Read Women discussion

This the thread for our April Read Around the World group read.

The book we will be reading is Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, set in Zimbabwe (though at the time the book is set, the country was known as Rhodesia.)

Nervous Conditions is a the first book in a trilogy. Deemed modern classic in the African literary canon and voted in the Top Ten Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century, this novel brings to the politics of decolonization theory the energy of women's rights. An extraordinarily well-crafted work, this book is a work of vision. Through its deft negotiation of race, class, gender and cultural change, it dramatizes the 'nervousness' of the 'postcolonial' conditions that bedevil us still. In Tambu and the women of her family, we African women see ourselves, whether at home or displaced, doing daily battle with our changing world with a mixture of tenacity, bewilderment and grace. (Goodreads blurb, slightly adapted)
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Author Tsitsi Dangarembga spent part of her childhood in England. She began her education there, but concluded her A-levels in a missionary school back home, in the town of Mutare. She later studied medicine at Cambridge University, but became homesick and returned home as Zimbabwe's black-majority rule began in 1980.

She took up psychology at the University of Zimbabwe, of whose drama group she was a member. She also held down a two-year job as a copywriter at a marketing agency. This early writing experience gave her an avenue for expression: she wrote numerous plays, such as The Lost of the Soil, and then joined the theatre group Zambuko, and participated in the production of two plays, Katshaa and Mavambo.

In 1985, Dangarembga published a short story in Sweden called The Letter. In 1987, she also published the play She Does Not Weep in Harare. At the age of twenty-five, she had her first taste of success with her novel Nervous Conditions. The first in English ever written by a black Zimbabwean woman, it won the African section of the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989. Asked about her subsequent prose drought, she explained, "There have been two major reasons for my not having worked on prose since Nervous Conditions: firstly, the novel was published only after I had turned to film as a medium; secondly, Virginia Woolf's shrewd observation that a woman needs £500 and a room of her own in order to write is entirely valid. Incidentally, I am moving and hope that, for the first time since Nervous Conditions, I shall have a room of my own. I'll try to ignore the bit about £500."

Dangarembga continued her education later in Berlin at the Deutsche Film und Fernseh Akademie, where she studied film direction and produced several film productions, including a documentary for German television. She also made the film Everyone's Child, shown worldwide including at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. (Goodreads author bio)
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I nominated the book and will do my best to lead however, I read the book a month ago, then had to return it to the library. I intended to re-read it this month, but of course, all libraries are now closed. However, I do have some notes on it.

As it's a short novel, we will discuss it without breaking it down into weekly sections.

I just wanted to say that this is one of the books available on archive.org to borrow for free. There is (allegedly) a way to convert the pdf and send to your kindle if you can't stand reading on the computer, although I have yet to set aside any time to figure that out.

I use this free service to convert pdf to epub. It's super easy.

https://ebook.online-convert.com/conv...

I have just reached the part where Tambudzai has arrived to live with her uncle's family to attend the mission school. I find it interesting that she chafed her entire young liife against the expectations of a female in society, yet she is entirely horrified by the disrespectful attitude and behavior of her cousin Nyasha to Nyasha's parents. Tambudzai wants to be free to study and earn an education and not simply learn how to be a good wife as her father wishes, but she is entirely conditioned to believe that children must always speak and behave respectfully to their elders. So her feelings mimic western ideas in some ways but not others.

Thanks Anita, I hadn't realised it was freely available! If the PDF is of a series of images (rather than text), conversion to .mobi or .epub formats will be quite tricky. I normally use Calibre to switch between formats https://www.calibre-ebook.com/about, as it also doubles up as a library manager and is open source.

This book has been on my shelves for a while but I'm not sure I'll be able to get to it this month aarrrrgh. Looking forward to reading your thoughts in any case.

Laurie wrote: "I have just reached the part where Tambudzai has arrived to live with her uncle's family to attend the mission school. I find it interesting that she chafed her entire young liife against the expec..."

Very good point, Laurie. If I'm remembering it correctly, she's rebellious inside her head only for most of the early part of the story.

As I said, I read the book over a month ago now, but took some notes. One of them: "being colonized means learning to despise the old ways--walking along the path (instead of driving), bathing in the river. We see this in the way Tambudzai's brother's education changes him--i.e.-- "all this poverty began to offend him".

One of the things that struck me reading this book is how well it fits in thematically with other social class 'boundary crossing' stories with female narrators from all over the world including:
Educating Rita
My Brilliant Career
The My Brilliant Friend novels

(And also to some extent, Jude the Obscure and Good Will Hunting with male protagonists)

The characters in all these stories seem to share the same thirst to change their destinies through education, the same friction with people in their families and communities, the same awareness of being undermined by their families, the same sense of being outsiders and so on.

I was particularly interested in how the relationship between Tambudzai and her mother was echoed in those other stories, especially Ferrante's novels. Where we might expect the mothers to want more for their daughters and even to support them in being less oppressed than they themselves are, instead we see the mothers trying to undermine their daughters. One quotation I wrote down was Tambudzai's mother saying (when Tambu decides to grow her own crops to pay for her school fees) "Let her see for herself that some things cannot be done."

What do you think? Was Tambu's mother's intention to be kind when she "began to prepare me for disappointment...she began to discourage me...accept your lot and enjoy what you can of it"? Or was she more focused on trying to destroy what she perceived as her daughter's sense of superiority? (" And do you think you are so different from us?")

