Deepika Bahri

School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
deepika.bahri@modlangs.gatech.edu

 

Directing his “attention to the importance of two problems raised by Marxism and by anthropology concerning the moral and social significance of biological and physical ‘things,'” Michael Taussig argues in The Nervous System that “things such as the signs and symptoms of disease, as much as the technology of healing, are not ‘things-in-themselves,’ are not only biological and physical, but are also signs of social relations disguised as natural things, concealing their roots in human reciprocity” (83). If Taussig’s observation with regard to the cultural analysis of an illness and its treatment in the USA in 1978 is extrapolated to a very different scene but not so distant time, the machinations of illness in a fictional case study reveal the usually syncopated socio-personal reciprocity Taussig suggests. The scene is Rhodesia on the brink of its evolution into the nation now named after a ruined city in its southern part. The “subject” under analysis is Nyasha, the anorexic, teenage deuteragonist of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 novel Nervous Conditions (a title inspired by Sartre’s observation in the preface to The Wretched of the Earth, that the native’s is a nervous condition¹). The novel, narrated in the first person by Nyasha’s cousin Tambu, catalogues the struggles of the latter to escape the impoverished and stifling atmosphere of the “homestead” in search of education and a better life, as well the efforts of other women in her family to negotiate their circumstances, offering the while a scathing critique of the confused and corrupt social structure they are a part of. Tambu’s movement from her homestead, which symbolizes rural decay, to the prosperous, urban mission of her uncle introduces us to a cast of characters scarred by encounters with the savagery of colonialism in the context of an indigenously oppressive socius. One of many characters in the novel suffering from a nervous condition, young Nyasha demonstrates in dramatic pathological form what appears to ail an entire socio-economic construct. If “the manifestations of disease are like symbols, and the diagnostician sees them and interprets them with an eye trained by the social determinants of perception” (Taussig 87), and if, as Susan Bordo argues in “The Body and Reproduction of Femininity,” “the bodies of disordered women . . . offer themselves as aggressively graphic text for the interpreter–a text that insists, actually demands, it be read as a cultural statement” (16), Nyasha’s diseased self suggests the textualized female body on whose abject person are writ large the imperial inscriptions of colonization, the intimate branding of patriarchy, and the battle between native culture, Western narrative, and her complex relationship with both. Not surprisingly, Nyasha’s response to this violence on the body is not only somatogenic but it is to manifest specifically that illness which will consume that body.

 

The pathological consequences of colonization, signaled in the heightened synaptic activity which, according to Fanon, produces violence among colonized peoples, take shape in Nyasha in the need to target herself as the site on which to launch a terrorist attack upon the produced self. According to Sartre, the violence of the settlers contaminates the colonized, producing fury; failing to find an outlet, “it turns in a vacuum and devastates the oppressed creatures themselves” (18). The quest for an outlet takes grotesque forms in Nyasha through the physical symptomatology of disorder. But it would be entirely too simple to attribute her disease to the ills of colonization alone: Nyasha responds not only as native and Other, she responds as woman to the ratification of socially en-gendered native categories which conspire with colonial narratives to ensure her subjectivity. The implication of precapital and precolonial socio-economic systems in the postcolonial state, moreover, makes a simplistic oppositionality between colonizer/colonized meaningless. Her response to Western colonial narratives which enthrall as they distress at a time when she is also contending with her burgeoning sexuality in a repressed society, further complicate any efforts to understand and explain her pathology. Living on the edge of a body weakening from anorexia and bulimia, Nyasha’s involuntary reaction to the narratives competing for control over her, I would suggest, appears to be to systematically evacuate the materials ostensibly intended to sustain her, empty the body of signification and content to make “a body without organs” (BwO) in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, and thereby to reveal and dismantle (although never completely) the self diseased by both patriarchy and colonization. As Tambu’s narrative unfolds, the female body as text itself is being rewritten as protest, attempting to rid itself of the desires projected on it, even if hybrid subjectivity prevents it from purging them all.² The “body talk” invoked in my reading, informed largely by postmodern (despite the “realist” mode of narration) and feminist concerns, also resonates with postcolonial, social, and psychological ones. Many of these approaches are of unlike ilk, and none of them can be explained fully within the scope of this essay. Rather, the interplay of these positions is used to shed light on a case that defies simple theoretical models. Readers will note the use in this essay of Western and non-Western theorists, often with widely ranging positionings: given the “hybrid” culture being described in the novel and the range of apparata necessary to understand Nyasha’s condition in terms that were medical as well as socio-political, feminist as well as postcolonial, physical as well as psychological, it seemed specious to confine the theoretical apparatus to non-Western theory or a particular feminist or postcolonial perspective. More importantly, it seemed less useful. None of these perspectives, however, preclude the analysis of body as metaphor and illness as symbol.

 

Nyasha’s recourse to a stereotypically Western female pathological condition ³ to empty herself of food, the physical token of her anomie and a significant preoccupation of African life, is ironic and fitting as Dangarembga forces a collocation of native and colonial cultural concerns to complicate our ways of reading the postcolonial. Nyasha’s accusatory delirium, kamikaze behavior and oneiroid symptoms are at once symptomatic of a postcolonial and female disorder whereby the symptom is the cure, both exemplified in her refusal to occupy the honorary space allotted her by colonial and patriarchal narratives in which she is required to be but cannot be a good native and a good girl. This entails her rejection of food (metonymic token of a system that commodifies women’s bodies and labor and sustains male authority), of a socio-sexual code that is designed to prepare her for an unequal marriage market while repressing her sexuality, and of an educational system which has the potential to emancipate women and natives but functions, instead, to keep them in their place and even further exacerbate their ills.

