Tsitsi Dangarembga Research Articles

Exploring Institutionalized Oppression in The Book of Not (2006)

ABSTRACT Tsitsi Dangarembga’s exploration of education takes on distinct forms in her literary works. The Book of Not (2006) focuses on traditional education encompassing classes, assessments and discipline. This article presents an analysis of Dangarembga’s second literary work, interrogating the tension between the promises of educational liberation and the entrapment of black female students within the confines of Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart, an educational institution that replicates colonial practices. The concept of education is read within the framework of Paulo Freire’s critique of the banking model, where practices of colonial education are shown to manifest neuroses in colonial subjects, exposing the hypocrisies and ironies within the colonial education model. Through this lens, we observe the profound alienation Tambudzai (Tambu) experiences with liberatory education. To succeed within the system, Tambu is pressured to abandon her cultural identity under the misguided belief that doing so will lead to acceptance. This forced renunciation causes psychological breakdowns, highlighting how the school exhibits institutional traits akin to asylums. Instead of fostering independence and collective thought, the school’s true aim is to enforce dependence by compelling students to discard themselves.

Gender Representation in Postcolonial African Literature

Purpose: The aim of the study was to assess the gender representation in postcolonial African literature. Materials and Methods: This study adopted a desk methodology. A desk study research design is commonly known as secondary data collection. This is basically collecting data from existing resources preferably because of its low cost advantage as compared to a field research. Our current study looked into already published studies and reports as the data was easily accessed through online journals and libraries. Findings: The study found that authors often critique patriarchal structures and colonial legacies that have influenced gender dynamics. Female characters in these narratives are depicted as resilient and multifaceted, challenging traditional roles and seeking empowerment. Works by writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Tsitsi Dangarembga highlight the struggles and triumphs of women navigating postcolonial societies, reflecting broader themes of identity, autonomy, and resistance. Additionally, postcolonial African literature often explores the intersectionality of gender with race, class, and ethnicity, offering a nuanced understanding of the lived experiences of African women and men in a rapidly changing world. Implications to Theory, Practice and Policy: Postcolonial theory, feminist literary theory and queer theory may be used to anchor future studies on assessing the gender representation in postcolonial African literature. Supporting emerging authors through literary grants and mentorship programs is essential for promoting diversity and inclusivity in literary production. Promoting gender-inclusive literary awards can incentivize authors to explore and challenge traditional gender norms in their works.

Otherization and Identity Distortion in Dangarembga’s Writing

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.

The semantics of gender, politics, and religion in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body

Zimbabwean literature produced after the attainment of independence has been predominantly engrossed with thematisation of the postcolonial subaltern subjects’ existential conditions, enunciated together with gender politics, religion and socio-economic environment that frame politics of difference, and sites of suffering or resistance. These tropes remain absorbing and critical even in contemporary female-authored novels that also engage with a deeply fractured modern-day Zimbabwe. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel, This Mournable Body, offers important site to debate the enduring concerns of gender inequalities, politics, and religion. A stylistic approach is adopted to identify the semiotic construction of the text and discuss the different styles that are deployed to foreground central tropes in the novel. The adoption of stylistics as an underlying conceptual model locates this current study in the interdisciplinary research which brings together gender, applied linguistics, poetics, politics, and religion, in order to provoke new ways of reading the dialogic and polyphonic elements of the text. The study contends that the politics of difference is an unsettling subject that profoundly impacts on gender relations and religio-political practices in a milieu where precarity is a major defining feature of the subaltern sections comprising women and the marginalised poor. Thus, the novel’s title figuratively foregrounds the (un)mournable bodies of the people, who are both dehumanised and heavily burdened by surviving at the margin.Contribution: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel, This Mournable Body demonstrates a deep concern with the plight of the subaltern people in a gendered society and how their conditions of the Othered bodies are further amplified by both religion and politics in present-day Zimbabwe. Thus the study contributes to the mounting discourses about politics of fragmentation and binary practices, and the ensuing agony suffered by the sidelined persons. The adopted stylistic reading of the focus novel underscores the interdisciplinary urgency to literary interpretative process.

