204 pages
English language
Published Aug. 7, 1989 by Seal Press.
This is a book about the oppression of women by men.Men in a society have more rights than women and the women have to succumb to anything that men say.It also touches on religion and explains the roles of men and women.It also tells us about a young lady 'Nyasha" who left her home with her prents for England and went through a process called ASSIMILATION,which means that he suffered cultural schizophrenia.
Becoming a familiar refrain in African literature: girl fights for education & freedom against patriarchy & colonialism. This one, set in pre-independence Zimbabwe, might be the original (?) and the best, with carefully crafted & evolving characters. Ends very suddenly, though.
After such a striking first paragraph, I had high hopes for Nervous Conditions and I wasn't disappointed. First published in the 1980s, I was interested - and somewhat disappointed - to realise that a lot of the issues Dangarembga's characters face are still being written about as present day problems in novels thirty years later. Young Tambudzai is a child at the beginning of our story. She doesn't understand her mother's warning advice about her fate as a woman and instead strives to equal her spiteful brother, Nhamo. Nhamo is selected to follow in his uncle's footsteps and be educated at the Mission School. Uncle Babamukuru is the shining light of the extended family. Educated away from his family by white missionaries, he later was even able to study for five years in 1960s England, as did his wife Maiguru, and their children were partially brought up there. Babamukuru has …
After such a striking first paragraph, I had high hopes for Nervous Conditions and I wasn't disappointed. First published in the 1980s, I was interested - and somewhat disappointed - to realise that a lot of the issues Dangarembga's characters face are still being written about as present day problems in novels thirty years later. Young Tambudzai is a child at the beginning of our story. She doesn't understand her mother's warning advice about her fate as a woman and instead strives to equal her spiteful brother, Nhamo. Nhamo is selected to follow in his uncle's footsteps and be educated at the Mission School. Uncle Babamukuru is the shining light of the extended family. Educated away from his family by white missionaries, he later was even able to study for five years in 1960s England, as did his wife Maiguru, and their children were partially brought up there. Babamukuru has a beautiful house, a good car and the job of Headmaster at the school. Everyone wants their children to emulate his success, but Dangarembga slowly pulls back a curtain to reveal what such Westernised success has destroyed.
Dangarembga illustrates how the culture clash of colonialism was to the extreme financial detriment of many black people unless they were the 'lucky' few chosen to live within white educational programmes and the like. In order to benefit however, those people had to forgo their traditional culture and replicate the restrictive white examples set them. What I found difficult to reconcile in my mind though was that the portrayal of black life is one of grinding poverty and constant labour, especially for the women. I often felt like yelling at the female characters to walk away and stand up for themselves, but of course - and as a couple of them discover - there is rarely anywhere to walk away to. Maiguru cannot use her academic brilliance in employment and having university degrees casts her as a loose woman. Obviously! Tambudzai might strive to equal and even surpass her brother, but what will she actually gain by that in a country where both black and white see excessive education as wasted on women.
I liked that Dangarembga doesn't attempt to offer easy solutions to her characters' predicaments. As a reader, I sometimes thought I saw an obvious solution, but I would soon realise I hadn't taken everything about a particular situation into account. I strongly felt for the women trapped in a certain traditionally proscribed existence and especially for those who had a glimpse of genuine alternatives (the niece partly raised in the UK for example) I couldn't begin to truly understand what they went (and are still going) through.
Ich mochte den bürokratischen Stil sehr. Es werden Dinge weggelassen oder nur flüchtig erwähnt, die andere Autorinnen ausführlich beschrieben hätten, und das Buch hat ein kompetentes Ende, wie oft gibt es das schon.
Krachtig verhaal over gender- en klasseongelijkheid zoals ervaren door een jong meisje in koloniaal Rhodesië. Het zit vol met sterke personages die het meeslepend vertelde verhaal complexiteit geven. De thematiek ligt er soms wat duidelijk op maar wat maakt het uit. Een zelfverzekerd debuut die laat zien hoe kolonialisme een samenleving, cultuur en families ontwricht.
This book feels like memoir, and I wish she had written it that way, because it doesn't quite work as a novel. It is an autobiographical coming of age story that takes place in 1970's Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) featuring a young woman who, with both luck and hard work, is able to move out of the very poor and very sexist world she was born into. But there really isn't a plot, and the reader is treated to a long series of frequently dreadful family anecdotes, which are sometimes interesting, sometimes hard to read, and often tedious.