 

In “Killing the Hysteric in the Colonized’s House”, Sue Thomas has argued for a reading of the novel as a narrative of loss of cultural and maternal affiliations, invoking Grosz’s suggestion that hysteria is a tragic self-mutilation that symptomatizes inarticulable resistance (27). Hysterical overcompliance with domination, she suggests, characterizes all the major characters in the novel. While this is well substantiated in her essay, I will argue that the female body is a very particular space that is marked in ways that narrativize elaborate systems of production, cultural and economic. The recoding of these systems in the text, elaborated in the story of Tambu’s introduction into and misgivings about the cycle, the adult women’s struggles within it, and Nyasha’s articulation of structural imparities is a staging of these narratives in performative terms that bears illustrative witness to the violence done to the female body in the successive scenes of pre and postcolonial Zimbabwe. Nyasha’s war with patriarchal and colonial systems is fought on the turf of her own body, both because it is the scene of enactment of these systems and because it is the only site of resistance available. This reading suggests that the performativity of female resistance needs to be at the heart of a feminist postcolonial politics.

 

It would be well to acknowledge the centrality of Dangarembga’s feminist agenda before attempting to transpose a postcolonial reading on the novel. In an interview with Rosemary Marangoly George and Helen Scott, the author claimed that her purpose was “to write things about ourselves in our own voices which other people can pick up to read. And I do think that Nervous Conditions is serving this purpose for young girls in Zimbabwe” (312). Tambudzai, the young female narrator’s missionary education tells only of “Ben and Betty in Town and Country” (27), not of her own people; Nervous Conditions is an attempt at telling Zimbabwean girls stories about themselves to counter the lingering narrative in which Zimbabwe remains a remote control neo-colony administered by toadies like Nyasha’s western educated father, Babamukuru and his ilk who are still “painfully under the evil wizard’s spell,” and will continue the colonial project (50). Women’s stories do not easily see the light of day in Zimbabwe because, according to Dangarembga, “the men are the publishers” and “it seems very difficult for men to accept the things that women write and want to write about” (qtd. in George 311). These stories, however, must be told. Early in the novel, Tambu tells us that the novel is not about death though it begins with the ironic admission “I was not sorry when my brother died” (1); rather it is about “my escape and Lucia’s; about my mother’s and Maiguru’s entrapment; and about Nyasha’s rebellion [which] may not in the end have been successful” (1). The postcolonial critic should be wary that any overarching theory proposed be mediated by Dangarembga’s emphasis on the feminist preoccupations of the story for the novel ends with the reminder: “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” (204). That the novel opens with the prefiguring of her brother Nhamo’s death to make way for Tambu’s tale is a poignant reminder of the symbolic starting point of female narrative. Far from making a postcolonial reading less tenable, however, Dangarembga’s feminist proclivities are useful in explaining the dense nature of power relations in the postcolonial world in a way that colonial discourse (including western feminist discourse) typically fails to do.

 

In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Chandra Talpade Mohanty complains that Western feminists “homogenize and systematize” third world woman, creating a single dimensional picture. They also assume a “singular, monolithic notion of patriarchy” which is reductive. Ultimately, “Western feminisms appropriate and ‘colonize’ the fundamental complexities and conflicts which characterize the lives of women of different classes, religions, cultures, races and castes in these countries” (335). Dangarembga’s representation of women of different ages, classes, educational qualifications, and economic capacities, makes composite and reductive sketches of the third world woman if not impossible, difficult. The women in this novel are neither simply victims, nor inherently more noble than the men; rather, their stories illustrate the difficulty of separating problem and solution, perpetrator and victim, cause and effect. That they are uniquely positioned to bear the brunt of native and colonial oppression, however, is vividly demonstrated: even issues of class and status are ultimately subservient to and informed by a pervasive but complex phallocentric order; this Tambu clarifies when she marvels at “the way all the conflicts came back to this question of femaleness” (116). The patriarchal order is supported by the colonial project, pre and post capitalist economy, and what we may call, for lack of a better phrase, traditional cultural codes. By layering gender politics with the atrophying discourse of colonialism, Dangarembga obliges us to recognize that the power structure is a contradictory amalgam of complicity and helplessness–where colonizer and colonized, men and women collude to produce their psycho-pathological, in a word, “nervous” conditions. What ails Nyasha, then, is not simply an eating problem but a rampant disorder in the socio-cultural complex that determines her fate as woman and native on the eve of the birth of a new nation.

 

The novel dramatizes the intersections of personal and national history on the one hand ⁴ and the feminist and postcolonial on the other through Nyasha’s attempts to escape her own assigned narrative as woman and colonized subject. Colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchal national culture conspire to produce an imperiled Nyasha and a nation in crisis. Symptoms of the latter abound in the repetitive images of rural poverty, female disempowerment, and continuing colonialism in educational and economic institutions while Nyasha’s crisis is evident in her hysteric, nervous condition and endangered body. Given this, one could read Nyasha’s story as yet another vignette of victimage, but, apart from Dangarembga’s own criticism of such a narrative, ⁵ there are other reasons for reading it as a text of possibilities for survival, agency, and re-creation. Several third world feminist critics reject the discourse of victimage in feminist and minority discourse. Mohanty objects in “Under Western Eyes” to the “construction of ‘Third World Women’ as a homogeneous ‘powerless’ group often located as implicit victims of particular socio-economic systems” (338). Spivak complains that “There is a horrible, horrible thing in minority discourse which is a competition for maximum victimization . . . . That is absolutely meretricious.”⁶ This is not to say that Nyasha is not victimized but to acknowledge that it is quite another thing to cast her as victim. Western feminists also recognize this distinction: Naomi Wolf’s recent Fire with Fire, for instance, issues a call to women to eschew the rhetoric of victimage. Nyasha is conscious of victimization but hardly content to remain a victim; regardless of the caliber or effectiveness of her methods of opposition, she/her body are the enunciation of protest against and the story of victimization. A reading of Nyasha as victim fails for another interesting reason: this is because the text reveals the ways in which she is quite complicit with the oppressive order she so abhors. In this sense, too, she emerges less as victim than as the mediated product of a conflicted narrative.

