Nervous Conditions

Resources for Nervous Conditions

Interviews

Christianse, Yvette. "Power Struggles: Tsitsi Dangarembga and Achmat Dangor." PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers 7 (2006): 125-33.

Focuses on Dangarembga's early education; debates the role of literature/film in political struggle; asserts the lack of a conversation about race and conflict in Zimbabwe; describes the "Anglo-Saxon Axis" that heavily contours the possibilities of arts funding in Zimbabwe. **NOT AVAILABLE THROUGH GMU E-JOURNALS--ILLIAD ONLY.

Dangarembga, Tsitsi. "This Year, Next Year." Women's Review of Books 8.10-11 (July 1991): 43-4.

Dangarembga talks about the circumstances of her publishing Nervous Conditions.

George, Rosemary Marangoly and Helen Scott. "An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 26.3 (1993 Spring): 309-19.

Dangarembga answers questions about the reception of and responses to NC, the role of literature in Zimbabwean culture, the nature of rebellion, the challenges that women writers face, and the role that female figures play in narrating and embodying colonial history.

Lee, Christopher Joon-Hai. "Desperately Seeking Tsitsi: A Conversation with Tsitsi Dangarembga." Transition 13.2 [Issue 96] (2006): 128-50.

Lee focuses on Dangarembga's transition into film from literature. Dangarembga describes her tenure at a German film school from 1989-1997, her interest in moving away from a "documentary" film aesthetic into a more stylized mode of storytelling, and the establishment of her production company, Nyerai films. She also provides details about the debut of her film Kare Kare Zvako (English title: Mother's Day) at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005.

Rooney, Caroline. "Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga." Wasafiri: The Transnational Journal of International Writing 51 (Summer 2007): 57-62.

Rooney asks questions about the publication of the NC sequel, The Book of Not, and the challenges it brought Dangarembga as a writer. Dangarembga also discusses the role of fiction and film--particularly "development film" in a documentary mode--in countering or addressing a history of violence in Zimbabwe. The article is a bit oblique at times if you haven't read The Book of Not.

Veit-Wild, Flora. "'Women Write about the Things That Move Them': Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga." Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society 3.6 (1989): 101-108. Rpt. Moving Beyond Boundaries. Vol. 2: Black Women's Diasporas. Ed. Carole Boyce Davies. NY: New York UP. 27-31.

Veit-Wild asks Dangarembga about the degree to which NC is autobiographical, and how it reflects her own personal experiences growing up. Dangarembga also speaks about other writers who have influenced her, including James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, and Leo Tolstoy.

Scholarly Criticism

Nervous Conditions has attracted the attention of scholars working in a wide range of academic fields--women's studies, anthropology, postcolonial studies, linguistics, and on and on. As a result, when starting to conduct research on Dangarembga's novel, a bit of orientation might be helpful. Below you will find a list of articles, books, and chapters that begin to demonstrate the scope and volume of scholarly criticism that Nervous Conditions has generated. Each entry has been annotated, offering a brief glimpse of the argument and the main themes addressed by the author. To get started, here's a quick reference guide organized by topic, suggesting which authors to try first if you're interested in a particular subject area:

• On strategies for teaching Nervous Conditions and general introduction: see Bravman/Montgomery, Eck, and Willey
• On subversion/resistance: see Aberbach, Aegerter, McWilliams, Stone, and Uwakweh
• On psychoanalysis and the influence of Frantz Fanon: see Boehmer and Counihan
• On language: see Donadey, Gorle, and Thompson
• On genre/narration: see Collins, Flockemann, Katrin, Mule, Okonkwo, and Sugnet
• On hysteria/illness: see Bahri, Nair, Thomas, and Wright
• On the social histories shaping the novel: see Katrin, Lenta, Searle and Shaw

*Unless otherwise noted, sources are available through the e-journal databases on the GMU library website.

Aberbach, David. "Enlightenment and Cultural Confusion: Mendele's The Mare and Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions.

Aberbach wants to read Tambu as a minority "victim of enlightenment," in which Tambu's insight gained through education becomes a source of unbearable pain rather than an escape from the "poverty trap," as Tambu had initially hoped. Aberbach refers to Tambu's predicament as the condition of "negative identity," in which she has internalized colonial oppressions of Shona culture rather than breaking free of them.

Aegerter, Lindsay Pentolfe. "A Dialectic of Autonomy and Community: Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 15.2 (1996 Fall): 231-40.

