Nervous Conditions

AnaMarie Mehmel

Professor Benander

World Literature III

2 May 2011

            Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi Dangarembga, is a very twisted, complicated story that makes the reader work to understand the first few chapters. It is a very interesting story, but the author uses a twisted writing style in the first few chapters that will make anyone’s head spin. After those chapters, though, the story goes to a linear story line making it easier for European readers to understand.

            The character Nyasha is an interesting one because she rebels against life her family wants her to lead. Her father Babamukuru, the head of the family, moves her, her mother and her brother to England when she was little. This starts a chain reaction of events that lead to Nyasha’s rebellion. Being in England changes her so much that she cannot function properly in her native Shona culture. She has learned that she can act a certain way, the European way, but when in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, everything she learned in England is wrong and her prents want her to go back to the traditional Shona culture. Yet, as Nyasha says in the story, a person cannot unlearn things. There is no going back once a course has been set and begun. So Nyasha has a hard time fitting in her new life in Rhodesia because it is not right for a girl to speak up or defy her father and mother, but in England the views on the woman’s role in the household and in life is very different. She does not understand why she cannot act the way she does because it is the European way and if it is European it must be right. Her rebellion only gets her pain and sorrow. In chapter 6, Nyasha and her father get into a fight that goes from verbal to physical and it is a fight that Nyasha loses. She suffers physical, emotional, mental, and every other kind of abuse you can think of at the hands of her father with the effects lasting a very long time. She become bulimic and dissocializes herself from her family. Her rebellion did not give her anything but pain.

            I believe that many people could probably relate to Nyasha. I know that I do. I moved in with my uncle to get away from my father and his domineering ways. Poor Nyasha did not get that option, unfortunately. I think her life would have been vastly different if she did not have to deal with the humiliation her father forced on her. She does escape in her schooling, but one can only hide behind books for so long. I know that is what I used to do so that I did not have to be around my dad and his hypocrisies. Maybe fathers do not realize how their actions hurt their children, but a wound, whether inflicted intentionally or not, is still a wound that leaves a scar. Each one changes a person for good or evil. Nyasha became bulimic, I left to start a new, better life.