Self-starvation in the context of hunger: Health, normalcy and the “terror of the possible” in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions

摘要

Despite receiving much critical attention, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988) has, perhaps surprisingly, not yet been considered in relation to discourses of hunger and health in Africa. This article seeks to redress this critical omission by examining the significance of the social and material context of widespread hunger and malnutrition to Nyasha's eating disorder. It uses disability studies' conceptualization and critique of normalcy to explore the social construction of hunger as a normative state of health in the novel's setting in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). It concludes that Dangarembga offers a comprehensive demonstration of how such a context can be disabling to its inhabitants, whether or not they are directly affected by famine. As such, Dangarembga encourages us to consider health and illness in situated cultural terms, and her careful historicization and contextualization of Nyasha's “nervous condition” is a productive intervention into often reductive debates on hunger and public health in Africa.