Nervous Conditions [Import]

An engaging (and fast) read. A must read for any one in the African diaspora experiencing some kind of change in social class (e.g. being first in the family to attend college or graduate school) or otherwise having suspicions about the sources of their feelings of alienation. Specifically, this is an amazingly relevant depiction of the pain experienced by those who do as they're told and pursue education to "better themselves": the richness of this book's characters show just how many costs go unstated by those who have the privilege of not paying said costs and unacknowledged by those who haven't had to go through the violent process of being harshly disciplined into being acceptable by the dominant segments of society. Nyasha's character resonated most with me: I, too, feel frustrated by what seems to be an obvious oppressive reality around me as well as the extreme deprivation that can encourage oppressed people to appear complicit. Additionally, most of the other characters also helped open my eyes to the ways that I have failed to understand why people with situations different from my own can seem complicit in their own subordination. The discussion of how gender plays out also may be eye-opening for those with little clarity on the violence that seeming innocuous hierarchies produce (e.g. even "good" people can enact said violence). I plan on reading the sequel, although I've heard it's not as good. I also recommend this book to: -Any person who doesn't understand the severity of the violence of colonization on those who have been colonized (e.g. people who aren't part of a colonized group, people who firmly believe today's racism is "less bad" than yesterday's) -Those who don't see why people in the African diaspora are often concerned with what often is written off as mere "identity politics" (as opposed to a legitimate sense of loss) -Any person who is having a hard time understanding how "nice" and "good" people are still among the hands that enact violence against colonized peoples -Any person who is having a hard time understanding how a "minority" can be among the hands that enact violence against (their own) colonized people (e.g. people who firmly believe in a rigid category of "sell-outs")