Native daughters, evil empires, Blazing Worlds: Margaret Cavendish's imperialism

ABSTRACT The kidnapped maiden reborn as an Empress in Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World (1666) ultimately returns to her birthplace to wage war upon its enemies, using her newfound powers to unleash a devastating military force and bring the rest of that world to its knees. Her might is absolute and terrifying and its scope is planetary: coming home means subduing other nations, and sovereignty requires the establishment of a new world order. If empire and colony switch places in the second part of The Blazing World, this reordering system is brutal and ‘astigmatic,’ however, mismatching home and away, ‘fancy’ and ‘serious philosophical contemplations,’ Big Subjects and Little ones. Ideas about autonomy and agency are likewise enlarged and contracted by a new world view which roughly redistributes power and space. The work of post-colonial critics provides a framework for the imperial cartography Cavendish describes, but we can also understand the Empress's ‘superpower’ by drawing upon post-colonial models of exile and return provided by Richard Wright and Tsitsi Dangarembga. Showing us what happens when a native daughter comes home, The Blazing World not only anticipates the resistance of colonial subjects but simultaneously envisions an ‘imperial administration’ vast to enough to crush it.

Transqueer Negotiations and Decolonial Space-Making in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions

Abstract: This article intervenes in the long critical reception of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions as a postcolonial feminist novel by using a decolonial framework—one that is attuned to the history of how the cisgender heterosexual gender binary constructs patriarchy—to propose a transqueer reading of the novel. A transqueer hermeneutic serves two functions in this article: first, it foregrounds the centrality of movement in the prefix “trans”; and, second, it emphasizes how this movement queerly manipulates gender and sexual normativity. A transqueer reading of Dangarembga’s novel points to gendered and sexual subversions of the colonial gender binary by arguing that the protagonist, Tambu, queerly reorients herself to and transly negotiates with the physical spaces in which she is placed instead of simply escaping them. Thus, Nervous Conditions quietly delinks from the colonial cisgender heterosexual binary. Overall, I examine the relation between colonial physical space and Tambu’s transqueer subversions by showing how she moves, however fleetingly, within and through decolonial and liminal spaces of refusal.

Through Filmic Lenses: The Social Impact of HIV/AIDS on the Orphaned Girl Child in Zimbabwe

Millions of children worldwide have become orphaned for many reasons such as war, famine, displacement, disease, and poverty. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has drastically altered the world children live in. It has led to many children becoming orphans worldwide. An orphan, according to the World Vision, is a child younger than 18 years who has lost either one biological, foster or adoptive parent or both biological, foster or adoptive parents. The Sunday Mail of 12 November 2017 carried a story in which the United Nations International Children’s Fund reported that 17.8 million children worldwide have lost both parents (double orphan), with 153 million having lost one parent (single orphan). The United Nations International Children’s Fund, furthermore, reported that in Zimbabwe there were close to 2 million orphans, with an estimated 3 900 orphans being raised in orphanages. The social roles, rights and privileges of children orphaned by HIV/AIDS have ultimately become disrupted particularly in child-headed households. Guided by the media reflection hypothesis coupled with a qualitative content approach, this article critically examines Everyone’s Child, a Zimbabwean feature film directed by Tsitsi Dangarembga in 1996, to discuss some of the social impacts of HIV/AIDS on the orphaned girl child in Zimbabwe. Films play an important role in society. They act as reflectors or mirrors of society; therefore, this article argues that the film Everyone’s Child reflects back to society which challenges are faced by children orphaned by HIV/AIDS in child-headed families in Zimbabwe. The absence of biological parents therefore makes the life of orphans stressful and affects their well-being negatively.

Being “Woman” and Zimbabwean in Zimbabwe: Reading the (Un)Mournable Bodies in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body

There is a growing interest in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s last sequel that critiques Zimbabwe as a failed state. In this article, I analyse the representation of black female bodies in postcolonial/neoliberal Zimbabwe. My argument centres on the effects of the second-person narrative perspective and explores how this narrative perspective as Dangarembga’s preferred storytelling method recalibrates with the idea of shared urgency in Zimbabwe. In my reading, I argue that the narrative perspective prioritises the idea of being humane as a need to re-make Zimbabwe’s homeliness, particularly for “women.” In this way, I explore Dangarembga’s other modes of being human/woman that identify with the concept of unhu/ubuntu. I argue that the idea of being humane, or a new world-sensing, and the narrative strategy create urgency in being Zimbabwean, and being a “woman” in Zimbabwe. I argue that Dangarembga’s writing about pain, betrayal, and false hopes in This Mournable Body is her way of simultaneously writing against the Empire and neoliberal Zimbabwe—a way of pushing back and resisting Zimbabwe’s sociopolitical and patriarchal capitalistic order.

