Tsitsi Dangarembga

Nervous Conditions

Part one!

HISTORY AND THE NOVEL!

Let’s begin our study of Nervous Conditions with some historical and contextual information

The story takes place in sub-Saharan Africa.

In a country then known as Rhodesia, and now known as Zimbabwe.

Rhodesia: A self-governing British colony until 1965.

Led by a small white minority, with a majority Black population.

Closely linked to its neighbour South Africa, also led by a white minority government at this time.

In 1965, after failed negotiations with the British government to try and preserve the minority government, Rhodesia declared a UDI (unilateral declaration of independence).

Still ruled by white minority government, headed by Ian Smith.

Beginning of (guerrilla) resistance movement that would eventually lead to a majority government and full independence in 1980.

The Text of the UDI

Highlights of Ian Smith’s Announcement of the UDI

Let no one believe that this action today marks a radical departure from the principles by which we have lived, or be under any misconception that now the Constitution will be torn up and that the protection of the rights of all peoples which are enshrined in that Constitution will be abrogated and disregarded. Neither let it be thought that this event marks a diminution in the opportunities which our African people have to advance and prosper in Rhodesia. Far from this being the case, it is our intention, in consultation with the chiefs, to bring them into the Government and administration as the acknowledged leaders of the African people on a basis acceptable to them… There can be no solution to our racial problems while African nationalists believe that, provided they stirred up sufficient trouble, they will be able to blackmail the British Government into bringing about a miracle on their behalf by handing the country over to irresponsible rule. There will be no happiness in this country, while the absurd situation continues to exist where people such as ourselves, who have ruled ourselves with an impressive record for over 40 years, are denied what is freely granted to other countries, who have ruled themselves in some cases for no longer than a year.

A Timeline of Rhodesia’s Slow Decolonization

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/11/

newsid_2658000/2658445.stm

“In 1969 under the Land Tenure Act, the proportion of land between whites and blacks was 'equalized' at 41.4 per cent of the land. The land allocated to a population of approximately 250,000 whites remained in the highveld or fertile areas with comparatively regular rainfall; that allocated or re-allocated to approximately 6.5 million blacks was divided into 160 areas of much poorer land with little rainfall and over-populated by both people and cattle. The seizure and unequal distribution of land, the discrimination in education, employment, pay, and the right to vote, and the intransigence of the Rhodesian government which led to the Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1965, were the main reasons why the black population resorted to arms and Zimbabwe underwent a civil war which lasted from 1963-1980. Zimbabweans had lived under a white government for 94 years.” —Irene Staunton, Publishing Director, Baobab Books (from the Postcolonial Web, www.postcolonial.web.org)

Social Organization in Southern Africa

•  Apartheid in South Africa and Similar Mechanisms in Zimbabwe

•  Interactions between ‘Whites’ and ‘Non-Whites’ Largely Illegal, Including Marriage/Relationships

•  Racially Segregated Schools

•  Overall Paucity of Educational Opportunities for Non-whites and Few Professional Jobs for Them

•  Emphasis on Keeping Black Africans in Situations of Rural Poverty

•  Control of the Economy by a Small Number of Large Landowners and Professionals (Mainly English or Afrikaner)

Note the relevance of all this for Dangarembga’s Novel!

•  Narrated RETROSPECTIVELY (& in the first person) by Tambudzai AFTER Zimbabwe’s independence!!“All the same, had I been writing these things at the time that they happened, there would have been many references to ‘palace’ and ‘mansion’ and ‘castle’ in this section” (62)!

•  Purposely set at a time of transition (1968 to shortly before 1980)!•  Makes Tambu’s story an ALLEGORY for the development of

Zimbabwe!•  Note sheltered environment of the mission school!•  Observe Tambu’s fight for education as the sole means of

advancement in a prejudiced society!

