CHAPTER III Resisting the Colonial and the Patriarchal in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. Nervous Conditions Literary depictions of feminist awareness have undergone major transformations in the decades that span Nectar in a Sieve (1954) and Nervous Conditions (1988), as this chapter’s examination of colonial and patriarchal agendas in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) will show. Markandaya, an Indian writing about India, and Dangarembga, a Zimbabwean writing about Zimbabwe, both Westernized, postcolonial women writers, deal with the ideological and physical entrapment of women in patriarchal cultures.1 Significantly, both texts were written and published in the years soon after their authors’ nations gained political independence. But where Dangarembga’s text departs from Markandaya’s is in the sharply striking ways in which a third world feminist consciousness informs this Zimbabwean writer’s critical consciousness and impacts her postcolonial perceptions of the nation and the national. While Markandaya’s text highlights the crippling effects of Indian cultural practices imposed on women and thus questions certain aspects of national culture whose tenets are mobilized by nationalism, Dangarembga’s double consciousness is both rooted in national concerns and uprooted from them. Insofar as women are located in the nation and its culture the text can be viewed as having national concerns. But because it focuses on how a culture supported and promoted by the nation, the national, and nationalism, has oppressed woman the text can be deemed to question the national. The text allows us to see why, if the patriarchal culture underlying the social system licenses woman’s oppression, then that patriarchal culture acts as an instrument of the nation. Situating both the writer and text in their historical, political, and social contexts, I argue that the writer’s approach to the national is informed by a feminist consciousness rooted in the nation albeit in a manner that allows us to read into it a moving beyond the national towards a postnational conceptual paradigm. Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 52 CHAPTER THREE Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in 1959, in Zimbabwe, which became politically independent in 1980, when the British government formally granted independence to Zimbabwe on April 18, 1980. Dangarembga went to England when she was two years old and lived there with her family for four years. She returned to study medicine at Cambridge, but after three years of experiencing racism returned to Zimbabwe, where she encountered sexism. For example, talking about the position of women in Zimbabwe, Tsitsi Dangarembga states, “A Zimbabwean woman may become a militant, genderless fighter but on pain of ridicule at the national level she may not become a fighting woman … My own experiences as a young writer illuminate grotesquely the energy-depleting toll on Zimbabwean women who grapple with their country’s version of the usual sexist controls.”2 Dangarembga’s novel confronts politically constructed fences, informed not only by the writer’s connections to the diaspora but also by a feminist consciousness that questions colonial (il)logic and indigenous patriarchal ideology. In Nervous Conditions, race and class impact feminist questions in a slightly different manner from that depicted in Changes. Unlike Changes, in which all the three major women characters, Esi, Opokuya, and Fusena, are, in different degrees, materially well-to-do, not all the women in Nervous Conditions are similarly privileged. Mainini, Lucia, and Tambudzai’s sites of struggle are marked by disempowerment because of poverty, a very real issue, which prevents Tambudzai from going to school--her family cannot afford the school fees. Dangarembga exposes the racial discriminatory practices instituted by the colonial government in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), which, Dickson A. Mungazi states, “enhance[d] its power to control, not only education, but also society itself.”3 Compelling us to “remap” and “rename,” to reevaluate the relationship between woman and nation, Dangarembga’s text reflects postcolonial third world feminist perspectives in ways that invite Anne McClintock’s analysis, in an article focused on women and nationalism in South Africa, that, “All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented, and all are dangerous. . . . They represent relations to political power … and to the technologies of violence . . . legitimizing, or limiting, people’s access to the rights and resources of the nation-state.”4 That nationalisms are gendered is underscored in the concerns that Dangarembga here reveals in her text. The different ways in which Nervous Conditions is invested in nationalism is reflected in the construction of woman’s identity which reveals, what I see as, her postcolonial and postnational feminism, particularly in her choice of individual characters, language, and setting. The main argument this book puts forward is that there can be seen a seeming paradox in the literary representativity of the message Nervous Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. CHAPTER THREE 53 Conditions conveys about the nation and national. If the national and cultural overlap and intersect, imbricate interstitially then what are we allowed to draw from the equation between women and nation? When this literary text describes colonial attitudes and practices against the colonized it can be seen as, in some ways, defending and upholding the national. When woman’s marginalization is depicted, the text clearly opposes, rejects, questions, confronts, subverts the national culture. So if women are the upholders of tradition what does their marginalization imply? Mama reminds us, “In 1983, several thousand women were detained by the Zimbabwean authorities, and many of them subjected to beating and other forms of abuse during ‘Operations Clean Up.’”5 After national liberation, then, no longer diverted and distracted by nationalist pressures in the same way, women could look inward, highlighting the “woman question” in the political context of a colonial past and a neocolonial present in male-dominated societies. As Rudo B. Gaidzanwa notes, “Before the independence of Zimbabwe, the issue of black women in society was overshadowed by other issues such as liberation of the whole nation from colonialism” (8).6 Turning their attention to themselves, women discovered that their lot in life was unchanged, that they were basically still expected to adopt the wife/mother/domestic roles. In consequence of this and an increasing feminist consciousness of how patriarchal ideologies oppress and perpetuate disenfranchisement, women writers were more focused on concerns that touched their lives, on questioning cultural constructions of women. Further, writers, especially women writers, but most particularly third world women writers, as creative artists, indicate a commitment to effecting social change in positing alternatives to prevalent dominant attitudes. Broadly speaking, I attempt to connect and contextualize the postcolonial, national, and feminist to see how their trajectories intersect and overlap in this text. Further, an analysis of Dangarembga’s feminist and postcolonial perspectives will, as I hope to demonstrate, show how this postnationalism, this postnational identity for woman derives from the national itself. Furthermore, foregrounding the different ways in which women characters resist existing patriarchal structures, the text, I suggest, invokes social change in the attitudes of female characters like Tambu, Lucia, and Nyasha toward patriarchally constituted cultural codes for women. Rosemary Moyana puts it thus, “These are the women who refuse to be compartmentalized into their chiseled roles. They question, struggle, and become liberated in different ways.”7 Taking its title, Nervous Conditions and epigraph, “The condition of native is a nervous condition” from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), the novel describes colonialism as a debilitating Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. 54 CHAPTER THREE nervous condition for the colonized native.8 In depicting the effect that the colonizer has on the natives, the novel focuses on the plight of the doubly colonized woman, highlighting the connection between feminism and nationalism. A literary critic, Charles Sugnet, emphasizes the connection between woman and nation in Nervous Conditions: The fact that Dangarembga read Fanon and found the phrase for her title only after her manuscript was complete seems to fulfill Radhakrishnan’s request for an ‘equal and dialogic’ relationship between women’s politics and politics of nationalism. The phrase from Sartre/Fanon stands as an indicator that the two discourses are in relation, a relation that flows from the body’s symptomatic resistance to two different but related forms of domination. By becoming narrator, teller, writer, finding the language to nudge her symptoms toward articulate consciousness and resistance, she breaks out of those discourses where she would remain perpetually as goddess/victim, and reclaims agency for herself.9 This quotation provides a platform for my argument that Nervous Conditions conflates the two discourses, patriarchal and the national, in its resistance to both. Dangarembga’s nationalism, thus, reflected through her feminist lenses, allows us to explore the relationship of woman to nation in terms of feminism and nationalism in this text. At the theoretical level, I put forward a question that R. Radhakrishnan poses, Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. “How is a genuinely representative national consciousness (and here I have in mind the distinction that Frantz Fanon draws between the official ideology of nationalism and nationalist consciousness) to be spoken for by feminism and vice versa?”10 The nexus among nationalism, feminism, and colonialism becomes clearer in light of Fanon’s views on nationalism in the context of colonialism. Indeed, that third world nationalism and colonialism are historically intermeshed is evidenced in Horace B. Davis’s comments referencing Fanon’s views on the damage to the nation’s psyche.11 Fanon contended that the end of colonialism did not alleviate the misery of the native disenfranchised because national liberation did not end class oppression.12 Davis reminds us that, “Fanon asked, Does the rise of nationalism and the throwing off of the colonial yoke have a rejuvenating effect on the psychology of the indigenous population? Does it lead to the ending of alienation? Fanon’s answer to this question was that alienation derived not only from national but from class oppression, which is not necessarily ended by national liberation. … But the beginnings of selfrespect do not need wait for the ending of either class or national oppression.”13 Nervous Conditions demonstrates, by raising concerns of selfalienation in the colonized, as, for example, in Nyasha and Tambudzai (and, socio-historically, in the ex-colonized, in the fact that Dangarembga is Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. CHAPTER THREE 55 exploring this issue after Zimbabwe’s national liberation), that the end of colonialism does not end all damaging effects of colonial domination. Dangarembga does not “wait for the ending of either class or national oppression” to show the “beginnings of self-respect” for woman. It is worth noting that while implicated in Dangarembga’s text is what can be seen as its engagement with nationalism what is telling is the fact that though set in preindependent Zimbabwe, (“Dangarembga returns Tambudzai to her own childhood in the Rhodesia of the late 1960s before the war gained momentum.”),14 and written after it gained political independence, the text does not deal overtly with the national liberation struggle,15 unlike the sequel to Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not.16 