improve, juggling old and new ways, or find his own position as "good boy" (defined
by a different but no less compelling rubric) jeopardized. Nyasha's body and her mind, then, are pressed into
Babamukuru's strangely distorted project of asserting his control and preserving his status in society lest it be
challenged: "I am respected in this mission," he announces, "I cannot have a daughter who behaves like a
whore" (114). Nyasha's questionable behavior, punished with a merciless beating, consists of coming in ten
minutes later than her brother Chido--who is not subject to the same rules anyway--and cousin Tambu--who
seldom challenges her uncle's authority or taxes him with the need to exert it--from a school dance. The
survival of patriarchal ideology, of which Babamukuru is torchbearer, depends on its enactment on Nyasha's
very person. This should not be surprising since, in postcolonial terms, the female body has often been the
space where "traditional" cultural practices that ensure male control over it, encoded in words like
"decency," must be preserved. Babamukuru chooses which parts of traditional culture and modernity
(represented through colonial education and ways) Nyasha is to adopt and exhibit to maximize his status as
colonial surrogate and de facto clan elder--a schema analogous to his acceptance of Maiguru's earnings (the
fruit of her Western education), while insisting on her compliance with the traditional requirement of wifely
obedience. The claims of traditional society, of colonial and precolonial modes of production, and of western
aesthetics on Nyasha's body, I would argue, together produce her pathological response. Fanon's contention
that "colonialism in its essence was already taking on the aspect of a fertile purveyor for psychiatric
disorders" (249) must be complicated by the observation that it is not only the colonial war Nyasha is
fighting on the turf of her body but also a battle with the megalomaniacal patriarchal control represented by
36
Babamukuru of whom she says: "Sometimes I feel like I am trapped by that man" (174). Her "anti-colonial"
war, moreover, is complicated by her own collusion with the corrupt system she is fighting--her
unwillingness to relinquish the accent acquired from her brief stay in England, her criticism of the racist
dominion of colonizers while remaining standoffish with her compatriots at school, and the lack of effort at
regaining her native language or contact with homestead relatives--visible to Tambu but unacknowledged, or
unknown to her except in her sense of herself as "hybrid," is also a factor in the war of ideas and values
being narrativized on her corporeal bodily space. Nyasha, "who thrived on inconsistencies," according to
Tambu, seems to internalize the conflicts posed by her surroundings till her tongue, body, and mind seem
together to want to carry the struggle to a dramatic conclusion (116).
18.
The body under siege, then, is not surprisingly the space for resistance. Moreover, Nyasha has exhausted the
options for legitimate engagement with oppression through official means. Having attempted and failed at
reasoning with her father, no "usual" recourse remains. In her view, other adult women in the novel offer no
viable alternatives. Nyasha is quite certain that her "mother doesn't want to be respected. If people did that
they'd have nothing to moan about" (78-79). Having witnessed her mother Maiguru's feeble and feckless
flutters for freedom, when she briefly runs away to her brother's only to return five days later,12 Nyasha,
who elsewhere concedes that her mother is rather "sensible," must look for other means of resistance.
Maiguru's state of "entrapment," foretold for the reader in the very beginning of the novel, and reflected in
her admission that she chose "security" over "self," is precisely what Nyasha is seeking to avoid. Aunt Lucia,
too, who is supposed to be an unmanageable free spirit and, commendably, rejects her paramour Takesure's
questionable support, ultimately disappoints Nyasha by resorting to propitiate Babamukuru. To Nyasha's
complaint that "she's been groveling ever since she arrived to get Daddy to help her out. That sort of thing
shouldn't be necessary," Lucia pragmatically responds, "Babamukuru wanted to be asked, so I asked. And
now we both have what we wanted" (160). Nyasha fails to appreciate that Lucia's strategies are essential to
her. In the final tally, Maiguru, "married" to patriarchy, and Tambu's mother, too tired and too traditional to
engage in a sustained struggle with it, her mind never being hers to make up, remain trapped (153) while
Tambu--with her "finely tuned survival system" (65), and Lucia are the ones who will "escape," both having
learned the value of survival and relative empowerment over enactments of dramatic protest, but effecting
their escape in different ways. But then Nyasha does not have the benefit of hindsight endowed on the reader
by Tambu's prefiguring of the fate of the women in the story. Her critique of women's ingratiating and
subservient ways, however, is instructive.
