"You had a daughter, but I am becoming a woman": sexuality, feminism and postcoloniality in tsitsi dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and She No Longer Weeps.

ABSTRACT

In this paper, an anthropologist examines sexuality, feminist consciousness, and postcolonial politics in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and in her earlier play, She No Longer Weeps. In both works, sexuality offers the promise of freedom, entails a loss of security, and delivers punishment. Reading the novel in light of the play provides insight into the sexual tension in the father-daughter relationship and suggests that Nyasha's nervous condition is in good part derived from the opposition between becoming a woman and being a daughter. Dangarembga's feminism, expressed through the power of speaking up and the erotic as power, has traces of the work of Audre Lorde, which Dangarembga uses and critiques. When directly addressing postcolonial Zimbabwe, feminism is vital to Dangarembga, but other forces, such as rampant corruption and state violence, form the backdrop for family dynamics. In the play, Dangarembga satirizes women's groups even as she points to the new government's betrayal of women.

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Before she wrote Nervous Conditions, the 1989 Commonwealth Prize novel for Africa, Tsitsi Dangarembga wrote She No Longer Weeps, a play that deals with gender relations in postcolonial Zimbabwe. (1) This essay concerns influences on Dangarembga's thinking discerned from the continuities and changes between the play and the novel, especially regarding her engagement of the postcolonial politics, representation of feminist consciousness, and female ambivalence toward sexuality. As an anthropologist, who lived and worked in Zimbabwe during the time Dangarembga wrote her major works, I examine cultural and historical conditions of their production. Building on the intertextuality of the novel and the play, I present a reading that shows Dangarembga's use of and contravention of Zimbabwean cultural practices, her engagement with and critiques of Western feminist ideas, and her intimations of postcolonial promise and despair.

In an interview, Dangarembga said that it was only after the play was successfully produced and accepted for publication that she gained the courage to start on the novel (Dangarembga, "This Year" 43-44). But the novel and the play share more than chronological contiguity and creative inspiration. Characters in the play, the topics it covers, and its emotional contours map well onto the famous novel. The novel, the story of two generations of women, revolves around Tambu, the poor, country cousin who comes to live with the family of her revered, educated, and wealthy uncle. In his house, she learns of the problems of his autocratic control and comes to admire his rebellious daughter Nyasha. Martha, the protagonist in the play, is the "bad daughter" whose parents see her behavior as an affront to conventional morality as well as an attack on their dignity and social standing. This is not unlike the situation with Nyasha, the headstrong daughter of a headmaster in Nervous Conditions. In the play as in the novel, family tensions directly concern the protagonist's sexual conduct; but in She No Longer Weeps a daughter directly battles with her mother and father for a new sexual morality in newly independent Zimbabwe.