Dangarembga, Tsitsi 1959–

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Tsitsi Dangarembga 1959-

Zimbabwean novelist, playwright, and screenwriter.

INTRODUCTION

Dangarembga is the first black woman from Zimbabwe to publish a novel in English. Her Nervous Conditions (1988), winner of the African segment of the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989, is a feminist novel that was initially rejected for publication in newly independent Zimbabwe, a region dominated by patriarchal attitudes. It was eventually accepted by an international publisher. Dangarembga is also recognized as the first Zimbabwean black woman to direct a feature film, Everyone's Child (1996), which she also co-wrote, calling attention to the AIDS crisis in Africa.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Dangarembga was born in 1959 in Mutoko, in the British colony of Rhodesia, a region in central South Africa that now comprises the country of Zimbabwe. From age two until the age of six she lived in England, where she attended school before returning to Rhodesia in 1965. There she was educated at a missionary school in the Zimbabwean town of Mutare, then completed her secondary education at a convent school. In 1977 she entered Cambridge University with the intention of studying for a medical degree; before completing her degree, however, she went back to Rhodesia, just prior to Rhodesia's gaining its independence from Britain in the spring of 1980. She subsequently finished her undergraduate studies in psychology at the University of Harare in Zimbabwe, working for a time as a copywriter for a marketing agency. At this point she became influenced by the celebrations of Zimbabwe's independence, began reading contemporary African literature, and discovered the oral tradition of the Shona. While at the university, Dangarembga also wrote several plays for the college drama group, including The Lost of the Soil (1983), which she also directed, and She No Longer Weeps (1987). In addition, she joined Zambuko, a theater group, and in 1985 published her first story, "The Letter," in Sweden. She gained literary repute in 1988 with the publication of Nervous Conditions, which has been acclaimed by critics. Dangarembga also maintains an interest in film direction. She continued her schooling at the Deutsche Film und Fernseh Akademie in Berlin and composed the storyline upon which the movie Neria (1992) was based, and also co-wrote the screenplay for Everyone's Child (1996), which has been shown all over the world. In 2006 she published the novel Book of Not, which continues the story of the narrator of Nervous Conditions.

MAJOR WORKS

The play She No Longer Weeps is a commentary on the patriarchal, postcolonial society of Zimbabwe, where independence from Britain did not result in corresponding freedom for women, who remained under the domination of males. In the drama, Martha is a single mother who defies societal expectations by raising her daughter on her own, completing her university education, and becoming a successful, practicing attorney. In the end, her abusive ex-lover returns, intent on vengeance. Faced with the possibility of losing custody of her daughter, Martha ends up murdering him.

In the much celebrated Nervous Conditions, Dangarembga treats such themes as education as it relates to gender—especially the impact of a colonial education on a vulnerable, impressionable young African girl—and how women in colonial Rhodesia suffered a double oppression: from the race-based imperialism of the British and from the patriarchal system of the Shona community. In the partially autobiographical Nervous Conditions, the narrator Tambudzai ("Tambu") looks back to her own adolescence and her relationships with her female relatives, including her mother, her aunt, and her rebellious, English-educated cousin Nyasha. As the novel opens, Tambu is living on a poor farm in colonial Rhodesia during the late 1960s. Following the death of her brother Nhamo, who had been attending a colonial mission school, Tambu goes to live with her wealthy and authoritarian Uncle Babamukuru, the Western-educated headmaster of the mission school. He selects Tambu to go to school in Nhamo's place so that she can help provide for her family. Tambu, though excited at the opportunity of an education, eventually experiences conflict and emotional distress over the dichotomy of her position as a traditional Shona woman being forced to abandon her heritage in order to conform to middle-class British racist, sexist, and socially condescending attitudes. The novel also addresses the nervous disorders suffered by women, including hysteria, depression, anorexia nervosa, and bulimia, as they face multiple levels of oppression based on gender, race, and social status.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Critical response to Dangarembga's works has centered primarily on Nervous Conditions. A particular area of scholarly interest is the novel's emphasis on the dual oppression of Rhodesian women by the economic and cultural authority of the colonial dominators in combination with the sexism inherent in the patriarchal Shona society, where women, under the guardianship of husbands, brothers, and fathers, assume roles of domestic servitude and are forbidden any rights to their children or to property. Many critics have described the resulting "hysterias" of the female characters as the result of the misogynistic and patronizing attitudes among Shona and colonial males and the feelings of alienation prompted by the invasion of Western cultural and educational principles, which claimed superiority over indigenous African traditions. In a similar vein, several critics have analyzed the symbolism of food in the novel, focusing specifically on how the consumption, rejection, or vomiting of food relates to women's consumption or rejection of British colonial culture and educational values. Food-related physiological disorders, such as anorexia and bulimia, have been studied as metaphors of male and colonial dominance and of resistance against the patriarchal hierarchy by women who have been psychologically and emotionally damaged by its tenets. Christine Wick Sizemore, in particular, has assessed how Tambu is able to avoid succumbing to these disorders and achieve her own identity while her cousin, Nyasha, is devastated by a physical and mental breakdown. According to Sizemore, Tambu rejects being pressed into complicity with the colonial elite and breaks through the rigid and restrictive gender code by maintaining ties to her Shona heritage while at the same time taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by the Western-style education. Other critical discussions have looked into the source for the novel's title, part of Jean-Paul Sartre's introduction to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, in which Sartre writes, "The condition of native is a nervous condition." Several critics have investigated the relationship between Dangarembga's novel and the theories in Fanon's work, in which he treated the psychological disorders suffered by natives as a result of colonialism.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

The Lost of the Soil (play) 1983

"The Letter" (short story) 1985

She No Longer Weeps (play) 1987

Nervous Conditions (novel) 1988

Neria (screenplay) 1992

Everyone's Child [with John Riber and Andrew Whaley] (screenplay) 1996

Book of Not: A Novel (novel) 2006

CRITICISM

Derek Wright (essay date 1997)

SOURCE: Wright, Derek. "Regurgitating Colonialism: The Feminist Voice in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." In New Directions in African Fiction, pp. 108-22. New York: Twayne, 1997.