According to Dangarembga, “her story, although set in the past, is about the future Zimbabwe” which will have “no option but to adapt increasingly to Western conventions, attitudes and styles.”17 The African context/Western values construction the text sets up in an oblique opposition between native tradition and bourgeois/colonial cultural values, subsuming both under patriarchal subjectivity suggests, as noted by Michael Chapman, “the impossibility of unlinking its woman’s story from its national story. Rather, it confirms that old and new codes of behaviour are entirely complicit in each other’s influence on processes of social transition” (308). The fact that women played significant roles in the freedom struggle for national independence from colonial rule in Zimbabwe is not apparent in Nervous Conditions as it is in Dangarembga’s sequel to it, The Book of Not. However, the plurality and multiplicity of Nervous Conditions can be seen in Chapman’s observation that Dangarembga’s avoidance of the liberation war and focus[ing] instead on a difficulty that has currency for the woman writer in Zimbabwe . . . may be summed up in the question: when the images of war continue to preoccupy the national psyche . . . the woman’s subject matter . . . [is the subversion of] patriarchal codes. (307) According to Chapman, Dangarembga’s story can be seen as having a “‘universalizing’ life” (307) because of the fact that she chooses to focus on women’s issues instead of on the national liberation at a time when the nation is preoccupied with decolonization. He sees Dangarembga focusing on “a difficulty that has currency for the woman writer in Zimbabwe, [the subversion of] patriarchal codes,” at a moment when “the images of war continue to preoccupy the national psyche” (307). Extrapolating from Dangarembga’s remarks that her story is about the “future Zimbabwe,” I see her novel rooted in the nation with an underlying attitude that I suggest can be seen as postnational feminist. Its women Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. 56 CHAPTER THREE characters reveal how “their personal histories are undergoing radical repositioning at the same time as their political histories are altering” (Chapman 307). The postcolonial and feminist trajectories converge and confront the colonial and patriarchal translated into the national/neo-colonial with continuities and discontinuities, with affinities and ruptures, as Sally McWilliams states: Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. Post-colonialist and feminist versions of mimicry intersect in these young women’s resistances to the man positioned next to the colonizer in this text. . . . . Tambu and Nyasha are struggling to inhabit their seemingly ‘unnatural positions within the educated class of Zimbabwean women faced with the changing values and mores of a country on the verge of black rule.18 Embedded in the novel’s overwhelming concern with woman’s position in society and on the colonial impact on women is a sense that national concerns are not only secondary to women’s but serve to highlight their marginalization by a culture and social system of a nation built on an infrastructure whose ontological structure is sustained by women. I envision in the text’s plurality in dealing with and avoiding of the national a concern that goes beyond the narrow confines of the national and translates into a postnational identity for woman. According to Flora VeitWild, “Though Dangarembga does not refer explicitly to post-independent society, her complex analysis of the liberation of the mind implies the contention that there is no easy way to nation-building in the Africa of the 1980s and 1990s.19 The text’s critical consciousness of the colonial project to subordinate the colonized underpins its awareness of the task of “nationbuilding” and underlies its feminist discursive formations. As Chapman puts it, the issues of socio-psychological interaction and cultural stress, which are explored by Dangarembga in the gendered family situation, will continue to have an important effect on the lives of people in any new Zimbabwean nation. (306) To examine woman’s subject-positionality in Nervous Conditions it is necessary, as Elizabeth Willey avers, to “link the postcolonial and feminist theoretical projects”20 because “women as historical subjects are complex interactions of not only sexual, but also racial, ethnic, class, cultural, and religious differences”21 and as such, “claim a space specifically for women in the postcolonial setting.”22 This text reflects, in its multiplicities and subjectivities, the ways in which postcolonial feminism in the context of third world national independence and neo-colonialism shifts woman’s concerns from the national to the postnational conceptual level. Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. CHAPTER THREE 57 Nervous Conditions, through an examination of the oppression of female characters by family, culture, and society analyzes woman’s relationship to culture and, as Charles Sugnet observes, “redefine[s] the ‘political’ and rearticulate[s] the relationship between feminism and anti-colonial nationalism,”23 and challenges the traditional role of woman. What enables and empowers Tambudzai to critical self-awareness, to question bourgeois values, to confront patriarchal tradition is the connection between the evolution of Tambudzai’s consciousness (because she, as the narrator, wrote her text after Zimbabwe won political independence) and the national liberation struggle.24 In other words, to draw parallels between Tambudzai’s intellectual development and Zimbabwean independence is to see their mixed legacies. Just as for Zimbabwe, political independence brought the realization of the need for psychological decolonization so for Tambudzai her Convent education made her realize the need for the decolonization of her own thought. Tambudzai is critically conscious of her subscription to a value-system that liberates and binds her simultaneously, even as she realizes that “there were other directions to be taken, other struggles to engage in besides the consuming desire to emancipate[her]self and [her] family” (Nervous Conditions 152)25 Thus the parallel with Zimbabwe’s independence which liberated the nation from political domination without an accompanying psychological decolonization. The task of psychological decolonization is made complicated and difficult, the text indicates, by the educational system which fosters values that generate a sense of superiority that goes along with the teaching of English literature in the colonial context. In depicting Tambudzai’s dramatic progress at the mission school that gains her a scholarship to a prestigious multi-racial convent in colonial Rhodesia, Dangarembga shows how, to quote Sugnet, “the dream’s very success undermines its assumptions” (43). The portrayal of Tambudzai’s Anglophilic schooling critiques the missionaries who played a major role in the colonial enterprise through their religion-affiliated educational institutions. The educational system run by the missionaries was a hierarchical selective system that fostered fierce competitive mind-sets among the colonized natives by imposing English cultural and academic yardsticks of excellence the achievement of which conferred jobs on those who succeeded. Thus missionary education became a determinant of social success because it ensured coveted jobs under colonial rule. Reinforcing existing patriarchal agendas in a way, missionary education as a cultural arm of colonial rule fostered bourgeois middle-class values defined by material culture: Tambudzai’s awareness of the material contrast between her thatched hut at home and Babamukuru’s bourgeois home which appears palatial to her; “Christian” and indigenous patriarchal values in Babamukuru’s Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 58 CHAPTER THREE condemnation of his daughter, Nyasha, for wearing a short dress and for being alone with a date that suggested to her father a defiance of Christian decorum and patriarchal honor; bourgeois table manners that dictate that Nyasha not begin eating before her father and that she finish all the food on her plate; and an emphasis on the ritualistic aspects of Christianity, such as churchgoing, duties of a Christian wife in being the “good” wife demonstrated in Maiguru’s painstaking efforts over food and other duties in the home for the comfort of husband and children. Dangarembga thus highlights the insidious ways in which colonialist and patriarchal agendas colluded to further perpetuate the subjugation of women. As Carole Boyce Davies puts it, “an African feminist consciousness recognizes that certain inequities and limitations existed/exist in traditional societies and that colonialism reinforced them and introduced others.”26 While Maiguru and Tambudzai’s mother (referred to as Mainini or Ma’Shingayi or Sisi in the novel), question and confront the roles and rules imposed on them by the male-dominated society, Lucia’s character demonstrates the ways in which it is possible, within patriarchal boundaries, for a woman to carve a space for herself by defying societal norms. All three, Tambudzai, Lucia, and Nyasha rebel and struggle, in different ways, against the dictates imposed by patriarchy. Thus we find embedded in the text’s engagement with race and gender issues that show Dangarembga’s central concern with, as Flora Veit-Wild states “how to avoid the usual ‘entrapment’ of women, to come to a true form of emancipation and at the same time avoid self-destruction” (“The Elusive Truth” 119). Trapped between the patriarchal and the bourgeois/colonial in Zimbabwe’s historical context, Lucia, Tambudzai, Nyasha, Maiguru and Tambudzai’s mother question and challenge their colonized identities. Nyasha, exceptionally, fails to negotiate the gender constrictions as she challenges patriarchally defined sexual codes of conduct for women, reflecting how, according to Spivak, “. . . traditional gender-stems have been used to appease colonized patriarchy by the fabrication of personal codes as opposed to imposed colonial civil and penal codes. They have also been the instrument for working out the displaced Envy of the colonized patriarchy against the colonizer” (“Diasporas Old and New” 97). However, despite the text’s emphasis on highlighting the patriarchal constraints on women’s emancipation, it also reveals the contradictions within the patriarchal system as we discover that the choices that enable Tambudzai and Lucia to judiciously better their economic conditions and gain a sense of liberation to some degree are made within patriarchally defined parameters. For example, though initially Babamukuru opposes it, he finally gives Tambudzai permission to attend the Convent. Focused thus on examining Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. CHAPTER THREE 59 woman’s place in society, the text also reveals the contradictions within the patriarchal/colonized social system. As Flora Veit-Wild expresses these contradictions: Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. Yet Nervous Conditions goes beyond an individualist feminist perception and analyzes contradictions of African society in a wider sense. ‘Nervous conditions’ describe all the contradictions exposed in the novel, the generally precarious relationships and delicate balance between men and women, between the generations, between educated and uneducated and between black and white. (“The Elusive Truth” 119120). For example, though Babamukuru wants Lucia to leave for her village he ends up getting her a job at his mission-school. Though these victories are gained by appeasing the patriarchal Babamukuru, in the final analysis, these are triumphant choices for Tambudzai and Lucia. Albeit Tambudzai discovers that her fractured subject-position after her hard-won gender victory leads to her realization of other kinds of subjugation predicated on race and class. Thus Nervous Conditions provides an