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Chapter 2.3.4, The Female Empowerment and Conclusion:
Other women of the novel also show signs of mental illness and resistance. Mainini, who is feeling helpless and worn out by the weight of poverty and childbearing, succumbs to depression after her daughter’s admittance to the Roman Catholic Convent School. However, her depression is not a sudden reaction to the fear of losing her daughter to British culture, but an aggravation of her prior fears. A week before Tambu’s departure for the mission school, Mainini’s anxiety spoils her appetite: ‘she ate hardly anything” and ‘she could hardly walk to the fields, let alone work in them” (57). When Tambu visits her parents in the Christmas holidays, she finds her pregnant mother in a bad condition even though her body seems to be unaffected. Tambu relates, ‘she was not looking ill at all. In fact, she was looking much stronger than she had been when I last saw her” (133). Tambu reports that Mainini suffers from ‘unlocalised aches all over her body” (131). Her suffering discloses the symptoms of the illness of the soul associated with trauma. After Tambu wins a scholarship and is thrilled to start her education at the white convent school, Mainini sees the validation of her concerns of losing Tambu to white culture. She develops depression and stops eating and looking after her baby: ‘She ate less and less and did less and less, within days she could neither eat nor do anything, not even change the dress she wore, reacting to nothing” (187). Mainini’s depression is likely to be attributed to the anxiety disorder of PTSD, after her exposure to multiple traumatic experiences of first losing her son to ‘Englishness’ and then the immediate threat of losing her daughter the same way. Her younger sister Lucia’s ‘shock treatment” (188) brings her back to washing herself and looking after her baby. Her sister’s help in caring for her baby relieves at least for a while the weight of Mainini’s motherhood. Moreover, with her early insights into the dangers of ‘Englishness’, Mainini ‘is the first to actually recognize Nyasha’s eating disorder, and to diagnose it: ‘It’s Englishness,’ [207] she says shortly.’ Zwicker contends that Tambu’s mother ‘sees things more clearly than do other characters of the text,’ and therefore, she ‘demonstrates an extraordinary self-consciousness throughout the novel’.
Dangarembga brings up the issue of the voice of subaltern woman in the novel, left ignored by Fanon. She not only challenges Fanon by emphasising the importance of gender in colonial discourse, but also eradicates the voicelessness of the subaltern woman by giving her a voice in her novel. Maiguru finds a way to resist the patriarchal dominance of her mighty husband and succeeds in finding her voice in the novel. Dangarembga depicts the ‘strained atmosphere’ of ‘the homestead and the mission,’ where Maiguru is ‘hysterically over compliant with Shona patriarchal expectations’ in spite of her ‘excellent education.’ The tense situation makes her ‘sick’ (174) from supporting Babamukuru’s family financially and physically and being permanently silenced by her husband. She complains of being unnerved by ‘the inmates of her house’ (115). Finally she escapes her miserable nervous condition and flees from her husband’s house. After her ‘five-day hiatus’ she changes her attitude and returns as a confident woman. She loses most of her ‘baby-talk’ (178) and no longer calls her husband ‘her Daddy-sweet’ (166). Tambu talks about the difference: ‘She smiled more often and less mechanically, fussed over us less and was more willing or able to talk about sensible things’ (178).
With the novel, the author demonstrates ‘gendered contexts’ of predicament and resistance and makes ‘visible a range of responses to oppressive situations.’ The novel tells a story about the resistance of colonised African women. It reveals ‘how Zimbabwean women can find collective and personal voices in a patriarchal society suffering from the effects of colonization.’ The novelist stresses that the resistance emanates from the women in the novel. On the one hand, the novel is a double critique of colonialism and sexism, but on the other hand, it concedes a subtle glorification of women’s oppression. In the long run women even benefit from it to some degree because they are less affected by assimilation. Since native women are less exposed to the dangers of colonial rule, they are less traumatised. Even though the author explicitly criticises women’s degradation and their deprivation of the right and opportunity to belong to the colonial elite, she exposes women’s better point of departure to cope with Englishness than that of men. Dangarembga’s novel implies that the doubly colonised women are better off because they are more likely to generate a resistance. The men in the novel are excluded from showing such acute symptoms of resistance due to their direct inclusion in the centre of colonial hegemony. Men are more directly subjected to colonial influence and, as agents of the implementation of the colonial system, they are more directly affected and thus endangered by Englishness. Their closeness to the centre makes them accomplices of their colonial masters and leaves less space for resistance. Since they are further away from the centre of the system, women’s ‘symptoms are likely to be expressed more fully and disruptively’.
Furthermore, with the book, the author creates an empowering act of self-assertion and ‘arrives at a sense of her own agency.’ The author makes use of ‘the tools given by colonial education to make her own account of herself.’ Paradoxically, the means she employs to articulate her consciousness and resistance are provided by the system she is criticising. Her work demonstrates that she has learnt to take advantage of colonial education in order to break out of silence and reclaim agency for herself. The plot of the novel demonstrates how she finds her own agency to combat the unjust system, and the novel itself is the evidence to her resistance. In the novel, she captures the traditions and rituals of her people in the language of the system that sought to extinguish them. With her account she shows that stomaching some ‘Englishness’ is ultimately empowering. Thus she writes back to the canon, and lays bare the complexities of the psyche of the colonised. She clarifies the continuous nature of colonial trauma and elucidates the consequences of living in a system woven with injustice and oppression. The novel illustrates how the women’s attitudes change and they find their voice and thus the means of articulation for their opinion. Dangarembga shows that the symptoms of colonial trauma also have a positive meaning. They are hints of resistance to subjugation, injustice and silencing. Therefore, the symptom of resistance is ‘a curse, but it is also a blessing.’ Dangaremba leaves the ending open and never tells us what will become of anorexic Nyasha. Nyasha, left still alive and struggling, leaves a chance open for healing and survival. Though the formerly colonised subject will never get back to his or her pre-colonial state, he or she can survive carrying the scars of his or her colonial past. Similarly, Nyasha might recuperate but never become fully unaffected, like Tambu, who certainly does survive with the trauma of the past lingering in her soul.
Dangarembga’s novel is an act of resistance to colonial oppression and has an alleviating effect on the author. Similarly to her main character, she ‘finds self and communal articulation through writing.’ The novel reclaims what has been stolen by colonialism and is an act of assertion of the rights and traditions of the indigenous population. Zwicker notes that the author ‘self-consciously crafts a national literature for the new Zimbabwe - a national literature that puts young women first.’ In addition, the book suggests Dangarembga’s objection to the traditional thinking in binary oppositions and implies following historical changes and integrating a new, third term of inbetweenness. Moreover, with the novel, Dangarembga comes to terms with her unnatural rejection of her deceased brother Nhamo. On the whole, although ‘the novel opens with Nhamo’s death and ends with Nyasha’s near-death,’ Dangarembga’s goal is not to depict violence but to emphasise resistance. The narrator Tambudzai, or Tambu, states in the opening of the book, ‘my story is not after all about death, but about my escape and Lucia’s; about my mother’s and Maiguru’s entrapment; and about Nyasha’s rebellion’ (1).