[In the following essay, Wright considers how images of eating, digesting, vomiting, and rejecting food are used in Nervous Conditions.]

Discontent with the doubtful legacies of liberation also found expression, albeit more gradually, in Zimbabwean women's writing. The War of Independence saw significant changes in gender roles and relations, but the struggle for national liberation was not matched by any lasting parallel progress in the position of the nation's women. In this entrenchedly patriarchal society, women traditionally had no rights of property ownership or custody over children and were subject to the lifelong guardianship of fathers, brothers, and husbands. During the war they participated equally alongside men, but this was a temporary upheaval that affected only a small part of the population. In the postindependence era inveterate patriarchal attitudes flourished again, female ex-combatants were advised by government media campaigns to return to traditional family roles, and the uncompliant were subjected to blatant intimidation such as the notorious "Operation Clean-Up" of December 1983, in which unattended women were randomly rounded up from the public streets and automatically detained on charges of prostitution.¹

The dominant patriarchal values behind such actions continued to be reflected in male fiction that emphasized conventional images of the African woman as allenduring wife, mother, and domestic provider whose self-sacrificing labor in both field and home was taken mostly for granted and so went unvalued and largely unacknowledged. There was little attempt in this fiction to realistically depict the lives of women, little awareness of or interest in their predicament in the new society, and a prevailing tendency to mete out punitive fates to those women who did not conform with received orthodoxies.²

Specifically, the Zimbabwean woman writer was hampered not only by lack of information about publishing opportunities and by her meager education (in a 1982 survey 65 percent of the country's unschooled population were women), but, more formidably, by the disapproval or open hostility of husbands who held women's ideas in contempt and by the arrogant sexism of indigenous publishers. The latter adopted standardized, clichéd notions of women as submissive, obedient wives and dutiful mothers and expected women writers to uphold the established male values expressed in these views.³ Thus it was that the first women authors writing in the indigenous Shona and Ndebele languages in the 1970s tended to take high-mindedly Christian, moralistic stands against "sinful" behavior and metropolitan "loose living" that were still essentially patriarchal in spirit; thus it was, also, that women enrolling in the postindependence literacy campaigns of the early 1980s were trained on texts that still habitually undervalued women, pilloried them for childlessness, and pressed upon them a sense of their general insignificance.⁴ In 1987, when 28-year-old Tsitsi Dangarembga submitted her first novel, Nervous Conditions, to a Zimbabwean publishing house, only 30 out of a total of 212 published Zimbabwean writers were women, and few of these had shown any signs of incipient radical tendencies.⁵Nervous Conditions was, predictably, rejected because of its strong feminist perspective and, upon its international publication in the following year, went on to win the Africa section of the Commonwealth Writers Prize (a Zimbabwean edition finally appeared in 1989).

Set in the colonial Rhodesia of the 1960s, Dangarembga's novel charts the educational odyssey of Tambudzai, or Tambu, out of provincial poverty into the more affluent world of the anglophile professional elite, the coopted middle class of schoolteachers and headmasters who occupy a fragile "honorary space" between the white colonial authorities and their own powerless poor relations. After her elder brother's sudden death, Tambu unapologetically seizes the educational opportunity that was his by right of gender in order that she may do some good "for the family before she goes into her husband's home."⁶ She is subsequently transfigured from a lowly peasant girl into a student at her wealthy uncle's mission school and later at a prestigious multiracial convent. Her path to emancipated self-discovery, however, is paved with contradictions, crises, and tribulations, not least of which is her realization and personal experience of the injustices done to women. In her escape from the farm, Tambu exchanges subordination to the will of her shiftless, sycophantic peasant father for domination by her tyrannical headmaster uncle; she learns, as an African woman, to suffer a double "colonization," in which she is a victim to both colonial and indigenous patriarchy. "The message was clear: endure and obey, for there is no other way" (NC [Nervous Conditions ], 19).

Under the prudish eye of her repressed and repressive Victorian-style uncle and sponsor, she discovers that each new freedom is really a form of alienation that removes her ever further from her indigenous African roots. While she arrives at his mission school expecting to find, under his guidance, "another self, a clean, well-groomed, genteel self who could not have been bred, could not have survived on the homestead" (NC, 58-59), she realizes that her earlier life and its traditional values cannot so easily be shed. Tambu's struggle toward selfhood evolves, in fact, into a complexly hybridized and layered identity, a composite personality that is submissive and self-abnegating but also adventurous, rebellious, and reluctant to passively accept the African woman's customary burdens.

