Queer Potential in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions

From the beginning of Nervous Conditions (1988) Tambudzai (Tambu) is involved in decolonising sexuality and gender. When Tambu goes to live at the mission after her uncle, Babamukuru, starts funding her education she is immediately drawn to her cousin sister, Nyasha. Despite Tambu having heard from Nhamo, her older brother, that she would probably have her own room in Babamukuru’s house; she yearns to sleep with someone: “I was not sure I would enjoy sleeping by myself with nobody to giggle with before falling asleep or whose presence would be comforting when dreams were disturbing”.[1] The intimacy Tambu yearns for highlights the importance of bodily proximity that depicts Tambu’s erotic imagination. Tambu’s erotic expression portrays Audre Lorde’s argument:

The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognised feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.[2]

Dangarembga gestures to Tambu’s erotic resource through her need for female “presence” beside her in bed. Tambu is deeply connected with her female and spiritual plane through her ability to recognise and express the power of the erotic. From the beginning, Tambu’s actions foreshadow the significance of queerness and feminism in her life since Tambu refuses to suppress her erotic energy.

However, we see the abruptness of Tambu’s erotic imagination when she learns she will be sharing a bedroom with Nyasha. Tambu worryingly says:

Yet it would be strenuous, disturbing too, to have to share a room with Nyasha, who was morose and taciturn, who made me feel uncomfortable because something had extinguished the sparkle in her eyes.[3]

Despite Tambu describing her reservations about Nyasha’s glum and cold manner through feelings of apprehension that she would be “uncomfortable”, Dangarembga creates this ambiguous erotic tension that is reflected by Tambu’s mention of the missing “sparkle in [Nyasha’s] eyes”.[4] The attention to detail in Tambu’s memory of Nyasha’s eyes shows her erotic observation of Nyasha. The sexual tension between Tambu and Nyasha is depicted when Tambu moves into Nyasha’s room through their eye contact. Tambu is frustrated that Nyasha initially does not pay her any attention when they are left in the room together for the first time. Tambu discontentedly remarks “Nyasha remained stern for some time after Maiguru left us”.[5] Tambu’s need to be recognised by Nyasha mirrors Lorde’s observation that “the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power”.[6] Tambu proves that her strength lies in challenging male models of power: she reserves her erotic power for Nyasha even though she knows she is going Shona decorum. Dangarembga reveals that Tambu fears revelling in her erotic energy: she explores it in the bedroom after Maiguru leaves. Lorde argues that many women mistakenly set aside their erotic power for marriage, god, or the afterlife which is “one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognised at all”.[7] The significance of sharing the bedroom to Nyasha is the belief that they can form a better relationship within this space. Nyasha speaks of sharing the bedroom as opening up a space of alternatives and possibilities as she says, “we’ll see what happens”.[8] Therefore, Nyasha and Tambu overcome the limitations of cultural expectations within the bedroom and recognise their erotic power.

However, despite the cautious depiction of their emotions in private Tambu decolonises sexuality overtly. Tambu remarks:

Fortunately, it was not in [Nyasha’s] nature to remain detached for long. She could not resist eyeing me quickly and cautiously when she thought I wasn’t looking, and I was able to catch her at it because of course I was doing the same. Our eyes met and Nyasha burst out laughing.[9]

Dangarembga highlights that resistance to the inevitable erotic energy intensified Tambu and Nyasha’s emotions. This reinforces Lorde’s point: “the fear of our desires keep them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance”.[10] Nyasha eyes Tambu “quickly and cautiously” because she fears her desires. Nevertheless, their queer potential is strong: Tambu “catch[s] [Nyasha] at it because of course [she] was doing the same”. Tambu’s lack of fear to indulge in her erotic power outside of the heterosexual institution shows she grows beyond the distortions that corrupt her eroticism. Adrienne Rich argues that one of the ways heterosexuality is imposed on women is by making the lesbian existence invisible.[11] Nervous Conditions makes queerness visible through the queer potential that exists between Tambu and Nyasha. This underlines that “the erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire”.[12] Tambu and Nyasha after sexually eyeing each other are able to measure their strongest feelings. There is an explicit sense of satisfaction in Nyasha’s spontaneous burst of laughter that signals her aspiration to succumb to the replenishing and seductive power of the erotic irrespective of cultural expectations.

Nervous Conditions is set two decades before Zimbabwe would win independence and end white British minority rule. At the heart of the story, thirteen year old Tambudzai Sigauke embarks on her journey to education at the mission. At the mission she is under the control of Babamukuru, her uncle and father, and Maiguru, Babamukuru’s wife. Tambu’s time at the mission is pivotal to her understanding of racism, sexism, and sexuality because of her relationship with her cousin, Nyasha. However, because of the class difference between the mission and the homestead, Tambu tries to distance herself from her mother, Ma’Shingai, who she sees as a powerless figure. Instead, she admires and looks up to her mother’s sister, Lucia, a feminist woman who fights for female empowerment.