19.
The implication of women in oppressive cultural codes--the craft and guile evident in their quest for survival
and advancement--is undeniably an issue here. Women provide the mainstay of patriarchal structures. In her
novel, Le Pique-nique sur l'Acropole, Louky Bersianik presents a stunning embodiment of female complicity
in the image of women as petrified pillars supporting the temple of Erectheion in Athens. Acropolis, the
bastion and symbol of traditional Western patriarchal thought is the site of a long male banquet at which
women have served as handmaidens. The homestead and the mission, too, are a picnic for men that women
will cater. Maiguru, Lucia, and Tambu's sporadic gestures of resistance are ultimately "permissible"
infractions because they are followed by propitiatory gestures consonant with compliant performances of
femininity and so do not seriously challenge the extant order; they "play" the system and attempt to prevail
within rather than without it, ultimately gaining some modicum of satisfaction by way of security, a job, or
an education--none of which, we are being told through Nyasha's expostulations and actions, is adequate
compensation. A propos of this issue, however, is the observation that Nyasha herself seems to decide to
give in to Babamukuru's authority because "it is restful to have him pleased (196). The strategies adopted by
Maiguru and Lucia--and on occasion Nyasha herself--are survivalist in nature in contrast to her ultimate
recourse to violent and destructive ones. Her seeming acquiescence toward her father--a survivalist tactic--is
followed, however, by a more solipsistic, private regimen of rebellion: she tells Tambu "that she had
embarked on a diet, to discipline [her] body and occupy [her] mind" (197). The diet and the disease become
for her a holy mission; Rudolph Bell in Holy Anorexia "relates the disease to the religious impulses of
37
medieval nuns, seeing starvation as purification" (qtd. in Wolf 189). To borrow Fanon's words yet again,
"this pathology is considered as a means whereby the organism responds to, in other words adapts itself to,
the conflict it is faced with, the disorder being at the same time a symptom and a cure" (290).13 Or as Wolf
puts it, "The anorexic refuses to let the official cycle master her: By starving, she masters it" (198). Taking
recourse to anorexia and bulimia then becomes for Nyasha a pathetic means of both establishing control over
her body in the only way possible and relinquishing control by giving in to a learned western pathology.
20.
But let us pause. There are two issues of import here: a.) rejection of food has already been read in terms
beyond the vocabulary only of anorexia and bulimia; b.) it is not only food that is being rejected by the
bodily organism. With regard to the first, let us remember that Tambu's mother also abjures food to protest
her departure for the mission at first, and then Sacred Heart because she thinks education and English-ness
will kill Tambu as it has Nhamo (184). Before her departure for the mission, Tambu speculates that "at
Babamukuru's I would have the leisure . . . to consider questions that had to do with survival of the spirit, the
creation of consciousness, rather than mere sustenance of the body," the latter having been a considerable
preoccupation for homestead women (59). That Nyasha can afford the luxury of refusing food is certainly
relevant, but it becomes less significant in light of Mainini's gesture. Refusal to eat is a time honored and
cross-cultural form of protest. Gandhi's program of Satyagraha14 and fasting were pivotal in India's fight for
freedom. It is interesting to pose the case of a teenage girl, hyper-conscious of the territorial offenses against
her, along the same spectrum of protest activity that accommodates Gandhi's lofty project of noncooperation. The difference is that female lives are usually confined to the private sphere; female protests
usually do not find outlet in public ways although one might argue that "the distinction between what is
public and what is private is always a subtle one, " especially if one reads the female body as implicated in
the economy of male and societal desire (Strachey 66). And lest we overlook the obvious, Nyasha, after all,
is only fourteen years old when she begins to stage her gestures of protest.