Tambu concludes her first-person retrospective narrative thus: "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" (NC, 204). Two of these women are Tambu's mother, Mainini, who has resigned herself fatalistically to both her poverty and the double burden of black womanhood, and her paternal aunt, Maiguru, a highly educated and prosperous woman who has nevertheless put security before self-fulfillment and accepted domestic subservience to her headmaster husband, Babamukuru (after a short-lived escape from the patriarchal home, she allows him to bring her back and reinstate her in her former role).⁷ A third is Tambu's maternal aunt, Lucia, an uneducated but strong and freethinking woman who defies social prejudices to fulfill her own desires and protests against injustice wherever she encounters it. Fourth, and most important for Tambu's growing self-awareness, is her English-educated cousin Nyasha, with whom she develops a close friendship at the mission and who serves in the novel as her rebellious alter ego. Mindful of her need for stable limits and lacking the courage of her convictions, Tambu suppresses her own mutinous instincts, which are acted out in her stead by her defiant cousin. Nyasha rejects her father's conformity to the type of "the good African," the first generation of Christian African elite whom she dismisses as colonial puppets, and rebels against his authority. Under the pressure of Babamukuru's tyranny she suffers a total nervous breakdown, develops anorexia, and is taken into psychiatric care. Tambu survives these trials and traumas, but the conclusion to Dangarembga's female bildungsroman leaves her questioning the true nature of emancipation and the value of the "Englishness" that has come to permeate her own and her country's existence.

Nervous Conditions is a work in the naturalist tradition, but it is remarkable for its high level of imaginative organization and contains some finely judged poetic symbolism. Specifically, there is an unusual and complex treatment of the bodily functions that have to do with the eating and processing of food—of con- sumption, digestion, and regurgitation—that are made symptomatic of the mental and spiritual health of the larger society and body politic, most especially when they begin to go wrong and break down. Dangarembga devises an intricate network of connections between education and consumption, skillfully using eating as the governing metaphor for Africa's consumption—nutritional, cultural, educational—of secondhand, imitative Western values that destroy its people, a process that removes the book's heroine ever further from her African family, language, and self. On the first page of the novel, Tambu's brother Nhamo, selected by his uncle Babamukuru for education at the colonial mission school, expresses his disgust with the bodily grossness and dirt that he identifies with the African reality: "Moreover, the women smelt of unhealthy reproductive odours, the children were inclined to relieve their upset bowels on the floor, and the men gave off strong aromas of productive labour" (NC, 1).

The education with which Nhamo seeks to buy his way out of this physical squalor is envisaged by his family as superior nourishment for a subsequently better fed, healthier body. Nhamo, like his uncle before him, is "a good boy, cultivable, in the way that land is, to yield harvests that sustain the cultivator" (NC, 19). His education, paid for by his mother's cultivation of extra crops, is an investment that will return handsome dividends to the family in the form of the foreign food and drinks that it will buy. Appropriately, Nhamo's father, in his homecoming ceremony for Babamukuru, applauds his "benefactor" and "provider" for "having devoured English letters" and "indigestible degrees" with "a ferocious appetite" (NC, 36), and Mainini, resentful of the educated sister-in-law who serves meat that she herself cannot provide, accuses her daughter of wanting "to eat the words that come out of her mouth" (NC, 140). Thus, although food cultivation translates into education, the latter has a habit of translating back into food: either metaphorically, in the form of a pervasive rhetoric of consumption and digestion, or literally, into luxury foodstuffs that are not locally cultivable (the refrigerated meat brought to the family feast by Babamukuru, and the English breakfasts and tea with biscuits served by his wife).

Nhamo dies, however, and his place at the school is taken by his sister Tambu, for whom food comes to mean a great many things in her educational career. It is a means of survival and an economic mainstay, "the chore of keeping breath in the body" (NC, 64). It is also, in its endless cultivation and preparation, a mark of women's servitude and oppression (which even the anglicized Maiguru does not escape), and of male authority. At the meal table Babamukuru manifests his patriarchal power, directing "the ritual dishing out of food" (NC, 81), flying into hysterical tantrums when his mini-skirted daughter Nyasha stays out late talking to white boys, and, as proof of his absolute authority and her submission to it, forcing her to eat the food that he provides (in Babamukuru's neurotic psychology, "playing with boys" is linked with turning up her nose at his food, identifying puritanism as the principal ingredient of the colonial educational diet that he forces upon his children). As Nyasha comments, "it's more than just … a plateful of food"; indeed, it has to do with the prim puritanical code that he has "digested" with his colonial missionary education and made his own—"really it's all the things about boys and men and being decent and indecent and good and bad" (NC, 190). At the meal table her copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover is confiscated: Lawrence is not yet part of the anglophile cultural diet.

First and foremost, however, food is itself the means by which Tambu breaks free from a life devoted to its cultivation. Long before her brother's death presents her with unexpected educational opportunities, Tambu cultivates her own sale crops to raise money for school fees, growing food in excess of subsistence needs in order to escape from subsistence farming and become one of the (significantly worded) "new crop of educated Africans" (NC, 63). This initiates a network of metaphoric connections between education and food that presents neither in a very positive light. The colonial education at issue turns out to be constricting and repressive, with each new freedom a form of alienation. As "food," it proves to be ill nourishing and spiritually deadening rather than healthful and life giving; it is a diet that leaves its devotees stunted and haggard. Significantly, it is tainted at its source, Tambu's school fees being provided by a desiccated, "papery-skinned" old white woman who—because of her fixed colonial view of "the native"—is tricked into compassion for the young vendor of corn.

