A central theme of Nervous Conditions is Tambu's inability to attend school, due to the gender and racial constraints placed on her. Throughout the first few chapters, she points out that this came from all facets of her life -- her father, her brother, and her mother all tell her that she cannot go to school, that she will never be able to make it, that even if she could the skills that she will be learning will not be useful to her. Rather than internalize this, she fights against it from a very young age. "My mother said being black was a burden because it made you poor, but Babamukuru was not poor," she tells us. "My mother said being a woman was a burden because you had to bear children and look after them and the children. But I did not think this was true. ... [Maiguru] was altogether a different kind of woman from my mother. I decided it was better to be like Maiguru, who was not poor and had not been crushed by the weight of womanhood" (Conditions 16).
She looks at what her family are telling her and does not internalize the restrictions placed on her. When she wishes to sell her maize, she does so even though there is no one to encourage her, and grows resentful of the idea that she can only be a wife and never educated. When she is told that she cannot go to school because there is no money, she does not think of how unfair this is; she decides that she will make it for herself since her family will not provide for her. At the age of eight, she has learned that self-sufficiency is the most important thing. While she still faces backlash, in the end she manages to make the money that her parents did not provide. At every turn there are attempts to thwart her made by her brother and her father (and, more passively, her mother) but she does not allow herself to be deterred. What is important to her is education, and she does not see a difference between herself and her brother, even though she is a girl. When, in fact, her brother points out that the reason she cannot go to school is because she is a girl, she says, "I was no longer listening. My concern for my brother died an unobtrusive death" (Conditions 21).
Importantly, however, the restrictions being placed on her by the different members of her family are coming from different points of concern. Her father wishes to keep her under his thumb; he does not want her to make money on her own because when she does she will leave him and he will not receive any of the benefits. When she has made ten pounds from selling her maize, he fights with the headmaster on it, saying, "Have you ever heard of a woman who remains in her father's house? ... She will meet a young man and I will lose everything" (Conditions 30). He does not want his daughter to succeed unless he will see some of the rewards coming from it. Her mother, on the other hand, is coming from a place of resignation and the idea that women should take care of the household because it is the more moral thing to do. In her long paragraph on page 16, she asks her, "Aren't we the ones who bear children? When it is like that you can't just decide today I want to do this, tomorrow I want to do that, the next day I want to be educated! ... And these days it is worse, with the poverty of blackness on one side and the weight of womanhood on the other." There is not the selfishness here, but a concern for her daughter's future and a sense of obligation. Finally, her brother is simply doing as he has been taught. "Perhaps I am making it seem as though Nhamo simply decided to be obnoxious, when in reality that was not the case; when in reality he was doing no more than behave, perhaps extremely, in the expected manner" (Conditions 12). While she is angry at him, and has lost concern for him, she recognizes now, later in life, that he was not entirely in charge of the things he said and the way he treated her.
Regardless of the different perspectives, Tambu solemnly tells us, "Thinking about it, feeling the injustice of it, this is how I came to dislike my brother, and not only my brother, my father, my mother -- in fact everybody" (Conditions 12). With all of the different pressures and her inability to freely do as she wished, she grew to dislike and resent her whole family and everyone standing in her way.
Like Jasmine, I found the line about Tambu growing to hate everyone very significant. I think that it first of all is very haunting and sad. I cannot imagine growing to hate my family and brothers. But I believe that that's what I'm supposed to be thinking. I am supposed to be wondering under what circumstances can a perfectly nice, normal girl grow to hate her entire family. It's unthinkable to me, which is what makes it so thought provoking. It expresses the almost insurmountable odds facing Tambu, shows how hard she has to work for her education and the extreme cost of her decisions.
ReplyDeleteIt also highlights the gender tensions that re so rife in the community described: it's either be a married woman and love your family or be educated and hate everyone. It emphasizes the problems at the level of the society as a whole. This isn't just one family's trouble: this is an entire society built on very specific gender roles that, as we see with Tambu, are extremely harmful.
This gender discrimination not only harms the culture because it prevents half the population from being developed, but also does serious personal damage to the people involved in this prejudicial hierarchy. This system is harmful to everyone involved in it in truly irreversible ways. It breaks up families and corrupts (arguably) one of the purest things in their world: familial love. All of this serves to inform us, as readers, how dire the situation really is.