If you yourself are a 'boundary crosser' (i.e. someone from a less advantaged background who attained a higher level of education than others in your family), does this resonate with you? (I am and it does!)

I'm not sure if Tambudzai's mother was trying to be kind when she discouraged Tambu from growing her crops, but her experience was that so much work would not reap rewards. But I also think she was trying to bring Tambu down a peg or two since she thought Tambu had grandiose ideas. I don't remember reading about the mother's education but we eventually find out she was from an extremely poor family. That fact makes it doubtful that she has much education. Maybe Tambu's mother had dreams of being more than a housewife at one time and those hopes were crushed. Most mothers want to spare their children similar pain.

When Tambudzai leaves for the mission school, I think her mother was jealous. She knew Tambu would never settle for the kind of life her mother leads in such a poor household if Tambu gets an education. We see that jealousy come out at Christmas when Tambu's mother greets her with the comment "I've been listening to you laughing and talking for a long time and wondering when you would remember that somebody gave birth to you." She behaves as a martyr forgotten by her daughter.

Strained mother daughter relationships are not hard to find in novels. I read My Brilliant Career just this year and it is good example of a mother who continually tears her daughter down. Nyasha and her mother also have a difficult relationship in this novel even though Maiguru is highly educated so the fear that her daughter will rise to a higher class than her is not there. What is present for both Tambu and Nyasha is the idea that they don't want to be ruled by men. They neither want the lives of their mothers and both mothers know it. What better source of conflict can there be between mothers and daughters than daughters repudiating and rejecting the role their mothers live whatever that role is.

Madeleine Thien interviews Tsitsi Dangarembga

https://brickmag.com/an-interview-wit...

I finished the book last night and I thought it was one of the better coming of age stories I've read. I did not like the ending though. It seemed rather rushed and suddenly focused on Nyasha and her bulimia. Tambu became just the storyteller and she gave no specifics about her life at the convent school. This shift in character focus was odd to me, as if Dangaremba didn't know how to end the book.

Overall the different ways the two girls pushed back against the patriarchal rule of Babamukuru were interesting. Nyasha's way was overt but it may have ultimately led to her issues with food. Tambu took a long time to rebel at all but she got her way when she finally did, and she took her punishment willingly.

I wasn't enamoured of the ending either, Laurie, because I missed Tambu's strong, angry voice.

However, I wasn't bothered by the switch in focus to Nyasha. My feeling was the Nyasha was Tambu's touchstone and guide and when they were separated and Tambu achieved her goal of going to the convent school, she lost her sense of self and became hollowed out or progressively more numb and estranged from herself. I saw the two girls' experiences as representative of the "Englishness that will kill them all if they are not careful".

Anyone else planning to join us to discuss this book?

I last read this book last year but it is one of my all time favourites. I originally read it in my early twenties and it was one of the first books which got me into reading diverse female (particularly feminist) perspectives from around the world which is still what I love to do the most in my reading. So I thank Tsitsi Dangarembga for this.

Although I had a very different experience from tambu and nyasha as an adolescent (being from a middle class white English background) I can still see echoes of the reactions of tambu's mother in my family. I feel a bit uncomfortable comparing my experience to that of the characters in the book but despite this huge differences I can still see similarities. All the women in my family take it for granted that they will and should be the ones to do all of the housework and childcare and whenever I expressed my frustrations with this as a teenager I was met with either ridicule or anger. I think people are threatened when young people question the way things 'have always been' because it threatens their world perspective and if the young people are right then that would force them to question themselves and their lives and push them outside of their own comfort zone. Most people are not willing to do this and get angry at those who are. This book helped me realise that it is ok to question the way things are and to understand the reactions of those who get angry.

Tambu has much larger forces working against her than I did with much more ingrained patriarchy as well as colonialism and poverty to deal with and that made me really feel for her and admire her strength and courage to stand up for herself and fight for what she wanted for her life. Nyasha was another character whom I could relate to as whilst she was relatively much more privileged than tambu she was just as unhappy (if not more so) with the 'way things are' and her questioning is again met with extreme anger and sadly we see this having a profound impact on her mental health. Is it a burden of adolescents everywhere to question the status quo no matter their circumstances? And are they always met with the anger of threatened adults?

Hannah wrote: "Is it a burden of adolescents everywhere to question the status quo no matter their circumstances? And are they always met with the anger of threatened adults? "

These are good questions, Hannah. I feel myself that it's the burden of anyone who's oppressed to question (and fight against) the status quo and my own experiences (and I'm well into middle age now) are that those efforts are often met with the anger of those who'd be happy to keep things just as they are.

But it is so saddening to see when that anger also comes from those who are themselves the most oppressed -such as Tambu's mother. Unlike Babamakuru, who has a vested interest in keeping things as they are, it is more difficult to see the anger of Tambu's mother - which I can only assume must come from fear. Tambu's parents don't seem to see this as their burden at all. It's been a while since I last read the book but am I right in remembering that other than the girls the only other character who starts to question anything at all is Nyasha's mother? Do you think this is unrealistic or just a sad truth of such deeply ingrained patriarchy/colonialism?

Hi all!

I actually liked the ending in the sense that I considered the consequence, like the outcome, of the nervous condition of being a colonized native that the author talks about. I was actually trying to read a bit more and I found this article interesting:

https://queenrooblog.wordpress.com/20...

I interpret it like a possible path in which Tambu can end if she doesn't do something to protect herself. In addition to the patriarchal culture, the context is toxic enough to end up with a mental illness.