•  Pay attention to the dislocation of a tiny black elite overseas to gain education and other qualifications and the difficulties of their reintegration into their society: –  Language:

“He had forgotten how to speak Shona. A few words escaped haltingly, ungrammatically and strangely accented when he spoke to my mother… Father was pleased with Nhamo’s command of the English language. He said it was the first step in the family’s emancipation… [Mother] did want him to be educated, she confided to me, but even more, she wanted to talk to him” (53).

–  Social Status –  Rural and Urban Tensions

Overt Political Subtext? From Jean-Paul Sartre’s Introduction to Frantz Fanon’s

Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), 1961:

Violence in the colonies does not only have for its aim the keeping of these enslaved men at arm’s length; it seeks to dehumanize them. Everything will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours…

But it does not happen immediately. At first the European’s reign continues. He has already lost the battle, but this is not obvious; he does not yet know that the natives are only half-native; to hear him talk, it would seem that he ill-treats them in order to destroy or to repress the evil that they have rooted in them; and after three generations their pernicious instincts will reappear no more. What instincts does he mean? The instincts that urge slaves on to massacre their master? Can he not here recognize his own cruelty turned against himself? In the savagery of these oppressed peasants, does he not find his own settler’s savagery, which they have absorbed through every pore and for which there is no cure? The reason is simple; this imperious being, crazed by his absolute power and by the fear of losing it, no longer remembers clearly that he was once a man; he takes himself for a horsewhip or a gun; he has come to believe that the domestication of the ‘inferior races’ will come about by the conditioning of their reflexes.

But in this he leaves out of account the human memory and the ineffaceable marks left upon it; and then, above all there is something which perhaps he has never known: we only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us. Three generations did we say? Hardly has the second generation opened their eyes than from then on they’ve seen their fathers being flogged. In psychiatric terms, they are ‘traumatized’, for life. But these constantly renewed aggressions, far from bringing them to submission, thrust them into an unbearable contradiction which the European will pay for sooner or later. After that, when it is their turn to be broken in, when they are taught what shame and hunger and pain are, all that is stirred up in them is a volcanic fury whose force is equal to that of the pressure put upon them. You said they understand nothing but violence? Of course; first, the only violence is the settlers; but soon they will make it their own; that is to say, the same violence is thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror.

Make no mistake about it; by this mad fury, by this bitterness and spleen, by their ever-present desire to kill us, by the permanent tensing of powerful muscles which are afraid to relax, they have become men: men because of the settler, who wants to make beasts of burden of them — because of him, and against him… If this suppressed fury fails to find an outlet, it turns in a vacuum and devastates the oppressed creatures themselves. In order to free themselves they even massacre each other. The different tribes fight between themselves since they cannot face the real enemy — and you can count on colonial policy to keep up their rivalries; the man who raises his knife against his brother thinks that he has destroyed once and for all the detested image of their common degradation, even though these expiatory victims don’t quench their thirst for blood. They can only stop themselves from marching against the machine-guns by doing our work for us; of their own accord they will speed up the dehumanisation that they reject. Under the amused eye of the settler, they will take the greatest precautions against their own kind by setting up supernatural barriers, at times reviving old and terrible myths, at others binding themselves by scrupulous rites. It is in this way that an obsessed person flees from his deepest needs — by binding himself to certain observances which require his attention at every turn. They dance; that keeps them busy; it relaxes their painfully contracted muscles; and then the dance mimes secretly, often without their knowing, the refusal they cannot utter and the murders they dare not commit. In certain districts they make use of that last resort — possession by spirits. Formerly this was a religious experience in all its simplicity, a certain communion of the faithful with sacred things; now they make of it a weapon against humiliation and despair; Mumbo-Jumbo and all the idols of the tribe come down among them, rule over their violence and waste it in trances until it in exhausted.