A voice screams out at you, The momentary embrace of the eyes in a far away camera glance. A dismissal of worth. The total subjugation and repression felt by women of the post-colonial world is not without its listeners. Titsi Dangerembga's "Nervous Conditions"(NC) is the story of a determined young girl who manuevers both patriarchal and Imperial obstacles to obtain an ambigous future. Offering an answer to the question of how a person who is "double colonized"(233pc) can break free from the restraints of both neo-colonial and cultural barriers NC never the less leaves for the reader the issues of western education and the judeo-catholic religion as unresolved mechanisms of future restraints in its character's lives." When Nervous Conditions was published in 1988, it added to the growing corpus of women's writing in Zimbabwe."(debunk1) Explaining the controlling theme of the novel Kwame Appiah writes in the introduction,"while not specifically addressed to a western readership, the problems of racial and gender equity the text raises are not in any way unfamiliar to us."(NCxi) Both Shani Mootoo's " Cereus Blooms at Midnight"(CBAM) published in 1996 and Arundhati Roy's "God of Small Things"(GOST) published in 1997 explore the theme of characters seeking to define themselves outside the traditional patterns of repression encountered universally by women in post-colonial society. This striking similiarity in the subject and themes of NC,CBAM and GOST makes for an interesting comparison. Ketu Katrak in an essay titled "Decolonizing Culture" warns against judgement, "One finds(1)little theoretical production of post colonial writers given the serious attention it deserves, or that it is dismissed as not theoretical enough by western standards; (2) the increasing phenomenon of using postcolonial texts as raw material for the theory producers and consumers of Western Academia; (3) theoretical production as an end in itself, confined to the consumption of other theorists who speak the same priveliged language in which obscurity is regularly mistaken for profundity. A near hedgemony is being established in contemporary theory that can with impunity ignore or exclude post-colonial writers essays, interviews and other cultural productions while endlessly discussing concepts of the 'other' of 'difference and so on" (239cr) It is with this warning against classification that a parallel can be drawn between the three novels and a unity of message defined in the texts. All three novels place Western education at the forefront of the story. By portraying abuse at the hands of the mimic-man (Bahbi) the contradiction between the value of western knowledge and the system of repression it represents is drawn. The patriarchal figure of Babamakura in NC is reconstituted in the figures of Chandin in CBAM and Papachi in GOST. Placing the mimic-man into a political context Frantz Fanon exhorts his "comrades" in the "Wretched of the Earth", "Let us not lose time in useless lament or sickening mimicry. Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of it's street corners, at every corner in the world."(WE235) By portraying characters that have broken away from societal norms and found happiness the authors of CBAM and GOST confirm the possibility of an alternative to the cycle of female oppression that NC challenges but does not defeat. Vivian May describes CBAM's interpretation of transcendence by it's characters as,"an alternative epistemology and economy of being that rely upon notions of love and desire which do not uphold the dysfunctional family of empire"(dislocate) By choosing a lifestyle that is outside of the normal structure of social roles for its protagonists Mootoo and Roy have offered an alternative to Dangarembga's vision for hers. In NC Tambudzai explains herself when she says," I was not sorry when my brother died. Nor am I apologising for my callousness, as you may define it, my lack of feeling."(NC1) With this apology Tambudzai includes the readers in the story emphasising the importance of the subject. Tambudzai goes on to say,"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."(NC1) NC's portrayal of the hoplessness of Tambudzai's mother and her aunt Maiguru are contrasted against the achievements of Tambudzai and Lucia but also tempered by the agony of Nyasha. CBAM also offers its interpretation of how a person can break free from the opression of cultural norms. Mr Tyler, an effeminate man, finds freedom by working in a field where he is the only male, he says,"I was, after all, the only Lantanacamaran man ever to train in the field of nursing."(CBAM6) Being a male in a female dominated career Mr Tyler becomes a symbol for female repression as he struggles to understand his place in society. Otoh, Mr.Tyler's friend and love interest also has found a place outside of the traditional Patriarchal and Imperial confinements of the story. Describing Otoh's change from woman to man Mootoo writes,"The transformation was flawless. Hours of mind-dulling exercises streamlined Ambrosia into an angular, hard-bodied creature and tampered with the flow of whatever hormonal juices defined him."(CBAM110) Alternately in GOST, the twins, Rahel and Estha also offer an idea of how to overcome entrenched societal strictures. Describing Estha's reaction on being reunited with his twin sister Roy writes,"It had been quiet in Estha's head until Rahel came."(GOST16) Explaining the space occupied by Rahel in society Roy comments,"Rahel grew up without a brief...Without anybody who would pay her dowry and therefore without an obligatory husband looming on her horizon."(GOST18) Freed from the patterns of Patriarchal repression Rahel and Estha live outside of the dominant culture,"So as long as she wasnt noisy about it, she remained free to make her own inquiries:...Into life and how it ought to be lived."(GOST18) In answering the ambiguous ending to Dangarembga's NC Mootoo and Roy have employed the technique of "Magic-Realism" to offer an alternative narrative to overcoming the repression of "double colonization".Vivian May explains the use of supernatural events among post-colonial writers,"They see an imaginary space as offering opportunities to remember identities and histories differently."(dislocate) Using magical and unreal events CBAM and GOST allow the reader to imagine a different reality, one that transcends normality and gives the reader the confidence to embrace a future that is optomistic and hopeful. Bahbi in his forward to "The Wretched of the Earth" says of the idea of using fantastical imagery and situations,"It is Fanon's great contribution to our understanding of ethical judgement and political experience to insistently frame his reflections on violence, de-colonization, national consciousness, and humanism in terms of the psycho-affective realm--the body, dreams, psychic inversions and displacement , phantasmatic political identifications."(WExix) Answering NC with the use of psycho-affectivity both CBAM and GOST draw from the teachings of Fanon in an attempt at,"an engagement with(or resistance to) a given reality..."(WExix) Foremost of the themes of psycho-affectivity and magic realism used in CBAM is the setting of the story on the mythical island of Lantanamacara. By setting the story in a place that is not part of the known reality of the reader Mootoo provides the necessary backdrop for an escape from the accepted patterns of repression and control. Another more subtle note of magic realism occurs in the character of Otto. Born as a woman but living life as a man, his feminine qualities are supressed along with the memory of the community of his early years of life as a female."So flawless was the transformation that even the nurse and doctor who attended the birth, on seeing him later, marvelled at their carelessness in having declared him a girl.(CBAM110) The inability of the people of Lantanamacara to remember that Otoh had originally been a female is one of several premises that would be hard to accept outside of a world colored by psycho-affectivity. GOST also offers its own magic realism in the setting of the abandoned home of Kari Saipu. Populated by the ghost of a white man who has "gone native" Roy compares the ghost to William Conrad's Kurtz in "The Heart of Darkness". Later the house becomes the reason for the death of Sophie Mol in her attempt to cross the river as well as the scene of Velutha's savage beating at the hands of the police. Explaining the place of the house in the story Roy writes,"Nobody went to Kari Saipu's house anymore. Vellya Paapen claimed to be the last human being to set eyes on it. He asaid that it was haunted. He had told the twins the story of his encounter with Kari Saipu's ghost."(GOS189) Including the supernatural within the story GOST also engages the reader to think beyond the known and consider situations and outcomes outside of the normal human experience. Answering the questions left by NC, CBAM and GOST offer an avenue of understanding to how women can break free from oppression. Using the themes of magic realism, gender variance and love without restrictions Mootoo and Roy have provided an alternate vision to the issues brooched by NC. By depicting characters of ambigous sexual orientation Mootoo enlarges the scope of oppression by voicing the concerns of those outside of traditional sexual relationships. Roy, in her investigation into the "Love Laws" comments that they control,"Who should be loved, and how. And how much."(GOST33) Offering another interpretation of how women are repressed in the control of their ability to love, GOST answers to NC with an additional aspect of female repression. Apparent in both the novel CBAM and GOST is the portrayal of relationships that are anathema to the judeo-christian tradition. Characters who have chosen relationships in direct opposition to religious dogma and found happiness is a direct refutation of a third oppressive structure that is unaddressed in NC.