insight into, to quote Flora Veit-Wild, “an awareness of the crisis of identity which the Zimbabwean woman has undergone in the last decades” (“The Elusive Truth” 117). As a postcolonial writer, hybridized through language and education, Dangarembga’s insight is enriched by the duality of her background, Zimbabwean and English. Nervous Conditions, which won the Commonwealth Prize for Fiction, has the distinction of being the first published novel in English by a black Zimbabwean woman.27 Dangarembga, described as having the “privilege of a moneyed and intellectual family background,”28 spent some of her childhood in Britain and went to a prestigious high-school in Salisbury. Though the novel is not autobiographical, Nyasha’s character does have some autobiographical elements, for example, Dangarembga’s highly educated parents, like Nyasha’s, got their Masters in England. She also studied medicine at Cambridge but not comfortable in the racial atmosphere there returned to Zimbabwe without completing her studies.29 Dangarembga’s concern with analyzing the psychological, economic, and societal damage wrought by the colonial encounter might lead one to expect a positive portrayal of the national in so far as it represents and is represented by the socio-cultural system but the novel questions it and its patriarchally defined social practices, opposing its oppression of women while highlighting the discourse of the colonized native throughout the text. Dangarembga evinces mixed responses to the national as she critiques both the colonial and the national cultural agendas inscribed into patriarchal bourgeois subjectivity. As Gayatri Spivak very pertinently asks: “What is woman’s relationship to Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 60 CHAPTER THREE cultural explanations in the nation-state of origin? What is ‘culture’ without the structural support of the state” (“Diasporas Old and New” 92). Dangarembga’s novel thus can be seen as an intervention into the crisis of woman’s relationship with the nation via its culture. In other words, it seems as if the text explores the question of nationalism or national identity more as a means to highlight the position of woman in society than as a focal point in itself. This is not to suggest that to talk of the nation is not to talk of woman or, inversely, that to focus on woman’s issues is to be unconcerned with the nation. Rather, because women have been marginalized by the powers that define the nation and the national, by focusing on women’s issues the novel transcends, as it were, the national to take woman’s identity and empowerment on to the postnational stage. This idea, that because women have been relegated to the peripheries of national considerations in different countries, causally linking woman and class not only in the national but also in the global context, has been attested to in different ways by women writers from different continents. Dangarembga, like them, is exploring issues more immediate to her gendered situation as a writer in Zimbabwe. She explores shifting national and gender boundaries but focuses more on the female subject in a colonial context in a postcolonial fertile landscape. Both the body politic in terms of female sexuality and the boundaries within which it is confined by patriarchy and territorial ambiguity in terms of whether the text is located exclusively in the colonial terrain or in the postcolonial are related to gender and national identity.30 In Nervous Conditions, one system is pitched against another in the collision of what constitutes an African and a woman as five different women move over different places.31 Nyasha, for example, feels that she has to fight both the African and colonial systems while Tambudzai slips into a system that negates her world completely, while she continues to benefit from its values. Tambudzai’s mother is defined by the village while Maiguru is not willing to let go of the privilege of being with her husband because her sense of identity is tied up with her husband’s. Lucia, the only one of the second generation of women who actually has her own name,32 does not believe in but uses patriarchally acceptable strategies to have a voice, and proves that she can be successful without being westernized.33 According to literary critic, M. Keith Booker, “Lucia plays an important structural role in the book, suggesting both the oppression and the potential power of women in traditional African society, while at the same time serving as a sort of traditional counterpart to the Westernized Nyasha.34 The text thus demonstrates the female imperative to challenge traditionally prescribed roles by reinventing her self and reshaping her identity. Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. CHAPTER THREE 61 Juxtaposed against the “entrapment” of Tambudzai’s mother, aunt, and cousin, is the deletrious, detrimental, and debilitating combined effect of colonial culture, education, religion, compounded by traditional patriarchy. Since the colonial is in collusion with the patriarchal, the line between the colonial system of meaning and the national gets blurred as we find in Babmukuru in whom both the patriarchally constituted ways of thinking found in colonial and traditional cultures come together. Implicit in the depiction of Babamukuru, who is deeply conditioned by colonialism, is the novel’s concern with the psyche of a colonized people which has further implications for the task of nation-building. This concern with the character of the male native is further highlighted in the depiction of the characters, Jeremiah and Takesure, both of whom are portrayed as irresponsible husbands and fathers. Thus the text psychologizes concern about the difficult task of nation-building when the psyche, attitude, and behavior of men like Babamukuru, Jeremiah, and Takesure are less than desirable and laudatory. Babamukuru’s internalization of colonial cultural ideology is testified to by his insistence that his brother legitimize his twenty-year marriage by undergoing a Christian Church wedding to atone for living “in sin.” Juxtaposed against his colonial Christian ethics which impels him to compel his brother and sister-in-law to undergo a Christian church wedding in order to exorcize any devil is his internalization of traditional patriarchal values evident in his patriarch’s role of helping his brother’s family lift itself out of poverty. However, his attitude toward his wife, daughter, and other female members of his extended family demonstrates both the “colonial” and “traditional” sides of his character, dictating what constitutes being good, what constitutes sin, and how a woman should conduct herself. He reveals the contradictions in his ideology when he advises Tambudzai that he has “observed from [his] own daughter’s behaviour that it is not a good thing for a young girl to associate too much with these white people, to have too much freedom. I have seen that girls who do that do not develop into decent women” (NC 180). That the systematic and endemic exploitation of the colonized was built into and constituted the very substance of the colonial system’s gain and success explains and emphasizes, as the text illustrates, how colonialism destroyed the economic fiber and social fabric of the people in general and damaged their psyche--but even those, like Babamukuru and Tambudzai, who were able to achieve success within the economic framework that the colonial government allowed were coopted into colonial culture. Babamukuru, for example, is not even aware of the extent to which he has become a pawn in the colonial game. Tambudzai succeeds in resisting the wedding, which she realizes makes a mockery of her parents’ marriage, by not attending. This is an Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 62 CHAPTER THREE example, among others, of the ways in which the novel questions the assumptions underlying colonial culture imbibed by the colonized. In Tambudzai, the rational and the intuitive intersect and conflict as she recognizes that to get an education she must obey the rules implemented by those invested with authority and power even if it means going against her sense of rational logic. She learns this lesson gradually the first seeds of which are sown in her childhood when she learns from her grandmother the story of her forebears, of the ways in which her grandfather was tricked into slavery by the colonizers and how her uncle’s hard work paid off. Tambudzai learns to work in the family fields beside her grandmother who “praising [Tambudzai’s] predisposition towards working, consolidated it in her [Tambudzai] as a desirable habit” (NC 17). She also gave Tambudzai “history lessons” in their colonial history. Tambudzai’s great-grandfather was a “rich man in the currency of those days, having many fat herd of cattle, large fields and four wives who worked hard to produce bountiful harvests.” This description of the wives working hard and of Tambudzai’s grandmother working hard, whom Tambudzai describes as an “inexorable cultivator of land, sower of seeds and reaper of rich harvests until, literally until, her very last moment” (NC 17,18) underscores the social history of Zimbabwean women who were historically conditioned to work hard in the fields as sole supporters of their families with absent husbands lost to the colonial gold and diamond mines.35 Notwithstanding this implicit concern with the damage done to the nation’s psyche and what it might augur for nation-building, the text highlights woman’s subjugation and explores possibilities for challenging the role imposed on her by a patriarchal society. Though Nervous Conditions is set in pre-independent Zimbabwe and does not deal overtly with the liberation struggle, in depicting the women as strong workers who are responsible in a major way for both home and field-work, as opposed to the men, who don’t do as much, it reflects one of the songs of the liberation struggle of Zimbabwe: As women of Zimbabwe/We symbolize toughness/ It’s so tough/It can only be handled by women. It does not matter how hard or tough it/becomes; We ourselves as women symbolize/toughness.36 As Olivia N. Muchena tells us, “Women sang [this song] everywhere during the war . . . but now the words refer to women’s struggles for emancipation from social and economic subordination” (Muchena 752). This song could very well be about Tambudzai who ploughed a whole field to grow maize, and all her women relatives who worked equally hard, mother, grandmother, and aunts, as for example, Lucia, who “was strong. She could cultivate a whole acre single-handed without rest” (NC 127). Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. CHAPTER THREE 63 Tambudzai also learns early in life the illogic of her parents, though at the time too young to see their deep entrenchment into the patriarchally defined cultural codes. Though her family barely subsists as a result of crop failure, her mother manages to sell vegetables and eggs to earn just enough to send Tambudzai’s older brother, Nhamo, to school. When Tambudzai, at the age of seven, is visibly upset upon realizing that there is no money left for her school fees and that she would not be able to attend school, her father tells her, “Can you cook books and feed them to your husband? Stay at home with your mother. Learn to cook and clean. Grow vegetables.” Tambudzai questions her father’s advice, knowing that her aunt Maiguru, who was in England at the time, was educated, “and did she serve Babamukuru books for dinner? [Tambudzai] discovered to [her] unhappy relief that [her] father was not sensible. (NC 15, 16) Tambudzai’s mother also dissuades her from going to school but explains her reasons in a different manner. Reminding her daughter not only of the “weight of womanhood” but also of the “poverty of blackness,” thus focusing on woman’s oppression by both colonialism and patriarchy, she explains that her father was right because even Maiguru knew “how to cook and clean and grow vegetables.” In addition to her father’s view that an education was not going to help her cook and feed her husband, her mother references race to explain the double colonization of women, “This business of womanhood is a heavy burden … with the poverty of blackness on one side and the weight of womanhood on the other. Aiwa! What will help you, my child, is to learn to carry your burdens with strength” (NC 16). Bewildered, Tambudzai cannot make sense of her parents’ logic, that “[B]eing black was a burden because it made you poor, but [her uncle] Babamukuru was not poor. [Her] mother said being a woman was a burden [but her aunt] Maiguru was not poor and had not been crushed by the weight of womanhood” (NC 16) Right from the time that her uncle, Babamukuru, and his family return from England, Tambudzai recognizes the power and authority of Babamukuru as her family’s benefactor and mentor. She recognizes that all his power and the respect accorded him derive from his education and his male status. However, we notice that Maiguru, despite earning the same degrees as her husband, does not get the same power from her education. Tambudzai wanted her “father and [her brother] Nhamo to stand up straight like Babamukuru, but they always looked as though they were cringing” (NC 49-50). She saw that Babamukuru “hadn’t cringed under the weight of his poverty. … Through hard work and determination he had broken the evil wizard’s spell” (NC 50). Unlike his older brother, Tambudzai’s father, Jeremiah, had not “broken the evil wizard’s spell” to overcome poverty. Configured into Tambudzai’s cognitive awareness of her father’s abject demeanor and slothful ways, Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 64 CHAPTER THREE juxtaposed against his older brother Babamukuru’s exalted worth and social status, is the underlying presence of colonialism. Her uncle’s power and wealth do not prevent Tambudzai from noticing the alienation of her newly-England-returned cousins from their native culture. Neither Chido nor Nyasha remember enough of their mother tongue, Shona, to be able to converse in it and seem ill at ease in the extended family gathering. Not joining the dancing and merrymaking to celebrate their arrival, their unease in the family gathering prompts Tambudzai, as yet uninitiated into missionary education, to think that England was not worth losing one’s culture for. Initially fluctuating between criticism and acceptance of the culture that she is exposed to at the mission school and in her uncle’s home, Tambudzai later sees the necessity of adopting colonial culture as her education progresses, to do what she deems essential to getting ahead in her schooling. Her uncle, who worked hard to educate himself within the colonial system and consequently succeeded, is enough of an example to make her see the necessity of obeying the powers that be as the only means of achieving her goals. All this is conveyed to her rather quickly as Tambudzai grows and develops intellectually. In her first phase, or stage of development, we see Tambudzai pitting her full force against her family’s attempt to socialize her into her gendered role by refusing to buy into her parents’ patriarchal ideology. Recognizing the injustice when her mother does scrape together enough for her brother’s fees because his cultural role as breadwinner prioritizes his education while her cultural role as wife/mother does not, she puts her spirited nature to full use by growing maize to pay her school fees which her parents cannot afford. At crucial moments in Tambudzai’s education we find it is her mother and aunt who support her. When her father dismisses her request for seed to grow maize, it is Tambudzai’s mother who persuades him to grant Tambudzai’s request: “Listen to your child [she tells him]. She is asking for seed. That we can give. Let her try” (NC 17). For a second time Tambudzai’s mother is successful in persuading her husband to give his permission to Tambudzai when she wants to go into town with Mr Matimba to sell her maize: “The girl must have a chance to do something for herself, to fail for herself [she tells him]. If you forbid her to go, she will always think you prevented her from helping herself. She will never forget it, never forgive you” (24-25). At both these moments it is her mother’s intervention that gains Tambudzai the requisite permission from her father. Similarly, it is because her aunt intercedes that her uncle finally agrees to allow Tambudzai to attend the elite Sacred Heart Convent. Achieving excellence at the primary school, Tambudzai is ready for the second phase in Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. CHAPTER THREE 65 her intellectual development. Her brother’s untimely death makes way for her further education at the mission school where her uncle is headmaster. Though her father and uncle consider educating her a waste because her education would benefit the family of the man she married, circumstances, such as her brother’s death and her own will-power pave the way for her progress. We find her aunt coming to her support when Babamukuru opposes her schooling at the multiracial convent, a prestigious private school, because it was expensive and because associating with white people would prevent her from developing into a “decent woman” (NC 180). Maiguru espouses Tambudzai’s going to Sacred Heart Convent to her husband firmly and with conviction, “If Tambudzai is not a decent person now, she never will be, no matter where she goes to school. And if she is decent, then this convent should not change her” (NC 180-181). Thus her mother and aunt support her successfully by persuading her father and uncle that Tambudzai be given a chance to educate herself so that she could then do what her brother was meant to: support and lift the family out of poverty. They point out that she would benefit her family at least till she got married. Going to the mission-school where her uncle is headmaster privileges her, like her brother before her, to live with her uncle’s family. Tambudzai, the village-girl who has always lived in a thatched hut, is overawed by the majesty of her uncle’s middle-class home: “the opulence of the living-room was . . . overwhelming to someone who had first crawled and then toddled and finally walked over dung floors” (NC 69). Her awe at the grandeur and opulence that she sees does not, however, blind her critical senses. Used to a meager existence in her village, she notes what to her seems wasteful living and eating at her uncle’s place. But, not before long, she is acclimated into the middleclass material comforts of Babamukuru’s home. Negating the world she has hitherto known, the culture she assimilates at her uncle’s and the missionary school makes her both self-aware and unsure of herself. The educational pathway to the ladder of academic and social success is not the magic wand she had imagined would make her world miraculously beautiful. On the contrary, after her initial awe at what she sees as material success at her uncle’s, Tambudzai becomes subdued, her spirited nature somewhat crushed. Her progression from the missionary school to the Sacred Heart Convent in some ways unsettles her even more when the white nun’s apartheid makes visible to Tambudzai for the first time the colonizer’s racializing of a whole nation. In retrospect, Tambudzai, the narrator, shares with the reader the implications of being colonized as her experience at the Convent underlines for her the precarious balance she needs to maintain between self and success. Her initial awe at the world Sacred Heart represents is later punctuated by Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 66 CHAPTER THREE nagging doubts that the opportunity her education there will afford her might not be worth the self-alienation it brings with it. But she consciously relegates her doubts to the back of her mind as she realizes that she has no choice because her education is a necessary means to succeed. The selective process under the educational system set up to generate only a handful of coveted admissions into grade school and then into high-school and beyond prevents most from any hope of decent jobs which require a highschool or college education. But as Tambudzai discovers, getting the desired admission into high-school comes with a price--the price of self-alienation and alienation from her family and community compounded by her awareness of the ways in which colonial education while providing social success has, in other ways, been self-debasing/eroding. The fear embedded in Tambudzai’s mother’s plea, “Tell me, my daughter, what will I, your mother say to you when you come home a stranger full of white ways and ideas? It will be English, English all the time,” (NC 184) warns against the assimilation of Tambudzai into the colonizer’s hegemonizing culture consequent to her education at the mostly all-white convent. As an older-but-wiser Tambudzai narrates self-consciously, her attending Sacred Heart does not only lead to her identification as the native with the colonizer but results in her self-alienation initially. The text stresses that the dilemma, the two-edged sword of upwardly mobile success and at the same time the alienation from her family and culture that colonial education will spell for Tambudzai is the direct outcome of the colonial social and economic policy that forces the native to become complicit with the colonizer’s orientalist ideology. By implementing a discriminatory educational system through a selective process the colonial government made it possible for only a few to obtain a higher education that was required for coveted jobs of teachers or headmasters of mission schools. The discriminatory strategies underlying the rules and laws governing the hierarchical educational system perpetuated the subjugation of the Zimbabwean people by only educating a few. Dangarembga underscores the fact that the political system ensured the economic poverty of most of the colonized while it fostered an unhealthy competitive spirit. Tambudzai tells us that “Glamour … surrounded the prospect of going to school at a convent. And not just any convent, but a multiracial convent” (NC 78). By making only two seats available for all the African Grade Seven girls in the entire country, admission to the Sacred Heart Convent was coveted and fiercely competed for. Tambudzai’s admission to the Convent would earn her the “privilege of associating with the elite of that time, the privilege of being admitted on an honorary basis into their culture” (NC 178). Consequentially only a handful of the colonized got the advantage of an education, the only path to social success. Therefore, Babamukuru’s job as the Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. CHAPTER THREE 67 headmaster of the mission school, Nyasha’s passing the school exams with flying colors, and Tambudzai’s admission to the Sacred Heart Convent are the envy of all. That their accomplishments in the colonial structure come at a cost of subjection to humiliation and dehumanization is underlined throughout the text. The all-powerful Babamukuru is silenced into accepting the crowding of Tambudzai with five other African students into a dorm room meant for four at the Young Ladies College of the Sacred Heart. To Babamukuru’s polite query, “I have been wondering, Sister. I was under the impression that the girls sleep four to a room, but I see there are six beds here,” the white nun’s peremptory response, “It is inconvenient, isn’t it?” (NC 194) sets Babamukuru’s “double consciousness” operating in this confrontation with the colonizer. Babamukuru’s obsequious acceptance of the fact that six African students have to share a room meant for four highlights his politically disempowered position in terms of race, gender, class in the colonial structure. When Tambudzai expresses delight at her admission to Sacred Heart and her determination to take maximum advantage of every opportunity there, the precocious