At the same time these high-placed, personages protect them; in other words the colonized people protect themselves against colonial estrangement by going one better in religious estrangement, with the unique result that finally they add the two estrangements together and each reinforces the other. Thus in certain psychoses the hallucinated person, tired of always being insulted by his demon, one fine day starts hearing the voice of an angel who pays him compliments; but the jeers don’t stop for all that; only from then on, they alternate with congratulations. This is a defence, but it is also the end of the story; the self is disassociated, and the patient heads for madness. Let us add, for certain other carefully selected unfortunates, that other witchery of which I have already spoken: Western culture. If I were them, you may say, I'd prefer my mumbo-jumbo to their Acropolis. Very good: you’ve grasped the situation. But not altogether, because you aren’t them — or not yet. Otherwise you would know that they can’t choose; they must have both. Two worlds: that makes two bewitchings; they dance all night and at dawn they crowd into the churches to hear mass; each day the split widens. Our enemy betrays his brothers and becomes our accomplice; his brothers do the same thing. The status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.

Living Between and Within Two Worlds •  The Colonizer •  The Colonized •  Estrangement

“We had forgotten what home was like. I mean really forgotten--what it looked like, what it smelt like, all the things to do and say and not to do and say. It was all strange and new. Not like anything we were used to. It was a real shock” (78).

•  Education as a Strategy of Alienation •  Internalization of Tensions between Different Systems

•  The “Psychological Trauma” of This Situation •  The status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and

maintained by the settler among the colonized people with their consent.

… my story is not after all about death, but about my escape and Lucia’s; about my mother’s and Maiguru’s entrapment;

and about Nyasha’s rebellion—Nyasha, far-minded and isolated, my uncle’s daughter, whose rebellion may not in the end have been successful. (1)

Estrangement: Tambu on Her Brother:

All this poverty began to offend [Nhamo], or at the very least to embarrass him after he went to the mission, in a way that it had not done before. Before he went to the mission, we had been able to agree that although our squalor was brutal, it was uncompromisingly ours; that the burden of dispelling it was, as a result, ours too. But then something he saw at the mission turned his mind to thinking our homestead no longer had any claim upon him, so that when he did come home for his vacations, it was as if he had not: he was not very sociable… (7)

On Cleansing Ceremonies: [Nyasha] was curious too about the proposed cleansing ceremonies, confessed that her ignorance of these things embarrassed her and asked me about all sorts of fine details, details that I was not very sure of since we did not often perform the rituals any more. 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… When I confronted Nyasha with this evidence of the nature of progress, she became quite annoyed and delivered a lecture on the dangers of assuming that Christian ways were progressive ways. ‘It’s bad enough,’ she said severely, ‘when a country gets colonized, but when the people do as well! That’s the end, really, that’s the end.

Nervous Conditions is an example “of postcolonial ‘fictional texts in which their narrators or protagonists function as surrogates for writers as transnational intellectuals’ who query and reject Western intellectual structures while, paradoxically, occupying them.”

—Christopher Okonkwo, discussing Biman Basu’s ‘Trapped and Troping: Allegories of the Transnational Intellectual’ (ARIEL, 1997)

Historical Conflict Internalized: The Turn to Gender

Nyasha was beside herself with fury. She rampaged, shredding her history book between her teeth (‘Their history! Fucking liars. Their bloody lies.), breaking mirrors, her clay pots, anything she could lay her hands on and jabbing the fragments viciously into her flesh, stripping the bedclothes, tearing her clothes from the wardrobe and trampling them underfoot. ‘They’ve trapped us. They’ve trapped us. But I won’t be trapped. I’m not a good girl. I won’t be trapped.’… The next morning she was calm, but she assured me it was an illusion, the eye of a 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 her wry gin. ‘But I am afraid,’ she told me apologetically. ‘It upsets people.’ (201)

Nervous Conditions

PART TWO: Thinking about Gender

Gender in the Context of Nervous Conditions Traditional Ideas about Women

in Southern African Societies •  Strong Sense of Patriarchal Order; Women Subservient

to Men. •  Women Have No Voice in Village Councils. •  Women Marry Young. •  Women’s Roles Include Child-rearing, Household Duties,

Farming. Women as Backbone of Home, Family. •  Women Denied Education. Educated women aren’t

“decent” (181). •  Fat Women Considered Beautiful Because in a Poor

Agricultural Society, Fatness=Health and Prosperity •  Women’s Condition Is To Suffer. •  Women Remain in the Villages while Men Migrate for

Work.