The motif of misguided nutrition concealing undernourishment is sustained throughout the novel, in which the educated elite's deracinatory Englishness is repeatedly expressed through culinary details and matters of cuisine. Tambu observes of Nahmo, when he returns from his first year at Babamukuru's school, that vitamins have "nourished" his skin and whitened his complexion but have simultaneously induced a language deficiency, causing him to forget his Shona. When he dies, Mainini thinks her husband must have eaten some poisonous shrub to want to send their next child to the same school, "a place of death." Later in the novel, when Babamukuru proposes to send Tambu on from there to the Sacred Heart Convent School, she accuses him of killing her children with "Englishness," taking their tongues (an organ of both taste and speech) and "fattening" them "like cattle are fattened for slaughter," feeding them with English learning that spells the death of their African identity and turns them into white ghosts: "You couldn't expect the ancestors to stomach so much Englishness" (NC, 184, 203). Maiguru's spacious table, Tambu muses, speaks volumes about "the amount, the calorie content, the complement of vitamins and minerals, the relative proportions of fat, carbohydrate and protein of the food that would be consumed at it" (NC, 69). But she notes also that it exists in an enormous empty room—like its elite owners, in a vacuum. The professional elite's foreign, fragile isolation, sealed off from their indigenous context, is similarly reflected in Maiguru's unused English tea set, in the strainer that filters out Africa to produce a more authentic English flavor, and in her uneaten, indigestible English breakfasts and suppers, in which the white gravy and potatoes obliterate the taste of the African vegetables. Having been flown in from outside, the elite's cultural sustenance draws hardly at all upon indigenous resources. Hence Maiguru's kitchen is symbolically in a state of dilapidation and disrepair; the meat from a traditional local celebration sticks between Babamukuru's teeth, reminding him of traditions that no longer nourish him; and his attempt to refrigerate half an ox, in the domestic English fashion, at the annual extended-family feast is ludicrously inadequate, causing the meat to rot.

If the intake of neocolonial cultural and educational values in Nervous Conditions is expressed through the consumption of food, then the rejection of this supply is, conversely, expressed through the inability or refusal to eat. Thus when Tambu is taken off to the mission school in Nhamo's place, Mainini has difficulty swallowing and eats hardly anything. And when, toward the end of the novel, she is informed that Tambu is to go to the College of the Sacred Heart, run by white nuns, she effectively goes on hunger strike, eating less and less and then nothing, withdrawing from her family role into an apathetic stupor (Tambu's own appetite also departs with the news). When Nyasha's prudish parents banish D. H. Lawrence from both dinner-table and educational diet, she declares herself "full" in protest and disobeys her father's command to eat her evening meal; in the same scene Tambu finds that the food "refused to go down my throat in large quantities" (NC, 82).

For Tambu the turning point and culmination of her protest occurs when Babamukuru forces upon her own parents a belated Christian wedding, an action that questions her own legitimacy as well as denying that of traditional African customs. "As if children were meant to be at their parents' wedding!" Nyasha aptly comments (NC, 170). At this point Tambu's body voices its own visceral protest: "I suffered a horrible crawling over my skin, my chest contracted to a breathless tension and even my bowels threatened to let me know their opinion" (NC, 149). On the day of the wedding, Tambu is, preposterously, commanded to attend as a bridesmaid. Her body, deserted by an unwilling spirit, falls into a cataleptic trance, refusing to move, and her subsequent failure to participate in the event incurs severe punishment—15 lashes of Babamukuru's cane and two weeks of menial domestic chores. Similarly, when Maiguru laments her wasted educational opportunities, her body acts of its own accord, her face involuntarily expressing her unhappiness: "The lower half of her face, and only the lower half, because it did not quite reach the eyes, set itself into sullen lines of discontent" (NC, 101). Finally, in the novel's extreme climax, Nyasha revolts against the petty rules and regulations of her father's regime by taking refuge in anorexia and bulimia, either not eating or immediately vomiting what she eats.

Nyasha crams for her exams, with obvious consumer innuendoes, but her overconsumption of Western education does not make her fat because her furious studies are combined with disturbed eating. The longer she stays at school and sits up at night studying, the more suppers and breakfasts she misses: At the literal level, the more she reads, the less she eats. Meanwhile, at the metaphoric level, not only does her neocolonial educational intake leave her culturally and spiritually undernourished but it also makes her critical of the diet of colonial history and literature that she is being fed, so that she digests less and less of what she ostensibly consumes. By an inverse proportion, the more Nyasha chews questioningly over, the less dogma she gratefully ingests. This is expressed at the physical level by her loss of appetite, which is restored for a brief period when exams are over. Her nervous disorder and skeletal appearance return, however, at Babamukuru's next round of petty restrictions. Unable to conceive his daughter's rejection of the value system that he has force-fed her, the father cannot even see her anorexic condition—"Did he not know? Did he not see?" (NC, 199). Tambu asks herself. "She does eat her supper when I have time to supervise her properly," he reassures his wife, blinding himself to the fact that as soon as he is gone Nyasha vomits up his food and, with it, his tyrannical supervision and control of her life. It is only when she shreds her colonial history books with her teeth and jabs shards of glass and pottery into her flesh that he calls for the psychiatrist.

