When the Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga published her first and only novel, Nervous Conditions in 1989, she was immediately recognized as a major new force in African literature. First, it is an autobiographical novel that draws on her experiences as a black child from a middle-class family growing up in England and later having to struggle to reconcile her inherited Englishness with the traditional beliefs and practices of rural Zimbabwe. Second, the novel’s probing attempt to understand the tormented lives of colonial subjects, especially women, reflects Dangarembga’s interest and training in psychology.
But the most important reason why the novel has quickly become a classic in the canon of African literature is its hybrid character, especially in relation to the history of the novel on the continent. Instead of breaking from the realism and modernism associated with her predecessors, Dangarembga’s novel appropriates those formal practices and yet transforms them by focusing on questions of gender and the inner lives of African women. In terms of its subject, Nervous Conditions takes on the most familiar themes in African literature.
It is concerned with questions of tradition and modernity, the constitution and education of colonial subjects, the emergence of cultural nationalism, and the coming into power of a new African elite. Tsitsi Dangarembga in her novel Nervous Conditions (1988) presents women’s psychical dissonance as a function of the interplay between colonialism and patriarchy. Nyasha, the anglicized daughter of a domineering Westernized father, feels an outsider when back in Zimbabwe, and she internalizes her cultural displacement, developing an eating disorder which threatens her life.
However, Tambu, the protagonist, learns from the condition of her cousin not to denigrate the invaluable immersion in tradition she has had through the women around her: her grandmother and her mother, for example. Furthermore, through her mother’s sister she is offered a model of strong womanhood anchored in the cultural values and lore of Shona society. In this, Tambu develops from a naive village girl who worships everything Western, especially as represented by her uncle Bambamukuru, to a wary adolescent who is much more cautious of her uncle’s position.
Realizing that, within the context of the racialized politics of Zimbabwe, he is merely an African overseer who is the black face of colonial authority. Through the rebellion of Maimuguru, the uncle’s wife, she learns the difficulties in-but also the possibility of-combining tradition and modernity in producing new modes of gendered identity. Dangarembga modified novel’s themes in a subtle and gentle way, showing how, for example, the opposition between tradition and modernity which structured most African literature in the 1950s and 1960s was not as clear-cut as it initially seemed.
Indeed, by placing women at the center of her novel she shows how they are neither the romantic embodiments of an African tradition nor active agents of modernity. The women in her novel are placed in a nervous condition in relation to both the traditions dominated by men and the modernity controlled by them. Whether at home or school, the two main characters in Dangarembga’s novel, Tambu and Nyasha, like their mothers, exist at the edge of the world, denied entry into either the traditional or the modern domain. They are hence forced to create and re-create their own traditions and notions of the modern.
Dangarembga’s novel is told in realistic style. But this use of realism enables her to focus simultaneously on the inner world of her characters, and their everyday experiences which take place against the background provided by Zimbabwe’s journey out of colonialism. Tsitsi Dangarembga ‘s Nervous Conditions (1989) is a novel of education. It is premised on the crisis triggered in its subjects by the process of education, which functions both as an opportunity and as a loss. Education is an opportunity because it provides the characters with social mobility, material advancement, and the expansion of horizons.
But it is also plotted as a loss because the more the characters move toward the horizons defined by colonial mobility, the more they are distanced from their natal spaces or at least from the mythology of a pristine culture. Many of the novels in this tradition are written from the perspective of this loss as their characters take stock of their situation and try to balance the relative privilege of their education with the loss it has engendered. Nervous Conditions technically unfolds in the very late colonial period when Zimbabwe is still Rhodesia.
The work shows the process of development of a radical consciousness of the female protagonist. Nervous Conditions illustrates how one daughter followed a path from blind ambition, in which she nearly lost her soul to the material temptations of westernization, to eventual recognition and an awakened consciousness of the violence done to her people and their traditions. Nervous Conditions is perhaps unique in its bold attempts to play out the various possibilities for African sons and daughters with regard to different models of westernization.
In Nhamo, for example, we see the sad tale of one who submits wholeheartedly to “modernization” and indeed does lose his soul and, shortly thereafter, his life. In Nyasha, who serves almost as an alter ego for Tambu, we see the ruin of a strong, capable African daughter who gets caught between tradition and change and is rendered a misfit. Near the end of the novel, as she sits pathetically in her mother’s lap in the throes of her nervous breakdown, “looking no more than five years old,” Nyasha is ironically able to pinpoint the truth: “‘Look what they’ve done to us . . I’m not one of them but I’m not one of you. ” (Dangarembga, 201) Tambu, however, as protagonist and narrator, remains the focal point of the novel. An exceptionally intriguing daughter/son in terms of what she represents with regard to the conflict of tradition versus change, Tambu remains, for most of the novel, an ambitious seeker of a more westernized life style. In this sense, she is “feminist”. She exhibits a strong determination to go to school.
