Hunger, Normalcy and Postcolonial Disorder in Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not

Abstract

There are significant conceptual parallels between the treatment of disability issues in Potiki and in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) and its sequel, The Book of Not (2006). Set in colonial Rhodesia in the 1960s and 1970s, with the later book encompassing the early years of Zimbabwean Independence, Dangarembga’s novels negotiate ideas of cultural health as they pertain in a subsistence economy in which poverty is the ‘norm’. Like Potiki, they promote a view of health as a collective, community-focused phenomenon based on a principle of reciprocity. Ill health is a very real concern for the central Sigauke family. For the narrator Tambudzai’s branch of the family, life on the rural homestead is frequently punctuated by periods of food shortage, hunger and malnourishment. For her more affluent relatives living in the mission house in Umtali town, disability becomes a disconcerting presence when Nyasha, Tambu’s teenage cousin, develops a severe eating disorder — a ‘nervous condition’ with a deeply complex provenance and symptomatology. This is where Dangarembga’s work departs from Potiki significantly, because while indigenous cultural politics are absolutely integral to Grace’s Maori disability narrative, the politics of gender provide the most pressing context for Dangarembga. Nervous Conditions has been highly acclaimed as a seminal study of the oppression of women under intertwined regimes of colonialism and indigenous patriarchy, and a great deal of attention has been paid to the novel’s title and epigraph: ‘The condition of native is a nervous condition.’