Disembodying The Corpus: Postcolonial

Pathology In Tsitsi Dangarembga's 'Nervous Conditions'

Deepika Bahri

© 1994

PMC 5.1

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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).

9. 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

10. 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).

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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).

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. 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).

24. 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).

25. 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).

26. 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.

School of Literature, Communication, and Culture

Georgia Institute of Technology

deepika.bahri@modlangs.gatech.edu

Copyright © 1994 Deepika Bahri NOTE: Readers

may use portions of this work in accordance with the Fair Use

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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)

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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

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Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,

1987.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis

of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London:

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Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans.

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George, Rosemary Marangoly, and Helen Scott.

"An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga." Novel:

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Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: Three

French Feminists. Sydney: Unwin, 1989.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on

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Columbia UP, 1982.

McWilliams, Sally. "Tsitsi Dangarembga's

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Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, et al. Third World

Women and the Politics of Feminism.

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Ogundipe-Leslie, Molara. "African Women,

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