Discussing anorexia nervosa, Dangarembga speculates that perhaps "one of the reasons why the girls are so prone to this disease is that if you live a very intellectual life you do become more divorced from the physical aspects of yourself, and it may not be easy to determine what is affecting what."⁸ This chimes fairly closely with Tambu's preoccupations in the novel with "questions that had to do with survival of the spirit, the creation of consciousness, rather than mere sustenance of the body" (NC, 59). The interview statement, however, is heavily qualified, especially with regard to what causes what, and the narrative perspective on her younger self supplied by Tambu (who is not the anorexic) is largely ironic. Tambu's dissociative opposition of mind and body, spirit and flesh, in which the one develops at the expense of and to the neglect of the other, is in fact against the run of textual evidence. The reading of Nyasha's condition that such a view licenses is perhaps insufficiently psychosomatic to take account of all of the book's symbolic threads. In Nervous Conditions the woman's mind and body are not mutually exclusive or inversely proportional but are directly related and act in close concert. What appears to happen is that the body steps in and acts on the mind's behalf, voicing its protest in physical terms, when the mind is unable to speak for itself for the reason that the only language available to it, the language in which its educational diet is encoded, is the patriarchal discourse of the colonial oppressor and his indigenous puppets—a language in which she cannot express what has to be expressed. As Toril Moi puts it, "There simply is no way in which femininity can speak itself within the dominant philosophical discourses: at best it can be traced in the gaps, blanks and silences of the text."⁹ In Nervous Conditions the women's protests either remain unexpressed or voice themselves nonverbally, outside of language, in "body-talk," the most extreme examples of which are the primal grunts, heaves, and screams of Nyasha's bulimic retchings.

What is being protested, moreover, has essentially to do with mind and spirit rather than with the body and is often of a highly intellectual nature. Heidi Creamer has demonstrated that narrow neurological readings of cases of anorexia and bulimia in Zimbabwean women, published by psychiatrists shortly after the end of the War of Independence, tended to erase the political context and colonial situation in which the patients had been living, thus reducing their disorders to the "nervous conditions" of hysteria-prone personalities.¹⁰ This was but a marginal improvement upon the verdict of the colonial psychiatrists who, unable to believe in the native's cultural rejection of colonial authority, declared the ailment purely imaginary: The fatuous white psychiatrist in Dangarembga's novel pronounces that "Africans did not suffer in the way we had described" and that Nyasha was merely "making a scene" (NC, 201). Either way, the effect was to obscure the exact nature of the sustenance that, in their minds, the patients were refusing or regurgitating. In Nyasha's case, the bulimic consciousness is informed by a highly intellectual awareness of the historical context of political subjugation. When she bites into the colonial history books, she challenges both the official "history," the white lies force-fed to Africans, and the ruling colonial powers who preside over a hierarchy of "groveling," preaching the obedience of Africa's women to her men and of her men to themselves.

Nyasha also rejects the neocolonial definition of herself as a "good African," refusing to be further "cultivated" in the English image, and breaks with authority at all levels: "I'm not one of them but I'm not one of you" (NC, 201). In the portrait of Nyasha, bulimia becomes a vehicle for the indignant regurgitation of a whole neocolonial heritage of obsolete, repressive puritanical values that the indigenous population can no longer stomach. What Mainini in an earlier scene had difficulty "swallowing" and what, symbolically, "lay heavy on her stomach" (NC, 76)—myths about the benefits of Western education—Nyasha now vomits outright. The body, of its own accord, decisively rejects the intellectual diet that the colonized mind has had forced upon it. Clearly, the psychosomatic nature of the illness, translating cultural rejections and disaffiliations into a physical condition, is integrated with the central symbolism of the book that presents neocolonial educational values in terms of food and eating. Earlier, Dangarembga claimed, "Even the history was written in such a way that a child who did not want to accept that had to reject it and have nothing."¹¹ The revisionary intelligence, faced with the task of rewriting history, has nowhere to begin, no space or terms to express its dissent in; the protesting intellect, as Nyasha puts it, has nowhere "to break out to" (NC, 174).

When Mainini stops eating in protest at her daughter's removal to the convent school, Tambu observes, "Now, unlike a physical ailment of which everyone is told, an illness of this nature is kept quiet and secret" (NC, 185). Her mother's psychophysiological condition is virtually a taboo phenomenon, something almost shameful and with a strong hint of foreignness and even unnaturalness in the African context. Yet the crass colonial psychiatrist notwithstanding, the Africans in the novel are no more immune to this "white disease" than to all the others. Commenting routinely in interview on cases of anorexia reported in Zimbabwe, Dangarembga allows for the effects of cultural assimilation that make it almost impossible to say what is authentically "African" any more or what exactly "anorexic" means. Meanwhile, in the more radical vision of the novel, nervous disorders such as hysteria, anorexia, and bulimia are not presented as specifically and peculiarly Western or feminine conditions. The use of food for the purpose of protest is not merely an English affectation indulged in by Nyasha, and her condition is not a solitary but a common and collective one. Mainini, Maiguru, and Tambu all stop eating in spontaneous, unanimous protest against the tyranny of Babamukuru's neocolonial impositions; in their solidarity the author grounds a plea for a more composite African female identity, combining the talents of women of different ages, classes, and educational levels as an alternative to the "extreme, dividing reality" of the status quo (NC, 138).