21.
Her rejection of food is linked to a whole set of other associated unpalatable realities: the anorexic herself
tells us that the fuss is about something else altogether, "it's more than that really, more than just food. That's
how it comes out, but really it's all the things about boys and men and being decent and indecent and good
and bad" (190). Nyasha's commodity status in the sexual economy, for instance, is exposed implicitly
through her anorexic behavior intended to erode the body and prevent its blossoming into womanhood; but it
is also exposed explicitly in a discussion on "private parts" between the cousins. The suppression of her
sexuality at the same time that she is being groomed for an equipoisal matrimonial market, her fear that a
tampon is the only thing that will enter her vaginal orifice "at this rate," and her recommendations, albeit
playful, to Tambu about the relative advantages of losing one's virginity to the sanitary device rather than to
an insensitive braggart, suggest the disbalancement of the market system that would ensue, should the girls
choose to transform sexual restriction into abstinence or "devalue" themselves by accidentally rupturing their
precious membranes (119; 96). The threat is a potent one because virginity is desirable in unmarried women
and functions symbolically, with "the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on
the human body" (Douglas 11). The vulvic crime Nyasha gestures at has the content of a vaginal betrayal of
the patrimonial body of the state--it is the denial of heterosexual exchange, of the preservation of expected
social narratives. While there is no textual evidence of her having lost her virginity thus, Nyasha's larger
project of making the body itself disappear by denying it nourishment tacitly promises to accomplish
something of the same objective.
22.
Ê Tested, tried, and unsuccessful as "good girl," it remains for Nyasha to fail as "good native." Confronted
with her "O" level exams, Nyasha transforms a test situation into a veritable trial of the soul, testing the very
38
mettle of history. Attracted and repelled in almost equal measure by colonial educational and cultural
systems, Nyasha reacts in a foreseeably conflicted manner to the variety of concerns weighing on her mind:
she becomes obsessed with passing the exams which will test her on the colonizer's version of knowledge
even while she is aware that this education is a "gift" of her father's status, and the "knowledge" itself is
questionable. As her body spurns food, her mind is rejecting what the colonizers have called knowledge, and
evincing a hysteric, physical revulsion to "their history. Fucking liars. Their bloody lies" (201). Nyasha's
"body language" is as loud and clear as her words for she is tearing her book to shreds with her teeth as she
rages. But what is the substitute? Dangarembga explains that "one of the problems that most Zimbabwean
people of my generation have is that we really don t have a tangible history we can relate to" (qtd. in
Wilkinson 190-91). Not available to Nyasha are the (his)stories heard in whispers from the margins, in the
brief accounts given by Tambu's grandmother15 who speaks of the history that "could not be found in the
textbooks" (17), about the "wizards" who were avaricious and grasping and annexed Babamukuru's spirit:
"They thought he was a good boy, cultivable, in the way that land is, to yield harvests that sustain the
cultivator" (19). The knowledge she has been fed is less easily digested by Nyasha than it is by the good
native, Babamukuru, although he too, incidentally, suffers from bad nerves. Nyasha's protest transpires
exponentially: "They've trapped us. But I won't be trapped. I'm not a good girl" (201). The moral content of
"goodness," like the symbolic content of "womanhood," are recognized by Nyasha as inherently bankrupt.
Her acute sensibility scans "goodness" as a managerial tool, rather than a moral imperative, that keeps
women and natives in line. Ironically, Nyasha's dramatic indictment of colonial education, delivered in the
language and in an approximation of the accent of the colonizer, speaks eloquently of an embattled and
muddled consciousness attempting to regain control. Nyasha fails in multiple ways as "good native": both in
her failure to accept the totality of colonial education and in her failure to renounce it completely.
23.
Ultimately, then, food is only the metonymic representation of all that Nyasha cannot accept and understand.
