Reading "the geography of hunger" in Tsitsi Dangarembga's nervous conditions: From Frantz Fanon to Charlotte Brontë

Journal of Commonwealth Literature

Volumn 33, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 35-45

  Plasa, Carl ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WALES   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34347285566     PISSN: 00219894     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/002200949803300104     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, Har-mondsworth: Penguin, 1990, p. 249
2. Sue Thomas, "Killing the Hysteric in the Colonized's House: Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions"', Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27, 1 (1992), 34
3. Michelle Vizzard, '"Of Mimicry and Woman': Hysteria and Anticolonial Feminism in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions", SPAN, 36 (1993), 205
4. Charles Sugnet, "Nervous Conditions: Dangarembga's Feminist Reinvention of Fanon" in The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature, ed. Obioma Nnaemeka, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 33
5. Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions, London: The Women's Press, 1997, p. 93. All subsequent references are to this edition and included in the text
6. Dangarembga's reference to Blyton is subtly pertinent, both ideologically and thematically: Blyton's work not only offers a version of "Englishness" that has been condemned by many as simultaneously classist, sexist and racist and is unlikely, as such, to do much to nourish the self-image of the Tambudzai who reads her but also, like Nervous Conditions itself, is strikingly food-centred. As Michael Woods puts it, Blyton's evocations of food and eating are "reminiscent of an orgy in an Edwardian emporium... tongues, ham, pies, lemonade and ginger beer. This is not just food, it is archetypal feasting". Cited in Stephen Moss, "The Eternal Child", The Guardian, Friday Review, 11 April 1997, p. 3
7. That the work of "the Bronte sisters" should resonate with the anticolonial feminism of an African novelist such as Dangarembga is far from surprising. As numerous critics have demonstrated, the feminist fictions of Charlotte and Emily Brontë in particular need to be situated - and critiqued - from the perspective of the larger discourses of colonialism and empire in which they are implicated. The most influential illustration of such an approach is, of course, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's analysis of Jane Eyre in "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism", Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), 243-61
8. For examples of more recent "decolonizing" readings of Charlotte and Emily Brontë see, respectively, Firdous Azim, The Colonial Rise of the Novel, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 109-213
9. and Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women's Writing, Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1996, pp. 96-125
10. It should also be recalled that Charlotte Brontë's early writings - produced in collaboration with Branwell Brontë - are themselves located in Angria, an imaginary imperial space "carved", in the words of Juliet Barker, "out of the interior of Africa". Juliet Barker, ed., Charlotte Bronte: Juvenilia 1829-1835, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996, p. 270
11. Abigail Bray, "The Anorexic Body: Reading Disorders", Cultural Studies, 10 (1996), 413
12. Dangarembga herself suggests that this assumption needs to be challenged, noting that cases of what might be called a black anorexia "have been reported in Zimbabwe", while at the same time recognizing - like Bray - that "The diagnosis of anorexia is something difficult. If a woman in Zimbabwe, rural or urban is depressed, loses weight etc. who is to say whether that is anorexia or not?... When does a depression become a disease?", "Between Gender, Race and History: Kirsten Holst Petersen Interviews Tsitsi Dangarembga", Kunapipi, 16, 1 (1994), 346
13. For detailed discussion of the conflicting ways in which the incidence of eating disorders in Zimbabwean and other non-Western contexts has been handled see Heidi Creamer, "An Apple for the Teacher? Femininity, Coloniality, and Food in Nervous Conditions", ibid., 359-60, note 8
14. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, London: Pluto Press, 1993, p. 161
15. Gwen Bergner, "Who Is That Masked Woman? or, The Role of Gender in Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks", PMLA, 110 (1995), 76 (emphasis in original)
16. On this point see, inter alia, Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980, London: Virago, 1987, p. 127
17. Rod Edmond, Affairs of the Hearth: Victorian Poetry and Domestic Narrative, London and New York: Routledge, 1988, p. 193
18. Deirdre Lashgari, "What Some Women Can't Swallow: Hunger as Protest in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley" in Disorderly Eaters: Texts in Self-Empowerment, ed. Lilian R. Furst and Peter W. Graham, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State, UP, 1992, p. 141
19. Elsie Michie, "From Simianized Irish to Oriental Despots: Heathcliff, Rochester and Racial Difference", Novel, 25, (1992), 125
20. Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989, p. 134 (emphasis in original)