Nervous Conditions: Subverting Western Expectations - Page: 2

Typically, western readers expect a beginning, a middle, and an end, with tension rising to a climax and falling to a satisfactory completion (which should not be misunderstood to mean "happy ending"). Normally, tensions in a story are foreshadowed, so that when they erupt, the extent of damage is expected and explainable. We may not have known it would go that far, but it does not surprise us that it has, because the author has led us "down the garden path" and when the shock comes, we know we deserve it and we marvel at the author's skill.

Dangarembga does none of this. But, I believe she does none of this deliberately. Instead, she uses feminist and postcolonial theory to create a postmodern novel that deconstructs our expectations and cherished beliefs about the root of problems in Africa, the western construction of the novel, and thus, western intellectual education.

Nervous Conditions ignores the typical plot construction. It lacks an ending. It has a beginning and a middle, but even with a beginning and a middle, it resists the masculine "sexual" plot structure where tension rises to a climax and then falls to an ending. The novel's ending provides no explanation for why it should end then, other than the fact that the protagonist Tambudzai has learned that "the problem [nervous conditions] is Englishness." We are left with an increasing sense of doom because she has embraced Englishness so quickly (Dangarembga 203).

Since the book is about Tambudzai's education, and we are only in the middle of that education, we expect to be taken through to the bitter end. Instead, the novel ends, lickety-split.

Tambudzai has gone back to an English school for her second term, has realized that "Englishness" is the problem, and then ends, suddenly, with no action on her part. She neither completes the natural time-frame of the story by graduating nor sabotages the education charade. Instead, in the last sentence of the book, she claims that the entire novel was about "my own story, the story of four women whom I loved, and our men, this story is how it all began" (Dangarembga 204). So the story begins as the novel ends! The entire novel is simply a preface to the real story.

In addition, although we have been led to believe that this is a story about Tambudzai's education, she suddenly informs us that this is not so. Rather, this is the story of herself, four women she loved, and their men. This deliberate "mis-structure" is both a feminist and postcolonial subversion. In this novel, Dangarembga appears to ask, "Why should we follow a male-oriented plot structure?" and "Why should we follow a western construction of the novel?" Why not begin at the ending?

A typical western novel deals with conflict very differently than Dangarembga chooses to do in Nervous Conditions. Typically, tension or conflict escalates during the course of the story so that when it explodes, the reactions of all characters are explainable. In Nervous Conditions, tension exists within the story, but it is overshadowed by exposition. Where it erupts, it is unexpected.

For example, Nyasha and her father begin a physical brawl because she arrives home late from a dance and he calls her a whore (Dangarembga 114). Dangarembga has not led the reader through the maze to expect this kind of action. Because Dangarembga presents all of the tension between Babamukuru and Nyasha through Tambudzai's exposition, rather than through action in the story, the reader cannot anticipate such a severe verbal and physical expression of it. Nothing in either Babamukuru's placid, though didactic, character, or Nyasha's adolescent angst, would have suggested this outcome. The plot has underplayed tension to the extent that the reader is confused by the level of emotion expressed.

Herein lies Dangarembga's brilliance. By subverting emotion to exposition, she demonstrates the reality of emotional life for the colonized. Colonized individuals have learned to mask their emotion to such an extent that no clue surfaces that would lead to an expectation of such an explosive eruption. This may be partly the result of African culture, particularly pertaining to the women, as we see later when the family calls a dare to discuss the problem of Lucia's illegitimate pregnancy; but it is certainly a result of western colonialism. Nyasha and Babamukuru, products of western education, but Africans nonetheless, have learned never to show what they really think or feel. Thus, when emotion emerges, it is volcanic in nature. Again, Dangarembga deconstructs the typical expectations of a western reader. Instead of foreshadowing tension, she lets it happen the way it really does in a colonized society.

Dangarembga's deliberate rejection of a typically constructed story is an attempt to free the novel from the clutches of the male and western intellectual domain; her deliberate subordination of tensions within the story, whose eruptions confuse the reader, is a subtle critique on the reader's learned response to these literary techniques and a subtle display of the reality of African women's emotional responses. This novel suggests that African women have learned to mask and subvert their emotions to such an extent that when they do erupt, the intensity is a surprise to everybody, including the participants.

In the conclusion, Tambudzai asks the reader to believe that Africa's absorption of "Englishness" has caused all of the intricate problems in the story. But this revelation is undermined by other elements in the story, which show that sexism existed in Africa long before "Englishness" was an element to be absorbed, that "Englishness" brought latent tendencies and problems to the surface as well as developing new ones, and that "Englishness" is both a tool of revelation and a tool of oppression. Without their "English" education, neither Nyasha or Tambudzai could have recognized their dilemma. It is not as simple as Tambudzai would have us believe.

Instead, Dangarembga deconstructs all of our expectations and beliefs by demonstrating that nothing is as it seems: the novel does not have to play by male or western rules; when everything breaks down, there are few clues to foreshadow the extent of the breakdown; and we are too quick to assign blame to one thing ("Englishness" or "Africanness"), and too quick to find a "center" (in the jargon of deconstruction) when the problem is often far more complex. At the end of the novel, when the real story "begins," the reader has no footing even to complain. Dangarembga has so thoroughly deconstructed the expectations of the reader that they can only wonder what just hit them.

For Further Reading:

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga