"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.

The themes that I engage in this paper--sexuality, feminist consciousness, and women in postcolonial politics--are not disparate but organically related. Each echoes the line from the play that I have chosen for the title of this examination of Dangarembga's works, "You had a daughter, but I am becoming a woman" (SNLW 35). An individual daughter's struggle to define her own identity as a woman, independent of her father and the confines of constricted cultural codes, reflects the broader effort of women in society to assert feminist conceptions of adulthood. Women's emancipation was promised by independent Zimbabwe, especially in the passage of the Legal Age of Majority Act, giving women the right to contract their own marriages, represent themselves in court, and be guardians of their children. (2) Despite such laws, many legal rights of women were not honored. Though increasing numbers of women broke away from the good daughter-loyal wife-sacrificing mother ideal to establish a different kind of sexual politics, they were certainly not heralded as cultural pioneers. In her writings, Dangarembga argues for women as independent, adult, sexual beings, but at the same time, she recognizes the awful responsibility, vulnerability, and loneliness that being in charge of one's own life can bring. Set against the influences of black American feminists such as Audre Lorde, Dangarembga's work interrogates what it means to become a woman generally and in the violent postcolonial context.

In this essay, I will tack back and forth between the play and the novel as I develop three main points. The first is that women's sexuality is caught up in a series of oppositions--sex as sin versus pleasure, sex as self-expression versus dependence, and sex as individual right versus cultural compulsion. Dangarembga develops these contradictions through several characters, but at heart, in the novel and the play, her primary concern with sexuality is directed to the antithesis between open sexuality and being a good daughter. In both Nyasha's and Martha's sexuality, their fathers figure prominently, signifying how strongly cultural norms and family relations shape sex as an individual choice. Secondly, Dangarembga's feminist consciousness was highly influenced by the discourses present in Zimbabwe at the time of the writing of both works and by feminist ideas popular in the west in the 1980s. In the second section of this paper, I address particular Western influences, show how Dangarembga uses and critiques them, and point out her lack of optimism about the possibilities of feminism promoting lasting social changes. Finally, the reality of postcolonial society and the efforts of the women's movement in Zimbabwe will be addressed. In doing so, I hope to show that in the postcolonial period, Dangarembga recognized very early on that gender inequality must be understood within the context of other social and political inequalities. The failures of postcolonial Zimbabwe in ethnic and gender relations seem to have dampened her enthusiasm for feminist social change.