Source: World Bank

The needs and sensibilities of the women in my family were not considered a priority, or even legitimate. That was why I was in Standard Three in the year that Nhamo died, instead of in Standard Five, as I should have been by that age. In those days I felt the injustice of my situation every time I thought about it, which I could not help but do often since children are always talking about their age. Thinking about it, feeling the injustice of it, this is how I came to dislike my brother, and not only my brother: my father, my mother--in fact, everybody. (12)

African scholars and critics, including Dangarembga, have argued that:

Ø Colonialism made the situation much worse for women in Africa.

Ø Pre-colonial Africa allowed women more scope, especially in terms of power within sexual relations and marriage.

Ø The introduction of Christianity strengthened the patriarchy.

Ø The migration of men for economic reasons introduced by colonialism weakened men’s sense of responsibility for their families.

Patriarchs/Patriarchal Forces in Nervous Conditions

o  Jeremiah o  Babamukuru o  Nhamo o  Mission School

‘Expatriates’ o  White-led

Government

Babamukuru

I am the head of the house. Anyone who defies my authority is an evil thing in this house, bent on destroying what I have made. (167)

‘Whatever they thought,’ she said, ‘much good did it do them! I still studied for that degree and got it in spite of all them—your uncle, your grandparents and the rest of your family. Can you tell me now that they aren’t pleased that I did, even if they don’t admit it? No! Your uncle wouldn’t be able to do half the things he does if I didn’t work as well…

‘…When I was in England I glimpsed for a little while the things I could have been, the things I could have done if—if—if things were—different—But there was Babawa Chido and the children and the family. And does anyone realise, does anyone appreciate, what sacrifices were made? As for me, no one even thinks of the things I gave up.’ She collected herself. ‘But that’s how it goes Sisi Tambu! And when you have a good man and lovely children, it makes it all worth while.’ (101-2)

How are the characters in Nervous Conditions caught between these different roles

(and their own desires)?

v Tambudzai (whose name means “Never Rest”)? v Nyasha? v Maiguru? v Lucia? v Mainini? v Tete Gladys? v Dangarembga herself (whose biography is more

like Nyasha’s than that of her protagonist Tambu)?

Pauline Ada Uwakweh: “Debunking Patriarchy: The Liberational Quality of

Voicing in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions”

Three categories of women characters in the novel:�

1.  the 'escaped' females 2.  the 'entrapped' females 3.  the ‘rebellious’ females�

•  Tambu and Lucia as escaped females •  Mainini and Maiguru as entrapped females •  Nyasha as the rebellious female�

[For more info, see

http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/nervousconditions.html]

Nervous Conditions as Counter-Narrative Against Patriarchy

First page of the novel: … my story is not after all about death, but

about my escape and Lucia’s; about my mother’s and Maiguru’s entrapment; and about Nyasha’s rebellion - Nyasha, far-minded and isolated, my uncle’s daughter, whose rebellion may not in the end have been successful.

Last page of the novel: …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.

Dangarembga in a BBC Interview (2005)

What is the role of women in Africa today? The role of African women has not changed much. We bear children, make and manage homes, earn our living, contribute to the running of society. What has changed is the context. In today's post modern information age, we are coping with new problems of isolation, disintegration of traditional networks and support systems and the increasing pace of life.

What challenges do they face? I think one problem is a lack of unity amongst women. Challenges are economic and social. The latter being in terms of the roles women are assigned in society. The economic situation is worsening by the day as a result of the market economy that determines access to and distribution of commodities. Traditionally women have been excluded from economically viable positions in society, and women are having to challenge this exclusion constantly.