 

Reading female praxis as narrative of relative “agency,” in The Beauty Myth Naomi Wolf tells us that anorexia and bulimia begin “as sane and mentally healthy responses to an insane social reality: that most women can feel good about themselves only in a state of permanent semistarvation” (198), although it is not the myth of female beauty alone that contaminates Nyasha–she is rejecting the very basic processes, the business of living in a colonized world where she shares the dual onus of being colonized and female. Wolf also tells us that “Eating diseases are often interpreted as symptomatic of a neurotic need for control. But surely it is a sign of mental health to try to control something that is trying to control you” (198). Nyasha leaves us in no doubt that she is aware of the oppressive forces that seek to bend her to their will. In one of her many pedagogic moments, she warns Tambu that “when you’ve seen different things you want to be sure you’re adjusting to the right thing. You can’t go on all the time being whatever’s necessary. You’ve got to have some conviction . . . . Once you get used to it, it’s natural to carry on and become trapped” and then it becomes clear that “they control everything you do” (117). Hardly, it would seem, is this the language or sensibility of a passive victim. Nyasha’s potential for agency cannot be acknowledged until one understands that the “[body] still remains the threshold for the transcendence of the subject” (Braidotti 151). Through the diseased female body as text is made visible the violence of history, and through its spontaneous bodily resistance, the possibilities for rupturing and remaking that text. Control over the body is a gesture of denial of representative abject/subject status for Nyasha since “the proliferation of discourses about life, the living organism, and the body is coextensive with the dislocation of the very basis of the human subject’s representation” (151).

 

The teleology of Nyasha’s anorexic and bulimic practices is intimately linked to her revulsion at the mandate to represent herself as good girl and good native in particular instances of infractions against her sense of self in the novel. Tambu speaks of the time Babamukuru confiscates Nyasha’s copy of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover which is objectionable for its depiction of female sexuality. Appalled at this invasion of her rights, and what might be seen as a persistent barrier to her development into sexual agent rather than sexualized commodity, Nyasha, indicating the etiology of her symptoms, refuses to eat for the first time in the novel (83). Tambu next alerts us to Nyasha’s quiet rejection of her meal when she is scolded by her father for not responding to her primary school headmaster and thereby shaming him; it is Tambu who tells us that her cousin’s behavior stems from her dislike of being spoken in the third person, because “it made her feel like an object” (99). In preparing for her Standard Six exams, too, Nyasha loses her appetite, signaling the much greater apotheosis of internal conflict to follow at her O-levels. Her withdrawal from the family and rejection of food after the confrontation over her late arrival from the school dance, and subsequently on another later arrival from school where she has stayed to study, then, comes as no surprise. Layered in between these specific instances are general references to Nyasha’s disdain of fatty foods in the interest of maintaining a more desirable body shape; this quest for “commodification” as an attractive object is not recognized by her as destructive and, interestingly, is not textually linked directly to starvation or anorexia. Instead, the usually appearance-centered practices of anorexia and bulimia become narrativized as artful, if grotesque, protest that will prevent Nyasha’s maturation into full fledged commodified “womanhood,” even as she embraces the abjection that comes from seeking a “pre-objectal relationship,” becoming separated from her own body “in order to be” (Kristeva 10).⁷

 

The question of control is focal and must be located within the matrix of complex power relations to understand the significance of Nyasha’s rebellion. ⁸ Patriarchal society, colonial imperialism, and capitalist economy function by controlling and commodifying the subject’s body and labor; the female subject in this cultural and social economy, well documented in Nervous Conditions, is assessed by the ability to reproduce (she goes into labor), to provide sexual release (the labors of love), and to work (home, farm, market labor). Prostitution and pimping are extreme representations of the annexation of female labor while the marital institution within oppressive narratives is a quotidian, usually sanctioned, appropriation. Female labor in this novel denotes a woman’s exchange value in the socio-familial and matrimonial economy. It is necessary to understand the role of female labor in the novel and the reason why it is not available as a site of resistance to grasp fully the implications of Nyasha’s default choice of the physical body as the locus for rebellion. Women are not only expected to work and work for men, their value and worth are determined by work, although it does not make them “valuable” in any intrinsic, meaningful sense. In “Re-examining Patriarchy as a Mode of Production: The Case of Zimbabwe,” Cindy Courville explains that “women’s exploitation and oppression were structured in terms of political, economic, and social relations of the Shona and Ndebele societies” (34). Under colonial capitalism, however, women became the “‘proletariat’ of the proletariats, becoming more subordinated in the new socio-economic schemes, and often losing their old and meaningful roles within the older production processes” (Ogundipe-Leslie 108).

 

Tambu reveals that “the needs and sensibilities of the women in my family were not considered a priority, or even legitimate” (12). Women are intended to enable men to attain value through their labor: Netsai and Tambu, therefore, must labor so their brother Nhamo can attend school. They may not enjoy the fruits of their own labor: “under both traditional and colonial law, they [African women] were denied ownership and control of the land and the goods they produced. It was the unpaid labor of women and children which subsidized the colonial wage” (Courville 38). Nhamo, in fact, steals Tambu’s labor–the maize she has been growing in a scant spare time to buy an education–and squanders it in gifts to friends, while her father steals her prospects by keeping the money Babamukuru has sent him for Tambu’s school bills.⁹ Interestingly, while the maize does serve to keep her in school, ¹⁰ and later allows her admission to the mostly White Sacred Heart Convent, we can assume from her aunt Maiguru’s trajectory and her own pursuit of it that she will continue to be schooled in the ways of a societal economy that will use her labor to support and enable the colonial and patriarchal order which will deny her, as it has Maiguru, the fruits of that labor. Maiguru, the most educated woman in the novel, is just as qualified as her husband Babamukuru (a little publicized fact that surprises Tambu when she learns of it) and just as instrumental in helping to maintain the mission lifestyle that Nhamo and Tambu find so dazzling, but her knowledge and her labor are never acknowledged: they have been annexed to serve a societal order which awards the fruits of that knowledge and labor as well as the associated prestige to Babamukuru, lending him authority, as a result, over the entire extended family, including his older brother. Babamukuru, in effect, has “stolen” her labor to enhance his position. To the untrained eye Maiguru appears to be incapable of suffering because she “lived in the best of all possible circumstances, in the best of all possible worlds” as Tambu says, ironically echoing Candide’s unfortunate and misguided philosopher Pangloss. To this Nyasha replies that “such things could only be seen” (142). Education, then, which might free women like Maiguru from service to capitalism and patriarchy becomes yet another token of exchange, further alienating them from the “home” economy of agricultural subsistence in favor of urban wage service.¹¹ When she and her husband return to their uneducated, struggling relatives, it is to further heighten the impoverishment of the homestead, and the need to escape from it. It is Nyasha who points out that the education of solitary family members will not solve the ills of rural poverty: “there’ll always be brothers and mealies and mothers too tired to clean latrines. Whether you go to the convent or not. There’s more to be done than that,” she tells Tambu who believes that education will “lighten” their burdens (179). Near the end of the novel, Tambu herself wonders, “but what use were educated young ladies on the homestead? Or at the mission?” (199). Admittedly comprehension has only begun to dawn on her at that stage, but a fuller realization seems to be clearly indicated.

