Theme Of Colonization In Nervous Conditions

When we look at colonization we always hear of or learn about the physical pains and hardships the native people had to go through. We see how these people were oppressed and had their lives changed by the white man coming in and trying to change their ways. We hear about the religion that was forced on these people but we never really get inside the mind of the colonized. We don’t see how these changes effect them internally. The novel Nervous Conditions looks at how the actions taken during colonization cause the natives to enter these nervous conditions.
Colonization in African nation nations caused the native peoples to enter into a sort of nervous condition. The colonizers, white people from Europe, would come into the villages of …show more content…
Some of these people, children especially, would go away to get an education and come back having adopted a lot of the European mannerisms. This put these natives in a position of not fitting into either the European culture, as the whites refuse to see them as equals, and they don’t fit in with their native people, as they have lost a lot of their African culture. This put them into a state of duel conscious, which produced a nervous condition. They were constantly being pulled between two different cultures. This can harm people as they feel they have nowhere to fit in. They feel isolated and this damages their psyche, thrusting them further into this nervous condition. In the preface to Wretched of the earth, Jean-Paul Sartre describes how the natives “can’t choose; they must have both. Two worlds: that makes two bewitching; they dance all night and at dawn they crowd into churches to hear mass; each day the split widens… The status of <> is a nervous condition introduced and maintained …show more content…
She was born in Africa but at a young age moved to England where she spent a majority of her childhood. She moved back as a teen where, being a product of both England and Africa, she experienced the pull of the two worlds. Having spent a majority of her life in England it was hard for her to fit back in the African culture she left as a child. She had a lot of different views the conflict with those of the native children causing not fit in with them. This push’s her to the into a double consciousness. The colonization has also caused her body to become a sort of battleground between her father and her. Her father wanting to adhere to the more traditional standards of how to treat her body, Nyasha, having the heavy British influence, disagrees with her father. This causes Nyasha to develop an eating disorder, taking back control of her body. She refuses to eat and throws up when she does eat. Eventually, the alienation she experiences catches up to her and she breaks down. She is described as having “sunken eyes, [with] her bony knees pressed together so that her nightdress fell through the space where her thighs had been, agitated and picking her skin” (Dangerembga 200). The stress and eating disorder had finally taken its toll. She has abused her body just to gain that power taken away from her by her father and the culture she can’t it in. Nyasha