It’s hard for me to rate this book because on the one hand, I really resonated with this story and the characters and as an African, it was a story told with a lot of heart and nuance and reflexivity. We get the benefit of Tambu’s older self editorially providing wisdom and reflection as she looks back at her younger self. And this is helpful in casting Tambu as a sympathetic character because with time and with age, there’s clearly been a lot of analyses of how she sees things. But despite her promising start in this story, I couldn’t help but feel that she wasn’t really the main character in her own narration. The premise is that when Tambu loses her brother, who happens to be her nemesis, she inherits his opportunity to move in with their wealthy uncle to pursue her dream of an education and a better life for her family. But she finds that life isn’t as perfect as she believed in the household of her god-like uncle and aunt, and she finds that in the pursuit of her dreams, she may be losing her identity. This was set up like it was going to be Tambu’s coming of age story, but it didn’t really deliver on that expectation. In the end, it was kind of a collection of incidents and events about family expectations, gender inequity and coloniality and the legacies of compromising oneself for the Western gaze in order to be successful enough to look after one’s family. Yet even though my expectation for a connected story about Tambu wasn’t met, and even though this was very “slice of life,” I think it articulated experiences that were very realistic and pertinent to a Zimbabwean and more broadly, African, experience. The character development was stellar, the scenes and reflections were on point, the scenarios and ways of thinking resonated. I could see the experiences of my own family, friends and neighbours in the grievances and hurts and expectations and hopes and responsibilities that lay in this book. I loved the complex family dynamics and the imperfect characters. If I’m removing one star, it’s because this did not feel entirely cohesive to me. I enjoyed the stories but I did feel it felt a little incomplete and “so what” at the end. It left me as a reader wondering what the author wanted to accomplish with this story which ended as abruptly as it started, kind of in the middle. I also thought it was a strange choice to include a spoiler-ridden introduction at the start of this edition. My understanding is that this is the first book in a trilogy of books featuring Tambu which might explain why this is so abrupt but I also felt like this didn’t end on a cliffhanger or with any express trigger to pick up the next book. I really liked the story and would like to see what older Tambu’s foreshadowing will lead to, so I plan to check out the other books in the series. I recommend.

TsiTsi Dangarembga has crafted a superb narrative of a family in the midst of sorting through the trials of colonial life in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Telling the story from the point of view of the young Tambudzai gives her free reign to express a range of emotions and genres of experience, such as fear, guilt, pride, resentment, confusion, and acceptance. As Tambu she sometimes makes sharp political commentary in a tongue and cheek sort of way, but the sting is there nonetheless. The characterizations all convey layered symbolic meanings in terms of the larger issues of female entrapment with its corresponding male entrapment, as seen for example in the relationship of Babamukuru and his wife Maiguru. Nervous Conditions' universality lies in the realization that we all have "nervous conditions" in our lives based on not just the immediate family situation, but on larger hegemonically enacted ones as well.

I have not heard of this author or book before. I often read African fiction but surprised that this book and author have never popped up in the recommendations on my Kindle. I first heard of the author when the shortlist for this year's Booker Prize was released. The plot explores the overlap of the effects of colonialism and the tenets of a traditional patriarchal society, and how rules and cultural practices are conveniently adapted to propogate the status of the men. I hope the author decides to edit and release this book again. It's an amazing story.

Congrats for the good job, Dangarembga! I could not wait getting this novel which is a masterpiece in the African literature.This is a must read for anyone interested in Postcolonial literature, the energy of women's rights, their cries and, lives in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe)in the 1960s. Fascinating characters in a fascinating and moving narrative with a compelling examination of the issue of freedom, Dangarembga's "Nervous Conditions" portrays the laborious and careful efforts to female subjectivity and the way to equality.This novel also offers a good read on the themes of colonization, the necessity of education, Christianity and the local religions...

I am pleasantly surprised with this novel. The story begins a little slow and then, without me realizing it, I am hooked. The women in the story are powerful and complex. The story wrestles with class and culture, the patriarch and progressive education, and the impact it takes on this small African community..