 

Babamukuru, his young nephew Nhamo, and son Chido, however, embrace colonial capitalism and education because they are usually compatible with and in fact, uphold traditional patriarchy. Courville tells us that “the colonial state sanctioned and institutionalized the political and legal status of African women as minors and/or dependents subject to male control” (37). Educational degrees, in this economy, are fodder for men’s appetites for control. Witness the following scene. On his return from England, Babamukuru is comically greeted by a rousing chorus of admirers who extol his abilities, while ignoring Maiguru’s comparable achievements: “Our father and benefactor has returned appeased, having devoured English letters with a ferocious appetite! Did you think degrees were indigestible? If so, look at my brother. He has digested them” (36). Indeed, men can digest degrees as well as the food prepared by women since both sustain their stature while failing to “nourish” the women. Their lot, educational status notwithstanding, is defined by service to and for men. Courville claims that while “some social aspects of African patriarchy were repugnant to European culture . . . colonial authorities recognized the significance of patriarchal power in mobilizing the labor of women” (38). That none of the women in the novel ever refuse their labor is no oddity since we learn that female labor may not be and is not withheld for fear of punishment; Netsai’s failure to carry her empty-handed brother’s bags at Tambu’s suggestion, for instance, results in a sound thrashing and her conclusion that she should have just done it “in the first place” (10). Nor is Nhamo’s behavior unusual; while Tambu acknowledges that “Nhamo was not interested in being fair,” she insists he was not being obnoxious, merely behaving “in the expected manner” (12). Netsai, needless to say, never refuses to carry his bags again. Even Tambu, who appears to demonstrate a keen sense of outrage at the injustice of a patriarchal order while at the homestead, participates in all the labor intensive tasks on the homestead while the men await service. One of the few instances of her failure to be a “good girl,” evident to her uncle in her refusal to attend the Christian ceremony that is to sanction her parents’ otherwise “sinful” marriage of many years–an embarrassing and humiliating proposition to Tambu, is also, predictably, punished with a beating and a sentence of domestic labor; interestingly, before she issues an outright refusal, Tambu confesses to a muscular inability to leave her bed, prompting her uncle to ask if she is “ill” and then to dismiss Maiguru’s affirmative response with injunctions to get the girl dressed; this event is an adroit linking in the novel of its major themes, revealing the nexus of relations between illness, body, labor, colonialism, patriarchy, and the female subject.

 

Nyasha, too, who is seen laboring on the homestead along with the other women, including Maiguru, at the family’s Christmas gathering, is clearly being prepared for a lifetime of service to the men in her life despite her relatively privileged economic status. Since labor cannot be denied in the phallocratic order–at least not with impunity, the body then becomes the site of conflict for control. I realize that the dichotomy between labor and the body here is problematic since it is the body that labors, but in this instance we need to separate the two to recognize the extent to which Nyasha’s body as text is scripted, and how that text might be reinscribed as protest.

 

In a certain sense, Nyasha’s understanding of bodily dimensions has been shaped, if not determined, by her brief exposure in England to the Western desire for the “svelte, sensuous” womanly frame (197); she is preoccupied with her own figure and urges her unofficial pupil Tambu not to eat too much (192). Her sense of the ideal self, then, has already been appropriated by an aesthetic that does not recognize the wide-hipped, muscle bound female form as beautiful; this same constitutional African female frame is prized for its capacity to produce labor and to signal the subject’s relatively superior status because it suggests that the subject is well-fed, a beautiful thing in societies that experience food shortages. Tambu and Nyasha’s aunt Lucia, for instance, “managed somehow to keep herself plump in spite of her tribulations . . . . And Lucia was strong. She could cultivate a whole acre single-handed without rest”; these twin attributes qualify her as an “inviting prospect” to Takesure, Tambu’s father, and, Dangarembga hints, Babamukuru (127). Nyasha’s attraction to the Western ideal of femininity must be mediated, then, by her understanding of the exploitative usurpation of the healthy African female body. On a visit to the homestead, Tambu’s mother, Mainini, pinches Nyasha’s breast after remarking that “the breasts are already quite large” and then asking when she is to bring them a son-in-law (130). Nyasha’s pathology and her belief that “angles were more attractive than curves” (135), I would insist, is not simply rooted in her desire for slimness (which it might be) but also in a rejection of the rounded contours of the adult female body primed for the Shona matrimonial and social economy.

 

The role of food as a pawn in this struggle for control over the body is a crucial one. Wolf notes that “Food is the primal symbol of social worth. Whom a society values, it feeds well” and “Publicly apportioning food is about determining power relations” (189). She concludes that: “Cross-culturally, men receive hot meals, more protein, and the first helpings of a dish, while women eat the cooling leftovers, often having to use deceit and cunning to get enough to eat” (190-91). This pattern is made amply clear at the Christmas reunion at the homestead where Babamukuru and Maiguru provide the victuals. Maiguru jealously guards the meat, insisting that the rotting meat be cooked and served despite its tell-tale green color, but not to the patriarchy who are served from meat that has been stored in the somewhat small refrigerator. The able women at the homestead must cook and serve the dwindling food, eating last and little, typically without complaint. They, in fact, sleep in the kitchen but their labor produced in their assigned space is not theirs to enjoy, except as scraps.

