Preliminaries: Examining the messages on the covers.
1. If you are using the edition that I own, the one by Seal Publishers, you will see this statement by Alice Walker: "That rare novel whose characters are unforgettable. It is an expression of liberation not to be missed." This comment is on the front cover, of course a marketing tool arguing that if Alice Walker enjoyed the book you should as well, but most importantly, the statement may help some readers judge the novel as a statement of feministic revolution, the concern for women like we see in The Color Purple. I look at the inclusion of the statement as a matter of establishing credibility, saying if Walker enjoyed the book, it must be worth reading. Let me say, I like this position because both Walker and Dangarembga are powerful authors. The "rare novel" has "unforgettable characters", an "expression of liberation". How can anyone forget about the captivating Tambu Sigauke? If Herman Melville was made popular by the statement "Call me Ishmael" , which is the first line of Moby Dick, Dangarembga has certainly become unforgettable because of the first sentence of Nervous Conditions: " I was not sorry when my brother died" (1). It is the kind of sentences that catches you by surprise, the Walkerian "unforgettable" quality that climbs the cliffs of the reader's conscience.
As I scan the back cover, my eyes stop on Doris Lessing's comment: "This is the novel we have been waiting for...I am sure it will be a classic." At the time she wrote this comment, Lessing was already a household authority for both popular readers and academic readers. I had to gulp chunks of The Grass is Singing in college, and went on to scour libraries for more of her works. Well, her statement at the debut of Nervous Conditions was a form of validation for Dangarembga, something similar to Chinua Achebe praising Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as Nigeria's most interesting young writer.
Let me just say: Nervous Conditions will open new doors of reasoning for you; it will engage and shock you, opening doors to a world you will continue to remember.
2. The Epigraph: The condition of the native is a nervous condition.
It is important to recognize that this statement comes from Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialist French philosopher who introduced Franz Fanon's seminal text, The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon's text dwells on the condition of the natives in the context of colonization, a dehumanizing process that ruins the condition of the colonized, making it a nervous (ill) one. The importance of connecting Fanon, and to some extent Sartre, to Nervous Conditions is that a grasp of Fanon's argument sheds light on Dangarembga's subtext - the historical context of the novel. The term "native" calls attention to itself in as much as it comes straight out of the mouth of the colonial machinery. Then Dangarembga's choice to present her characters as natives shows in advance that the concerns of the narrative cover but move beyond issues of gender to a political terrain on which forces of inequality are the ultimate statement about life in the Zimbabwe of the 1960s. Dangarembga is quick to mention the year 1965, indeed a tragic year for Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), when the minority white government declared independence from Britain, thereby triggering Chimurenga, the liberation war that brought independence to Zimbabwe. The epigraph also allows readers to tap into the existential philosophy of Sartre, at once interrogating the issues of "being and nothingness", or just the meaning of existence in a society that demands the individual's conformity to authority.
Chapter 1: "I was not sorry when my brother died".
Chapter Highlights
At the beginning of the story, the narrator informs the reader of the death of her brother, a loss about which she is not sorry. There is a shocking quality in the seeming insensitivity in the narrator's claim of no regret, but it pulls the reader in. Unapologetic about her "callousness", the narrator opens the door wide for the reader to enter this world where sisters celebrate (on the surface), or give sighs of relief for, the death of their brothers. Then the readers learn that the girl is not alone in this story where brothers die and sisters are relieved; Tambu hastens to state, in the fashon of argument, mapping ther premise of her story, that hers is a story "about my escape and Lucia's; about my mother's and Maiguru's entrapement; and about Nyasha's rebellion" (1). So now we have a thesis, and the story (the argument) is about to begin.
Tambudzai reveals that she was thirteen when Nhamo died, an important detail for the first chapter as we shall learn that Tambudzai's it seems, can only be possible in the absence of her brother, and we are talking about eternal absence, that elimination of the masculine to enable the feminine agency. Nhamo does not die until chapter three, so the first chapter foreshadows this important change in the family since it signifies an important change in Tambu's life. In the meantime, we get to meet Nhamo, the brother against who Tambu has built much resentment. On one level, we see sibling rivalry; in fact, we see the average brother and sister inlvolved in brother-and-sister conflict, but the world in which these siblings exists is not ordinary, and the authors aims to reveal he conditions of the context of the story that cause the constant state of nervousness, experienced in different degrees by the characters. Buut first, we meet the key characters of the novel, as Tambu takes us through the map of her family.
The Sigauke Family
