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Research in African Literatures 34.2 (2003) 53-74



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Space Matters:
Form and Narrative in Tsitsi Dangaremgba's Nervous Conditions

Christopher Okonkwo
University of Missouri-Columbia


Wherever Something Stands, Something Else will stand beside it. Nothing is absolute. I am the truth, the way, and the life would be called blasphemous or simply absurd. . . .

—Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day

You have to keep moving. . . . Moving, all the time. Otherwise you get trapped.

—Nyasha, Nervous Conditions

Tsitsi Dangaremgba's Nervous Conditions (1988) is an ingeniously written novel. Its appeal goes beyond Dangaremgba's arresting interest in (post)colonial, gender, and cultural politics and the fact that the novel came out at a moment in Zimbabwean history when there was little supportive space for women in that country who wished to write themselves into the public sphere and discourse by pursuing publishing careers, particularly in English language (see George and Scott). The novel's biggest strength lies in its superior crafting or, rather, in how its narrative instruments, from the obvious to the veiled, enhance effectively the work's layers of meaning. For what we find on close reading of this book is a text that exemplifies the notion that content and form complement each other and thus are inseparable. In Nervous Conditions, this reciprocity shows in how different narrative elements are interwoven skillfully and tightly with the umbrella motif of space, all performing as organic components that work not alone but cooperatively and hence successfully to carry the weight of Dangaremgba's serious message. The novel's overarching moral against hegemony, exclusion, and stasis and its thematic support of prudence, balance, and growth are reflected variously in how the story is told and the ingredients Dangaremgba, as author, assembles to make it come alive. As Derek Wright has stated, "Nervous Conditions is a work in the naturalist tradition, but it is remarkable for its high level of imaginative organization and contains some finely judged poetic symbolism" (111). Rosemary Gray (1995) and Gilian Gorle (1997) echo that assertion, noting that the novel is sophisticated and complex.

In reading this complicated novel, then, critics have talked about, among other things, Dangaremgba's feminist leanings, her appropriations of Frantz Fanon, her manipulation of food, language, the bildungsroman, psychosis, the poetics of vocal resistance and, in this case, the matter of space. A hugely important but critically underdeveloped issue in the novel, the idea of space has to date received what seems to be its more involved treatment in Biman Basu's insightful essay, "Trapped and Troping: Allegories [End Page 53] of the Transnational Intellectual" (ARIEL 1997). While Basu's observations reinforce the present discussion in some ways, his focus serves nonetheless as my departure point.

"Trapped" proffers the thesis that Nervous Conditions could be seen alongside other postcolonial "fictional texts in which their narrators or protagonists function as surrogates for writers as transnational intellectuals" who query and reject Western intellectual structures while, paradoxically, occupying them (7). Identifying Tambu as one of those developing transnational thinkers (11), "Trapped" engages, among other things, the novel's "meticulous [. . .] attention to physical space, both geographical and bodily" (7) and also the characters' movement through "the tertiary space of the homestead, the mission, and the Convent" (11). As Basu rightly argues, "The relationship among the three spaces is fluid" and their boundaries are continually redrawn (11). "Trapped," however, does not quite deal with the other aspects of the novel's spatial configurations. It fails, specifically, to engage either the gender, character, and familial implications of the text's structural, ideological, and narrative spaces or how the characters' actions and their very movements, particularly Tambu's, tie directly to the novel's open-end plot and its journey motif and hence advance the narrative's resistance to statis—an idea Basu recognizes as well (13). With the interplay of space and the novel's other devices not explored in "Trapped," and with some of the available criticism on the text stressing more conventionally the operations of a single narrative apparatus relative to theme while overlooking...

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