‘The Geography of Hunger’: Intertextual Bodies in Nervous Conditions

Abstract

On its appearance in 1988, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions became the first novel by a black Zimbabwean woman to be published in English, meeting with immediate critical acclaim by winning the Africa section of the Commonwealth Writers Prize in the following year. The novel is preceded by an epigraph (also the source of its title) derived from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) — ‘The condition of native is a nervous condition.’ As might be expected, Dangarembga’s allusion (via Sartre) to The Wretched of the Earth has led numerous critics to locate her text within a Fanonian frame of reference. At the same time, however, these critics are rightly at pains to stress how Dangarembga’s fiction not only deploys Fanon’s theoretical insights into the pathological workings of colonial domination but also extends and revises them from a black feminist perspective. As M. Keith Booker writes, in the most recent instance of this approach: ‘Nervous Conditions goes beyond Fanon, whose male-oriented analysis of the colonial condition does not explore gender issues in any substantive way’.²

Now that the mouth is shut, the heart is proud.

Tsitsi Dangarembga

The relations of man with matter … and with history are in the colonial period simply relations with food … The fact is that the only perspective is that belly which is more and more sunken, which is certainly less and less demanding, but which must be contented all the same.

Frantz Fanon

Take the matter as you find it: ask no questions; utter no remonstrances: it is your best wisdom. You expected bread, and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don’t shriek because the nerves are martyrized: do not doubt that your mental stomach — if you have such a thing — is strong as an ostrich’s — the stone will digest.

Charlotte Brontë¹