In 1988, just eight years after Zimbabwe gained independence from the colonial British regime Tsitsi Dangarembga became the first black Zimbabwean woman to publish a novel, Nervous Conditions in English which won the commonwealth prize in 1989.[13] Nervous Conditions, which explores black women’s experience in 1960s to 1970s Rhodesia within a domestic traditional family setting, raised Dangarembga’s profile as a novelist, playwright, and filmmaker.[14] Since then Dangarembga drew public attention when Nervous Conditions was named by the BBC in 2018 as one of the top 100 books that have shaped the world.[15] However, although Nervous Conditions has received a tremendous amount of critical acclaim and critical attention in different sectors of literary research such as postcolonialism, medical humanities, and feminism it has garnered little attention in queer literature.

The chapter calls for the recognition of Nervous Conditions as a significant canonical African novel that breaks the barriers of familial boundaries in its portrayal of queer potential in its characters specifically Nyasha, Tambu, and Lucia. Expanding the category of ‘queer literature’, my chapter raises important questions about how and why we might read a supposedly heterosexual text by deploying a queer lens. I explore the ways in which Dangarembga’s preoccupation with female oppression within domestic Shona families, not only reflects the colonial context of Rhodesia but more importantly portrays Nyasha, Tambu and Lucia’s efforts at decolonising sexuality and gender within the colonial heteropatriarchal family. By emphasising the necessity of sexual and gender decolonisation whilst seeing a postcolonial Zimbabwe, Dangarembga establishes a decolonial counter narrative influenced by Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963), José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009), and Audre Lorde’s Your Silence Will Not Protect You (2017). In her brave portrayal of Nyasha, a hybrid character with both Shona and British influences, Tambu, a protagonist that embraces her growth in education and feminism, and Lucia, a sexually liberated woman, Dangarembga challenges her readers to question the colonial myth of homosexuality as Un-African.

I read the novel’s “queering” of traditional familial structures as a form of decolonising sexuality and gender. There is a two tier colonial system occurring: the first being the colonial regime by the British rule, and the second is the colonial control of the women by the men. I predominantly focus on the latter which is imposed on the women by the compulsory heterosexuality within their society that indoctrinates them to believe they are inferior to men. I examine decolonisation within the context of “male-identification”.[16] Rich defines gender colonisation as “internalizing the values of the colonizer and actively participating in carrying out the colonization of one’s self and one’s sex . . . Male identification is the act whereby women place men above women…”.[17] This male-identification is often shown by the cultural clash between conflicting Shona and British culture that both require the women to defer to men’s needs. Nervous Conditions represents the chasm between Shona culture and colonial British culture that formulates the “in-between” spaces that conflict with the paradigm of colonial individualism and Shona communalism. These gaps between two cultures that are either consensual or conflictual, are what Bhabha describes as “in-between” spaces, which I coin as cultural crevices. Cultural crevices are the gaps within the constructed and propagated culture that reveal the crevices within the norms and values labelled as original culture. Cultural crevices are in opposition with the dominant cultures, which in the text are Shona and British foreign culture. The novel depicts the gaps within these constructed and propagated cultures through the colonial heteropatriarchal family. As this chapter argues, cultural crevices are the gaps within the negotiation of culture that produce queer potential through new signs of sexual identities, innovative sites of collaboration, contestation, and the (re)defining of sexual boundaries.

Bibliography

[1] Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions, (London: Faber & Faber Limited: 2021), p. 92. Subsequent references will appear as a bracketed ‘NC’ followed by a page number.

[2] Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You, (London: Silver Press: 2017), p. 22.

[3] Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions, p. 92-93.

[4] Ibid., p. 93.

[5] Ibid., p. 118.

[6] Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You, p. 22.

[7] Ibid., p. 26.

[8] Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions, p. 119.

[9] Ibid., p. 118.

[10] Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You, p. 27.

[11] Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, (London: Onlywomen Press Ltd: 1981)

[12] Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You, p. 23.

[13] Mia Swart, ‘Tsitsi Dangarembga: Life in an ‘ever-narrowing Zimbabwe’, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/11/16/qa-tsitsi-dangarembga [accessed 23 August 2022]

[14] Ibid

[15] ‘The 100 stories that shaped the world’, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180521-the-100-stories-that-shaped-the-world [ accessed 01 September 2022]

[16] Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality, p. 18.

[17] Ibid., p. 18