 

In Babamukuru’s household, women do not eat least although they must wait till he is served. Even here, Maiguru replicates the practices of the homestead, fawning over her husband and eating his leftovers. Babamukuru puts out a token protest at her servility, following it up with a rebuke to Nyasha for helping herself to the rice before he is quite finished. He, nevertheless, prides himself on his table and would have been gratified by wide-eyed and poorly-fed Tambu’s silent observation that “no one who ate from such a table could fail to grow fat and healthy” (69). In this case, however, it is important to note that the ability to provide plentifully gives Babamukuru prestige even though Maiguru’s labor is just as important in accounting for the ample table. Refusal to eat at such a table is tantamount to a direct challenge to his authority. He repeatedly insists that Nyasha “must eat her food, all of it” or he will “stop providing for her–fees, clothes, food, everything” (189). Given this, it may be somewhat easier to understand Nyasha’s inability to stomach the food intended to “develop” her into a valuable commodity for the market, and to serve as a token doled out to enhance her father’s stature and to exercise his control over her, exhibited in multiple other ways as well.

 

Babamukuru is obsessed with control in general, control over women in particular, and control over his girl-becoming-woman daughter, how much she eats, how she dresses and speaks to the elders in the family, how often and how much she talks with boys, and what she reads, all measures designed to fashion her into a “decent” woman. Perhaps it might be more accurate to add that he is “pathetically” obsessed, being himself implicated in a societal system that puts men of means and education in the slot of caretaker and guardian so he must maintain and improve, juggling old and new ways, or find his own position as “good boy” (defined by a different but no less compelling rubric) jeopardized. Nyasha’s body and her mind, then, are pressed into Babamukuru’s strangely distorted project of asserting his control and preserving his status in society lest it be challenged: “I am respected in this mission,” he announces, “I cannot have a daughter who behaves like a whore” (114). Nyasha’s questionable behavior, punished with a merciless beating, consists of coming in ten minutes later than her brother Chido–who is not subject to the same rules anyway–and cousin Tambu–who seldom challenges her uncle’s authority or taxes him with the need to exert it–from a school dance. The survival of patriarchal ideology, of which Babamukuru is torchbearer, depends on its enactment on Nyasha’s very person. This should not be surprising since, in postcolonial terms, the female body has often been the space where “traditional” cultural practices that ensure male control over it, encoded in words like “decency,” must be preserved. Babamukuru chooses which parts of traditional culture and modernity (represented through colonial education and ways) Nyasha is to adopt and exhibit to maximize his status as colonial surrogate and de facto clan elder–a schema analogous to his acceptance of Maiguru’s earnings (the fruit of her Western education), while insisting on her compliance with the traditional requirement of wifely obedience. The claims of traditional society, of colonial and precolonial modes of production, and of western aesthetics on Nyasha’s body, I would argue, together produce her pathological response. Fanon’s contention that “colonialism in its essence was already taking on the aspect of a fertile purveyor for psychiatric disorders” (249) must be complicated by the observation that it is not only the colonial war Nyasha is fighting on the turf of her body but also a battle with the megalomaniacal patriarchal control represented by Babamukuru of whom she says: “Sometimes I feel like I am trapped by that man” (174). Her “anti-colonial” war, moreover, is complicated by her own collusion with the corrupt system she is fighting–her unwillingness to relinquish the accent acquired from her brief stay in England, her criticism of the racist dominion of colonizers while remaining standoffish with her compatriots at school, and the lack of effort at regaining her native language or contact with homestead relatives–visible to Tambu but unacknowledged, or unknown to her except in her sense of herself as “hybrid,” is also a factor in the war of ideas and values being narrativized on her corporeal bodily space. Nyasha, “who thrived on inconsistencies,” according to Tambu, seems to internalize the conflicts posed by her surroundings till her tongue, body, and mind seem together to want to carry the struggle to a dramatic conclusion (116).

 

The body under siege, then, is not surprisingly the space for resistance. Moreover, Nyasha has exhausted the options for legitimate engagement with oppression through official means. Having attempted and failed at reasoning with her father, no “usual” recourse remains. In her view, other adult women in the novel offer no viable alternatives. Nyasha is quite certain that her “mother doesn’t want to be respected. If people did that they’d have nothing to moan about” (78-79). Having witnessed her mother Maiguru’s feeble and feckless flutters for freedom, when she briefly runs away to her brother’s only to return five days later,¹² Nyasha, who elsewhere concedes that her mother is rather “sensible,” must look for other means of resistance. Maiguru’s state of “entrapment,” foretold for the reader in the very beginning of the novel, and reflected in her admission that she chose “security” over “self,” is precisely what Nyasha is seeking to avoid. Aunt Lucia, too, who is supposed to be an unmanageable free spirit and, commendably, rejects her paramour Takesure’s questionable support, ultimately disappoints Nyasha by resorting to propitiate Babamukuru. To Nyasha’s complaint that “she’s been groveling ever since she arrived to get Daddy to help her out. That sort of thing shouldn’t be necessary,” Lucia pragmatically responds, “Babamukuru wanted to be asked, so I asked. And now we both have what we wanted” (160). Nyasha fails to appreciate that Lucia’s strategies are essential to her. In the final tally, Maiguru, “married” to patriarchy, and Tambu’s mother, too tired and too traditional to engage in a sustained struggle with it, her mind never being hers to make up, remain trapped (153) while Tambu–with her “finely tuned survival system” (65), and Lucia are the ones who will “escape,” both having learned the value of survival and relative empowerment over enactments of dramatic protest, but effecting their escape in different ways. But then Nyasha does not have the benefit of hindsight endowed on the reader by Tambu’s prefiguring of the fate of the women in the story. Her critique of women’s ingratiating and subservient ways, however, is instructive.

