A Nauseating Fall. Understatement and Realisation in Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions

摘要

The strikingly simple style of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions —the narration of an apparently innocent child, Tambudzai— cuts deep into the reader, making the novel an impressively powerful critique of the colonial machinery. The aim of this paper is to show to what extent the unreliable narrator, with her understatements, is responsible for the numerous connections with the most well-known postcolonial theories. The many readings Dangarembga’s work has received, from a myriad of perspectives (feminism, postcolonialism, the bildungsroman), are rooted in the apparent ambiguity of the narrator’s words. The first part of this paper is concerned with describing the quality of this narration: just as Fanon’s prophetic voice, Dangarembga’s revolts the reader so as to make her fall into realisation. The second part of this paper deals again with this sudden awareness of reality, not the reader’s but the characters’ when having to experience what Bhabha defined as mimicry; the wedding between Tambu’s parents is a turning point in her life because of her refusal to comply with the discourse of power and thus speak of her «newly acquired identity» (Dangarembga, 1998: 169). Taking into account the oppression to which the characters are subjected and their manifold kinds of resignation, Nervous Conditions fights back with conscience. Understatement and subsequent realisation are the best device to make us, readers, aware of the shackles of the Empire and, at the same time, conscious of the menace that this ironic contempt implies. Dangarembga’s tight smile in the face of power through the voice of a conscious child is, decidedly, a cry of hope.