Aegerter analyzes the ways in which Tambu and Nyasha resist oversimplification of the African woman's position and assert agency by carving out new sites for representation between tradition and resistance. Nyasha's critique of assimilation assists Tambu in avoiding the alienation from Shona culture that Nhama experienced.

Bahri, Deepika. "Disembodying the Corpus: Postcolonial Pathology in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism 5.1 (1994 Sept).

Bahri Focuses on Nyasha's eating disorders, arguing that her "diseased self suggests the textualized female body on whose abject person are writ large the imperial inscriptions of colonization, the intimate branding of patriarchy, and the battle between native culture, Western narrative, and her complex relationship with both."

Berndt, Katrin. Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction (Bayreuth African Studies 73). Beyreuth, Germany: Beyreuth University, 2005.

Berndt's monograph contains chapters on social, historical, and literary background shaping Dangarembga and her contemporaries; identity construction; the importance of the Bildungsroman; the role of orature; etc.

Boehmer, Elleke. "Versions of Yearning and Dissent: The Troping of Desire in Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga." Matatu 29-30 (2005): 113-28.

Boehmer attempts to counter a perceived silence in postcolonial studies on queer sexualities in Africa. She attempts to define queerness not as explicit content or theme, but as a "searching and interrogative approach to relations between women, and to women's sexual identity." She thus focuses her analysis on the way links between women in NC could be read as a kind of queer resistance. **NOT AVAILABLE THROUGH GMU E-JOURNALS--ILLIAD ONLY.

Bravman, Bill and Mary Montgomery. "Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." African Novels in the Classroom. Ed. Margaret Jean Hay. Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 2000. 97-105.

Bravman and Montgomery provide an overview of the novel and suggest teaching strategies.

Collins, Walter P. "The 'Lightening of Various Darknesses': Tambu's Tortuous Path to Development in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." Tracing Personal Expansion: Reading Selected Novels as Modern African Bildungsromane. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006. 71-90.

Collins is interested in reading NC as an African Bildungsroman, a genre in which the protagonist follows a conflicted path towards ultimate enlightenment and escape. He also argues that Tambu's experience as an individual character is intended to embody and reflect the experiences of Zimbabwe as a nation on its "conflicted path" as it acquired independence from English colonial rule.

Counihan, Clare. "Reading the Figure of Woman in African Literature: Psychoanalysis, Difference, and Desire." Research in African Literatures 38.2 (Summer 2007): 161-80.

Counihan is interested in the relationship between race and sexuality in the psychoanalytical critiques of colonialism written by Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha. She argues that, for Fanon and Bhabha, racial difference is equated with and reduced to sexual difference--and, as a result, she claims that we should question the role that psychoanalysis plays in understanding the dynamics of postcolonial societies. She proposes two alternatives to psychoanalysis: reading for the "dispersal of desire" (the entwinement of race, gender, and sexuality), and reading for the "ghost in the postcolonial" (the woman who is simultaneously absent and present in different narratives). As examples of these absent-present women, she analyzes the characters of Ezinma in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and Nyasha in NC.

Donadey, Anne. "Overlapping and Interlocking Frames for Humanities Literary Studies: Assia Djebar, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Gloria Anzaldua." College Literature 34.4 (Fall 2007): 22-42.

Regarding Dangarembga, Donadey focuses on the novel's Shona-inflected English. She tracks the necessity and implications of "code-switching" between English and Shona for the characters in NC. She also clarifies the particular meanings of many of the Shona words used in NC that Dangarembga does not explicitly define.

Eck, Lisa. "Thinking Globally, Teaching Locally: The "Nervous Conditions" of Cross-Cultural Literacy." College English 70.6 (Jul 2008): 578-98.

Eck describes in detail her first experience teaching the novel at Framingham State College in Massachusetts with thirty-seven students in the spring of 2004. She addresses the role of "intractable cultural difference in the world literature classroom." Eck is interested in teaching NC via an invitation for American students to identify with the African characters coupled with a warning against overidentifying with them--she describes this tactic as a kind of "nervous dissonance," or "teaching in opposite directions."

Flockemann, Miki. "'Not-Quite Insiders and Not-Quite Outsiders': The 'Process of Womanhood' in Beka Lamb, Nervous Conditions, and Daughters of the Twilight." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27.1 (1992): 37-47.

Flockemann compares NC with two other examples of the female Bildungsroman, in which the coming of age of a colonial protagonist is counterpointed by that of another less successful female character. In all three, education enables but also complicates the protagonist's resistance to patriarchy and the success of her integration into a post-colonial context.

