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I wrote Nervous Conditions as a fugitive from what my life had become: Dangarembga - NewsDay Zimbabwe

NERVOUS Conditions is a novel about yearning and wanting, about black girls — in this case Zimbabwean girls — desiring better for themselves and their loved ones. I wrote it as a fugitive. A fugitive from my first memories and of what my life had become. Early memories were of a foster home in Dover, then of returning to a Rhodesia that had just removed itself from the British empire. After school I returned to England to study for a BSc in medicine at the University of Cambridge. The idea was to proceed to a teaching hospital after I graduated, such as the hospital at the mission in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe where I would spend several years of my childhood. But the nationalist liberation struggle escalated while I was at college, and in the summer of 1979 a peace treaty resulted in a road map to independence. I was in London, where I’d spent all my summers since arriving in England, during the peace talks. The bleakness of the Zimbabwean students’ lives, their self-medication with various drugs and episodes of mental collapse related to reliving a war from which they’d fled indicated to me how the mind needed as much treatment as the body. Returning to Cambridge under strain, I decided there was no point in enduring the pressure of finding cheap digs I could afford for the holidays, of being the only black girl in my college, reading for a degree I was no longer interested in. Nor was anyone aware of, or interested in, the historical upheaval that had ruined lives and families in Rhodesia. I returned to Zimbabwe in the winter and enrolled at the University of Zimbabwe. I flourished in the new, independent country. Looking back on my cross cultural experiences and my upbringing in a conservative semi-traditional culture, I realised I had been singularly unprepared to manage the circumstances I had encountered in England I had experienced racism growing up in Rhodesia and had not expected it in England. I didn’t suffer it. But I suffered from lack of interest in and ignorance of a bloody war that had affected my family. A culture-shocked student at Cambridge, I suffered from sexual predation when I looked for holiday digs, and ended up in cheap B&Bs. It became evident to me that differences between how my elder brother and I had been brought up had an impact on our coping mechanisms. Standing up for oneself, knowing what one wanted and asking for it were not part of my repertoire. I thought young women had to be warned about this. I wanted to write about a girl many young Zimbabwean women would identify with, someone who was grounded in a Zimbabwean experience, so I chose the character of a rural girl, Tambudzai (the country’s population was more than 70% rural at the time). Babamukuru, her well-off uncle, came to me easily. The extended family, with more and less well-to-do branches, is still a reality and a source of frustration and contention caused by demands, expectations and obligations today. At first, I didn’t have a clue what I was writing. Then I read Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, which gave m

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