World Literature, Contrapuntal Literature May Hawas

Chapter 2

Gender Resistance as World Literature:

Individual and Global Landscapes

in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions

and Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage

Feminist practice…operates at a number of levels: at the level of daily life through the everyday acts that constitute our identities and relational communities; at the level of collective action in groups, networks, and movements constituted around feminist visions of social transformation; and at the levels of theory, pedagogy, and textual creativity in the scholarly and writing practices of feminists engaged in the production of knowledge.

Chandra T. Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders (5)
So history is spread out beneath [the] surface, from the mountains to the sea, from north to south, from the forest to the beaches…[R]esistance and denial, entrenchment and endurance, the world beyond and dream. (Our landscape is its own monument: its meaning can only be traced on the underside. It is all history).

Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse (11)

In his admirable exposé of the development of Weltliteratur (2006) John Pizer examines the concept coined and practised by Goethe and antecedents in Germany, and discusses how it later developed during the twentieth century in the US. Pizer suggests that one of the critical objectives of World Literature in its recent re-emergence (also initially intended by Goethe) is to locate the interchange between ‘universal’ and ‘specific’, ‘transnational’ and ‘subnational’ elements in a literary work. World Literature would then offer a way to discuss texts within a global but not generalist framework, and to draw out the “linguistic/cultural alterity” (7) in texts without being limited by the too-narrow confines of perceiving a purely national literature. On the same topic Svend Erik Larsen discusses an analogy used by Danish comparatist Georg Brandes. According to Larsen, Brandes defined World Literature as the kind of locally-anchored literature that transcends its local constraints and opens up to a translocal world, yet one that gains its value (or “vigor”) by being firmly rooted in its historical context. The approach required by World Literature needs to look at the work as if through a telescope with differently functioning glasses on either end, one end magnifying the text’s contextual specificity and the other diminishing it by distance (Larsen).⁷²

Clearly, “the move away from singularities of ‘class’ or ‘gender’ as primary conceptual and organizational categories, has resulted in an awareness of the subject positions –of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation– that inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world” (Bhabha Location of Culture 2). How can such different subject positions be negotiated simultaneously? In her article “Besides the West: Postcolonial Women Writers, the Nation, and the Globalised World”⁷³ on the crossovers between (postcolonial) gender studies and transnational discourses, Elleke Boehmer suggests at least one way in which gender in particular may link in productive ways such ‘subnational and transnational’ or ‘specific and universal’ elements. Focusing on Arundhati Roy and Yvonne Vera, Boehmer argues that by engaging with their condition as women specifically in relation to the nation or to a nationally-circumscribed space, writers succeed in addressing issues of belonging that have both trans-local or global resonances, and thereby are able to suggest various modes of cross-border affiliations.

This chapter will look at the ‘subnational and transnational’, ‘universal and specific’ points of dialogue in the gendered journeys of acculturation and conditioning whereby several women protagonists move towards education, independence and social status and come to understand something about their individuality, their local/national communities and their places in the world. Touching upon the tensions between nation and globe pervading discussions of World Literature, the chapter will compare how Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) and Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: A Woman’s Journey from Cairo to America (1999) address local issues by drawing on or appealing to a shared ethical or moral world of gender, what, for the purposes of this thesis may be called, a ‘global nation’.⁷⁴ Going, as Damrosch calls it, ‘glocal’⁷⁵ the women protagonists explore individual formation in light of gender issues and within a specific national context. They thus transcend the nation to a more global ‘solidarity’ of women by qualifying (rather than effacing) the political question of the texts from one of national citizenship (what does it mean to be Zimbabwean, Egyptian or English) into one of gender codified by national and postcolonial paradigms (what does it mean for the narrator to be a woman of the world at a specific time in Zimbabwe, Egypt, England and the US?). This chapter proceeds in smaller concentric circles from the globe to the individual, using Brandes’s proverbial ‘telescope’, to examine how the protagonists appropriate and describe landscapes to reflect the formation of their identity and resistance to their political status quo.⁷⁶ The view thus moves from natural landscapes being designated as natural resources, then national territory, before narrowing gradually to smaller constructed, boundaried landscapes, such as ornamental private gardens, the home, and lastly, the bedroom.

