Text Club 005: stitching the fabric of our lives
Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions
We are so back! That August+September break was very needed, so I could work on this and some other stuff. I kept a diary while at it though; you can flip through here.
For October, I bring our first novel. The only book I have read and thought, "I need to frame this." Which I did. It's been almost ten years since I last read it and now I look forward to what old and new irritations, inspirations and insight I will find in it. Join me :)
Register at: tinyurl.com/sstextclub
Primary text: Nervous Conditions
Nervous Conditions is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel by Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga, first published in the United Kingdom in 1988. It won the Best Book of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1989.
The novel illustrates themes of race, colonialism, and gender during Zimbabwe's colonial period Zimbabwe in a way that still speaks to many African women's realities today. It's a powerful exploration of cultural imperialism in a postcolonial African country and of an individual's journey to personhood.
Its title is taken from the introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) where Sartre writes: "The status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent. Laying claim to and denying the human condition at the same time: the contradiction is explosive. For that matter it does explode, you know as well as I do; and we are living at the moment when the match is put to the fuse."
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"I was not sorry when my brother died," is how Nervous Conditions begins.
The following is how it ends: "Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when I can set down this story. It was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion. It was a process whose events stretched over many years and would fill another volume, but the story I have told here, is my own story, the story of four women whom I loved, and our men, this story is how it all began."
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If you do not have a copy, you can get one from me once you register. I look forward to discussing this book and I’m hoping for some variety in the demography of attendees.
Supplementary Text:
Whatever you bring. Maybe your own life stories of how you've begun to assert yourself, to listen to yourself, to expand yourself, to trust yourself.
See you soon!