This book is like a coiled snake. For the most part, it starts innocently and quietly -- but it pounces towards at the end with emotions. You shouldn't expect a book titled Nervous Conditions to be without heartache.

Ho dato 5 stelle a questo libro perchè oltre ad avere un'ottima presentazione generale risulta leggero, maneggevole e ordinato nella formattazione. Ottimo e completo di epigrafe, introduzione e note che permettono, per chi come me studia all'università, di avere un quadro completo sulle tematiche affrontate e quindi di approfondire gli studi.

This edition of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel has an introduction by Kwame Anthony Appiah that was written twenty years ago and sixteen years after the novel was first published in the UK. In many ways not much has changed since 1988 or 2004 in terms of gender. And maybe not since the novel’s setting in the Sixties and early Seventies. In fact, maybe we’re going backwards. Kwame Appiah’s introduction begins with the first words of the novel proper: “I was not sorry when my brother died.” Those words are written by a woman of indeterminate age remembering the day her brother failed to come home for the holidays from his mission school. The narrator, Tambu, was around thirteen at the time, her brother Nhamo a year older. We learn that they lived in what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Theirs is a family of subsistence farmers who are not quite dirt poor as they have a reasonably sized house with some furniture. Two reasons they’re not on the breadline – despite the laziness of their feckless father Jeremiah – are the industriousness of Tambu’s mother and the benevolence of her uncle, Babamukuru. He is headmaster of the mission school in a nearby town and he and his wife Maiguru have had the good fortune to go to university in South Africa and England. He lives in a big house, has servants and two cars and he takes Nhamo under his wing. The plan is that the boy will benefit from a good education and raise his side of the family further up the social ladder. Despite the value that many characters – including Tambu – place on education, there is a strong feeling that it is wasted on males and females in different ways. Babamukuru has had access to “western” ideas, having spent five years in England in the Swinging Sixties doing a Masters. However, he has still come home as a patriarch with traditional ideas about hierarchy and a “woman’s place”. His wife Maiguru is also a post-graduate but she has had little opportunity to use her education, apart from doing some teaching at the mission school. She is a submissive wife who humours her husband and rarely challenges his authority. Nhamo as a teenage boy appears to be following Babamukuru’s example. He has been doing well at school but he uses his male privilege to lord it over Tambu and remind her that as a girl she is his social and intellectual inferior. He is lazy and selfish and refuses to help on the farm when he comes home for the holidays. Meanwhile Tambu often has to miss classes at the local school to milk the cows or because there is no money to pay the fees. Being the resourceful type, at the age of about eight she starts growing maize to sell in the local town to pay the school fees. She gets not support from her family for this, including her mother, who is suspicious of education. Neither of her parents believe that girls need any education beyond cooking and chores around the farm. Then Tambu’s brother dies suddenly of mumps. His death opens doors for Tambu because her uncle decides that she must replace Nhamo as her family’s hope for the future. This puts her in closer touch with her cousin Nyasha. You think this is going to be a wonderful, rich friendship but it’s problematic. Nyasha is about the same age as Tambu, but she has spent five years in England with her parents and has come back with a head full of western traits (we see her reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover) and a miniskirt. Tambu still shares her family’s traditional ideas so she finds Nyasha’s version of Sixties permissiveness (short skirts, smoking, hanging out with boys) rather shocking. However, they share a room and after some initial mutual suspicion, they do become friends. Nyasha can’t reconcile her experience of life in England and her intellectual curiosity with the straitjacket that traditional norms impose on her and she develops bulimia. This is her protest against paternal authority and the injunction for women to give men curves. Which reminds me that the novel has another admirable female character, her mother’s sister, Lucia. She likes having sex with men and although this has disadvantages for her – she gets pregnant by a deadbeat – she has enough spirit to flick the finger at anyone who sneers at her. She also has enough brains to get her way. She persuades Babamukuru to give her a cooking job at the mission school, which enables her to go to evening classes. A better future awaits her. I won’t say what becomes of Tambu, but there is hope at the end of the novel that a better future awaits her too. I will definitely read more books by Tsitsi Dangarembga.

Am happy

It is my first book by any Zimbabwean writer. Tambudszai is thirteen and lives with poor parents, an elder brother, and two little sisters in an unknown village in Zimbabwe. To uplift the family fortune, her father's elder brother, a headmaster in an English missionary school, takes her brother, Nhamo, to the mission and sponsors his lodging and studies. But when he died due to a strange illness, his position was taken over by Tambudszai, an ambitious, confident, focused, revolting, yet disciplined young lady. The author excellently portrayed the social, financial and psychological endeavour journey of a young, poor, and deprived rural girl in patriarchal colonial Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in the 1970s. Dr Brij Mohan Author-Second Innings.

Different