Born in 1959 in what was then Rhodesia, Tsitsi Dangarembga was educated for a short time in England as a child, moved to Rhodesia to receive her A-levels, moved back to England to start medicine at Cambridge, before returning to what had become Zimbabwe to take up psychology at the University of Zimbabwe. With the support of the international network of women’s institutions (Sugnet 47) Nervous Conditions swiftly became a bestseller and was acclaimed as ‘the first novel in English by a Zimbabwean woman writer’. It was also quickly categorised as a classic Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, representational of Africa and African women in general, Zimbabweans in particular and black Zimbabwean women at its most specific –as indicated by all except two of the fourteen review-quotes accompanying the 2006 Ayebia edition. Featuring on many syllabi on women’s studies, postcolonial literature and African writers in universities around the world, one author described it as “canonical…even ubiquitous” (Mustafa 389; see also Hassan; and Gallagher). Semi-autobiographical, the novel’s time frame almost runs parallel to Dangarembga’s own lifetime. Tambu, the main protagonist and narrator is a Shona peasant girl living in colonial Rhodesia in the 1960s-70s (when Dangarembga herself would have been a child). Tambu leaves to the mission school near Umtali where her uncle is the headmaster, moves into her uncle’s house and shares a bedroom with her second fictional self, the slightly older cousin Nyasha who has recently returned after having spent five years in England (like Dangarembga herself at about that age). A few years after, possibly early or mid-1970s, Tambu wins a scholarship to the exclusive Young Ladies College of the Sacred Heart (a similar institution to the one in which Dangarembga herself had taken her A-levels). As the book closes on Tambu’s first years at the Sacred Heart, Zimbabwe is on its way to gaining independence. Some nine years later, narrative time and real time come together: the year is 1988, Dangarembga has turned 29, and Tambu’s adult voice begins recounting her first-person novel in retrospect, looking back at the past, but making clear that her journey to awareness was “a long and painful process…whose events stretched over so many years” eventually bringing her “to this time when I can set down this story” (208).

Written as a memoir, Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: A Woman’s Journey from Cairo to America presents a comparable formation narrative. Growing up in 1940s Cairo, Ahmed goes to university in England, moves on to teach in the UAE, and then relocates to the US where she finally settles. Frequently stopping in her memoir at moments when she has reached peace with herself whether in relation to her parents, the colour of her skin or her society and class, Ahmed realises that her journey of self-knowledge has taught her that the self is plural, changing and continuous: conceived at a threshold of what might be called, following from Lionnet (1989; 1995), métissage:⁷⁷

For the truth is, I think that we are always plural. Not either this or that, but this and that. And we always embody in our multiple shifting consciousnesses a convergence of traditions, cultures, histories coming together in this time and this place and moving like rivers through us. And I know now that the point is to look back with insight and without judgment, and I know now that it is of the nature of being in this place, this place of convergence of histories, cultures, ways of thought, that there will always be new ways to understand what we are living through, and that I will never come to a point of rest or of finality in my understanding. [Italics in original] (Ahmed 25-26)

Ahmed’s river metaphor (‘we always embody in our multiple shifting consciousness a convergence of traditions, cultures, histories coming together in this time and place and moving like rivers through us’) can productively be extended to compare ideas of nature, education and cultivation in the two works and how they are used to evoke combined delineations of self/nation/world.

The first few pages of both works are dominated by descriptions of the natural landscape.⁷⁸ From the river where Tambu first plays and bathes and does the laundry to the kitchen where she cooks, cleans and sleeps, and from the garden where Leila plays to her grandparents’ house where she grows up with the family, the narratives tell the stories of women’s lives in women’s spaces. Women appropriate geographical space (landscape) into social space; and because the narratives are politically-charged, the act of designating social spaces becomes a political act, thus reflecting the complex interrelated issues of gender, post-colonialism and literary expression.⁷⁹ Land of course, has always been the physical and conceptual site for colonial, and political in general, conflict:

Underlying social space are territories, lands, geographical domains, the actual geographical underpinnings of the imperial and also the cultural contest. To think about distant places, to colonize them, to populate or depopulate them: all of this occurs on, about, or because of land. The actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about. At the moment when a coincidence occurs between real control and power, the idea of what a given place was (could be, might become), and an actual place –at that moment the struggle for empire is launched. This coincidence is the logic both for Westerners taking possession of land and, during decolonization, for resisting natives reclaiming it…[and affirms] both the primacy of geography and an ideology about control of territory. (Said Culture and Imperialism 93)⁸⁰
In this manner women’s geographic space, whether imposed or self-imposed, makes the ‘land’ they live on, use or are affected by, a social space inherently tied to their designated positions within the political community or nation-state, and bearing further particular political signification if that state is colonised.