Her dwindling body boldly enacts the pervasive and aggregate suffering and bewilderment of colonized
women caught between opposing as well as joined forces. Clearly, she also does not have the stomach for the
deception and lies of the colonial project or the pathetic mimicry of this project by natives like Babamukuru
and his confused and endearment mouthing consort, Maiguru. "It's bad enough," she laments, "when . . . a
country gets colonised, but when the people do as well!" (147). Having learned the discourse of equality and
freedom, young and confused though she might be, Nyasha recognizes that the native has failed to adopt the
more salubrious aspects of Western humanism. The truth is that natives could learn different lessons from
colonial education. Instead, the overwhelming preoccupation with food and food presentation, the "eyeing
and coveting" of dresses outside the mission church, Tambu's visualization of a convent education in terms
of a smart and clean "white blouse and dark-red pleated terylene skirt, with blazer and gloves, and a hat"
(183), the ritualized attention to hierarchy at gatherings, unbridled materialism and lust for goods and items
of "comfort and ease and rest" evident in the mission as Tambu catalogues Babamukuru and Maiguru's
household effects (70), the incongruous adoption of western diet and the presence and prevalence of a
servile, laboring class in the very hearth of the mission, among other symptoms of a community in crisis,
testify to endemic class divisions heightened by a total capitulation to commodity fetishism. The embrace of
selective items of Westernization by Babamukuru and others, even Nyasha, to the exclusion of its more
useful possibilities is exposed throughout the novel. The potential for communicating the principles and
values of Western education is clear to Babamukuru who does not approve of Tambu's desire to go to the
mostly white school because association with white people would cause girls "to have too much freedom," a
consequence incompatible with their eminently desirable development into "decent women" appropriate for
the marriage market (180).
24.
At the same time that the potential for emancipation promised by the colonial encounter is left frustrate by
the natives' refusal to accept the better part of western humanism, the failure of colonizers themselves to
exercise those same principles which serve to legitimize their sense of superiority over "less civilized"
natives is exposed through Nyasha's revolt. Nadel and Curtis explain the psychology of colonial dominion in
39
their introduction to Imperialism and Colonialism: "Underlying all forms of imperialism is the belief--at
times unshakable--of the imperial agent or nation in an inherent right, based on moral superiority as well as
material might, to impose its pre-eminent values and techniques on the 'inferior' indigenous nation or
society" (1). In The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, Tzvetan Todorov demonstrates that
colonialism exerts its control by extending the principle of equality only when it withholds from its Others
the principle of difference. Principles of democracy, freedom, and independence, that fueled the American
and French revolutions as well as reforms in much of the Western world did not, for instance, stand in the
way of colonialism. Nor did concessions to minorities in the developed world encourage officials to extend
the same to colonized subjects. The excesses of African patriarchy, for instance, which repulsed European
sensibilities, were tolerated "in the interest of colonial profit" while the condemnation of polygynous
marriages resulted not from a concern for women but from a need "for the reproduction of the labor force"
(Courville 38). These contradictions are glaringly obvious to young Nyasha. The colonizer's formula for
accommodating the native, as she astutely observes, is to create "an honorary space in which you could join
them and they could make sure you behaved yourself" (178); "But, she insisted, one ought not to occupy that
space. Really, one ought to refuse" (179).
25.
The net impact of Nyasha's "refusal" seems less important than that in her, Dangarembga has offered not
only a textbook example of the havoc wrought by colonial and patriarchal systems, but a narrativization of
the body itself in terms of conflict and resistance and its angry longing for a better, less perplexing world. In
bodily terms, Nyasha almost succeeds in destroying herself, in achieving, if not the body without organs-which is admittedly unrealizable anyway, at least a grotesquely unhealthy remainder of her original self. The
anorexic, after all, is effectively unwomanned and left a shell of herself: "the woman has been killed off in
her. She is almost not there" (Wolf 197). But the woman that dies is the abject self that has never enjoyed the
luxury of self-determination, that is no real woman but an insubstantial changeling who functions as token
and currency in the labor and matrimonial market. Nyasha's pathological persona enacts a multi-pronged
assault on a complex and interwoven system that involves the body and the mind, patriarchy and the female
body, colonialism and history, reinscribing the text of history and psycho-social sexuality, of Corpus and
Socius (Deleuze and Guattari 150). Nyasha has attempted an attack on the corporeal to annihilate the
symbolic. What is left is the BwO which is "what remains when you take everything away. What you take
away is precisely the phantasy, and signifiances [sic] and subjectifications as a whole" (151). Whether the
violence of her rebellion has left her more "stratified-- organized, signified, subjected" must be determined in
light of the only choices that remained; for finding out how to make the BwO is "a question of life and death,
youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out" (161;151).