Gorle, Gilian. "Fighting the Good Fight: What Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions Says about Language and Power." Yearbook of English Studies 27 (1997): 179-92.

Gorle examines the ways in which language functions as an indicator of cultural hegemony and an agent of alienation as well as power. She argues that the novel's refusal of closure leaves unresolved the success of Tambu's negotiation of "Englishness" and tradition.

Lenta, Margaret. "Fiction and History: Unity Dow's Juggling Truths and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." The English Academy Review 22 (2005): 43-54.

Lenta focuses on the relationship between NC and the historical backdrop of the fight for colonial independence. She argues that NC, like Nadine Gordimer's anti-apartheid novels, writes a "history from the inside," demonstrating the inner life and "interactive personalities" of women excluded from "official" histories.

McWilliams, Sally. "Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions: At the Crossroads of Feminism and Post-Colonialism." World Literature Written in English 31.1 (Spring 1991): 103-12.

McWilliams relates Tambu's experiences to various post-colonial theories about how dominant cultures construct an inferior other to reinforce their own power.

Mule, Katwiwa. "Blurred Genres, Blended Memories: Engendering Dissidence in Nawal el Saadawi's Memoirs of a Woman Doctor and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 6.2 (2006): 93-116.

Mule argues that NC should be read as a subversive autobiography, rather than simply as a novel or Bildungsroman. More broadly, the author suggests that challenging the boundaries imposed by "genre" can be a method of achieving politically and culturally resistant subjectivities.

Nair, Supriya. "Melancholic Women: The Intellectual Hysteric(s) in Nervous Conditions." Research in African Literatures 26.2 (1995 Summer): 130-39.

Nair contrasts Tambu's use of education to escape limited options to the demonizing treatment of colonial education as a force of alienation in the work of African male novelists like Achebe and Ngugi.

Okonkwo, Christopher. "Space Matters: Form and Narrative in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." Research in African Literatures 34.2 (Summer 2003): 53-74.

Okonkwo argues that the foundational strength of NC lies in the complexity of its narrative style. He believes that there is a reciprocity between form and content in the novel that contains the novel's most enduring political significance. This reciprocity can be seen most clearly by paying attention to the motif of space: traps, exclusions, marginality, and--most importantly--methods for negotiating shared spaces, both material and symbolic.

Searle, Allison. "The Role of Missions in Things Fall Apart and Nervous Conditions." Literature and Theology 21.1 (Mar 2007): 49-65.

Searle explores the tension between universal truth claims and 'the particulars of a given culture or locality" in representations of Christian missionaries in colonial Africa. These tensions, she claims, stem in part from paradoxical conceptualizations of a Christian mission as a fundamentally "cross-cultural enterprise." The author also contrasts education as pacifying "benefaction" and education as the development of resistant critical faculties.

Shaw, Carolyn Martin. "'You had a daughter, but I am becoming a woman': Sexuality, Feminism, and Postcoloniality in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and She No Longer Weeps." Research in African Literatures 38.4 (Winter 2007): 7-27.

Shaw argues that, in both these works by Dangarembga, "sexuality offers the promise of freedom, entails a loss of security, and delivers punishment." The author is an anthropologist who conducted field work in Zimbabwe, and thus she provides useful information about the historical and social conditions in which NC is set--including the history of the women's movement in Zimbabwe.

Stone, E. Kim. "In the Bedroom: The Formation of Single Women's Performative Space in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 41.1 (2006): 111-26.

Stone focuses on "the formation of female intellectual subjectivity" within the patriarchal national imaginary. In particular, the author argues that the novel troubles an easy subordination-subversion binary. Instead of that binary, it fosters a "spatial politics of resistance" in the creation of empowered selves. In other words, as philosopher Judith Butler might put it, "spaces that matter" (like the bedroom) produce "bodies that matter" (like Nyasha's and Tambu's).

Sugnet, Charles. "Nervous Conditions: Dangarembga's Feminist Reinvention of Fanon." The Politics of (M)othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature. Ed. Obioma Nnaemeka. New York: Taylor & Francis, 1997. 33-49. Available through http://scholar.google.com

Sugnet argues that the novel's portrayal of various female strategies for emotional survival enables them to resist being reduced to an essentialized female identity in service to nationalist goals. He also considers the reasons why neither tradition nor feminist liberation offer sufficient grounds for female identity. He includes some suggestive comments about how the limited character Tambu becomes the analytical narrator Tambu.

