This essay looks at Tsitsi Dangaremgba’s novel ‘Nervous conditions’ (1988), which is set in colonial Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) from the 1950s up to the period shortly before the country’s independence in 1980. It offers a reading that conjoins toward thematic explication the focal idea of space and a number of the text’s other literary elements, namely ‘point of view’, character, plot, action, narrative. It argues more specifically that interweaving those resources, ‘Nervous conditions’ explores the following premise: it asserts that its female character’s plight is codified in various domestic and public spatial structures, ideologies and experiences that differently impede women’s lives under (post)colonization, which itself is an unfinished tale of history and identity. The novel points out concomitantly that survival and transcendence of that colonization experience and its stresses demand that one, especially the ex-colonial, remains ideologically flexible rather than unbending and repressive. Furthermore, the essay shows that the text of ‘Nervous conditions’ exemplifies the notion that content and form complement each other and thus are inseparable. Bibliogr. [ASC Leiden abstract]