Subtle-Radical Female Subversion as a Means of Self-Empowerment in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood

In this article, we use two African literary texts written by African women to demonstrate ways in which women use very subtle but radical ways to circumvent patriarchal norms. We re-read Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood to demonstrate subtle-radical ways in which women subvert patriarchal expectations. We utilise African radical feminism as a literary theory to frame our analysis. Furthermore, we problematise the ideology of using radical means as a way to survive and argue that women ought to survive and live a meaningful, free life post survival. To do this, we bring to light the subtle-radical ways in which characters such as Tambudzai, Lucia, and Adaku subvert gender role expectations in order to emancipate themselves from the shackles of patriarchal expectations. We find that women who use conventional radical resistive ways tend to have the full force of patriarchy’s weight clamped down on them, while those who use subtle-radical means tend to get their freedom and succeed.

Divulging Women's Plight: A Critical Examination of Gender Exploitation and Suppression in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s this Mournable Body

This article critically examines the portrayal of gender exploitation and suppression in Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel, This Mournable Body. Drawing on the legacy of early African female authors and the works of contemporary African female writers, the study explores the depiction of women in the novel and their experiences, challenges, and injustices. Using a postcolonial feminist approach and employing close reading as a method, the article probes the preconceptions, norms, and narratives within the novel that perpetuate gender inequality. It investigates the portrayal of female characters, their agency and representation, and the intersections of gender with other dimensions of identity. The analysis reveals how women in the novel are subjected to public abuse, including street harassment, public shaming, and victim-blaming and domestic exploitation. It also highlights the intense subjugation, discrimination, and oppression faced by women in the Zimbabwean society depicted in the novel in general. By shedding light on these issues, the research aims to contribute to the promotion of gender equality and social justice, elevate women's voices, challenge patriarchal myths, and advocate for radical transformation within and beyond the literary world. The article employs a systematic approach that combines textual analysis with a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework.

InterKontinental: Ambassadors for African Writing in Germany

InterKontinentalAmbassadors for African Writing in Germany Lawrence Schimel (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution SINCE THE INVENTION of the printing press, it's not been uncommon for publishers—whether large international operations like Italy's Rizzoli or small, scrappy independents like Deep Vellum in Dallas, Texas—to decide to open bookshops to sell their wares (as well as those of colleagues or competitors). It is perhaps the easiest way for a publisher to make sure their books are physically on bookstore shelves and available for purchase to the public, and there is a strong commercial argument in favor of this kind of vertical holding. Less common, but perhaps more interesting, are those passionate booksellers who also decide to become publishers, often because there is a gap in the market for the kinds of books they most wish to champion. The latter is the case of InterKontinental, a specialist bookstore in Berlin focused on literature from Africa and its global diaspora, which won the Deutschen Buchhandlungspreis (German Bookstore Prize) in 2021 and started its own publishing program in August 2022. Stefanie Hirsbrunner and Karla Kutzner are the team behind InterKontinental. During a phone conversation, Stefanie explained how this progression evolved over the years in an organic fashion. "The festival fueled the idea of having a bookstore, when we realized that no bookseller had the international titles by the invited authors." So they started to import these books themselves—originally just for the festival, but it was quickly evident that there was a larger demand for these titles year-round as well. And once they opened the bookshop, they soon realized that "what other publishers are putting out, number wise, is not enough for the bookstore." Repeated requests from customers, as well as what they wanted to see made available themselves, led to their beginning to publish translations into German of works by African authors. Writers like Lauri Kubuitsile from Botswana and Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi from Uganda were on last year's launch list, with works by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma from Zimbabwe and Fiston Mwanza Mujila from Congo scheduled to be published this year. While Stefanie and Karla are political scientists, and originally came from the events side of things, they are no strangers to publishing: Stefanie writes essays and nonfiction and has published six books so far; Karla is a professional editor. Both have also lived and worked in Africa and are specialists in African-European relations. "We are not pretending to be spokespeople for the Black German community, which has its own spaces and events and communities," Stefanie explains, although there are often, of course, overlapping interests. She adds that, from the beginning, "it is essential that the curator of the festival be African." Past curators include German Nigerian Olumide Popoola and Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga, and this year's curator is Mohamedou Ould Slahi Houbeini from Mauritania. The festival, whose motto this year is "Breaking Free," will take place in Berlin August 25 through 27. Of course, residents of or visitors to Berlin can visit the shop in the Friedrichshain neighborhood at Sonntagstr. 26 and online at www.interkontinental.org. [End Page 96] Lawrence Schimel Lawrence Schimel is a bilingual (Spanish/English) author and literary translator based in Madrid, Spain. His co-translation with Layla Benitez-James of afropean novel Hija del camino, by Lucía Mbomio Asué Rubio, won a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. His translation of Voice of the Two Shores, by Agnès Agboton from Benin, won a PEN Translates Award from English PEN and was just published in the UK in a trilingual Gun/Spanish/English edition by flipped eye. Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Unmaking agency: intersectionality and narrative silencing in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body

