Tsitsi Dangarembga Nervous Conditions

Biographical Information Born in 1959 in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia. Spent early years in England where her parents were educated. Returned to Zimbabwe in 1965 and attended mission schools. She went to Cambridge to study Medicine, but returned home on the eve of Zimbabwe’s independence (1980) because she didn’t want to put up with the isolation and racism she experienced in England. She studied psychology and authored three plays, which were produced at the University in Zimbabwe. Nervous Conditions was published by Women’s Press in London in In the spring of 1993 she was living in Germany and working on a second book.

Nervous Conditions and Literature in Zimbabwe Dangarembga observes that it’s difficult to get fiction published in Zimbabwe because people see education as an instrument of advancement. You read to increase your language skills. In addition, because publishing houses in Z are controlled by men, it is difficult for women to get their work published. “It seems difficult for men to accept the things that women write and want to write about.”

Literature in Zimbabwe Cont. “I would say that one thing I was very concerned with was to leave a very real taste of life during the times that I grew up. I had been reading all the English classics, and you know how they give you a real sense of time, of the passing time, and it just seemed to me that there were people living in Zimbabwe, and nobody knew about them, and if nobody set it down, then nobody would know about them.”

Lit. in Zimbabwe Cont. She talks about people “inserting themselves in to literature” and observes that people in her country didn’t have that opportunity. “With all the things you read, everything you’re taught, you construct a kind of cognitive map for yourself that is comfortable. This was something that was denied to us, absolutely and completely. People were not encouraged to write. We had what was called the Literature Bureau and they published all the African writing. And they would only allow tales of traditional witchcraft, wives poisoning their husbands, you know. That was the only cognitive map that the forces in power then were allowing us to construct.” What kinds of cognitive maps does U.S. education/publishing allow us to construct for ourselves?

More about Lit. in Zimbabwe “I’ve been thinking about 18 th, 19 th and even 20 th century women writers in Britain. Writing developed indigenously in those societies. Now what you have in Zimbabwe is a whole society where the actual technique of writing (novels, poetry short stories) has been imposed. And, what is important is that they were not even imposed by an elite that belonged to that group.”

Home and Nervous Conditions She claims that none of her characters are “at home.” Colonization has forced all of them to internalize a consciousness of powerlessness in order to survive. If you don’t cave in and figure out how to act, it looks as if you are being self-destructive. This double- consciousness encourages you to act in one way at work and in another at home. Your submissive characteristics come out at work and your power characteristics are intensified and distorted at work. How is this not-at-homeness evidenced in the first three chapters?

Feminism and Nervous Conditions Tambu understands that her problems are related to gender, they’re about male/female subordination. Is this a false consciousness? asks the interviewer. “Your consciousness is defined by your world. And, so, if this is the world that she perceives then it’s not false consciousness. If she maintains this view even as her world changes then it would be false consciousness.”