This essentialism attached to being a woman is fascinating. According to both her father and deceased brother Nhamo, Tambu should possess a natural affinity to the home. Even further, she shouldn't possess any interest at all outside of it. Her brother states this plainly to Tambu in an conversation arguing that, "I go to school. You go nowhere" (21). Members of Tambu's family are consistently reiterating the gender norms of her society. It is unnatural for her to go to school, her responsibilities as a woman already being established.
Even when Tambu finally is given the chance to go to school, she realizes the "self-esteem curb" she has to overcome. She was well aware of the shame her brother had for their way of living and had even accepted it as a shameful thing (12-14). Reflecting on her appearances as she heads to school, Tambu describes herself as a peasant, albeit physically almost exclusively. "It was evident from the corrugated black callouses on my knees, the scales on my skin that were due to a lack of oil, the short, dull tufts of my malnourished hair" (58). In this passage, the narrator describes the characteristics of a laborer as opposed to a student or scholar. This physical class status is a source of shame for Tambu, which is already layered with the fact that she is a young woman going to school. Regardless of these forces, Tambu takes full advantage of this opportunity to be educated. What I appreciate most about this text is the intersectional narrative that is embedded from the very beginning. It seems as if blackness is often conflated with class, a notion I look forward to deconstructing within our discussions.
I appreciate that you draw attention to the fact that this sacrifice of Tambu's was very normalized to the point that she was not even allowed to view it as a sacrifice. I think that two factors are at play here in lowering Tambu's self esteem and self worth: not allowing her to feel that she deserves an education, and her lack of education itself. Obviously, in implying that she has no purpose beyond the home, this notion would discourage her from feeling any self worth. Conversely, in being denied the education that her brother was provided, she begins to feel less important to her family because she is not able to "raise them out of poverty" as they believe Nhamo to be doing.
ReplyDeleteOn that note, however, one question I would like to draw attention to, is how much of this attitude toward education is gendered and how much of it is based on class. That is not to imply that they aren't deeply intertwined. However, my interpretation of the book seems as though the family acknowledged that even Nhamo's education was a privilege and not a right. I think the large issue presents itself when the family only has enough funds to send one child to school and then the gender roles dictate that the boy should be the one to carry on his education rather than the girl. That said, the conversations between Jeremiah and Babamukuru suggested to me that in families often times it was seen as necessary to keep some of the children home to work (like Jeremiah) while others were educated (like Babmukuru). I agree that there is undeniably a gender component to deciding who gets to go to school, though I am not convinced that the belief, at least within the family presented is that boys deserve education while girls are expected to stay home. I think there are more aspects of economic availability at play to answer the question of who has a right to education.
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ReplyDeleteI like that you point to moments in the text when we are able to very clearly see the ways in which schooling and domesticity are gendered. The perpetuation and pervasiveness of these traditional gender roles, alongside understanding of class and blackness, is framework through which Tambu navigates.
ReplyDeleteI also thought it was valuable to include the quote by Tambu’s brother pulled from page 21. The “You go nowhere” in this quote can help us to understand the denial of her education not solely as a product of class and gender oppression but also as a denial of agency and mobility. The word “nowhere” is both literal and symbolic in the sense that it represents the affordances of an education and Tambu’s realities that come as a result of not having equal access to it. Realities that are wrapped in class oppression and social constructions of gender.
I also like that you call attention to this presumable conflation of blackness and class. For instance, on page 16 when Tambu’s mother mentions the idea of the “poverty of blackness”. I think it is useful to think about what Tambu’s mother might be saying here. Is she saying that poverty is inherent in blackness or that poverty is a product racial oppression? Unpacking this phrase further could shed light on the intersectional complexities presented within the novel.
I agree. The class politics were very apparent from the beginning of the novel. What interested me was the connection between education and class, which was also present with Nhamo. The author states that, “all this poverty began to offend him, or at the very least embarrass him after he went to the mission, in a way that it had not done before” (7). After attending school at the mission, he began to feel a sense of superiority, which made his old life and family feel inadequate and shameful, causing him to distance himself from them. More interestingly is his conception of poverty and “squalor” as the author describes as, “before he went to the mission, we had been able to agree that although our squalor was brutal, it was uncompromisingly ours; that the burden of dispelling it was, as a result, ours too. But then something that he saw at the mission turned his mind to thinking that our homestead no longer had any claim upon him” (7). From this passage, it seems like the family’s poverty had not bothered them because they felt power and control over it; they felt that they had the power to overcome it but chose not to. But Nhamo’s education had contributed to his individual sense of superiority and caused him to distance himself from his family and their poverty, he no longer felt any ownership or connection to them.
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