In This Mournable Body, the voice of Dangarembga’s Tambu is strikingly missing. What happened to the protagonist whose voice pervades the narrative landscape of the earlier novels? This paper attempts to account for the authorial shift in narrative perspective. It engages the ‘unmaking’ of Tambu’s agency by deliberating on the causal factors through the framework of Intersectionality. By tracing Tambu’s subjectivity in the post colony back to her actions in Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not, this paper examines the implications of her co-constructing multiple identities. It argues that Tambu’s misjudgments, pathology, narrative erasure, silencing, disrupt her presence in this last trilogy, and her predicament also parallels the anxieties and travails of her fragile post colony. Further, the paper considers the constituents of agency within the postcolonial African cultural context, affirms that Dangarembga celebrates the power of women in the post colony, and shifts the criteria for agency to a new level of activism against oppressive neocolonial forces. More significantly, the author also aligns her women’s activism with Unhu communal ethics and practices. Overall, the paper establishes that Dangarembga’s political critique in This Mournable Body is evident in her representational choices which reinforce social awareness, individual accountability, and communal responsibility as the redemptive pathway for postcolonial African nations.

"A Great Time to Be a Zimbabwean Writer": A Conversation with Siphiwe Ndlovu

"A Great Time to Be a Zimbabwean Writer"A Conversation with Siphiwe Ndlovu Anderson Tepper (bio) and Siphiwe Ndlovu Click for larger view View full resolution If—as Booker Prize–winner Damon Galgut said—2021 was a good year for African writing, 2022 was especially good for Zimbabwean writers. I spoke with novelist Siphiwe Ndlovu, author of The History of Man, about her work, her contemporaries, and Zimbabwe's impressive and deep-rooted literary tradition. Anderson Tepper: This year both you and Tsitsi Dangarembga were awarded the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize for fiction, and NoViolet Bulawayo was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. What do these honors say about the state of Zimbabwean writing today? Siphiwe Ndlovu: I have said it before and I will say it again: this is definitely a great time to be a Zimbabwean writer. There are just so many writers out there telling the story of a country that is often maligned or, worse still, written off as a "failed state." These writers often help us think critically about the overly simplified way that the media tends to write about Zimbabwe. Those of us who come from Zimbabwe understand the complexity, knottiness, and messiness that the many forms of violence and injustice—the product of exploitative and extractive settler colonialism and rampant postcolonial corruption and greed—create. The media narratives and portrayals of Zimbabwe both within the country and internationally tend to be limited and limiting and create the need for alternative narratives—and this is where storytelling comes in. In Zimbabwe's fiction, there is anger, outrage, disappointment, disillusionment, hope (and the loss of it), but most importantly, there is a call for reckoning and change that the politics of the country have failed to successfully address. All this makes for a literature that is concerned with many of the issues that globally plague our twenty-first century: the erosion of civil rights; the rise of a dangerous, exclusionary, and myopically inward-looking populism; and the persistence of racism and other forms of hate. The international recognition of Zimbabwean writers, via such awards as the Windham Campbell Prize and the Booker Prize, shows that we are not simply telling stories about a pariah state but about a world living and fighting its way through various crises and inheritances from the past—stories that, although they are about a country, are really of the world. Tepper: Who were some of the authors who played a role in inspiring you to first write about your country and its history? Ndlovu: Even though I grew up in Zimbabwe and spent all my years of primary and secondary education there, I didn't really encounter Zimbabwean fiction until I was a college student in the US. I remember reading Charles Mungoshi's wonderful collection of short stories, Coming of the Dry Season, in high school for one of the national exams. But I believe that was the sum total of my engagement with local fiction. In college, when I told one of my professors that I had never read Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, she was rightly appalled and aghast that I, a Zimbabwean creative writing student, had never read the book. She [End Page 23] immediately gave me her own copy of the novel to read … and everything changed. I could relate to the experiences of all the characters in that novel—Tambudzai, Nyasha, Babamukuru, Lucia, Takesure. I knew and was related to people just like them. All of a sudden literature became not just something I loved but something that was familiar. That experience led to a journey of discovery that brought me into contact with such brilliant works as Dambudzo Marechera's The House of Hunger, Shimmer Chinodya's Harvest of Thorns, Peter Godwin's Mukiwa, Doris Lessing's The Grass Is Singing—these works helped me understand my country and its history. However, it was not until I devoured Yvonne Vera's entire oeuvre, especially Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins, that I realized that one could write about my city, Bulawayo, a city that I love very much, and make it come alive—make its absolute richness known to the world (see WLT, Sept...