26.
Nyasha's offensive against her bodily self reenacts the narrative of violence on woman and native while at
the same time gesturing at the possibility of agency: signaling from the bathroom and the bedroom (her
favorite retreats) that a more pervasive insurgence, a more public and widespread struggle by women for
freedom from the patriarchal and colonial order may be soon to follow. This promise is manifested not only
in Tambu and Lucia's "escape," but in recent campaigns against female abuse in Zimbabwe and organized
assistance for abused and disenfranchised women. These struggles must be recognized no matter what shape
they are in; a responsible reading must reinstate female praxis to a central place in feminist and postcolonial
politics. Given such a reading, one might say that regardless of the fact that Tambu is mildly disapproving of
her cousin's behavior, the text of Nyasha's "bodybildungsroman" (in Kathy Acker's memorable neologism)
does tell Zimbabwean girls stories about themselves in terms that expose the crises they are likely to
encounter. Nyasha's condition reveals to her cousin her own impending crisis; when the cornerstone of one's
security begins to "crumble," she admits that "You start worrying about yourself" (199). The import of
Nyasha's theatrics might be measured in terms of its placement within the larger context of female and
postcolonial existence in a society struggling to reconcile competing and conflicted narratives. The promise
of something gained is evident in the textual arrangement of the narrative as well, in the parting words of
Tambu, who had once said "it did not take long for me to learn that they [Whites] were in fact more beautiful
40
[than Blacks] and then I was able to love them" (104), and who at the end of the novel ominously remarks
that "seeds do grow" (203) and "something in my mind began to assert itself" (204). The novel, after all, is a
kunstler and bildungsroman which catalogues Tambu's maturation even as she functions as the amanuensis
of Nyasha's performances. Tambu's changing consciousness is the stuff of hope; it is no less than the promise
of a different text, a whole new corpus, in the future.
School of Literature, Communication, and Culture Georgia Institute of Technology
deepika.bahri@modlangs.gatech.edu
Copyright © 1994 Deepika Bahri
NOTE: Readers may use portions of this work in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright
law.
In addition, subscribers and members of subscribed institutions may use the entire work for any internal
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Notes
1."The status of 'native' is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized
people with their consent" (20).
2.For this last realization, I am indebted to my friend Ritch Calvin\Koons who collaborated with me on a
performance dialogue on the novel at the International Conference on Narrative Literature in Vancouver in
1994.
3.Nyasha begins to engage in starvation (anorexic) and purging (bulimic) activities when she is fourteen.
Anorexia and bulimia are provisionally being described as Western female pathologies because, according to
Naomi Wolf, "Anorexia and bulimia are female maladies: From 90 to 95 percent of anorexics and bulimics
are women" and most Western women can be called, twenty years into the backlash, mental anorexics (181;
183). I would suggest that industrialization and development in the ersatz third-world countries and contact
with "first world" cultures may be producing a similar profile among women in the developing world
although research in this area remains scant. Nyasha's illness, interestingly enough, is not recognized by a
white psychiatrist because "Africans did not suffer in the way we had described" (201). At a conference in
November 1993, I heard a graduate student paper on anorexia based on research for her dissertation. The
student had been interviewing women anorexics in western countries and was surprised when I suggested
that she might investigate instances in the non-western parts of the world. She had never considered the
possibility. For the moment, it would appear, anorexia and bulimia remain western preserves.