 

The implication of women in oppressive cultural codes–the craft and guile evident in their quest for survival and advancement–is undeniably an issue here. Women provide the mainstay of patriarchal structures. In her novel, Le Pique-nique sur l’Acropole, Louky Bersianik presents a stunning embodiment of female complicity in the image of women as petrified pillars supporting the temple of Erectheion in Athens. Acropolis, the bastion and symbol of traditional Western patriarchal thought is the site of a long male banquet at which women have served as handmaidens. The homestead and the mission, too, are a picnic for men that women will cater. Maiguru, Lucia, and Tambu’s sporadic gestures of resistance are ultimately “permissible” infractions because they are followed by propitiatory gestures consonant with compliant performances of femininity and so do not seriously challenge the extant order; they “play” the system and attempt to prevail within rather than without it, ultimately gaining some modicum of satisfaction by way of security, a job, or an education–none of which, we are being told through Nyasha’s expostulations and actions, is adequate compensation. A propos of this issue, however, is the observation that Nyasha herself seems to decide to give in to Babamukuru’s authority because “it is restful to have him pleased (196). The strategies adopted by Maiguru and Lucia–and on occasion Nyasha herself–are survivalist in nature in contrast to her ultimate recourse to violent and destructive ones. Her seeming acquiescence toward her father–a survivalist tactic–is followed, however, by a more solipsistic, private regimen of rebellion: she tells Tambu “that she had embarked on a diet, to discipline [her] body and occupy [her] mind” (197). The diet and the disease become for her a holy mission; Rudolph Bell in Holy Anorexia “relates the disease to the religious impulses of medieval nuns, seeing starvation as purification” (qtd. in Wolf 189). To borrow Fanon’s words yet again, “this pathology is considered as a means whereby the organism responds to, in other words adapts itself to, the conflict it is faced with, the disorder being at the same time a symptom and a cure” (290).¹³ Or as Wolf puts it, “The anorexic refuses to let the official cycle master her: By starving, she masters it” (198). Taking recourse to anorexia and bulimia then becomes for Nyasha a pathetic means of both establishing control over her body in the only way possible and relinquishing control by giving in to a learned western pathology.

 

But let us pause. There are two issues of import here: a.) rejection of food has already been read in terms beyond the vocabulary only of anorexia and bulimia; b.) it is not only food that is being rejected by the bodily organism. With regard to the first, let us remember that Tambu’s mother also abjures food to protest her departure for the mission at first, and then Sacred Heart because she thinks education and English-ness will kill Tambu as it has Nhamo (184). Before her departure for the mission, Tambu speculates that “at Babamukuru’s I would have the leisure . . . to consider questions that had to do with survival of the spirit, the creation of consciousness, rather than mere sustenance of the body,” the latter having been a considerable preoccupation for homestead women (59). That Nyasha can afford the luxury of refusing food is certainly relevant, but it becomes less significant in light of Mainini’s gesture. Refusal to eat is a time honored and cross-cultural form of protest. Gandhi’s program of Satyagraha¹⁴ and fasting were pivotal in India’s fight for freedom. It is interesting to pose the case of a teenage girl, hyper-conscious of the territorial offenses against her, along the same spectrum of protest activity that accommodates Gandhi’s lofty project of non-cooperation. The difference is that female lives are usually confined to the private sphere; female protests usually do not find outlet in public ways although one might argue that “the distinction between what is public and what is private is always a subtle one,” especially if one reads the female body as implicated in the economy of male and societal desire (Strachey 66). And lest we overlook the obvious, Nyasha, after all, is only fourteen years old when she begins to stage her gestures of protest.

 

Her rejection of food is linked to a whole set of other associated unpalatable realities: the anorexic herself tells us that the fuss is about something else altogether, “it’s more than that really, more than just food. That’s how it comes out, but really it’s all the things about boys and men and being decent and indecent and good and bad” (190). Nyasha’s commodity status in the sexual economy, for instance, is exposed implicitly through her anorexic behavior intended to erode the body and prevent its blossoming into womanhood; but it is also exposed explicitly in a discussion on “private parts” between the cousins. The suppression of her sexuality at the same time that she is being groomed for an equipoisal matrimonial market, her fear that a tampon is the only thing that will enter her vaginal orifice “at this rate,” and her recommendations, albeit playful, to Tambu about the relative advantages of losing one’s virginity to the sanitary device rather than to an insensitive braggart, suggest the disbalancement of the market system that would ensue, should the girls choose to transform sexual restriction into abstinence or “devalue” themselves by accidentally rupturing their precious membranes (119; 96). The threat is a potent one because virginity is desirable in unmarried women and functions symbolically, with “the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body” (Douglas 11). The vulvic crime Nyasha gestures at has the content of a vaginal betrayal of the patrimonial body of the state–it is the denial of heterosexual exchange, of the preservation of expected social narratives. While there is no textual evidence of her having lost her virginity thus, Nyasha’s larger project of making the body itself disappear by denying it nourishment tacitly promises to accomplish something of the same objective.

 

Tested, tried, and unsuccessful as “good girl,” it remains for Nyasha to fail as “good native.” Confronted with her “O” level exams, Nyasha transforms a test situation into a veritable trial of the soul, testing the very mettle of history. Attracted and repelled in almost equal measure by colonial educational and cultural systems, Nyasha reacts in a foreseeably conflicted manner to the variety of concerns weighing on her mind: she becomes obsessed with passing the exams which will test her on the colonizer’s version of knowledge even while she is aware that this education is a “gift” of her father’s status, and the “knowledge” itself is questionable. As her body spurns food, her mind is rejecting what the colonizers have called knowledge, and evincing a hysteric, physical revulsion to “their history. Fucking liars. Their bloody lies” (201). Nyasha’s “body language” is as loud and clear as her words for she is tearing her book to shreds with her teeth as she rages. But what is the substitute? Dangarembga explains that “one of the problems that most Zimbabwean people of my generation have is that we really don t have a tangible history we can relate to” (qtd. in Wilkinson 190-91). Not available to Nyasha are the (his)stories heard in whispers from the margins, in the brief accounts given by Tambu’s grandmother¹⁵ who speaks of the history that “could not be found in the textbooks” (17), about the “wizards” who were avaricious and grasping and annexed Babamukuru’s spirit: “They thought he was a good boy, cultivable, in the way that land is, to yield harvests that sustain the cultivator” (19). The knowledge she has been fed is less easily digested by Nyasha than it is by the good native, Babamukuru, although he too, incidentally, suffers from bad nerves. Nyasha’s protest transpires exponentially: “They’ve trapped us. But I won’t be trapped. I’m not a good girl” (201). The moral content of “goodness,” like the symbolic content of “womanhood,” are recognized by Nyasha as inherently bankrupt. Her acute sensibility scans “goodness” as a managerial tool, rather than a moral imperative, that keeps women and natives in line. Ironically, Nyasha’s dramatic indictment of colonial education, delivered in the language and in an approximation of the accent of the colonizer, speaks eloquently of an embattled and muddled consciousness attempting to regain control. Nyasha fails in multiple ways as “good native”: both in her failure to accept the totality of colonial education and in her failure to renounce it completely.

