Nervous conditions

Gratitude. That's one of the clearest, and most double-edged, themes running through Tsitsi Dangarembga's 1988 debut, often voted one of the greatest African novels of the 20th century. And even if I don't completely agree that it is, I can see why others would think so.

Nervous Conditions is set in late-1960s and early-1970s Rhodesia, narrated by a woman named Tambudzai (though supposedly based on Dangarembga's own experiences) telling about her teenage years, starting with the day her brother dies. This, to Tambudzai, is almost a cause for celebration; not just because her brother is a complete brat who has tormented her (and gotten away with it, being the only boy in the family) for most of their lives, but because this means that she, as the oldest remaining child, will get to go to school despite being a... shudder... girl. After all, she's supposed to get married in a couple of years, what good is an education going to do her? But her rich uncle, educated in England ("a good boy, cultivatable, in the way land is, to yield harvests that sustain the cultivator") insists: after all, he's an enlightened African and knows that women are supposed to achieve a certain level of education so as to better serve their husbands. Just as long as she recognizes the enormous favour he's doing her, and that she never forgets that she needs to be humble and grateful for this - just like her alcoholic father is grateful towards his brother for all the times he's bailed him out of debt, like her worn-out mother is grateful towards her husband for marrying her even if he sleeps around on the side, like her uncle is grateful towards the white men for allowing him to learn how to be as civilized as they are... the word rights is, for the most part, conspicuous by its absence, and everything is always for someone else's benefit.

It might be a little simplistic to compare this to Yvonne Vera's Under The Tongue, since that's the only other Zimbabwean novel I've read. And sure, the two novels are polar opposites in some ways; where Vera loses herself in cryptic symbolic poeticisms, Dangarembga is, if anything, too literal. There are a few too many passages here where she, at least from my Western horizon, might have trusted the reader to see what she was getting at rather than spell it out and come dangerously close to sounding like a sociology textbook (Sexism in a Post-Colonial Africa: A Critical Study). And yet the story told is largely the same: the overlooked voices of girls and young women caught between a colonial power that tells them they should be grateful if they're ever treated as humans despite their race, and a traditional patriarchy (reinforced by the colonists) that tells them they should be grateful if they're ever treated as humans despite their sex. Where are they supposed to go? In both books - this one especially - the struggle for national independence is a background event, a foregone conclusion that's almost irrelevant; their own struggle has to take centre stage, especially since it's still ongoing.

The focus point of the novel - two of several very richly-drawn and complex characters - is the relationship between Tambu and her cousin Nyasha; one girl raised in a traditional home trying to fit into a Westernised system, the other raised in England and now expected to conform to traditional values - even though they live under the same roof. Neither manages to reconcile the two without giving up themselves to some degree. They're told in two languages to be grateful and subservient for what they get; but Tambu's English is as bad as Nyasha's Shona, and there's no language available to them to speak their own minds and write their own narrative.

Nervous Conditions is something of a rarity in that it's an explicitly political novel that still manages to weave its opinionating into a strong (if slightly talky) and psychologically complex narrative. Dangarembga has written a sequel, The Book of Not, which I'm sure I'll search out at some point; with Nervous Conditions, both she and Tambu take the right to be heard.