AFFILIATE PRODUCTS Item ID: #668Nervous ConditionsProduct Information:
Item DescriptionDangaremba s acclaimed first novel tells of the coming-of-age of Tambu, and through her, also offers a profound portrait of African society. In awarding Nervous Conditions the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa in 1989, the judges described the book as a beautiful and sensitive exploration of the plight and struggle of an African people…. A distinguishing feature of this work is its courageous honesty and devastating understatement. Item Reviews5 Responses to “Nervous Conditions”Leave a Reply |
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This is an engrossing book. The story details the life (and growth) of a young girl in a patriarchal culture. I cheered her every ambition, endeavor, and accomplishmnt. Her courage to move beyond her “station” in life is nothing but amazing. But it’s not just her story – it belongs to all her female relations and how they accept or defy their expected place. Actually, it probably belongs to many women at one time or another. I look forward to reading the sequel with much anticipation.
TsiTsi Dangarembga has crafted a superb narrative of a family in the midst of sorting through the trials of colonial life in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Telling the story from the point of view of the young Tambudzai gives her free reign to express a range of emotions and genres of experience, such as fear, guilt, pride, resentment, confusion, and acceptance. As Tambu she sometimes makes sharp political commentary in a tongue and cheek sort of way, but the sting is there nonetheless. The characterizations all convey layered symbolic meanings in terms of the larger issues of female entrapment with its corresponding male entrapment, as seen for example in the relationship of Babamukuru and his wife Maiguru. Nervous Conditions’ universality lies in the realization that we all have “nervous conditions” in our lives based on not just the immediate family situation, but on larger hegemonically enacted ones as well.
I’m taking two college level literature classes this year in high school so I have to do a lot of reading, and this book has been my favorite by far. I’ve connected with this book like no other. At first I was rather annoyed that I had to read this book over the summer but a few pages in and I was completely enthralled–I couldn’t put the book down! You definitely will not regret reading this book, it was great.
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel “Nervous Conditions” is a clear vision of the coming of age of both individuals and families in Zimbabwe, at a time when the country was still called Rhodesia, the capitol was still named Salisbury, and any move through social strata was a move in a landscape drawn and delineated by the (white) men in power.
Central to the story is the relation between Tambudzai and Nyasha, two girls whose families went each their ways when the girls were still little kids. Nyasha’s parents went to England to go to university, while Tambudzai and her family stayed at the farm and kept up a working life with fields and animals.
As those two social itineraries meet up again later in the 60s, not long before the war of liberation, gender roles and cultural forces start changing while the novel simultaneously explores the territory of the family and how communal life and personal life become entangled in larger historical contexts.
Tambudzai and Nyasha find each other again after the long absence of Nyasha, but with the return of Nyasha’s family has also come the ghost of hitherto unknown potentials and with that both new possibilities, new demands, and new layers of friction with the existing, rural way of life of Tambudzai’s family.
On the surface the plot is quiet and slow in unfolding, but it has an explosive character when read as a family drama, and in that sense it reminds me of books like Sefi Atta’s “Everything Good Will Come” and J. Nozipo maraire’s “Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter” which map similar territories from the perspective of African women.
Nervous Conditions deals in transitions. Kids turning into teens. Women turning from houseworkers to students. Countries moving from colonialism towards independence. Men moving into themselves to shelter from oncoming demands and the push for their family thrones.
And while two family tragedies, one sudden and another creeping, color the book with an outer, tangible drama, the inner tour is where Dangarembga has managed to pull of a work of brilliant (almost) feminist fiction.
Women struggle to free themselves most of all from the chains laid on them by the thoughts of their men, the family leaders, the ones with the traditional sources of power and authority. However, it is not a straight-forward movement, it is more like a rising tension and a shaking deadlock, where it can be hard to reach and take what you have fought for once it is within your grasp:
“Since the thoughts of my mother had belonged to her father first and then to her husband and thus had not been her own, she found it hard to make a decision”.
For the men the decisions are no less harder to make, but they mostly decide under either direct or more subtle social pressure. Tambudzai’s father, for instance, struggles to come terms with whether his daughter should go to school and as a consequence become a fruitful investment in the future – or if he should keep her working around the house to make her a capable wife for whom a fine number of cattle could be won. Take chances on the new or go with conformity?
It all comes down to change. Larger scale change which was happening in not only Rhodesia but in the world around it as well in the 60s. Changing gender and family patterns most of all.
But what I really like about Nervous Conditions – and the title, by the way, is a fine summary of both the social contexts and the psychological mindscapes in the book – is how change is not a big external mechanism. Change requires action and the ability of a person to see herself enter into new situations. In other words: Change requires agency.
Obviously agency has its limitations, and those are always defined by who is acting, where she acts, how she acts, in relation to whom, and when (and then some). In 1960s Rhodesia, societal structures and the built-up landscape of institutions that went beyond the family were controlled by the colonial rule, and so it also is in Nervous Conditions.
Family matters are still distinctly local, full of long-running formal relations and clear divisions of labour, which many of the women in the book openly find oppressive, but for those with social aspirations, the real ladder is not in their back years – it is firmly planted in white man’s land.
This does not make the ladder unclimbable, it just makes getting to it and then up it a different route than possible routes in the spheres of the family. For any climber, who is not the older brother and thus the obvious candidate, this will almost inevitably cause two different social processes to conflict, and different aspects of such conflicts play out in Nervous Conditions.
It is a story in which moving up in the world by means of education does not mean the same for black girls as for whites. If you are a Tambudzai or a Nyasha you risk ending up in an in-between world, neither accepted by those friends you grew up with nor accepted by those you try to grow into, and as identities start becoming frail and floating people begin struggling with their senses of selves.
Ultimately this neither-here-nor-there state of being is what Tsitsi Dangarembga portrays in this emotional and sensitive tribute to women, and while the conditions brought upon them might make some readers edgy, nervous, at times enraged, Dangarembga has brought a powerful voice to people she admires and respects and out of that has come an important, beautiful book.
I read this book as a college student many years ago and fell in love with the story–and Zimbabwe. I loved it so much I decided to assign it to my college students. It is a simple story of the effects of colonization on the people of Zimbabwe–specifically women. A must read; highly recommended.