Nyasha, cognizant of the psychological damage done by colonialism and its culture, warns Tambudzai against the inevitable consequences of going to the Sacred Heart Convent. The dialogue between the two cousins highlights the double bind between assimilation and self-alienation within which a colonial education would position Tambudzai but, clearly, the glamour of the Convent and the chance of success it represents for her mean that Nyasha’s exhortations to Tambudzai that any benefit afforded by that education would be outweighed by its maleficence, fail to dissuade her. Nyasha tells her that the Convent would make her “forget who you were, what you were and why you were that. The process, she said, was called assimilation …” (NC 178-9). She insists that Tambudzai would get a more valuable education at the mission but fails to shake Tambudzai from her determination to go to Sacred Heart. Tambudzai rejects Nyasha’s narrative of the dangers of assimilation into the colonial culture because of her remark, that Tambudzai would gain a more productive education at the mission. It was common knowledge, Tambudzai declares, that the “European schools had better equipment, better teachers, better furniture, better food, better everything. The idea that anything about our mission could be better than theirs was clearly ridiculous. … I for one was going to take any opportunity that came my way. …” (NC 179). In Tambudzai’s eyes Nyasha, her affluent uncle’s daughter, has everything that she does not, the material comfort and easily available opportunities a privileged background bring. However, underlying Tambudzai’s response to Nyasha we detect an unconscious disquieting sense of unease at any advice Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 68 CHAPTER THREE that would force her to question her own ambition to succeed. Tambudzai “did not appreciate the gravity of [her] situation at that time, [her] only experience of those people having been with charitable Doris and the fervent missionaries on the mission” (NC 178). But her family’s poverty strengthens Tambudzai’s resolve to go to the Convent for, “how could [she] possibly forget [her] brother and the mealies, [her] mother and the latrine and the wedding? These were all evidence of the burdens [her] mother had succumbed to. Going to the convent was a chance to lighten those burdens by entering a world where burdens were light” (NC 179). The coded insight into colonizing power with which Dangarembga underpins Nyasha and Tambudzai’s discourse magnifies the discrimination in a systematic institutionalized economic exploitation of Africans in colonial Zimbabwe. But she could afford it, being my affluent uncle’s daughter. The class basis of Tambudzai’s decision is highlighted in her knowledge that, unlike Nyasha, she “had to take whatever chances came [her] way” (NC 179). Tambudzai, unaware as yet that the anglicized colonial education would alienate her from her family and culture, sees the fortuitous opportunity afforded by the Convent, not only as a chance to emancipate her family, but to acquire Nyasha’s learning, sophistication, intellectual acumen and zeal, to become more like Nyasha whom she sees almost as an alter ego. At the same time, Tambudzai has a vague sense that what she feels emanating from Nyasha is that perhaps there are “other struggles to engage in besides the consuming desire to emancipate herself and her family” (NC 152). Notwithstanding the ambiguity and ambivalence surrounding the outcome of the success her convent education would bring, an unaware Tambudzai finds seductive the idea that in going to the convent she would become more like her sophisticated cousin. Earlier, when already at the mission, Tambudzai “strutted along beside [her] thoroughbred cousin, imitating her walk … so that everyone would see that [they] were a unit” (NC 92). “Vague as [she] was about the nature of [Nyasha’s] destination, [she] wanted to go with her … did not want to be left behind” (NC 152). The convent promises all kinds of freedom to Tambudzai, “away from the flies, the smells, the fields and the rags; from stomachs which were seldom full, from dirt and disease, from my father’s abject obeisance to Babamukuru and my mother’s chronic lethargy. … The cost would balance. It would be worth it to dress my sisters in pretty clothes, feed my mother until she was plump and energetic again, stop my father making a fool of himself every time he came into Babamukuru’s presence. Money would do all this for me. With the ticket I would acquire attending the convent, I would earn lots of it. … I saw myself smart and clean in a white blouse and dark-red pleated terylene skirt, with blazer and gloves and a hat” (NC 183). Tambudzai’s constant awareness that her economic situation differs Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. CHAPTER THREE 69 from that of her cousin’s bourgeois existence underscores Tambudzai’s anticipation and excitement at going to Sacred Heart, so that she submerges quickly any doubts that it might be anything but the best thing for her. When Tambudzai goes off to the Convent, Nyasha is left without her only ally as she rebels against her father whom she sees bound by traditional patriarchal norms and an internalized sense of Christian ethics. She tells Tambudzai about her rebellious relationship with her father who orders her to finish her food, little realizing that she is bulimic: “Imagine all that fuss over a plateful of food. But it’s more than that … it’s all the things about boys and men and being decent and indecent and good and bad” (NC 190). She tries to see things from his point of view of “tradition and expectations and authority” (NC 190) but thinks he should see her viewpoint too. The magnitude of Nyasha’s “nervous condition” becomes apparent when in rebelling against both colonial and traditional oppressions she is unable to withstand the combined pressures. Other factors also contribute to Nyasha’ breakdown as described by Moyana: “Nyasha finds it difficult to cope with the demands of a patriarchal world complicated by alienation caused by western education acquired abroad and lack of good parental guidance. The outlet for her is, sadly, a nervous breakdown” (30). Propelled by her bulimia, Nyasha suffers a nervous breakdown, the psychiatrist’s incredulous response to which is that to be African was to be incapable of such eating disorders because it was a disease that only whites suffer. The psychiatrist “said that Nyasha could not be ill, that Africans did not suffer in the way we had described. She was making a scene” (NC 201). Nyasha’s sense of self, identity, roots, weakened by her five years in England make it difficult for her to straddle both the English and Zimbabwean cultures. Failing to gain security in the knowledge that she is equally at home in neither cultural terrains, she cannot and does not see herself operating from any position of strength. Mistaking her insecurity for snobbery, her classmates don’t accept her. As she writes to Tambudzai at the Convent, the girls at her school “do not like [her] language, [her] English, because it is authentic and [her] Shona, because it is not! They think [her] a snob … [because she does not] feel inferior to men” (NC 196). Nyasha tells Tambudzai that she would very much like to belong but finds she does not, one of the compelling factors that compound her self-destructive bulimia. The bulimia into which Nyasha’s crisis of identity, a crisis generated by her acculturation into the hegemonic yet degrading colonizer’s culture, and alienation from her own, plunges her ultimately leads towards her frenetic hysteria and nervous breakdown. When she learns of her father’s decision that Tambudzai’s parents need a church wedding because they were “still living in sin … [because they were not] married in church before God she lecture[s] Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 70 CHAPTER THREE [Tambudzai] on the dangers of assuming that Christian ways were progressive ways. ‘It’s bad enough,’ she said severely, ‘when a country gets colonised, but when the people do as well! That’s the end, really, that’s the end’” (NC, 147). Her cognitive awareness that all of her family are overtaken by colonial culture leads her further into depths of depression. Just as Tambudzai cannot fully comprehend Nyasha’s breakdown, she cannot completely appreciate Maiguru’s predicament as one highly educated woman, with a job, who is subservient to her husband, stays in his shadow, subscribing to the patriarchal agenda. Tambudzai is unable to see that Maiguru, operating under pressures of her own, in some ways, has failed to emotionally support Nyasha and has not coped with her daughter’s illness. Maiguru’s role-playing sublimates, to some extent, her frustration and resentment at her self-effacement so that her husband can enjoy the full limelight. Because she defines her identity through her husband’s social success the text seems to suggest that Maiguru’s education does not automatically empower her to resist internalized cultural codes that prevent her from asserting her self. Notwithstanding Maiguru’s submissive attitude and her inability to stand up to her husband the text establishes that education is imperative for woman’s economic strength. Embedded in Maiguru’s submissive attitude is a warning against the internalization of a colonial value-system. Education is certainly one means whereby a woman can empower herself and effect social change, although acquiring an education does not necessarily guarantee these gains. From another perspective, it is possible to see Maiguru as an educated woman who exercises a choice in submerging her identity by staying with her husband and basking in his glory. But more realistically, what options does Maiguru have available to her? We can read into the fact that when she does leave her husband for a few days and goes to her brother’s, that the option of living alone is not presented to her. In admitting to Tambudzai that she chose the security of marrying Babamukuru over the opportunity to develop her professional self, she reveals that an education and an earning job have not empowered her enough to resist societal norms. Maiguru laments that she has had to choose “between self and security. When [she] was in England [she] glimpsed for a little while the things [she] could have been, the things [she] could have done if … things were--different … But that’s how it goes, Sisi Tambu! And when you have a good man and lovely children it makes it all worth while” (NC 101-2). The novel shows the extent to which Maiguru is implicated by her bourgeois desire that persuades her to seek the “security” and status she enjoys as the wife of the mission school’s headmaster rather than forge a new direction for herself. Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. CHAPTER THREE 71 Unlike Esi in Changes, Maiguru, in Nervous Conditions, cannot opt out of her marriage and indeed, does not seem to want to, despite her awareness that her marriage has forced her to stay in her husband’s shadow. Though Maiguru does express her frustration, she only hints at the “things [she] could have been [and] could have done” (101). That she sees her self-effacement as the choice between “self and security,” that she sees her marriage as her choice of security and social status over self-assertion and self-realization seem to suggest that Maiguru is trying to convince herself that she had no alternative (101). While it is possible to believe that Maiguru is exercising a choice in staying in an oppressive marriage, we see no viable options open to her in her historical, social and cultural context. Maiguru’s choice to remain in her marriage and accept her motherhood role is attributable, in some measure, to the fact that in Zimbabwe, as stated by Nancy Folbre “women [had] no legal guarantees of joint ownership, inheritance from husbands, or even control over earnings.”37 Maiguru earns but “never receive[s] her salary” as a teacher in the mission school where her husband is headmaster because, as we learn, he takes her money (101, 172). Her marriage to Babamukuru involves her self-effacement because Maiguru’s social status as the headmaster’s wife has meant sacrificing her “self” in subservience to her husband, choosing “between self and security” (101). While her position as Babamukuru’s wife certainly bestows security and social status on Maiguru, she exists to be a wife to her husband and we do not see her except on a few occasions speaking up her mind. Two examples, for instance, reveal how Maiguru takes a stand in defiance of her husband: she supports Tambudzai’s admission to the Sacred Heart; and protests the injustice of not being allowed a say in matters pertaining to his side of the family while her husband feels free to draw on her salary and services to feed them on festive occasions like Christmas. When Babamukuru mentions his right to punish Tambudzai, Maiguru protests, “Yes, she is your brother’s child. … But when it comes to taking my money so that you can feed her and her father and your whole family and waste it on ridiculous weddings, that’s when they are my relatives too. … I am tired of my house being a hotel for your family. I am tired of being a housekeeper for them. I am tired of being nothing in a home I am working myself sick to support” (NC 172). The text further suggests how colonial education, in a sense, entraps a woman further by imposing bourgeois standards of social success, as in Maiguru’s case, which become difficult to shrug off. Tambudzai’s mother, on the other hand, recognizes the injustice of her marriage and accepts the hardship it brings because, as she says, she had no choice but to marry her husband because of poverty. It is significant that the unmarried Lucia, juxtaposed against her unhappily married sister and against Maiguru is Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 72 CHAPTER THREE portrayed as the happiest of all the female characters. Tambudzai attributes her aunt Lucia’s spirited nature and happiness to the fact that she is not married, “Although she [Lucia] had been brought up in abject poverty, she had not, like my mother, been married to it at fifteen. Her spirit, unfettered in this respect, had experimented with living and drawn its own conclusions. Consequently, she was a much bolder woman than my mother” (NC 127). Similarly, in Maiguru’s character, positioned between colonial and traditional cultures, Dangarembga demonstrates Maiguru’s entrapment, with no visible viable alternative. The novel, rather ironically, tells us that Maiguru was “a good wife and took pride in this identity” (135). Caught, in effect, between the traditional mother/wife role and the one imbibed from colonial/bourgeois values, Maiguru is in a double-bind, role-playing rather mechanically a “good” westernized wife, without much visible feeling. Why doesn’t Maiguru, educated and employed, like Esi, opt out of her marriage? Though Maiguru does protest her unequal marriage by leaving her husband, for a few days, she is unable to free herself of her internalized patriarchal ideology in her self-image of the “good” wife. Her sense of disempowerment prevents her from intervening in her husband’s physical and verbal abuse of their daughter Nyasha. Set in colonial Rhodesia, Nervous Conditions highlights the connection between decolonization and feminism, given the debilitating effects of colonialism in general and on women’s oppression, in particular. Dangarembga’s depiction of Maiguru’s inferior status to her husband reflects the position of women in Rhodesia which, according to Olivia N. Muchena “resulting from cultural and historical factors, [was] largely subordinate and . . . subservient to men at home, at work, and in society.”38 Maiguru also reflects how for women in Zimbabwe, according to Muchena, the “worst obstacles [to their progress] seem to be women’s own internalized negative self-image and men’s negative attitudes toward women’s emancipation--usually couched in defense of ‘culture.’”39 Maiguru, positioned between traditional cultural practices and Westernized attitudes, negotiating the two without any deep sense of conviction in either, is caught up in conforming to the role of wife. Adopting from both what basically suits her, from traditional norms of wife-behavior and those prescribed by colonial, Christian, Westernized values, it seems that she does whatever will enhance her in her own eyes as the “good wife.” This is the identity Maiguru adopts, aware of the social position her husband’s job as headmaster of the missionary school bestows on her. Dangarembga’s text explicates feminist concerns in Maiguru’s inability, broadly speaking, to basically assert herself and voice her opinion though at times she does speak up, in her marriage. Maiguru is so mired in the social Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. CHAPTER THREE 73 system that enslaves her to her husband, that the daily struggle to negotiate a superficial existence allows Maiguru little self-examination. The extent to which Maiguru has submerged her own self to obey her husband is evident in her interactions with all the members of her family. That Dangarembga allows Maiguru and the other women, Tambudzai, Nyasha, Lucia and Tambudzai’s mother only limited options within their social and economic framework needs to be examined in its historical and political context. In preindependent Zimbabwe women were economically and socially oppressed and had few rights. This is reflected, for example, in the fact that Maiguru is not presented with the choice of divorcing her husband, unlike Esi who divorces her husband in Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo’s novel, Changes.40 What avenues are made available for women to break out of the confines of domestic arenas in Nervous Conditions? How does Dangarembga negotiate her women characters’ self-affirmation and enablement within the circumscribed social and political parameters, and given that patriarchal attitudes had the support of values fostered by colonial culture? The women characters, though they voice their dissatisfaction with their socially prescribed gender roles, have limited options available that would enable them to break out of domestic oppression. Maiguru, however, does leave her husband, if only for a few days as it turns out, and though her daughter is disappointed that her mother goes to her brother’s because she goes to “a man” the point is that she takes a stand, asserts her position as wife, and gains her husband’s respect. Maiguru leaves to protest not having a say in decision-making in her own home especially when her husband relies on her salary to feast and support his side of the family. That she returns, another disappointment for her feministconscious daughter, suggests that Maiguru exercises a choice in returning to her husband, but given Maiguru’s class consciousness and the extent to which she has internalized her gendered role of wife and mother she does not seem to have a viable alternative other than to return to her husband. That Maiguru is role-playing her gendered role as both the traditional wife who should regard the husband as ‘god’ and as the educated, anglicized wife always sweet-talking her husband is apparent in Tambudzai’s observation of her aunt, “Maiguru, always smiling, always happy, was another puzzle. True, she had good reason to be content. She was Babamukuru’s wife. She lived in a comfortable home and was a teacher. Unlike her daughter, she was grateful for all these blessings, but I thought even the saints in heaven must grow disgruntled sometimes and let the lesser angels know” (NC 97). Tambudzai, later in the narrative, is shocked to discover that her aunt has a Master’s Degree, like her uncle, because she had assumed that her aunt had gone to England to “look after Babamukuru.” In her statements to Tambudzai that her “uncle wouldn’t be able to do half the things he does if [she] didn’t work as Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 74 CHAPTER THREE well” and that she “never received her salary” she hints at her husband’s appropriation of her salary (NC 101). The narrator offers insight into Maiguru’s domination and exploitation as a wife by describing the cultural and moral universe that impels, and impinges on, Maiguru’s actions and decisions. Tambudzai, reflecting on her aunt’s ideological world shares particularly significant culturally dominant processes in a colonial Zimbabwe that shape her aunt’s lack of resistance to her subordination and explain Maiguru’s position. Tambudzai enlightens the reader that Maiguru’s view of herself as the wife who does not have a right to use the money she earns as a teacher at the mission school and prevented by marriage from doing what she aspires to, needs to be examined in light of the fact that as Babmukuru’s wife she enjoys social status. “But it was not so simple, because she had been married by my Babamukuru, which defined her situation as good. If it was necessary to efface yourself, as Maiguru did so well that you couldn’t be sure that she didn’t enjoy it, if it was necessary to efface yourself in order to preserve his sense of identity and value, then, I was sure, Maiguru had taken the correct decisions” (NC 102). Tambudzai’s observations here show a Tambu still in thrall of her uncle and his god-like status in their family. Tambudzai’s mother also voices her dissatisfaction at being married to Jeremiah who is lazy and irresponsible as father and husband. Tambudzai observes that “since most of her life [her] mother’s mind, belonging first to her father and then to her husband, had not been hers to make up, she was finding it difficult” (NC 153) to decide whether to leave her husband or not. But her indecision does not prevent her from expressing her anger and resentment at the miserable condition of her married life. She says to her sister, Lucia, “Do you think I wanted to be impregnated by that old dog? Do you think I wanted to travel all this way across this country of our forefathers only to live in dirt and poverty? … So what difference does it make whether I have a wedding or whether I go” (NC 153)? Lucia, earlier in the narrative, describes her sister’s husband, Jeremiah, as one who has given her “nothing but misery since the age of fifteen” (NC 145). Seeing her sister’s health deteriorate, Lucia threatens to take her away with her though the burdens of motherhood and poverty allow Tambudzai’s mother to see no option but to stay. That Lucia is better positioned to both speak her mind and act on it fearlessly, the novel acknowledges, is due to the fact that, as her rhetorical power demonstrates, her spirit has not been crushed by the institution of marriage. She informs Babamukuru, “… maybe when you marry a woman, she is obliged to obey you. But some of us aren’t married, so we don’t know how to do it. That is why I have been able to tell you frankly what is in my heart,” eliciting praise from Babamukuru. Lucia is “like a man herself,” says Babamukuru to his wife (NC 171). Mirroring Dangarembga’s feminist Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. CHAPTER THREE 75 consciousness, the text’s resistance and categorical challenge to patriarchal discourse underlie the unconscious irony in Babamukuru’s comment, which invests assertiveness with masculinity.41 As the patriarch of the family, Babamukuru decides that the solution to all their family problems is to have a church wedding for his brother and sister-inlaw since they had been “living in sin.” His behavior toward the women of his family reflects the influence of colonialism because native tradition alone does not explain his physical abuse of his daughter or his insistence on his brother’s church wedding after twenty years of marriage. Babamukuru’s Christian ethics stem from his indoctrination by colonial ideology which in its own way supports his patriarchal attitude. Thus embedded in Dangarembga’s critiques of colonialism and indigenous tradition we find the text’s concern with the nation and the national. Demonstrating how not only Babamukuru but all the characters, Tambudzai, Nyasha, Maiguru, Lucia, Tambudzai’s mother, Jeremiah, Takesure, in different ways, are victims of the colonizer, beset by nervous conditions, the text underscores the debilitating effects of colonial domination, as for example, seen in the poverty and lack of economic options that reflect in some measure Jeremiah’s and Takesure’s attitudes. How, then, are we to comprehend what it would take to form and shape men such as Jeremiah and Takesure, or, indeed, Babamukuru himself. Sugnet suggests that notwithstanding the categorical rejection of misogyny targeted at women by native African men, the novel clearly ascribes to the colonial structure the forming and shaping of men as disempowered victims. From her grandmother’s history lessons Tambudzai learns of the avaricious “wizards,” as the grandmother refers to the white men, who usurped their lands and tricked them into slavery. Sugnet points out the ways in which Dangarembga draws on Fanon’s insight to show that the concept of the “native” was a colonial construct. Hence, Sugnet explains, in Jeremiah we see the creation of the colonial stereotype of the “shiftless ‘native,’” perpetuated by colonial ideology to legitimize a pervasive racism and exploitation of the African. Dangarembga indicates a sense of rootlessness to which the colonial system has sentenced Jeremiah, reflected in his abject cringing in the presence of his brother, Babamukuru, his callousness in wanting his daughter’s hardearned school fees for his beer, his utter incapability to ever lift a finger to repair their home. Babamukuru, too, is a victim of the colonizer, in whom we find the collusion and conflating presence of patriarchal ideology as propounded by both the colonizer and the native. My reading a national consciousness into the text’s counter-hegemonic discourse acknowledges the text’s plurality and derives from the fact that even though Dangarembga, like Markandaya, grounds her novel in the local culture Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 76 CHAPTER THREE and tradition and in issues of national import, the nation as a nation-state, finally, is not as primary a concern as woman is. The text unfolds the subaltern and alterity in a gender envelope, stamped with a postcolonial third world postmark, thus telescoping the colonial and patriarchal/traditional trajectories under a postcolonial lens. The difficulties that a woman faces in defying socially and culturally prescribed codes of behavior are among the text’s overwhelming issues as it highlights how patriarchy holds the social system in place whereby Maiguru, Tambudzai’s mother, Tambudzai, Lucia, and Nyasha, all are in their own ways oppressed, the oppression compounded by colonial culture and a colonial educational and economic system that prevents the native people from progressing in any substantive way. Obversely, it is possible to argue that though the overwhelming concern of the novel is feminist in that it confronts, questions, and subverts patriarchal agendas, its national concern surfaces in its condemnation of the colonial regime, particularly in the way colonialism and colonial ideology empower, support, and strengthen Babamukuru’s patriarchal attitude. That the text does not engage with the liberation struggle despite it’s pre-independence setting does not invalidate its concern with the task of nation building and does not quite make it fit the pronouncement that, as Flora Veit-Wild states, the “concept of a close link between literature and resistance, valid for other African countries, has been shown to be invalid in the case of Zimbabwe.”42 The link between literature and resistance is visible in Nervous Conditions, especially in its resistance to indigenous cultural agendas that are complicit with patriarchal agendas. By situating the relationship between woman and culture and between woman and nation in Nervous Conditions in the Zimbabwean historical and political contexts, we see the ways in which it departs from its literary antecedents in Zimbabwe. Rudo B. Gaidzanwa, acknowledging that “Tsitsi Dangarembga encouraged [her] in many ways,” observes, “Before the independence of Zimbabwe, the issue of black women in society was overshadowed by other issues such as liberation of the whole nation from colonialism. … [We need to examine how] black writers … as formerly colonised people … [have] internalised and interpreted the experience of colonisation as reflected by the way they form images of women”43 Gaidzanwa underlines the connection between women writers’ experiences of social reality in the colonial context and their creation of women’s images in literature because she recognizes that the ways in which their “internalis[ation] and interpret[ation of] the experience of colonisation [is] reflected [in their] images of women” is significant for effecting social change. In determining whether women’s images, as depicted in literature written mostly in the seventies, reflect social reality Gaidzanwa observes that the “struggles of Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. CHAPTER THREE 77 Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. women in Zimbabwe predate colonialism, [have] continued throughout the colonial era and after independence. The emergence of the women’s movement in the West … has helped to highlight the struggles of women in the Third World. … [T]he rights of women in the world have become focal issues because of the particular experiences of women” (8-9). Dangarembga’s women characters, it should be noted, are radically different in terms of a feminist consciousness from those of earlier Zimbabwean writers, such as Makhalisa, as apparent from Gaidzanwa’s observation that women characters in seventies’ Zimbabwean literature were depicted as “ideal” wives and mother. She bemoans the fact that “This ‘ideal’ state of these women tends to be cheapened and diminished by the fact that they do not choose. It is socially difficult for them to be otherwise and this calls into question whatever virtue one may have seen in their behaviour. In fact, it is a matter of making a virtue out of necessity since they had no other real choices” (32). What is significant about this observation for our purposes here is that unlike the women characters described by Gaidzanwa above, the women characters in Nervous Conditions are not presented as ideal women role models nor as idealized victims in their role of silent suffering wives. Rather, their comparatively radical presentation embodies elements that fulfill criteria that Flora Veit-Wild regards as defining the new Zimbabwean literature: After Independence, Zimbabwean … writers … raise questions about the new socioeconomic and political conditions …Thus Zimbabwean literature consists of a multitutde of fragmented voices rather than of a homogeneous collective voice. Hence one has to question the endeavour of literary critics or cultural politicians who are still in search of a national literature. Has this term not become obsolete? Have writers and critics in the Africa of the 1990s not to find new ways and new terms in which to describe the multi-faceted nature of post-colonial experience and of postcolonial writing? (“The Elusive Truth” 120) The ways in which Dangarembga’s text is different from earlier ones and the ways in which it raises questions about the “socio-economic conditions rather than give any definitive answers” reflects “new ways and new terms” in which to describe the “multi-faceted nature of post-colonial experience and of postcolonial writing” (120). Dangarembga’s third world feminism that refutes both colonial assumptions and traditional patriarchy, compares subalternity and bourgeois class consciousness, and examines alterity’s double consciousness is, in one sense, rooted in national concerns at the same time that it opposes the national as the cultural symbolic. In challenging those aspects of the nation and national that are complicit with the patriarchal tradition, the text in a sense moves and takes its feminist concerns beyond the national into a postnational identity for women. While patriarchal ideology insists that Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 78 CHAPTER THREE women uphold decency and honor, as Babamukuru expects of Nyasha and Tambudzai, they, along with Maiguru, Tambudzai’s mother, and Lucia, resent the restrictions that are enforced in the name of tradition. Often tradition is evoked in the name of nationalism and hence attempts to resist tradition evoke a postnationalism. While Tambudzai’s mother resents her poverty much more than her duties as mother and wife, Maiguru, for whom poverty is not an issue since she enjoys material comforts and the help of a maid, resents the fact that she has to be submissive to her husband. This is revealed when she shares with Tambudzai the fact that her career took second place to her husband’s, and when she protests having to cater to her husband’s extended family as expected by tradition. Hence, despite her socially privileged class, despite her higher education, she is as shackled in her marriage as Tambudzai’s mother. Though her education and job do not empower and enable Maiguru to “unlearn the dominative mode”44 the text argues for a woman’s economic viability for self-empowerment, emphasizing equally the importance of education and a job as well as the necessity of unlearning culturally constructed notions of womanhood. The text seems to suggest that a woman’s social behavior should be a personal choice but not at the cost of suicidal repercussions, as in the case of Nyasha, that a judicious manipulation of power and authority is sometimes necessary to survive, as in the case of Lucia. Tambudzai’s narrative warns against the the inherent dangers of subscribing indiscriminately to and internalizing bourgeois culture and values, imbibed by way of a colonial education, because it can prevent the empowerment of self and agency and subject-positionality, as mirrored differently in Tambudzai, Nyasha and Maiguru. The novel’s overwhelming concern with woman’s oppression by both colonial and traditional cultures is underlined in the portrayal of the male characters, Jeremiah and Takesure, whose lack of a sense of duty and responsibility toward their families seems to be, in a way, endorsed by the patriarchal culture. Notwithstanding his own enormous sense of responsibility toward both his immediate and extended family, Babamukuru’s objection to his brother’s lax morality arises only with Lucia’s threat of taking her sister away. We don’t see Babamukuru objecting to his brother’s behavior because of unjust or unfair treatment of the wife. He objects to his brother’s behavior only because it offends his internalized Christian ethics and this concern too arises only when Lucia threatens to disrupt his brother’s home by taking her sister with her, leaving the care of the home and children to her sister’s husband, Babamukuru’s brother. Conflated thus in the character of Babamukuru is the collusion of patriarchal values defined by both colonial culture and native tradition. In his Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. CHAPTER THREE 79 patriarchal attitude toward his wife, daughter, niece, sister-in-law, and Lucia, Babamukuru can be seen as having benefitted from colonialism with all its attendant paradoxes inherent in cultural values defined by racial superiority. Hence, his character reflects the text’s concern with the ways in which the national as represented by those in positions of authority is complicit with the patriarchal. Reiterating what I say in the beginning of this chapter, the text allows us to see why, if the patriarchal culture underlying the social system licenses woman’s oppression, then that patriarchal culture acts as an instrument of the nation. Thus the national becomes complicit with patriarchy and makes it imperative for