Early on she faces many of the patriarchal obstacles that confronted Akunna, but she is a much stronger, more assertive character than Akunna, who is actually, despite her inner determination, rather meek. Later, after her brother’s death, she enjoys some family support for her education, mainly through Babamukuru and his family, but she never experiences the unqualified communal support that Njoroge had, mainly because no one, herself included, sees her education as having much potential to ameliorate the “nervous conditions” under which the people live.
Still, her desire to be accepted in a world of men and her growing taste for luxury (along with her revulsion for the “brutal squalor” of her old home life) drive her on. Tambu’s relentless quest for a western-style education is rather surprising, given that her own narrative casts such pursuits as hypocritical. Thus, she hates her brother for having rejected his roots, but is herself unable to recognize that the same thing is happening to her. Oblivious to the irony of her actions, she seeks for herself that which she deplores as abominable in others.
As such, she appears at this point to represent the type of feminist daughter who fails to see that pursuit of western “emanicipation” for women inevitably results in the loss of a valuable Afrocentric balance between issues of gender and racial discrimination. One of the most powerful illustrations of Tambu’s misguided behavior is her callous disregard of her mother’s distress. When her mother learns about Tambu’s wishes to follow in the dead Nhamo’s footsteps, she is inconsolable. Despite her mother’s terrible anxiety and impassioned pleas that Tambu remain at home, she refuses to alter her course.
Coldly and dispassionately, Tambu recounts: . . . I went to the mission all the same. My mother’s anxiety was real. In the week before I left she ate hardly anything, not for lack of trying, and when she was able to swallow something, it lay heavy on her stomach. By the time I left she was so haggard and gaunt she could hardly walk to the fields, let alone work on them. “Is mother ill? ” whispered Netsai [Tambu’s sister], frightened. “Is she going to die too? ” Netsai was frightened. I, I was triumphant. Babamukuru had approved my direction. I was vindicated! Dangarembga, 56-57) Here the juxtaposition of Tambu’s mother’s great suffering with Tambu’s insensitive self-absorption underscores Dangarembga’s disapproval of such behavior by a daughter. Yet Tambu- as-participant is shockingly unaware of the cruelty and hypocrisy of her actions. In a crucial moment of recognition, Tambu perceives that, to an extent, her history of enthusiasm for the “modernization” offered by Babamukuru “had stunted the growth of my faculty of criticism, sapped the energy that in childhood I had used to define my own position. (Dangarembga, 164) In an action that marks the beginning of her true rebelliousness as a daughter, Tambu avoids the wedding and receives “fifteen lashes” and is made to assume the housekeeper’s chores. Tambu’s “rebelliousness” contrasts sharply with the action of Akunna, who turns against tradition by pursuing a modern education. Tambu rebels against the “modern” ways of westernization in order to affirm tradition. Tambu’s radicalization intensifies at the end of the novel with Nyasha’s breakdown, which is closely identified with the brutalizing impact of colonization.
Ceasing to blame “tradition,” Nyasha launches into a lengthy and caustic indictment of imperialism: “It’s not [my parents’] fault. They did it to them too. . . especially to [Babamukuru]. . . But it’s not his fault, he’s good. ” Her voice took on a Rhodesian accent. “He’s a good boy, a good munt. A bloody good kaffir,” she informed in sneering, sarcastic tones. Then she was whispering again. “Why do they do it, Tambu,” she hissed bitterly, her face contorting with rage, “to me and to you and to him? . . . They’ve taken us away. . . . All of us.
They’ve deprived you of you, him of him, ourselves of each other. We’re grovelling. . . . I won’t grovel. ” (Dangarembga,199) . . . Nyasha was beside herself with fury. She rampaged, shredding her history book between her teeth (“Their history. Fucking liars. Their bloody lies. “), breaking mirrors . . . jabbing the fragments viciously into her flesh. . . .”They’ve trapped us. . . . I don’t hate you, Daddy. . . . They want me to, but I won’t. ” (Dangarembga, 200-201) In this incredibly poignant speech, Nervous Conditions allows the devastated and disconsolate Nyasha to speak for Tambu, as well.
If Tambu remains the more emotionally stable of the two, it is none the less clear that she has come to appreciate the insights into the soul-destroying practices of colonialism that Nyasha offers. In the process, Tambu’s feminism, like that of Nyasha, has become more complete. Thus it is that, by the novel’s end, Tambu-as-participant and Tambu-as-narrator merge into one. They fuse into the persona of Tambu the enlightened daughter, who understands that she must be assertive, must “question things and refuse to be brainwashed. (Dangarembga, 204) This is the Tambu who recognizes that one way in which she can make a contribution to the restoration of the integrity of ‘her people is to become Tambuas-narrator, the one who will “set down this story. ” (204) As she notes in the final sentence of the novel, “It was a long and painful process for me” (204), and it is precisely the book’s success in presenting this process by which Tambu develops from an unenlightened daughter into an enlightened woman that distinguishes Nervous Conditions as central to any discussion of the depiction of sons and daughters in contemporary African literature.
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions reminds also readers that the issues of socio-psychological interaction and cultural stress, which are explored by Dangarembga in the gendered family situation, will continue to have an important effect on the lives of people in any new Zimbabwean nation.
