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Nervous Conditions: Subverting Western Expectations

© Jessica Powers

Tsitsi Dangarembga, author of Nervous Conditions, withholds very important things from the reader.

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?

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