Food, as we have seen, is a symbol in the novel for the African woman's oppression and is linked with alienating colonial educational values and a nutritionless diet of elitist English tastes and manners, all of which feature prominently in this oppression. It is therefore apt that the women should use food to rebel against the neocolonial patriarch's authority—and ironic that when Nyasha, in her bulimic rages, most rejects Englishness, she has attributed to herself a nervous condition thought to be peculiarly English. Thus, far from being marks of Westernization, hunger strikes and eating disorders prove to be very African modes of resistance: They are the means by which African women collectively reject what symbolizes their subservience and seek to create and express a unified identity.

Moreover, Dangarembga devotes a great deal of energy in her novel to deconstructing the conventional binary oppositions and hierarchic categorisms of patriarchal discourse. Each of these hinges on an invisible male/female polarization, with its inevitable positive/negative evaluation: for example, dominance/subservience, intelligence/emotion, rationality/sensuality. In Babamukuru's puritanical missionary ideology, the Manichean antitheses are underlain by moralistic gender dualisms: virtue/sin, good/evil, decency/degeneracy. This patriarchal binarism insists that there is such a thing as an essential femaleness or femininity. In colonial Africa, Maiguru observes, it has led to a prejudice against educated women because of its sexist conception of intelligence as a male preserve, ridiculously equating intellectual prowess with the "unwomanly" or "unfeminine" or even with "indecency" and "looseness." "I was an intelligent girl but I had also to develop into a good woman, he [Babamukuru] said, stressing both qualities equally and not seeing any contradiction in this" (NC, 88). Dangarembga subverts these oppositions by reversing the conventional roles.

In Nervous Conditions the rational, active challenger is a teenage girl, and the irrational neurotic is the male head of the household. Babamukuru is, of course, the novel's real hysteric and the cause of his daughter's breakdown. He is the center of neurosis in his Western nuclearized family, the sick one who stays well by making the well ones sick, his "bad nerves" expressed in erratic sequences of missed meals and secret, compulsive eating between meals. Babamukuru is a familiar type, a psychological case study in colonial repression. His is the "nervous condition" of the "native" in the Fanonian title, his compensative, domestic power-complex fueled by colonialism's long suppression of traditional male authority in Africa. He is victim to that process identified by Fanon, whereby the protesting energies and "muscular tension" induced by colonial oppression are turned inward and deflected violently back upon the colonized subjects themselves in a "collective autodestruction" engineered by the colonial authority that is their true target (WOE [Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth], 43). Unable to voice his frustration with the tiny "honorary space" allotted him in the colonial hierarchy, Babamukuru victimizes his daughter by venting his prurient sexual jealousy of the white boys, the representatives of the white male power to which he must daily fawn and cringe. Dangarembga thus subverts the traditional patriarchal binarisms and, after deconstructing the false essentialisms built into them, is anxious in her use of conventionally "feminine" nervous complaints such as hysteria and bulimia not to fall back into an alternative biological essentialism and to reduce Nyasha's illness to another stereotypical, "female" condition.

Rather than create a new binarism, in fact, Dangarembga deconstructs the ground in which such oppositions reside. Toril Moi, in her essay on feminist literary criticism, argues that, as a result of the dominant and all-pervasive nature of patriarchal power, "there is no pure feminist or female space from which we can speak" and refers to Kristeva's theory of femininity as marginality—that is, as a position rather than a definable quality, and, moreover, a frontier position at the limit of a symbolic order that has habitually defined femininity, patriarchally, as lack, negativity, absence, and nonbeing (Moi [Toril Moi, "Feminist Literary Criticism," 1982], 205). Similarly, Terry Eagleton contends that because women in the male-governed order "are always the negative of that social order, there is always in them something which is left over, superfluous, unrepresentable, which refuses to be figured there."¹² All of this is, of course, doubly true of the twice-colonized African woman, whose marginality as a woman is exacerbated by her cultural uprooting. The colonized African woman, contends Dangarembga, has been written simultaneously out of colonial history books, educational primers, and a public role in society and has subsequently been robbed of her indigenous history, social identity, and self-worth. She writes back from a "void," a "nothing," "a great big gap inside her," since most of what she is has been left unrepresented (Wilkinson [Jane Wilkinson, Talking with African Writers, 1992], 191, 198). For educated African women like Maiguru, the "honorary space" allotted within the co-opted anglophile elite of colonial puppets is a very small and empty space—really no space at all, says Nayasha, but a series of "loopholes" to be "slipped through" (NC, 179). The primary need of these women is to find a space in which a new historical and social identity can be created and defined. This need dictates the presentation of Nyasha's "anorexic" and "bulimic" conditions, which are not limitingly labeled but are left deliberately open as sites of hitherto unexpressed meaning and spaces for definition.

Thus Nyasha's bulimic voiding of her stomach also represents a verbal void, something outside of and opposed to the prevailing language conventions, and unrepresentable in the Manichean oppositions of a colonial-dominated male value system. It encompasses everything in the female experience that, because it still awaits verbal representation, cannot be said and there- fore has to be vocalized in a different way, through the grunts and heaves of the woman gagging on food and retching. It embraces femininity also because its existence has never been admitted, let alone identified, and is open to a plurality of possible explanations—cultural, political, medical, psychological, and so on. The novel's tropology of anorexia and bulimia refers to the uncategorizable in female experience in a patriarchal society and indicates a position (hitherto a marginal one) in which African femininity resides rather than a definition of that femininity, definition having been an exclusively male prerogative up until now.

Much has been said in recent literary theory about patriarchal discourse's monologic and omniscient voices and its phallogocentric closures that presume to penetrate and possess truth through language. Current theory also discusses an opposing l'écriture féminine that presents multiple perspectives and opens up language to a challenging plurality of meaning. In keeping with these oppositions, Nyasha can be seen as a force of unvoiced resistance in the novel to the limiting categorisms and closures of the neocolonial order. Her bulimia subsequently embodies a whole complex of issues that are not easily classifiable, embracing everything that is preached at Babamukuru's meal table: the colonial etiquette and cultural politics, the ritualized submission to the father's domestic authority, the mother's infantile sentimentality, the prudery of both parents, and the censorship of everything that offends it. Whereas the father's authoritarianism constantly closes down options and frustrates potential, everything about his daughter speaks of "alternatives and possibilities" that "wreak havoc" with the "concrete and categorical"; her exploring "multi-directional mind" "thrives on inconsistencies" and displays a "passion for transmuting the present into the possible" (NC, 75-76, 116, 151, 178). Accordingly, her bulimia is fertile in ambivalence and contradiction and has been seen both as a positive act of self-control and as a despairing, suicidal attempt to efface herself from an alienating environment.¹³ Nyasha's refusal of food is at once an assertion and a denial of the body, a complex of oral power and anal repression. The body's vomiting of her parents' foreign food proclaims its punitive rejection of their Englishness, but in its refusal to ingest there is also an implied refusal to excrete, which, it has been argued, signifies the dirt fixation of an arrested anal phase of development and, symbolically, the denial of Africa's dirt and physical squalor (Veit-Wild, 336).

Nyasha's shredding of the history books with her teeth is, at the same time, a parodic reenactment of the colonial subject's hungry devouring of imperial knowledge, eagerly swallowing its falsehoods, and an actual act of demolition that tries to reverse the existing pattern of cultural consumption. "Regurgitation" is, of course, verbally ambiguous, referring to both a literal bringing up of food and, figuratively, to the rote parroting of facts for examinations, and thus contains the possibilities of both rejection and retention. Nyasha's excessive study is in keeping with this paradoxical "logic" since it leads to her critical self-dissociation from what is studied. Thus one commentator on the novel has traced in the pattern of Nyasha's bulimic behavior Irigaray's notion of defiance through overcompliance, of subversion through extreme submission to power discourses that generate hysteria and similar libidinal reactions.¹⁴ Dangarembga's image complex of ingestion-and-regurgitation is thrown open to a variety of possibilities and keeps breaking out into new meaning.

What this process amounts to in real terms for the oppressed women in the novel, however, is fraught with reservations. As Nyasha puts it, "So where do you break out to?" (NC, 174). Her mother's desertion of her household role and departure from home is merely a temporary "breaking out," an absence of five days, and Mainini, confronted by Babamukuru's tyrannical demands, can only withdraw into an apathetic stupor. Meanwhile, Nyasha herself, who is unable to answer her own question, arguably breaks out only into another kind of Englishness. Nyasha opposes to her father's prim missionary respectability and Victorian paternalism the 1960s libertarianism to which she has been exposed in London (hence the flaunted copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, on trial in 1963 shortly before her London sojourn). Having experienced the modern mid-twentieth-century white world, she no longer has any use for the genteel puritanism and missionary remnants of Victorianism that still make up such a large part of Babamukuru's ideology.

The deculturation of Maiguru and Babamukuru is not as radical as their daughter's. Belonging to another cultural era, they have failed to update their Englishness. Yet their lives, with their odd mixture of African culinary rituals and Western name diminutives, are neither more nor less hybridized than hers. Therefore, at the crux of the conflict between father and daughter, and only partly perceived by Tambu, is not Western individualism and teenage rebelliousness versus indigenous patriarchal traditions of female subservience but rival modes and manners of Englishness. On the one side, Babamukuru has become almost completely divorced from his traditional Shona culture, and it is no accident that in the part of the narrative devoted to Tambu's stay in his house the sprinkling of Shona words—notably the staple food, sadza—disappears from the novel. He has difficulty speaking his people's language and eating their food, he is embarrassed by his brother Jeremiah's traditional welcoming ceremony, and the charade of the retroactive "marriage" that he forces upon Tambu's parents shows him to be painfully out of touch with traditional values. It is not Babamukuru's Africanity that is outraged by Nyasha's behavior but his prim, anglicized missionary sensibility and colonial-legated Christian puritanism, which are as foreign to indigenous African experience as Nyasha's 1960s' liberalism.

On the other side, Nyasha herself, for all her defiant regurgitations, is as anglicized in her own way as her parents and as neocolonial in her thinking. Her attachment to African tradition is entirely theoretical, her interest in her grandparents' ancestral customs more hypothetical than real, and her purely ornamental, decorative interest in clay pots does not express a very African viewpoint. Not surprisingly, Dangarembga describes Nyasha as "a very romantic character, for all that she insists that she is entirely factual and logical and rational" (Wilkinson, 192). In fact, the novel's only concrete link with the ancestral past is Tambu's grandmother, with whom she works in the fields early in the novel and from whom she absorbs scraps of Shona history and learns how to prepare a fine sadza, "so wholesome and earthy, like home-baked cornbread instead of the insubstantial loaves you buy in the shops" (NC, 39).