Thomas, Sue. "Killing the Hysteric in the Colonized's House: Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27.1 (1992): 26-36.

Influential essay dealing with eating disorders and other behaviors as symptoms of hysterical resistance to oppression. See Thomas's 2003 listing for revised and expanded version.

_____ . "Rewriting the Hysteric as Anorexic in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women's Writing. Ed. Tamar Heller and Patricia Moran. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 183-98.

This is a revised and expanded version of Thomas's 1992 essay arguing that Dangarembga revises Fanon's theories about the effects of colonization on the native by demonstrating the ways in which Shona patriarchy is a parallel system of repressive authority. It examines hysteria as forms of behavior (in both male and female) forced by enslavement to patriarchal and/or colonial master narratives.

Thompson, Katrina Daly. "The Mother Tongue and Bilingual Hysteria: Translation Metaphors in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43.2 (2008): 49-63.

Thompson argues that NC is an "extended metaphor of translation." In that sense, Tambu's and Nyasha's "linguistic struggles" (described in the novel variously as "escape," "transformation," "dislodgement," "assimilation," and "brainwashing") are "attempts to translate themselves from one language and culture to another--attempts which are hindered by those who fear such hybridity.

Uwakweh, Pauline Ada. "Debunking Patriarchy: The Liberational Quality of Voicing in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." Research in African Literatures 26.1 (1995 Spring): 75-84.

This essay surveys the ways in which patriarchy oppresses women in the novel and how they resist its pressures.

Willey, Ann Elizabeth and Jeanette Treiber eds. Negotiating the Postcolonial: Emerging Perspectives on Tsitsi Dangarembga. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2002.

Wright, Derek. "Chapter Seven: Regurgitating Colonialism: The Feminist Voice in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." New Directions in African Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1997. 108-22.

Wright analyzes the figurative and literal similarities between consuming education and consuming food and examines the wider metaphorical implications of illness. He comments on the ways binaries like intelligence/emotion and rationality/sensuality serves the ends of patriarchal power.

Literary Intertexts

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. 1959.

TFA is frequently touted as the seminal African novel in English. Many scholars argue that Nervous Conditions constitutes a feminist response to Achebe's work, as Dangarembga underscores a set of patriarchal social structures working oppressively in tandem with the colonial presence to circumscribe the opportunities of African women.

Dangarembga, Tsitsi. The Book of Not. 2006.

TBON is the sequel to NC, tracing the fate of Tambu and her family during Zimbabwe's liberation struggle.

_____ . "Tambu's Choice." Transition 13.2 [Issue 96] (2006): 108-26.

Short story adapted from The Book of Not, the sequel to Nervous Conditions.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Published in French in 1961.

TWOTE is a seminal work of postcolonial criticism by Frantz Fanon written during Algeria's fight for independence from France. Dangarembga's title, "Nervous Conditions," is taken from philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's preface to Fanon's book, in which he states: "The status of 'native' is a nervous condition." Dangarembga's title thus underscores the importance of understanding the psychological effects--in addition to the material and political effects--that the colonial experience had on those it subjugated.

Wainaina, Binyavanga. "How to Be an African." Transition 13.2 (2008): 64-66.

_____ . "How to Write about Africa." Granta 92 (2005).

Teaching Resources

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History of Zimbabwe

Darnolf, Staffan and Liisa Laakso eds. Twenty Years of Independence in Zimbabwe: From Liberation to Authoritarianism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

"History of Zimbabwe." History World. 2008.

Schmidt, Elizabeth. "Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Colonial State in Zimbabwe." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16.4 (1991): 732-56.

" Zimbabwe's Political History." The History Channel. 2008.

Current Events in Zimbabwe

African Studies Center: Zimbabwe. U Penn.

Gateway site hosted by the University of Pennsylvania on the history, culture, government, and economy of Zimbabwe with many useful links including to several Zimbabwe newspapers.

"Zimbabwe: New Era?" BBC.

Up-to-date BBC page devoted to tracking changes in Zimbabwe under the power-sharing government--includes articles, images, and videos.

"Zimbabwe in Facts and Figures." BBC.

Article published March 2008 with information on the economy, population, land, and politics.

"Q&A: Zimbabwe crisis." BBC.

Article published on 11 Nov 2008 that explains the power-sharing negotations between Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai after the recent elections.

"Cholera lays bare Zimbabwe's collapse." BBC.

Cluster of reports on the ongoing cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe.