Generally, mother-daughter relationships in women’s fiction tend to serve as a focal point for the plots of these feminist texts, as a mechanism to purposefully focus on female versus male representations in the literary arena (George 40; Willey 273; Uwakweh 1995). Many of the sources in the subject area of mother-daughter relationships focusing Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga tend to be postcolonial in nature, in that they are focused exclusively on how the mother-daughter relationship serves to reproduce colonial power differentials in a postcolonial environment along with offering critical support systems in times of hardship (Willey 273). This paper serves to explore further the under-appreciated educational aspect of the mother-daughter relationship in the context of postcolonial feminist theories.
First, this paper will examine scholarly critiques and evaluations of Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions. Here, there will be a focus on three critical articles first in the literature review of this novel, in which additional scholarly perspectives aside from a postcolonial critique are sampled concerning feminist theory and female sexuality (George 1998; Shaw 2007; Uwakweh 1995). In a postcolonial critique in the veins of African feminist perspectives, Verna Erna George (1998) in her piece “Putting Up Resistance: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Annie John and Nervous Conditions” makes a case for the characters Tambudzai (hereafter referred to as Tambu) and Nyasha as giving voice to themselves and their mothers as female colonial subjects seeking individuation (George 39). George extends this postcolonial tradition in her exclusive focus on how the mothers and “other-mothers” of the protagonists prepare their daughters to face a postcolonial world in ways that emphasize both survival by following the status quo, but also subtle rebellion against the established order (George 39).
Moreover, in Tambu’s central journey and Nyasha’s peripheral journey in Nervous Conditions, George sees both mothers (and “other mother” grandmothers) as cultural repositories for the Shona culture that serve as central sites of resistance to colonialism, despite the mother-daughter relationship not being as central to Nervous Conditions as it is to other Afro-Caribbean women’s novels (George 43). However, to both characters, the mothers initially represent female subjugation in a patriarchal world, as both have internalized their inferiority with respect to the men in their lives, with Tambu’s mother Ma’Shingayi counseling her to carry on the “burdens of womanhood” and Nyasha’s educated mother Maiguru recommending similar acquiescence to patriarchy in terms of prioritizing “security” over self-realization (Dangarembga 104; George 43). George explains this paradox of mothers who “seemingly acquiesce to their own subordination also subtly impart the possibility of emancipation” in the face of oppression as a necessary survival tactic common to the black mother-daughter relationship (George 39, 46).
While Tambu can rely on her mother and her grandmother for strength as she encounters oppressive colonial forces, as both warn of the “dangers of Englishness”, Nyasha, whose time in England left her unable to reconnect with the traditional Shona culture and language, is unable to buttress her identity against these forces (George 51-52). George argues that Tambu can avert the mental breakdown of Nyasha because she can adapt to colonial ways without losing sight of her cultural heritage because of her mother’s and aunt’s life experiences (George 51-52). “Whereas…Tambu look[s] toward [self] fulfillment and expansion” because of her matrilineal guidance, without similar sociocultural connections, Nyasha ultimately ends up “struggling alone with the powerful feelings [of split identities] that beset her…[and] is overwhelmed by images of entrapment” alone without the tempering lessons of subtle rebellion (George 51).
Meanwhile, Carolyn Martin Shaw in “‘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” argues that the mother-daughter relationship serves to counter the power of the father through the espousing of female sexuality (a common taboo) as a way for Tambu and Nyasha to subvert the patriarchal forces at work in the colonial society they find themselves in by portraying women as “independent and adult beings” (Shaw 8-10). In Shona culture, mothers and other extended family female relatives are primarily responsible for the education (primarily sexual) of their daughters, who are in turn responsible for mothering the “future” (Shaw 11). Therefore, the seeming failure on the part of Maiguru to instill a sort of puritanism in her daughter Nyasha can be read as a rebellion against Nyasha’s father Babamukuru, the mimical embodiment of Shona and British patriarchal oppression (Shaw 11).
Similarly, both Nyasha and Tambu were heavily impacted by the free expression of sexuality represented in their aunt Lucia and contrast this with their mothers’ lessons to subordinate themselves to men to survive (Shaw 16). While not having the same outright violent reaction as Nyasha to the patriarchal forces present in the novel, Tambu comes to realize the importance of sexuality as a rebellion: “The narrator’s memory of the luxuriousness of Tambu’s dance movements, her celebration of her aunt Lucia’s sexual appetite, and representation of Nyasha’s desire for bodily pleasure all suggest a well-spring of erotic power that can fuel social change” (Shaw 16). Thus, a free expression of sexuality is linked to feminist concepts of a woman’s independence and ability to define herself in terms outside of the patriarchy (Shaw 8-10). To Shaw, Nyasha’s breakdown represents her prevention of growing into a fully-realized woman through anorexia/bulimia “because she recognizes her complicity in colonialism and because she cannot prevent the onslaught of womanhood, with the attendant dangers and pleasures of sexuality” that serve to designate her as a whore in the eyes of her father (Shaw 9). In the fusion of Shona and British cultural ways, women’s sexuality is seen to have the potential to bring honor or shame upon the family and potentially compromise one’s advantage in the colonial system (Shaw 9-11). Shaw sees Nyasha’s seemingly learned outward expression of sexuality as a threat to his high status and the larger force of patriarchal colonialism (Shaw 9-11).
Not unlike George (1998), Pauline Ada Uwakweh (1995) sees the overall focus on Tambu’s women relatives as narrated by an adult Tambu a method to educate readers on the womens’ “muted challenges to the dual burden” of patriarchy and colonization (Uwakweh 78). Dangarembga achieves this by writing ‘beyond the ending,’ in which Dangarembga’s Tambu is “freeing herself from patriarchal control and the danger of cultural alienation” by attaining the “superior status of the interpreter” (Uwakweh 78).
This then allows for a closer focus on how the mother-daughter relationship seeks to subvert the double oppressions put upon them (Uwakweh 1995). In taking a closer look at these female relationships, Uwakweh classifies Tambu’s and Nyasha’s mothers as “entrapped females” who recognize the injustice of their positions, yet do not outwardly rebel (Uwakweh 80-81). Uwakweh hints that the key to successful feminist challenges to patriarchy and colonialism in Nervous Conditions is “the communal bonding of females against a common dominant power” (Uwakweh 82). While she acknowledges the “tenuous” rebellions made by both Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru, such as Ma’Shingayi’s encouragement of Tambu in her efforts to fundraise to continue her schooling and Maiguru’s leaving of home, Uwakweh sees effective rebellions as mostly lacking (Uwakweh 80-83). However, like Shaw (2007), Uwakweh notes that Tambu is more able to use the education from her female kin to fight against the mental breakdown that Nyasha suffers from not being able to rebel effectively in the context of oppressive forces in Rhodesian society (Uwakweh 78-83).
Thus, while the postcolonial and feminist critiques considered look at different aspects of the mother-daughter relationship, their underlying premises are ultimately very similar in associating the relationship with forms of patriarchal and colonial resistance (George 1998; Shaw 2007). This paper will build upon the scholarly insights surrounding matrilineal education in the context of patriarchal and colonial oppressions as introduced by Shaw (2007) and continued by George (1998) by taking a closer look at the matrilineal educations present in the novel.
One finds in Nervous Conditions a similar education by the two mothers, Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru, regarding becoming individuals in a colonized society (Shaw 2007). However, their matrilineal educations are different in important ways. The two women come from different backgrounds, with Ma’Shingayi living impoverished on the family homestead and Maiguru a wealthy woman with a master’s degree and a more privileged position in colonial Rhodesia (Dangarembga 16-20). Because their socioeconomic circumstances differ immensely, Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru teach Tambu and Nyasha, respectively, very different lessons with a similar overall message. However, both Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru teach their biological daughters and “other-daughters” (a twist on the concept of “other-mothers” as established in Verna Erna George’s study (1998) relating to women who are not the biological daughters of that particular mother) many lessons.
Early in the story, Tambu’s mother warns against internalizing the toxic values of the “white wizards” and their “Englishness” that contributed to her brother Nhamo’s untimely death (Dangarembga 16-18, 207). Fearing further intrusion of “Englishness” into her family, Ma’Shingayi feels a sense of impending cultural death when faced with the prospect of Tambu’s education at Sacred Heart permanently separating both her and her daughter and perhaps leading to the condition of internal colonization that Nyasha warns frequently about throughout the novel (Dangarembga 16-18, 150, 207). Instead, Tambu is counseled to be proud of her hard work in the domestic sphere, as she is still making meaningful contributions to society, even if these contributions are not what she would have otherwise chosen for herself in the productive sphere dominated by the colonizing British (Dangarembga 16-18). This is seen when Tambu feels superiority in retaining her knowledge of preparing the traditional sadza dish for family gatherings, critical culturally-connected culinary knowledge her cousin has lost that demonstrates her pride in her motherly-taught “utilitarian” self (Dangarembga 40). In other words, Tambu is taught by her mother to not resist her social destiny under both Shona and British patriarchal cultures, in which the double “burdens” of “blackness” and womanhood destine many Shona women to a life of domestic poverty (Dangarembga 16). Furthermore, Ma’Shingayi insists that “when there are sacrifices to be made, you [women in general] are the one who has to make them” in trying to dissuade her daughter from pursuing further education for herself, alluding to Maiguru’s later lament at having to subordinate self (pursuing a career) for security, both economically and physically (Dangarembga 16, 103). While not necessarily heeding her counsel on the matter, with Tambu unwilling to accept her predestined life of domesticity, nevertheless Ma’Shingayi’s warnings against pursuing further education ironically enable her daughter to have an epiphany of her own that will continue to conflict her as she continues her schooling:
My mother said being black was a burden because it made you poor, but Babamukuru [uncle, husband of Maiguru) was not poor. My mother said that being a woman was a burden because you had to bear children and look after them and the husband. But I did not think this was true. Maiguru was…altogether a different kind of woman from my mother. I decided it was better to be like Maiguru, who was not poor and had not been crushed by the weight of womanhood” (16).
Also reinforcing this dynamic of womens’ inferiority in Shona culture is Tambu’s father Jeremiah’s derisive comment upon discovering Tambu’s market fundraising scheme that, “you can’t feed books to your husband” (Dangarembga 15). Ma’Shingayi’s response that Jeremiah should let his daughter try her maize-selling plan and “let her see for herself that some things cannot be done” as “a little seed was not a large price to pay” to persuade Tambu of her futility in fighting her domestic destiny is a textbook example of subtle rebellion by a mother forcing “a space” within the limits of patriarchy and thereby making “a small blow against oppression” (Dangarembga 17; George 48).
In the end of the novel, we see Tambu coming ultimately question the values she has been taught by British missionaries throughout her education and confronting her fragmented identity between her Shona and British selves, remarking that her mother’s lessons against “Englishness” (manifested in Tambu’s uncle Babamukuru) has planted a protective “seed” of resistance against complete internal colonization by the British while taking full advantage of the opportunities afforded her by an education (Dangarembga 150, 207-208). While primarily receiving education from her biological mother, her “other-mother” Maiguru, not unlike Ma’Shingayi, teaches her subtle ways to recognize inequities and even rebel against the status quo as well, as when Tambu refuses to go to her parents’ wedding that she views as serving to give artificial “legitimacy” to her life (Dangarembga 103, 168-169). Essentially, Tambu comes to hybridize the educations that she receives under her mother (overall acceptance of social destiny, with veiled rebellions) with that of her aunt Maiguru’s (subtle deviances of the patriarchal order), which will be further explored below (Dangarembga 16-18, 200-208).
Meanwhile, Nyasha, the product of an upper-middle class Shona family in Rhodesia, receives a different education than her cousin Tambu, but ultimately comes to the same conclusions as Tambu does in challenging Ma’Shingayi’s counsel of necessary submission to one’s social destiny (Dangarembga 16-19, 91). As an English-educated woman who learned a Western version of feminism, Nyasha is thus repulsed by her mother Maiguru’s subservient position relative to her father Babamukuru, despite her academic achievements in England (Dangarembga 103). Maiguru sums up this idea rather succinctly, when she laments ‘what it is, to have to choose between self and security” (Dangarembga 103). This echoes similarly to Ma’Shingayi’s lesson that socioeconomic security can come at the price of autonomy for individual women (Dangarembga 16). Maiguru thus teaches a similar lesson to Nyasha as Tambu’s mother does for her, but Nyasha reacts on it outwardly and violently throughout the book through her struggle with anorexia and bulimia in contrast to Tambu’s outward passivity and internal battles over wanting to take full advantage of the education Babamukuru allows her access to as a way to prevent herself from becoming an “entrapped female” like Ma’Shingayi (Dangarembga 169, 192-202, 207-208; Uwakweh 79).
Additionally, Nyasha rebels throughout the book against the societal conventions assigned to Shona women by both the Shona and British colonial authorities, primarily represented by her father, Babamukuru, as she is convinced that her mother is not willing to act boldly on her own rightful self-agency in standing up to Babamukuru (Dangarembga 103-108, 145, 177). Nyasha sees her mother’s subtle rebellions in the refusals to attend the family celebrations on the homestead and her leaving of the house altogether as acts to demand further self-respect for her vital contributions to the family as not going far enough, yet respects her very much as a result (Dangarembga 103-108, 177). In educating her cousin Tambu about the finer points of colonization and assimilation, she says that the colonial authorities “made a little space into which you were assimilated, an honorary space in which you could join them and they could make sure you behaved yourself” (Dangarembga 182). However, Tambu (and others) would be better off by opting to not “occupy that space” at all, a difficult prospect that for Nyasha ends up bringing on a psychological and physical breakdown, as this non-occupation of space means that she does not have a foundation upon which to create and build a stable self-identity (Dangarembga 177, 182; George 1998). Tambu further criticizes this when she recognizes that like Maiguru, she has to take opportunities when she gets them to escape the “poverty of blackness” and like Maiguru, is stuck in her “investment” in Babamukuru’s household (Dangarembga 16-17, 177).
It is this equilibrium within assimilation itself in which a person was not “colonized” while still taking advantage of the opportunities provided for women in a colonial society that Maiguru ultimately represents is the primary lesson derived from both Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru (Dangarembga 16, 182). This position Tambu comes to advocates because of both Ma’Shingayi’s and Maiguru’s life experiences, as she sees the best way to confront the constraining forces at work is to essentially use the education provided to her by the missionaries in order to more effectively counter these forces internally and externally, countering feminist Audre Lorde’s assertion that “the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house” (Dangarembga 183; Shaw 16). She is determined not to give into the creeping “tentacles” of marriage threatening to “disrupt my life before I could even call it my own” again as she finds herself in a similar situation as at the beginning of the novel in lacking sufficient funds to continue her education at the Sacred Heart convent school now because of Babamukuru’s (not her father Jeremiah’s) insistence on providing for another boy in the family after Nhamo’s death (Dangarembga 183; Shaw 16). This time, it is Maiguru who comes to Tambu’s defense:
People were prejudiced against educated women. Prejudiced. That’s why they said we weren’t decent. That was in the fifties. Now we are into the seventies. I am disappointed people still believe the same things… All I know is that our daughter Tambudzai is not a decent person now, she never will be, no matter where she goes to school. (184)
The ultimate proof of Tambu’s “liberation” within the constraints of the colonial system is manifested by “writing the novel itself as part of her own (and by implication) other women’s liberation” as a product of her previously forbidden education, which she learns to insist upon in terms of her own further self-development (Shaw 16). This fundamental conviction on the part of Tambu is founded on the lessons of Ma’Shingayi and Maiguru (Shaw 16). Tambu’s ultimate triumph in narrating the novel in which she describes her and Nyasha’s struggle for self-independence against the backdrop of the struggles of their female extended family echoes sentiments expressed by Uwakweh (1995), who noted that Dangarembga’s use of a traditionally male literary tradition in the bildungsroman novel is a similar rebellion equivalent to Tambu’s insistence on receiving an education (Dangarembga 17, 91; Shaw 16; Uwakweh 75-77).
Conversely, Nyasha herself is not able to adopt this position out of the virtues of her English education’s espousing of a hypersensitivity to gendered and colonial injustices and the importance of individual, rather than communal, resistance to these injustices (Dangarembga 16, 182; Shaw 12). In the end, this inability to negotiate between the “burdens of womanhood” view of Ma’Shingayi and the associated traps concerning colonial education (a side effect of her English education) with the need for gradual and subtle rebellions against the patriarchal order based on the strength of female relationships like the mother-daughter bond that dooms Nyasha (Dangarembga 16, 205). Not aiding her further is her perception of Maiguru, in a much more privileged position than Ma’Shingayi, is still “trapped” in her inability to negotiate self and security by choosing to remain in Babamukuru’s household, unable to push the envelope further in her patriarchally-restricted domain (George 44).
Ultimately, because of the tension between seeming to acquiesce to oppression, yet still resist, “the normal affinity between mother and daughter and what that very affinity could mean is a source of pronounced dissonance on both sides of the relationship” for Maiguru and Nyasha in particular (George 43). While Tambu experiences this to some degree over her frustrations with Ma’Shingayi over continuing her education, Tambu is ultimately able to buttress herself better than her cousin does against the oppressive forces of society (Dangarembga 208; George 1998; Shaw 2007).
Nyasha ultimately lacks the maternally-nurtured “seed” developing in Tambu’s head by the end of the novel which caused her to “question things and refused to be brainwashed” in such a way so as to not completely isolate herself from the tainted opportunities of advancement in her life (such as further education at the Sacred Heart convent school), while at the same time retaining her ability be necessarily skeptical about the ideas she encounters (Dangarembga 208; George 1998; Shaw 2007).
In conclusion, the mother-daughter relationship as it relates to the education that mothers provide for their daughters has been underexplored in the current literature. In this paper, a literature review of the current critical thinking on the topic of mother-daughter relationships in the novel Nervous Conditions was conducted. Concurrently, Shaw’s (2007) and George’s (1998) critical pieces regarding the matrilineal educational aspect of the mother-daughter relationship as a site of resistance was used as a basis for further exploration and analysis of the mother-daughter relationship in this paper. It is my hope that the role of education in this relationship will be explored further in future literary critiques.
Bibliography:
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Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. 2nd ed., Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd., 2004. Print.
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George, Verna E. "Putting up Resistance: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Annie John and Nervous Conditions." Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 7, no. 2, 1998, pp. 39-53. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23019709. Accessed 26 October 2016.
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Uwakweh, Pauline A. "Debunking Patriarchy: The Liberational Quality of Voicing in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." Research in African Literatures, vol. 26, no. 1, 1995, pp. 75-84. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3820089. Accessed 25 October 2016.
Willey, Nicole. "Colonialism's Impact on Mothering: Jamaica Kincaid's Rendering of the Mother-Daughter Split in Annie John." Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women's Literatures, edited by Elizabeth Podniecks and Andrea O’Reilly. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010, pp. 273-286. Proquest Ebrary, www. wisconsin.hosts.atlas-sys.com/illiad/gzu/illiad.dll?Action=10&Form=75&Value=2383819. Accessed 27 October 2016.
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