 

Ultimately, then, food is only the metonymic representation of all that Nyasha cannot accept and understand. Her dwindling body boldly enacts the pervasive and aggregate suffering and bewilderment of colonized women caught between opposing as well as joined forces. Clearly, she also does not have the stomach for the deception and lies of the colonial project or the pathetic mimicry of this project by natives like Babamukuru and his confused and endearment mouthing consort, Maiguru. “It’s bad enough,” she laments, “when . . . a country gets colonised, but when the people do as well!” (147). Having learned the discourse of equality and freedom, young and confused though she might be, Nyasha recognizes that the native has failed to adopt the more salubrious aspects of Western humanism. The truth is that natives could learn different lessons from colonial education. Instead, the overwhelming preoccupation with food and food presentation, the “eyeing and coveting” of dresses outside the mission church, Tambu’s visualization of a convent education in terms of a smart and clean “white blouse and dark-red pleated terylene skirt, with blazer and gloves, and a hat” (183), the ritualized attention to hierarchy at gatherings, unbridled materialism and lust for goods and items of “comfort and ease and rest” evident in the mission as Tambu catalogues Babamukuru and Maiguru’s household effects (70), the incongruous adoption of western diet and the presence and prevalence of a servile, laboring class in the very hearth of the mission, among other symptoms of a community in crisis, testify to endemic class divisions heightened by a total capitulation to commodity fetishism. The embrace of selective items of Westernization by Babamukuru and others, even Nyasha, to the exclusion of its more useful possibilities is exposed throughout the novel. The potential for communicating the principles and values of Western education is clear to Babamukuru who does not approve of Tambu’s desire to go to the mostly white school because association with white people would cause girls “to have too much freedom,” a consequence incompatible with their eminently desirable development into “decent women” appropriate for the marriage market (180).

 

At the same time that the potential for emancipation promised by the colonial encounter is left frustrate by the natives’ refusal to accept the better part of western humanism, the failure of colonizers themselves to exercise those same principles which serve to legitimize their sense of superiority over “less civilized” natives is exposed through Nyasha’s revolt. Nadel and Curtis explain the psychology of colonial dominion in their introduction to Imperialism and Colonialism: “Underlying all forms of imperialism is the belief–at times unshakable–of the imperial agent or nation in an inherent right, based on moral superiority as well as material might, to impose its pre-eminent values and techniques on the ‘inferior’ indigenous nation or society” (1). In The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, Tzvetan Todorov demonstrates that colonialism exerts its control by extending the principle of equality only when it withholds from its Others the principle of difference. Principles of democracy, freedom, and independence, that fueled the American and French revolutions as well as reforms in much of the Western world did not, for instance, stand in the way of colonialism. Nor did concessions to minorities in the developed world encourage officials to extend the same to colonized subjects. The excesses of African patriarchy, for instance, which repulsed European sensibilities, were tolerated “in the interest of colonial profit” while the condemnation of polygynous marriages resulted not from a concern for women but from a need “for the reproduction of the labor force” (Courville 38). These contradictions are glaringly obvious to young Nyasha. The colonizer’s formula for accommodating the native, as she astutely observes, is to create “an honorary space in which you could join them and they could make sure you behaved yourself” (178); “But, she insisted, one ought not to occupy that space. Really, one ought to refuse” (179).

 

The net impact of Nyasha’s “refusal” seems less important than that in her, Dangarembga has offered not only a textbook example of the havoc wrought by colonial and patriarchal systems, but a narrativization of the body itself in terms of conflict and resistance and its angry longing for a better, less perplexing world. In bodily terms, Nyasha almost succeeds in destroying herself, in achieving, if not the body without organs–which is admittedly unrealizable anyway, at least a grotesquely unhealthy remainder of her original self. The anorexic, after all, is effectively unwomanned and left a shell of herself: “the woman has been killed off in her. She is almost not there” (Wolf 197). But the woman that dies is the abject self that has never enjoyed the luxury of self-determination, that is no real woman but an insubstantial changeling who functions as token and currency in the labor and matrimonial market. Nyasha’s pathological persona enacts a multi-pronged assault on a complex and interwoven system that involves the body and the mind, patriarchy and the female body, colonialism and history, reinscribing the text of history and psycho-social sexuality, of Corpus and Socius (Deleuze and Guattari 150). Nyasha has attempted an attack on the corporeal to annihilate the symbolic. What is left is the BwO which is “what remains when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and signifiances [sic] and subjectifications as a whole” (151). Whether the violence of her rebellion has left her more “stratified–organized, signified, subjected” must be determined in light of the only choices that remained; for finding out how to make the BwO is “a question of life and death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out” (161;151).

 

Nyasha’s offensive against her bodily self reenacts the narrative of violence on woman and native while at the same time gesturing at the possibility of agency: signaling from the bathroom and the bedroom (her favorite retreats) that a more pervasive insurgence, a more public and widespread struggle by women for freedom from the patriarchal and colonial order may be soon to follow. This promise is manifested not only in Tambu and Lucia’s “escape,” but in recent campaigns against female abuse in Zimbabwe and organized assistance for abused and disenfranchised women. These struggles must be recognized no matter what shape they are in; a responsible reading must reinstate female praxis to a central place in feminist and postcolonial politics. Given such a reading, one might say that regardless of the fact that Tambu is mildly disapproving of her cousin’s behavior, the text of Nyasha’s “bodybildungsroman” (in Kathy Acker’s memorable neologism) does tell Zimbabwean girls stories about themselves in terms that expose the crises they are likely to encounter. Nyasha’s condition reveals to her cousin her own impending crisis; when the cornerstone of one’s security begins to “crumble,” she admits that “You start worrying about yourself” (199). The import of Nyasha’s theatrics might be measured in terms of its placement within the larger context of female and postcolonial existence in a society struggling to reconcile competing and conflicted narratives. The promise of something gained is evident in the textual arrangement of the narrative as well, in the parting words of Tambu, who had once said “it did not take long for me to learn that they [Whites] were in fact more beautiful [than Blacks] and then I was able to love them” (104), and who at the end of the novel ominously remarks that “seeds do grow” (203) and “something in my mind began to assert itself” (204). The novel, after all, is a kunstler and bildungsroman which catalogues Tambu’s maturation even as she functions as the amanuensis of Nyasha’s performances. Tambu’s changing consciousness is the stuff of hope; it is no less than the promise of a different text, a whole new corpus, in the future.

