Nervous Conditions [Import]

Set in the late 1960's -- 1970's, Tsitsi Dangarembga's 1988 novel "Nervous Conditions" (1988) tells the story of an adolescent girl growing up in rural Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). The author is a Zimbabwe native who earned a medical degree and lived in Germany and England before returning to her native country. She has become a full-time writer of novels, plays, and films. "Nervous Conditions" is the first book of a projected trilogy. The second book "The Book of Not" was published in 2006.

Written in an appealingly simple and understated way, "Nervous Conditions" explores issues of cultural and gender relationships in colonial Rohdesia. It is a first-person narrative in the voice of Tambu, a grown woman whose age is not given, recounting and reflecting upon the events of her youth beginning in 1968 when Tambu was 13 and continuing for three years. At the end of the book, Tambu has received the rare opportunity to study at a Catholic girls' school that admits a small number of native African girls. But Tambu has already seen enough to know that the experience will not give her the life that she wants. She is apparently rejecting assimilation to Western culture in favor of the local life in which she was raised.

The story pivots upon the death of Tambu's older brother Niamo who was attending a missionary school. With Niamo's death, a place opened up for Tambu, an intelligent and ambitious young woman, to attend the school under the sponsorship of her wealthy and British-educated uncle, Babamukura, who is the headmaster as well as the head of the family. Babamukara and his wife Maiguru have a daughter, Nyasha, who is Tambu's age and is also highly intelligent. Nyasha has become British in outlook from the five years her parents spent studying in London. Tambu has been raised on a poor rural commune that Dangarembga describes in detail. Her father, Babamukra's brother, is poor and unambitous while his wife is subservient but tries to do her best for her children.

Tambu describes her story as "the story of four women whom I loved, and our men". (p.204) The four women her mother, her mother's younger pregnant sister, Lucia, her uncle's wife Maiguru and Nyasha, their daughter. Gender is a pervasive theme of the book as Tambu and each of the four women are portrayed as caught in and responding to a native Rhodesian society dominated by men which allows little room for the growth and autonomy of women. Tambu is beset af first by her brother and her father and their understanding of the role of women in the family. She continues to struggle with gender expectations as she attends the missionary school. Her friend Nyasha with her exposure to British culture contends and literally fights with her father while Nyaka's educated mother must also remain in her educated, domineering husband's shadow. Lucia, pregnant under questionable circumstances, is also dependent upon Babamukura. Each of the four women in this novel develop in varying degrees the ability to speak for themselves and, so to speak, to fight back.

The other primary theme of this book is colonialism as Dangarembaba examines the relationship between the British and the native Rhodesians. Tambu's uncle Babamukra is the pivotal character. He has had the rare opportunity to study in England at the graduate level and to become respected and prosperous. He is the head of the family and it shows as he demands obeisance from his poorer relations, especially the women. He and his family have worked to become acculturated in the ways of the West. Throughout the book, it becomes increasingly apparent that he and his family are patronized and diminished by their British overlords. Dangarenrga guves great attention to the missiouary school system which, at its best, was open only to a small number of natives while carefully restricting the opportunities available to the selected few. The tension between British and native values together with gender relations works to ruin the life of Tambu's friend Nyaka and to radically change Tambu's own outlook on life as she comes to see the value of her native culture and to reject that of the British. There is a tension between the gender-related aspect of the story and the colonialist-related aspect of it that is not entirely resolved.

Most of the time books with a heavily ideological component do not work for me as novels. This book is an exception. Dangaremrga's book moves quickly and her characters are portrayed sympathetically. The protagonists in the story come to life as people rather than as counters in the service on an ideological position. Tambu's voice and the choices she must make are portrayed in a convincing way. I learned much from this book's portrayal of mid-20th Century Rhodesia. Thus I found that Dangarembga successfully combined ideology with storytelling and character development in this book to create a successful, moving novel.

Robin Friedman

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 find myself frustrated with some of the more negative reviews here. I understand the argument that the novel is more into telling instead of showing, but I tend to disagree a bit. The novel hinges on the pretext that the central characters are cerebral, and that their intellectual complexity is misunderstood by colonial doctors. For me, the action that was taking place in the mind, whether we saw it or were told about it from an outsider perspective (that of the narrator, who is often an outsider and an observer), was very powerful.

Generally, it has taken me a little while to adjust to African novels, which I read intermittently throughout high school and college, but this one is a wonderful place to start for people who do take time to adjust to the more traditional style. Since the narrator has a Western education, the novel reads more like a Western novel...in a way, this makes the story much more heartbreakingly real, but it also makes it accessible to Western audiences. I highly, highly recommend it.

