Nervous Conditions

From Publishers Weekly
Tambu, an adolescent living in colonial Rhodesia of the '60s, seizes the opportunity to leave her rural community to study at the missionary school run by her wealthy, British-educated uncle. With an uncanny and often critical self-awareness, Tambu narrates this skillful first novel by a Zimbabwe native. Like many heroes of the bildungsroman, Tambu, in addition to excelling at her curriculum, slowly reaches some painful conclusions--about her family, her proscribed role as a woman, and the inherent evils of colonization. Tambu often thinks of her mother, "who suffered from being female and poor and uneducated and black so stoically." Yet, she and her cousin, Nyasha, move increasingly farther away from their cultural heritage. At a funeral in her native village, Tambu admires the mourning of the women, "shrill, sharp, shiny, needles of sound piercing cleanly and deeply to let the anguish in, not out." In many ways, this novel becomes Tambu's keening--a resonant, eloquent tribute to the women in her life, and to their losses. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister
"I was not sorry when my brother died." So begins Tambu, narrator of Nervous Conditions, as she looks back on her childhood. Tambu grew up on her family's impoverished farm within a traditional native society; her determination to receive an education, however, brings her into contact with British colonialism in the form of mission schools. As an African woman, Tambu comes to understand that oppression has many forms; it is never simple and solutions are hard to come by. The patriarchal traditions of her own culture oppress women, while British colonial education takes native children from their parents, literally and figuratively. Tambu grows maize to earn her school fees because there is only enough family money for her brother, only to have her brother steal her produce and give it to friends. She tells of her cousin Nyasha, raised in England and brought back to Zimbabwe; unable to live in either culture, she self-destructively turns her struggle inward. Tambu talks of how she herself has changed. Despite the pain and oppression that she has witnessed, Tambu loves her country. Bitterly, with barely repressed irony, she points out wrongs, and then lovingly describes a pathway, a pool, the face of a woman. A strong, intelligent, loving girl/woman, Tambu is a character to stay with and care about, even - perhaps especially - as the conditions she describes enrage us. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.


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"Sardonic, coolly observant, splendidly detached from every form of chauvinistic nonesence, 'Nervous Conditions' introduces a new voice that, in its self-assurance, sounds, at times, very old. As if the African sisters, mothers and cousins of antiquity were, at last, beginning to reassert themselves in these perilous times, and to speak." — Alice Walker


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