 

Notes

 

1. “The status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent” (20).

 

2. For this last realization, I am indebted to my friend Ritch Calvin\Koons who collaborated with me on a performance dialogue on the novel at the International Conference on Narrative Literature in Vancouver in 1994.

 

3. Nyasha begins to engage in starvation (anorexic) and purging (bulimic) activities when she is fourteen. Anorexia and bulimia are provisionally being described as Western female pathologies because, according to Naomi Wolf, “Anorexia and bulimia are female maladies: From 90 to 95 percent of anorexics and bulimics are women” and most Western women can be called, twenty years into the backlash, mental anorexics (181; 183). I would suggest that industrialization and development in the ersatz third-world countries and contact with “first world” cultures may be producing a similar profile among women in the developing world although research in this area remains scant. Nyasha’s illness, interestingly enough, is not recognized by a white psychiatrist because “Africans did not suffer in the way we had described” (201). At a conference in November 1993, I heard a graduate student paper on anorexia based on research for her dissertation. The student had been interviewing women anorexics in western countries and was surprised when I suggested that she might investigate instances in the non-western parts of the world. She had never considered the possibility. For the moment, it would appear, anorexia and bulimia remain western preserves.

 

4. This is noted by Sally McWilliams in her analysis of the novel: “Their [Nyasha and Tambu’s] personal histories are undergoing radical repositioning at the same time as their political histories are altering” (111).

 

5. In her interview with George and Scott, the author states, “Western literary analysis always calls Nyasha self-destructive, but I’m not sure whether she is self-destructive” (314).

 

6. Forthcoming interview. See complete reference in “Works Cited.”

 

7. Kristeva suggests that the ultimate abjection occurs at the moment of birth, “in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be” (10).

 

8. This paper does not discuss colonialism and patriarchy as pathologies although this aspect of all projects of domination is an important one to bear in mind nor does it investigate the case of Babamukuru as controlled by colonial education and traditional cultural codes–fruitful subjects for quite another discussion.

 

9. Jeremiah also “steals” his daughter and pregnant sister-in-law, Lucia’s labor when he takes credit for thatching a roof they have been slaving to mend.

 

10. A White woman in town gives her money for the maize entirely because she misconstrues Tambu’s enterprise for “Child labour. Slavery” (28), the only language available for explaining Tambu’s presence in the city as a seller of green maize. She nevertheless takes pity on Tambu and gives her money for the school fees after Mr. Matimba, her headmaster explains (and exaggerates) her predicament.

 

11. In the interest of fairness, one must acknowledge that education does not free Babamukuru either from service to patriarchy and neo-colonialism. It is Nyasha once again who recognizes that “They did it to them too . . . . To both of them [Babamukuru and Maiguru] but especially to him. They put him through it all” (200). His positioning within these systems, however, is so different from Maiguru’s that his story, in some ways the same as that of the women, still tells a different tale that would require a significantly different critical model to explain it.

 

12. Nyasha complains that “she always runs to men . . . . There’s no hope” (175).

 

13. It may be useful to note at this juncture that both Fanon and Dangarembga were trained in medicine and psychology.

 

14. Hindi for passive resistance.

 

15. In her interview with George and Scott, Dangarembga explains her rationale for the grandmother figure:

 

I didn’t have a grandmother or a person in my family who was a historian who could tell me about the recent past. And so I felt the lack of such a history very much more. I’m sure that other Zimbabwean women who perhaps did have that need fulfilled in reality would not have felt such a lack, such a dearth as I did, and would not have felt so strongly compelled to create a figure like the Grandmother’s in Nervous Conditions. (311-12)

 

Works Cited

 

• Bersianik, Louky. Le Pique-nique sur l’Acropole: Cahiers d’ancyl. Montreal: VLB Editeur, 1979.
• Bordo, Susan. “The Body and Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault.” Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. Ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan Bordo. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1992.
• Braidotti, Rosi. “Organs without Bodies.” Differences 1.1 (Winter 1989): 147-61.
• Courville, Cindy. “Re-examining Patriarchy as a Mode of Production: The Case of Zimbabwe.” Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women. London: Routledge, 1993. 31-43.
• Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. Seattle: Seal, 1988.
• Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966.
• Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1963.
• George, Rosemary Marangoly, and Helen Scott. “An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga.” Novel: A Forum of Fiction 26 (1993): 309-19.
• Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Sydney: Unwin, 1989.
• Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
• McWilliams, Sally. “Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions: At the Crossroads of Feminism and Postcolonialism.” World Literature Written in English 31.1 (1991): 103-112.
• Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, et al. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
• —. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2 12.3/13.1 (Spring/Fall 1984): 333-58.
• Ogundipe-Leslie, Molara. “African Women, Culture, and Another Development.” Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women. London: Routledge, 1993. 102-117.
• Nadel, George H. and Perry Curtis, eds. Imperialism and Colonialism. New York: Macmillan, 1964.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Preface. The Wretched of the Earth. By Frantz Fanon. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1963. 7-31.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Forthcoming interview in Between the Lines: South Asians on Postcolonial Identity and Culture. Ed. Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1995.
• Strachey, Lytton. Queen Victoria. London: Collins, 1968 [1921].
• Taussig, Michael. The Nervous System. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Thomas, Sue. “Killing the Hysteric in the Colonized’s House: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27.1 (1992): 26-36.
• Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper, 1984.
• Wilkinson, Jane. Talking with African Writers: Interviews with African Poets, Playwrights and Novelists. London: Heinemann, 1990.
• Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1991.
• —. Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century. New York: Random House, 1993.