This book is so real and honest it depressed me. It's about colonialism and patriarchy, but more specifically it's about the ways families enforce patriarchy, about struggles within families for dominance on the one hand and independence on the other, and about the ways these systems hurt and distort and destroy people--particularly girls. It's heavy stuff. And I'm not so sure it is a coming-of-age novel, as it's often described: Tambudzai, the narrator, is a teenager, and she gains knowledge and experience, but along the way she loses her confidence, perhaps even her sense of identity. That's the opposite of the positive progression in your typical coming-of-age story.

There isn't a lot of plot here in the traditional sense, but at the same time there's a lot going on: there's Tambu's struggle to get an education; there's her relationship with her more worldly cousin, Nyasha; there's Nyasha's rebellion against her father's authority; there are the various other relationships within the family. Tambu's impoverished mother and her well-educated aunt are both unhappy with their roles in life, but resigned to them; there's really nowhere else for them to go because--this is crucial--their family is shaped by the larger society and doesn't seem to be any better or worse than anyone else's. There's a tendency in books about oppression of women to lay all the blame at the feet of some particularly awful man--which makes for a more optimistic story, because then all the heroine has to do is escape that man, find a nice one and ta da! Happy ending! But the patriarch here, Babamukuru, is far from a monster: he's a successful man who's generous with his extended family, and in return he expects gratitude and obedience. After all, he knows what's right, and everyone else is his responsibility.

So, the characters are well-drawn and believable, and their relationships have the depth and authenticity you'd expect from a literary novel. The writing is also good and the themes are handled well. The book does perhaps over-explain its characters' psychologies, in the way old-fashioned novels do, but it was only written in 1988 and might have benefited from telling less and trusting readers more. It's written from Tambu's perspective as an adult woman, with a much better understanding of the events and personalities than she had at the time, but we never see how she reached that understanding; the ending is abrupt, and feels more like a beginning than an end. But maybe all that explaining is necessary; maybe the dynamics portrayed here are so subtle and so unexceptional that if not pointed out they would be lost entirely.

At any rate, this book was a bit of a struggle for me--although short, it's not a quick or light read. But it is well-written and thoughtful enough that it's worth the effort.

This is one of my fav books. This coming of age novel, is awesome and very telling to the current mind state of many people know deal with adjusting to two very different realities without forgetting your roots!

This is a very interesting story and it keeps you flipping the pages till the end. It is a sad but heartwarming story all wrapped up in one.

Great read if you want to learn about a woman's role in African culture!

Starts off a little slow, but the story line picks up. I like how the character evolves and how her perspectives change as her world opens up. Great insight into the lives of a culture where some grow up with 'privilege' and others are not as fortunate, but both have to overcome challenges. Classic case of 'things are not always as they seem', and 'the grass is not always greener on the other side'.

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.

Nervous Conditions is the intricate and symbolic narrative of an adolescent girl in colonized Zimbabwe who manages to establish herself as a feminist survivor amidst the oppressive forces that surround her. Poverty dictates the social clime of the era where education is the only escape. Metaphorical references abound in the novel that looks at oppression, race, class, sexuality, and gender and examines the often deadly ramifications of assimilation as an avenue for escapism. A country hungry for independence and a woman starving herself to suppress her pain is just one example of the dichotomous network of upheavals and conflicts woven into this powerful social commentary.

The rebellious and head-strong Tambu spares no reader the pain of suffering along with her as she delves deep into her emotional well to describe her disdain for a sibling who has betrayed her, her family that revels in her misery, and as she searches for true freedom from psychological and mental bondage. It is the astonishing individuality and insightful deliberations of the narrator that establishes the tone as the reader is drawn into discussions of domestic violence, depression, and survival. To remain a strong, Black, connected woman in a society that has eaten the very being of those around her is Tambu's greatest obstacle. While others have succumbed to the lore of the oppressors humiliation and degradation, Tambu survives, calling upon a sense of history and identity not of her time. It is surely the knowledge of the ancestors that has been imparted to her that has been held deep within her very soul that gives her more maturity, knowledge and stamina than those around her who have come to identify themselves through the bluest eye of the oppressor.

Nervous Conditions shows that imperialism is not just an economic form of bondage, but also a sociological one in which its captors suffer exponentially from the rape of cultural and spiritual norms. Dangarembga's novel is a brilliantly painted picture of the human spirit excelling in the face of resistance.