women to go beyond the national, evoking the postnational because their need to be liberated transcends traditional patriarchy that sanctions such treatment of women either through complicity or by remaining silent. In challenging colonial assumptions and cultural colonialism, Dangarembga emphasizes the systematic colonial dehumanization of the native at the same time protesting against the confines imposed on women by the social system that enforces cultural practices. In her anticolonial and antipatriarchal stand I see Dangarembga not advocating nationalism but rather seeming to argue for a postnational identity for women. In showing how patriarchal tradition, lack of education, and economic dependence, all contribute to women’s subjugation, the novel underscores how various factors, namely, the patriarchally constituted values and norms, the institution of marriage, colonial westernized education, bourgeois values, colonial culture, individually or collectively, deny women any viable choices, as for instance, demonstrated by the fact that Maiguru leaves and returns to her husband. While the novel’s one message, among others, clearly is to emphasize the importance of education for women as a first step toward gaining economic viability, it highlights the conflicts that education foregrounds between traditional expectations of women’s subordination and between women’s subjectivities. To conclude, Dangarembga’s engagement with the nation and the national in Nervous Conditions is to be seen in the sense that it is concerned with Zimbabwean patriarchal culture, poverty, education, and its colonial encounter, and in the sense, as I have stated earlier, that all these in different ways define the nation and the national. That a culture cannot exist without the nation’s support informs my reading of this text implicit in which is the nation’s sanctioning of a social system and endorsing of a culture that legitimates woman’s oppression. This feminist text’s focus on women characters trapped in the social and cultural problematic voicing their frustration underlines this feminist text’s exploration of social change. Given that the nation and its culture and society perpetuate woman’s oppression, it Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 80 CHAPTER THREE is possible for us to view this text as taking woman’s concerns beyond the national register onto a postnational plane where different categories of women, as demonstrated in Nervous Conditions, are on a common platform. Women, along with subaltern groups, are part of the disenfranchised constituency who are not first class national citizens of their country. Hence, we can read into this text how woman’s identity is postnational in some respects, acknowledging that necessary qualifications must be made on the basis of class and privilege and other cultural and social differences among women. The critical consciousness of this text derives from its implicit conviction that a woman’s identity, rooted in, yet fractured from the nation and the national, goes beyond the national. Embedded in the text’s portrayal of women’s entrapment and in its exploration of their options is, I contend, a postnational identity for woman for whom escaping her entrapment takes precedence over the nation’s patriarchal culture. Confronting how a national culture legitimizes woman’s oppression, the text shows how the culture, endorsing patriarchal agendas, is complicit with and cannot exist without the nation’s support. My analysis of the text has been to show how it suggests a connection between the patriarchal culture underlying the social system and its complicity with the national which endorses what the society sanctions. In other words, Nervous Conditions suggests that the whole cultural ethos must change, that the nation can progress only if women have freedom and equality of opportunity. This text thus underlines that national liberation cannot be a guarantor of a nation’s progress without woman’s independence and liberation from oppression. The next chapter explores the connections between third world feminism and the nation undergirding Anita Desai’s opposition to both colonial legacy and indigenous tradition in Clear Light of Day (1980), situated in colonial and post-independent India. Notes 1 For detailed studies of patriarchal cultures in India and Zimbabwe see, for example, Amrita Basu, ed., The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women’s Movements in Global Perspective, With the assistance of C. Elizabeth McGrory, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu, eds., Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia, (New York: Routledge, 1998); Maria Mies, Indian Women and Patriarchy: Conflicts and Dilemmas of Students and Working Women, (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1980, c1979); Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986); Nzongola-Ntalaja, et al., Africa’s Crisis, (London: Institute for African Alternatives, 1987); Robin Morgan, ed., Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. CHAPTER THREE 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 81 Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology, (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1996, 1984); Elizabeth Schmidt, Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939, (Portsmouth, N. H.: Heinemann, 1992); Kathleen Sheldon, ed., Courtyards, Markets, City Streets: Urban Women in Africa, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996). Tsitsi Dangarembga, “This Year, Next Year,” (The Women’s Review of Books Vol. VIII, Nos. 10-11 July 1991) 43. Dickson A. Mungazi, “A Strategy for Power: Commissions of Inquiry into Education and Government Control in Colonial Zimbabwe,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 22, 2, 1989, 267. Anne McClintock, “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven?’: Women and Nationalism in South Africa,” Transition no. 51 (1991): 92-99, Cited by Amina Mama in Alexander and Mohanty, 53-54. Amina Mama, 47. Rudo B. Gaidzanwa, Images of Women in Zimbabwean Literature (Harare: The College Press, 1985) 8. Rosemary Moyana, “Men & Women: Gender Issues in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions & She No Longer Weeps,” New Trends & Generations in African Literature, ed., Eldred Durosimi Jones, (London: James Currey, 1996) 30. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (London: Penguin, 1961) 17. Charles Sugnet, “Nervous Conditions: Dangarembga’s Feminist Reinvention of Fanon,” The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature, ed., Obioma Nnaemeka, (London: Routledge,1997) 47. R. Radhakrishnan, “Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity,” Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 186. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 18. Ama Ata Aidoo illustrates how national independence from colonial rule did not bring any material benefit to the disenfranchised in “For Whom Things Did Not Change” in her collection of short stories, No Sweetness Here. D. Caute, Frantz Fanon, (New York: Viking Press, 1970) 32, 64-65; Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, (New York: Grove Press,1967) 21; Both cited in Horace B. Davis, Toward a Marxist Theory of Nationalism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978) 217-218. Michael Chapman, Southern African Literatures, (London: Longman, 1996) 307. Paul Bohannan and Philip Curtin, Africa and Africans, 3rd ed., (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc., 1988) 31. Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not, (Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke Publishing Limited, 2006). Tsitsi Dangarembga, Interview, New Nation, 2-8 November 1990, 9. Cited in Michael Chapman, Southern African Literatures, (London: Longman, 1996) 307. Sally McWilliams, “Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions: At the Crossroads of Feminism and Post-Colonialism,” World Literature Written in English (31.1 1991) 111. Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. 82 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 CHAPTER THREE Flora Veit-Wild, “The Elusive Truth. Literary Development in Zimbabwe since 1980,” African Literatures in the Eighties, ed., Dieter Riemenschneider and Frank Schulze-Engler, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993) 120. Elizabeth Willey, “National Identities, Tradition, and Feminism,” Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film, ed., Bishnupriya Ghosh and Brinda Bose, (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997) 5. McWilliams 103, (Also cited in Ghosh and Bose). Willey 5. Charles Sugnet, “Nervous Conditions: Dangarembga’s Feminist Reinvention of Fanon,” The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature, ed., Obioma Nnaemeka, (London: Routledge, 1997) 33. Sugnet 46. All subsequent references to this novel, abbreviated NC will be in the main body of the chapter within parentheses, e.g. (NC 152). Carole Boyce Davies, “Introduction: Feminist Consciousness and African Literary Criticism,” Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, ed., Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves, (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, Inc., 1986) 9. See “Tsitsi Dangarembga: Nervous Conditions” in Flora Veit-Wild, Teachers, Preachers, NonBelievers: A Social History of Zimbabwean Literature, (London: Hans Zell Publishers, 1992) 331-8. Flora Veit-Wild, Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers, 331-8. See Dangarembga Interview in Jane Wilkinson, Talking with African Writers: Interviews with African Poets Playwrights & Novelists, (London: James Currey, 1990 and 1992) 196. I am indebted to Rhonda Cobham’s Presentation at an English Department Colloquium at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1992 for the ideas in this paragraph and in the following one. Rhonda Cobham, Colloquium Presentation. “Mainini, Maiguru, and Babamukuru are the Shona words for, respectively, mother, aunt, and uncle. Tambudzai refers to these three figures by their titular names throughout her narrative.” Derek Wright, “Regurgitating Colonialism: The Feminist Voice in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions,” New Directions in African Fiction, (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997) Footnote no. 7, 187. Rhonda Cobham, Colloquium Presentation. M. Keith Booker, The African Novel in English: An Introduction, (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998) 197. Olivia N. Muchena, “Zimbabwe: It Can Only Be Handled by Women,” Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology, ed., Robin Morgan, (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1984; The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1996,) 752-5. Muchena, 752. Nancy Folbre, “Patriarchal Social Formations in Zimbabwe,” Patriarchy and Class: African Women in the Home and the Workforce, Eds. Sharon B. Stichter and Jane L. Parpart, (Boulder & London: Westview Press, 1988), 75. Muchena, 753. Muchena, 753. Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48. CHAPTER THREE 40 41 Ama Ata Aidoo, Changes, (New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1991, 1993). This reminds me of Ama Ata Aidoo in “To Be A Woman” recounting praise for a lecture she delivered. She is told “[her] English was absolutely masculine.” “They had always told me I wrote like a man. They had always told me I drove like a man. Now I speak English like a man.?” Flora Veit-Wild, Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers, 341. Rudo B. Gaidzanwa, 8. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society Copyright © 2009. Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. 42 43 44 83 Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms, edited by Hena Ahmad, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unomaha/detail.action?docID=3029701. Created from unomaha on 2017-04-02 15:37:48.
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