Nervous Conditions is an iconoclastic and at times harrowing indictment of sexual and cultural imperialism in which the stultifying power of colonial assimilation is revealed to be total and inescapable. If there is any way out of the neocolonial elite's terminal Englishness, no directions are given in Tambu's narrative, and what is true for Nyasha is also true, though at a lower level of frustration, for her. At the end of the book Tambu's inner conflict is left unresolved. She returns to her colonial convent to acquire more of the "killing" Englishness that will only deepen her moral dilemmas and exacerbate her country's nervous condition. In the last paragraph she tells us that at that time something in her mind "began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed" but the "long painful process" of "many years" that took her from that initial questioning to the critical position from which she was able to write her story is not described: How she got from there to here, which "would fill another volume," is left unclear (NC, 204). Tambu's story is a story of the 1960s. The stories of the 1970s and the 1980s—of the Zimbabwean woman's difficult struggle for freedom and uncertain growth to independence, parallel to the nation's—have yet to be told.

Notes

1. See Flora Veit-Wild, "Creating a New Society: Women's Writing in Zimbabwe," Journal of Commonwealth Literature 22, no. 1 (August 1987): 173.

2. See Dieter Riemenschneider, "Short Fiction from Zimbabwe," Research in African Literatures 20, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 401-11.

3. See Flora Veit-Wild, Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers: A Social History of Zimbabwean Literature (London: Hans Zell, 1992), 239; Survey of Zimbabwean Writers: Educational and Literary Careers (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 1992), 91-92, 101-2; and "Creating a New Society," 172-73.

4. See, for example, Veit-Wild's discussion of the work of Joyce Simango and Barbara Makhalisa in Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers, 246-49; and her account of reading matter in schools and literacy campaigns in "Creating a New Society," 172-73.

5. Barbara Makhalisa adopts a more radical stand on fertility and the stigmatization of childless women in her collection The Underdog and Other Stories (Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo Press, 1984), the first Zimbabwean women's fiction to be published in English. In the story "Baby-snatcher," a woman who fails to become pregnant is placed under such pressure that she steals another woman's baby. The ironic ending reveals the husband to be infertile.

6. Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (London: The Women's Press, 1988), 56; hereafter cited in the text as NC.

7.Mainini, Maiguru, and Babamukuru are the Shona words for, respectively, mother, aunt, and uncle. Tambu refers to these three figures by their titular names throughout her narrative.

8. Kirsten Holst Petersen, "Between Gender, Race and History: Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga," Kunapipi 16, no. 1 (1994): 346.

9. Toril Moi, "Feminist Literary Criticism," in Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction, ed. Ann Jefferson and David Robey (London: Batsford, 1982), 218; hereafter cited in the text.

10. Heidi Creamer, "An Apple for the Teacher? Femininity, Coloniality, and Food in Nervous Conditions," Kunapipi 16, no. 1 (1994): 359-60.

11. "Tsitsi Dangarembga," in Talking with African Writers, ed. Jane Wilkinson (London: James Currey, 1992), 198; hereafter cited in the text.

12. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 190.

13. See, respectively, Sally McWilliams, "Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions: At the Crossroads of Feminism and Postcolonialism," World Literature Written in English 31, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 110; and Miki Flockemann, "Not Quite Insiders and Not Quite Outsiders: The Process of Womanhood in Beka Lamb, Nervous Conditions and Daughters of the Twilight," Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27, no. 1 (August 1992): 46.

14. Sue Thomas, "Killing the Hysteric in the Colonized's House: Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions," Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27, no. 1 (August 1992): 27.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. London: The Women's Press, 1988.

Secondary Sources

Selected Interviews

Wilkinson, Jane. "Kofi Awoonor," "Tsitsi Dangarembga," "Ngugi wa Thiong'o," "Ben Okri," and "Wole Soyinka." In Talking with African Writers, ed. Jane Wilkinson, 19-32, 77-110, 123-36, 189-200. London: James Currey, 1992.

Critical Studies and Anthologies, and Journal Special Issues

For reasons of space, uncollected journal articles have not been included here. Most of the articles cited in the chapter notes are published in the journal issues or are reprinted in the critical studies and essay collections listed below.

Fanon, Frantz. Les damné de la terre, 1961. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1967. The classic analysis of third-world revolution and neocolonialism that deeply influenced African writers and intellectuals, liberals and radicals alike, during the postindependence decade.

Kunapipi 16, no. 1 (1994). Special issue "Post-Colonial Women's Writing," including an interview with Dangarembga and a penetrating analysis of Nervous Conditions by Heidi Creamer.

Veit-Wild, Flora. Teachers, Preachers and Non-Believers: A Social History of Zimbabwean Literature. London: Hans Zell, 1992. A meticulous social and ethnographic survey of the production of Zimbabwean literature from the 1950s to the 1980s, strong on cultural history but short on textual analysis.

Christine Wick Sizemore (essay date 2002)

SOURCE: Sizemore, Christine Wick. "Girlhood Identities: The Search for Adulthood in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye." In Negotiating Identities in Women's Lives: English Postcolonial and Contemporary British Novels, pp. 21-35. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

[In the following essay, Sizemore focuses on the fact that both Nervous Conditions and Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye each portray two female characters—one of whom overcomes the opposing forces of colonialism and gender restrictions, while the other is lost to mental illness.]

This text has been suppressed due to author restriction.

This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.