Nervous situation by Tsitsi DangarembgA

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, explores the convoluted and subtle groups of obstacles that women in 1960's Rhodesia had to labour with. Throughout tense situation, Tambu, the protagonist is battled with opportunities and obstacles. Nervous situation depicts communal progress with a conformist mind-set; one desires the acceptance of accepted, characterised constituents of a higher communal class, in alignment for one's actions to be viewed as progression. Tambu administered with the development of intellect and self, amidst a society that standards learning as the only way of progress. Yet with learning arrives the development of free will and unaligned thought. One might think that Tambu's large-scale obstacle was society's predetermined functions of the sexes; women are capable but are bound to their more industrious and less cerebral jobs. However, this is not the case, Tambu's biggest obstacle was being unaligned, while still being grounded to her heritage, background, and beliefs.

It is rather evident from the very starting that Tambu's ties with the direct family were any thing but tight when she states, "I was not regretful when my brother died. Nor am I apologizing for my callousness, as you may characterise it, my need of feeling" (pg 1.) neither was she uncertain to depart her mother and dad to attend her Uncle Babamukuru's school. Tambu was continually looking for a way out all through Nervous situation.

After her brother past away, Tambu took up her uncle's offer to live with him and his family and to attend his school. Knowing that an education was her only way out, Tambu joyously obliged. Babamukuru was educated in England and worked very hard to make the leap in communal status that he made. Granted that he worked very hard, he was an outcast in society because it would take a much longer time for his poor relatives to apprehend up with all he wise and skilled from his years overseas in England. Before Tambu became "bewitched" with her learning, she recognized how Babamukuru's life was not an unquestionable representation of humanity at that time. For instance, when she first moves to Baba's house and is astounded at the lavishness of it: "The nonattendance of dirt was verification of the other-worldly environment of my new home. Iknew, had renowned all of my life, that living was soiled and I was let down by it" (pg 70.) Tambu accepts the separations of worlds and she notices no remnants of her world. She even recognized how that idealization of living might corrupt her, and make her misplace feel with her unadulterated, Rhodesian self: "I was in danger of becoming an angel, or at very smallest a saint, and forgetting how ordinary people existed-from minute to minute and from hand to mouth" (pg 70.) Tambu was ignorant of the cultural division beforehand, and she made a concerted effort in the beginning to maintain a sense of where she came from, but she, like Babamukuru, let the superiority of education ...