Critical Analysis of Contrast as a stylistic Device in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Works

Critical Analysis of Contrast as a stylistic Device in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Works

Women’s Perceptions of Nature: An Ecofeminist Analysis of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body

The purpose of this article is to explore ecofeminist issues in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body. It mainly focuses on the relationship between women and nature and explores the perceptions of women toward the natural environment. Thus, a close reading was done to extract the necessary information from the novel. Next, the extracted data was analyzed using textual analysis. Additionally, ecofeminist literary criticism was adopted as a lens to analyze the novel. Therefore, based on the analysis made, the novel portrays various issues related to women and nature. Firstly, the novel shows that African women are gardeners, agricultural laborers, and protectors of the land and the natural environment, which makes them have a strong relationship with the natural environment. On the other hand, it shows, that not all women have the same perception of nature. In this manner, Tracey, a white businesswoman, considered nature as an income generator in the form of the ecotourism industry, regardless of the degradation of the natural environment. In contrast, the native women consider nature as a means of their survival. Nyasha, a woman from Zimbabwe, believes nature and land space enhance co-operation and harmony between inhabitants. Similarly, Tambudzai, also from Zimbabwe, recounts the beauty and healing power of nature, and she expresses her concern about the degradation of the natural environment. Therefore, the novel has discovered the different relationships between women and nature. Their understanding of and connection to nature vary and directly relate to their background and context. At last, the novel portrays the impact of neocolonialism and capitalism predominantly on women and nature. In this manner, the author shows her concern for African women and the natural environment.

Debunking patriarchal assumptions about motherhood as represented in selected Southern African literature

This article explores how literary representations of African motherhood demystify oppressive patriarchal assumptions that have marginalised women whilst promoting male privilege. This study’s objective is to challenge patriarchal values that continue to damage and undermine many African women’s position and status in society. This is critical in order to address gender injustice and make a claim for African women’s rights to respectful, dignified and fulfilling lives as full members of society. An interpretive content analysis of Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions has been adopted. African feminist theory provided the interpretive framework for analysing the selected texts. In sharp contrast to patriarchal assumptions of women as inferior to men, this research indicates many African women performing critical roles that ensure family survival with little to no help from men. Depictions of African mothers’ sacrifice and struggles to safeguard the interests of the families contrast the irresponsible behaviours and failures associated with fatherhood in the texts studied. Given the important contributions of women to improving quality of life, the study recommends the need for transformation of oppressive patriarchal values that undermine women to create a more equitable society.

The depiction of chiramu register and the female voice and communicator in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions

ABSTRACT This article examines Tsitsi Dangarembga’s depiction of the Chiramu register in Nervous Conditions. The article argues that, in Shona culture, the type of relationship one enjoys in the family determines the register that he/she employs in order to score success in communication. Therefore, as the article argues further, an appreciation of these relationships and registers is critical to our understanding of the politics and power dynamics in Nervous Conditions. In order to successfully argue the spelt viewpoint, this article demonstrates with examples that the character Lucia strategically manipulates the Chiramu register in her engagement, negotiation and bargaining with the character Babamukuru to further her interests and maximise her security. Such an exercise underscores the flexibility and fluidity of relationships in the text. In the final analysis the article concludes that Shona traditional society provided checks and balances on how power and authority was exercised.

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

“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...

