“Are the Wizards Still at Work?”: Response to “Rethinking Missionary Colonization in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions” by Chinelo Ezenwa

Abstract

“Are the Wizards Still at Work?”Response to “Rethinking Missionary Colonization in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions” by Chinelo Ezenwa Jill Planche, Respondent Toward the end of Nervous Conditions, Nyasha angrily accuses her parents, crying out to Tambu, “They’ve done it to me,” but she adds, “It’s not their fault. They did it to them too” (200). The “doing of it” to which she refers is the generational, deliberate, and legislated abrogation of their lives; the colonial practice of stealing land and imposing missionary education that Chinelo Ezenwa identifies as “Holy and White” wizardry in her post-magical realist examination of Tambu’s and her Grandmother’s retelling of their histories, each challenging the colonial missionaries’ exclusionary narrative. Her article is timely, coming as it does shortly after the publication, thirty [End Page 230] years after Nervous Conditions, of Dangarembga’s third novel in the Tambu trilogy, the 2020 Booker Shortlisted This Mournable Body (2018). Ezenwa offers a useful critique through which to look at the transfiguration of the colonized native to elucidate the older Tambu’s embodiment in the reality of postcolonial, postwar Zimbabwe. Here, I omit the hyphens deliberately because, as Tambu’s story unfolds, it is clear that there is no “post” for a systematized, colonized world or self. If Nervous Conditions can be considered as a magical antirealist retelling of the “Holy and White Wizards’” narrative of negation, inculcated in the encounter of community and colonization, in This Mournable Body Tambu performs her self descending into a state of unreality, into a magical realist mode closer to Márquezan visions and transfigurations. Her fracturing, her disintegration, echoes the disillusionment of the postcolony after a brutal war of liberation, and is threaded with concerns of land use, colonial (here neocolonial) power, and split native captured in Ezenwa’s article. Despite her attempt to break away from the wizardry, Tambu finds the wizards are still in control in various roles, their superimposing of “civilized” or European ways embedded in the psychological self her body tries to shed in a hearkening back to Nervous Conditions. The major shift between the two novels is Dangarembga’s use of the second-person narrative voice, raising the question: is this intradiegetic voice Tambu talking to her self, or, is she drawing the reader into the story? In her notion of ‘giving account,’ Judith Butler posits, “‘I’ give an account to ‘you’ and ‘you’ call me to be ‘me,’” arguing that one can only tell an autobiography to an other, “an ‘I’ only in relation to a ‘you.’” Without the ‘you,’ she says, “my own story becomes impossible” (12). It is an idea that subverts the telling of the real (Ezenwa’s “porousness”), perhaps to shed the violently imposed subject of the younger Tambu. As she tries to escape the social world in which her identity has been instantiated, to find her unhu-the Shona concept of personhood she seeks at the end of The Book of Not, second in the trilogy-Tambu seeks a relational form of narrative toward self constitution, realizing she, the ‘I,’ cannot exist on her own apart from the conflicting frameworks that have formed her. In her hallucinations, paranoia, and sense of alienation, Tambu sees women as her threat: the family members who try to help her, her mother who sends messages and a bag of mealie meal through one of her cousins, and women in power such as her bosses, co-workers, landladies, and even the young students she briefly teaches. Symbolic of her state is the pair of European shoes sent to her by Nyasha that she calls Lady Dis, which she has to wear in her constant hunt for lodgings and jobs, and which each time turn her feet into bloated, blistered torments, their ill-fitting construction leading to greater physical and psychological degradation. She is recurringly tormented by her image in the mirror that turns into a purple hyena with whom she converses as she descends into nervous collapse. The climactic scene of the novel returns to the place of her childhood-the Homestead explored in Ezenwa’s article-with a fantastical reenactment of the earlier tensions of colonial dominance of land...