Great gains have been made, but the challenge is still with us.

Dangarembga: Are women's voices being heard?

I personally do not think women's voices are being heard at adequate volume nationally, or internationally. It is very difficult for a woman to rise to a position where she has national and international recognition. Often, on the way, the women's struggle takes a back seat as she struggles for survival. Once a woman has secured a position, she is also aware of the national problems which need to be tackled. It is therefore often difficult to emphasise women's issues when there are many pressing national issues. I think the bottom line is that as Africa gets poorer, women are going to suffer. This is certainly the case in Zimbabwe, and there is great widespread resentment at those who control the world's resources for putting the country in this position.

Dangarembga: What stigmas or taboos prevent women having a stronger voice and if so,

what could change this? Women still want to get married, and always will. Thus women often tend to present themselves as good potential or actual wives by adopting meek and submissive ways of behaving. I think upbringing can change this. Women are often afraid to excel because they believe this will cast them in a threatening image. Women need to be told from an early age that they can excel.

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4370007.stm]

The Intersection of Race and Gender

Ø Women in Colonial Contexts “Doubly Oppressed” (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)--by race and by gender

Ø Women Caught between Conflicting Demands of Different Systems

Ø Women Thus Stuck in a “Nervous Condition”

Ø Women Given Opportunities by Men and/or White Society Continually Made Aware of the Gratitude They “Owe”:

‘Honourary’ Whiteness/’Honourary’ Maleness

… And not just any convent, but a multiracial

convent. A prestigious private school that manufactured guaranteed young ladies…

…So it was not in the least surprising that I

performed brilliantly in that entrance examination, thereby earning the privilege of associating with the elite of that time, the privilege of being admitted on an honourary basis into their culture… (178)

...[Nyasha] thought there were more evil than advantages to be reaped from such an opportunity. 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 intended for the precocious few who might prove a nuisance if left to themselves, whereas the others--well really,who cared about the others? So they made a little space into which you were assimilated, an honourary space in which you could join them and they could make sure that you behaved yourself. I would be comfortable in such a position she remarked nastily, because look how well I got on with Babamukuru [the ‘good African’; the ‘Uncle Tom]. But, she insisted, one ought not to occupy that space. Really, one ought to refuse. In my case that mean not going to the nun’s mission. (178-9)

Psychic Conflict and Its Bodily Effects

Let’s hear some ideas from Sue Thomas

in “Rewriting the Hysteric as Anorexic in Tsitsi Dangerembga’s Nervous Conditions” in Tamar Heller and Patricia Moran, eds., Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women's Writing (Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 2003), 183-98.

Charged metaphors of eating disorders in the novel, which are:

a)  Gendered--eating disorders are seen to be a “women’s problem”

b)  Racialized--”Africans don’t get eating disorders”

c)  Chosen to show how racism, colonial oppression, and gender inequality are internalized by women

d)  As well as autobiographical

ü Colonialism seen as ingestion--i.e. eating. Thus resisting/rejecting food has explicit political implications.

ü The denial of African women’s ability to have anorexia or bulimia equals a denial of African women’s interiority.

ü Anorexia, in this context, constitutes an attempt at self-determination: when you have no control over pretty much anything, you take control over the one thing you do have: YOUR BODY.

•  Nyasha’s anorexic body functions as parody of Western beauty: different from Shona concept of plumpness

•  Mainini’s depression, with its own impulses of self-annihilation, also reject the notion that African women are fundamentally different from other women in their relationship to food and eating.

•  Lucia’s frank acknowledgement of her “appetites” and her lack of shame as a repossession of control over the body. ‘That one,’ [Babamukuru] chuckled to Maiguru, ‘she is like a man herself’ (171).

Can We Let Babamukuru Have the Last Word?

I like to think the novel’s success might have encouraged young African women to go out there and do their thing, whatever it might be… So I hope my success has shown some young women here that with perseverance, much is possible. --Interview with Seal Press