Response to “Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril” by Angie Wong

Response to “Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril” by Angie Wong Chinelo Ezenwa, Respondent Angie Wong’s article “Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril” addresses the subtle ways in which two recent acclaimed Hollywood films reinforce cinematic violence against Asian women, who are either hypersexualized, rendered mute, or shown as carriers of deadly diseases that disrupt the Arcadian world of the whiter Westerner. The article shows that in Venom (2018), the two pre-action Asian women are depicted as disease-ridden bodies, whose main role, it seems, is to deliver the disease from Malaysia to San Francisco. Their transference of disease to the white world also conveniently takes place at an airport, at the border where non-white peoples are often designated as non-beings. Kyoko in Ex Machina (2014) is similarly subjugated by Nathan, her white creator; she represents the white male exploitation of the body, labour, and sexuality of the Asian woman by a hypermasculine white society. Wong points out that in both films, there is neither character development for those women nor any escape for them as soon as they serve the perverse purposes of their “creators.” Perhaps this is because, on the aggregate, they are simulations of real people (“SimulAsians”). But, based on Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism, Wong argues that using the fragmented prism of a technological form of Orientalism (techno-Orientalism) and creating such “SimulAsians” allows these movies to violate and exploit the Asian female characters. Kyoko, the Asian housekeeper-mistress figure in Ex Machina, is the ultimate “Simulacrum” and “SimulAsian,” as Wong demonstrates. This is because, for most of the film, one is uncertain if Kyoko is a cyborg created to look Asian, or if she is [End Page 232] an Asian deliberately presented to look like a cyborg. Whatever reality exists for her is premised on Nathan’s (her manufacturer’s) stereotypical perception of the Asian woman as cold, silent, and sexually available (Wong 9). But it is not even Kyoko’s poor development that bothers one most about Ex Machina. Instead, it is how the film manages to minimize Kyoko when shown against Ava, the Caucasian cyborg. The latter in fact becomes triumphant by exploiting both Kyoko and the unnamed Asian woman’s body. Ava’s only means of escape, it seems, is by literally cherry picking the skin off the bones of the unnamed female Asian figure in order to achieve “humanity.” Therefore, after their final “battle,” only Ava is triumphant while Kyoko remains a victim of the liberation march. Yet, as Wong equally observes, though the film seems to criticize the “dehumanization” of the Asian cyborgs, it is only able to achieve this critique by presenting them as sacrificial lambs, without any will and ability to achieve liberation. This double subjugation is not uncommon for “women of colour.” In my discussion of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, for instance, I show how the Zimbabwean women are double yoked under colonial and traditional patriarchies. The difference is that where the Zimbabwean girls and women are deliberately portrayed in Nervous Conditions with critical voices, Ex Machina and Venom do not allow the Asian women any such power. They are stereotyped as figures of annihilation, while the extreme physical violence against them is masked under the notion that they are not human. The horror of that form of cinematic occlusion of violence is perhaps clearer when one considers the implications of the two Asian diseased bodies in Venom, as Wong does. They are pitted against the white heroic journalist, Eddie Brock, and his lawyer girlfriend, Anne Weying. Despite their flaws, the latter two characters are somehow found the acceptable bodies of the “future” who are able to not only achieve symbiosis with the alien but still maintain their societal moral codes, act out their heroisms, and rescue their world from the threats of the extraterrestrial disease embodied in the Asian women and the equally Asian-looking genius inventor, Riz Ahmed. In both films, the viewer is encouraged to ignore the scenes of violence against the Asian women because the action is conveniently set in the magical world of the movies. Wong rightly points...

REPRESENTATION OF FEMALE MENTAL ILL HEALTH IN THE AFRICAN NOVEL

This study examines the depiction of female mental ill health in selected African novels. We intend to explore some causes and manifestations of, as well as responses to women’s emotional disorders. Through the prism of psychoanalytical feminism, our paper identifies those socio-cultural and environmental factors that are drivers of female mental ailments as represented in Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter and Scarlet Song, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail, Nawal El Saadawi’s Women at Point Zero, and Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift. A close reading of these selected African novels reveals that the predominantly patriarchal nature of many African cultures enable and promote gender relationships that act as stressors to women’s psychological welfare. That this paper focuses on an often ignored or glossed over, but very important, aspect of African women’s existential reality is one of its strengths. It concludes that there is a need to give priority attention to the festering epidemic of female mental illness in African societies in order to attain more holistic outcomes for individual, gender and social well-being.KEYWORDS: Female Mental Health, African Novel, Medical Humanities, Psychoanalytic Feminism.