Otherization and Identity Distortion in Dangarembga’s Writing

Abstract

In spite of the fact that most African novelists, penning stories in English language by the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, were graduates of the British colonial missionaries and universities, they had yet been able to escape the suppressive ideology of colonization and become genuine mouthpieces for their native communities’ struggles and adversity. Amongst whom, the Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga rose to the fore as representative of her fellow countrywomen during the British colonization. Henceforth, concomitant with the rise of postcolonial criticism in the literary arena, this paper aims to address the European colonial mechanism of otherization and its impact on the identity construction of the otherized subject in Dangarembga’s novels, Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not. Dangarembga foreshadows the main thematic realm of her semi-autobiographical trilogy, through her first novel’s title which is reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s preface in the book of The Wretched of the Earth. To unravel the intricate complexities of the colonizer/colonized contact, this study pinpoints the psychological confusion of the protagonist, Tambuzdai, as an exemplar of the colonized Black individual’s distress. To fathom the depth of Tambu’s psyche during those encounters, this paper relies on Elke Boehmer’s attribution of otherization as a Western self-projecting process that seeks to produce self-soothing and “dark mirror-images” of the other. In addition, Du Bois’s analysis of double consciousness seems to account for the protagonist’s identity crisis and self alienation. In conclusion, Dangarembga does not seem as an opponent of cultural exchanges in general or hybridity in particular, but she simply advocates cautious adaption that does not decentre and disregard one’s native-ness and cultural origins.