4.This is noted by Sally McWilliams in her analysis of the novel: "Their [Nyasha and Tambu's] personal
histories are undergoing radical repositioning at the same time as their political histories are altering" (111).
5.In her interview with George and Scott, the author states, "Western literary analysis always calls Nyasha
self-destructive, but I'm not sure whether she is self-destructive" (314).
41
6.Forthcoming interview. See complete reference in "Works Cited."
7.Kristeva suggests that the ultimate abjection occurs at the moment of birth, "in the immemorial violence
with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be" (10).
8.This paper does not discuss colonialism and patriarchy as pathologies although this aspect of all projects of
domination is an important one to bear in mind nor does it investigate the case of Babamukuru as controlled
by colonial education and traditional cultural codes--fruitful subjects for quite another discussion.
9.Jeremiah also "steals" his daughter and pregnant sister-in-law, Lucia's labor when he takes credit for
thatching a roof they have been slaving to mend.
10.A White woman in town gives her money for the maize entirely because she misconstrues Tambu's
enterprise for "Child labour. Slavery" (28), the only language available for explaining Tambu's presence in
the city as a seller of green maize. She nevertheless takes pity on Tambu and gives her money for the school
fees after Mr. Matimba, her headmaster explains (and exaggerates) her predicament.
11.In the interest of fairness, one must acknowledge that education does not free Babamukuru either from
service to patriarchy and neo-colonialism. It is Nyasha once again who recognizes that "They did it to them
too . . . . To both of them [Babamukuru and Maiguru] but especially to him. They put him through it all"
(200). His positioning within these systems, however, is so different from Maiguru's that his story, in some
ways the same as that of the women, still tells a different tale that would require a significantly different
critical model to explain it.
12.Nyasha complains that "she always runs to men . . . . There's no hope" (175).
13.It may be useful to note at this juncture that both Fanon and Dangarembga were trained in medicine and
psychology.
14.Hindi for passive resistance.
15.In her interview with George and Scott, Dangarembga explains her rationale for the grandmother figure:
I didn't have a grandmother or a person in my
family who was a historian who could tell me about
the recent past. And so I felt the lack of such a
history very much more. I'm sure that other
Zimbabwean women who perhaps did have that need
fulfilled in reality would not have felt such a
lack, such a dearth as I did, and would not have
felt so strongly compelled to create a f
42
Purging a plate full of colonial history: The 'Nervous Conditions' of silent girls.
(Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel) (Third World Women's Inscriptions)
College Literature
| February 01, 1995 | Hill, Janice E. | Copyright
Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga is currently writing the sequel to her first novel, Nervous
Conditions (1988).(1) Indeed, the conclusion seems to invite a sequel:
It was a process whose events stretched over many years and would fill another volume, but the story I have
told here, is my own story, the story of four women whom I loved, and our men, this story is how it all
began. (204)
Dangarembga's narrator, Tambu Sigauke, describes the events that lead up to the conclusion of her story as a
seed she buries in her mind. "But seeds do grow," Tambu tells her reader (203). By the end of the story, she
has begun the "long and painful process" out of which narrative voice will grow(204).
In Dangarembga's novel, however, the cultivation of voice and of the mind through education is inextricably
connected with a problematic silencing that is manifested through symptoms of illness. Tambu, who is
unable to express disobedience verbally, does so through her body. She refuses, by feigning paralysis, to
become complicit in events over which she has little control. For her cousin, Nyasha, the refusal to eat food
and later, the regurgitation of food become acts of rebellion. She expresses a voiceless anger through her
body and her mouth.
The title, Nervous Conditions, comes from a statement Dangarembga uses as the prologue to her novel "The condition of native is a nervous condition" - taken from the introduction to Frantz Fanon's The
Wretched of the Earth (1963), in which he wrote about the psychosocial effects of colonization. Thus, illness
is a preexistent, thematic condition under which the events of the novel take place. For Nyasha and Tambu,
the condition of native as a nervous condition comprises not only colonization but also the condition of
gender and the condition of female education. Their attempts to function in a society that does not allow
them socially acceptable verbal or written outlets as educated, female Africans result in their being punished
for inappropriate expressions of dissatisfaction and anger.
Because Nyasha is the character who articulates most of the historically "real" political events mentioned in
the narrative, she expresses most clearly Dangarembga's thematic articulation of illness as a colonial
condition. On a metaphoric level, colonialism and Western influence are presented as contaminations that
infect and threaten the lives and health of the colonized. If physical and psychological illness can be read as
symptomatic of colonialism, it can be cured only by independence, so the ending of Dangarembga's narrative
looks ahead to the time of Zimbabwean independence, although the novel itself ends several years before
then. And since Nyasha's rebellion against the silencing of her voice and body is a gendered rebellion against
patriarchal authority, her personal experience of rebellion figures the guerilla war taking place in Southern
Rhodesia during the 1960s and 70s when the novel is set.
Silence and obedience are important values in Shona culture, the Sigauke family's ethnic tribe, and in
colonial Southern Rhodesia. In an anthropological work entitled The Genuine Shona: Survival Values of an
43
African Culture (1973), which was published about the time the events of the novel, but not the story, were
coming to a close, Michael Gelfand describes Shona families as being structured by a clearly defined
paternal system of rank. Women were lower in rank than men, gaining in status as their brothers and sons
moved higher in family rank. The Shona displayed respect for anyone of a higher status through what
Gelfand describes as "good manners," by being silent and obedient in that person's presence. Gelfand
contends that, among Shona family members, "harmony" reigned, and there was an "appreciation of the
status of every member of the group." This led "to a well disciplined unit" that ensured the avoidance of
"friction" (29, 33). Such a tradition of silence and obedience was reinforced by the way colonial government
stratified society along racial lines. Southern Rhodesia's codified system of segregation ensured that Whites,
legally higher in rank, were treated with silence and obedience by Africans. In Nervous Conditions the use of
spoken language, particularly English, signals power, and the lack of language signals lack of power.
Because Nyasha disregards rank, her speech disrupts and threatens the authority of gender- and racedetermined status in colonial society.
Colonial education, and the drive of the entire Sigauke family to educate themselves and each other through
the colonial system, drive and complicate much of the action of the novel in ways that are directly connected
to silencing and voice. Although Whites often determined that the Africans who benefitted most from a
colonial education were the ones least likely to threaten the social order, mastery of written and spoken
English had currency in Shona society because it provided access to economic power in a way that
circumvented race-determined rank. "Whites were indulgent towards promising young black boys in those
days, provided that the promise was a peaceful promise, a grateful promise to accept whatever was handed
out to them and not to expect more" (106). Nyasha's parents, Babamukuru and Maiguru, owe their current
prosperity to the missionary system, so they place a high value on colonial education.
Under Babamukuru's direction, the family uses its limited resources first to educate the sons, then to educate
the daughters, although not in the same style. Nyasha's brother, Chido, goes to a boarding school on a
scholarship arranged by Mr. Baker, the white missionary who sends his sons, but not his daughter, to
boarding school. Nyasha and Nyaradzo Baker are being educated at the mission school. And while Tambu's
brother, Nhamo, attends school at the mission, Tambu goes to the village school until she replaces him at the
mission after his death. It is through education that Nyasha and Tambu develop many of the skills that enable
them to question the validity of the patriarchal and colonial system according them an inferior status, but
their questioning is always silenced in a way that is crucially connected to the nervous conditions they
develop.
In a country where most Africans are poor, the currency of food is both real and symbolic. Nyasha uses the
refusal of food as a weapon of control and power, but in addition to the eating disorder she develops, issues
of food permeate the narrative in tangled power relationships with education, language, gender, race, and
class. During the period when Babamukuru and Maiguru are in England on missionary scholarships,
studying for Master's …
44