According to Nira Yuval-Davis “it is the differential access of different collectivities to the state which dictates the nature of the hegemonic national ethos in the society” (Gender and Nation 2), and this shows in the women’s appropriation of space in accordance to their places in the colonised society. In Tambu’s case, for example, women’s-only places have been marked out at the river probably by the women for their own convenience because such spots are suitably shallow for washing laundry, drawing water for cooking and cleaning and minding children.⁸¹ The women’s ‘designated’ areas suit their societal responsibilities, and imply their roles within the family order, and within the larger organised ‘society’ that is maintained or condoned by the state –as unpaid labourers, for example, (who use the river to water their land), or as girls with unequal access to education (who mind the babies and help their mothers with chores as their older brothers go to school).

As black Zimbabwean women, a move to change or abandon these ‘women’s places’ becomes a move to change their roles in society and therefore protest against their political status-quo. Attitudes such as Tambu’s, who avoids these places because they remind her of her unremitting chores, point to an engagement with various issues at the same time: feminist, racial, national, postcolonial, third-world, etc. Because these women have also marked out these spaces themselves, however, for their convenience (to save time, for example, or to seize the chance to socialise), the sites also become with familiar and repeated practice places of empowerment and exclusion. So while Tambu avoids them, other women can take refuge in them and find solace and support in the company of family members and friends. The places then stand as an alternative to services that state infrastructure might have provided for the women such as day care centres or even public education systems and medical support. Only when a series of small shops opens nearby do the women abandon their favourite places at the river because now they have become too exposed to passersby, and not exclusionary enough.

The form of Ahmed’s memoir often borders on the mystical, an impression furthered by her frequent allusions, including epigraph and concluding quote, to the works of Rumi, the thirteenth-century Muslim Sufi mystic, an epitome of a figure who was at once one and plural.⁸² Like other mystic and Sufi poets, the general theme of Rumi's thought is essentially that of the formative concept of (re)union with the beloved/master (the primal root) from which/whom the mystic subject/slave has been cut off. Often making use of music, poetry or dance as a path for reaching God, the Sufist aimed to go on a mystical journey of spiritual ascent through mind and love to the Perfect One. In this journey the seeker symbolically turns towards the truth, grows through love, abandons the ego, finds the truth and arrives at Perfection. The seeker then returns from this spiritual journey with greater maturity to love and to be of service to the whole of creation indiscriminately and regardless of beliefs, races, classes and nations. Seven centuries later and despite what it would seem to offer of a spiritual, highly localised poetic taste, Rumi’s poetry in 2007 was claimed as the most popular in the United States (Haviland).

Ahmed’s metaphor in likening the ‘convergence of traditions, cultures, histories coming together…like rivers through us’ is mystically apt, suiting well the journey to oneness with nature or the life force. It also makes it easier to locate the versions of practised or spiritual Islam recounted in her book (such as the belief in pacifism) which stresses connectedness to the world and empathy for humanity as a foundation for doctrine. Self-knowledge for Ahmed appears as a way of being in the world and can mean affirming one’s connectedness to all things, and the connectedness of all things to each other, comparable to the connectedness and mutual well-being in the Bantu philosophy of ‘unhu’ that Dangarembga weaves into the sequel to Nervous Conditions.⁸³ By evoking the process of Sufi spiritual self-revelation the river image in Ahmed’s metaphor expands its common metaphorical use in English for the life force and aptly brings out the journey of formation in her narrative.

Ahmed’s references to Sufism too give a segue into the notion of plurality as a way of resisting socio-cultural dominance. Sufism implicitly offers an understanding or acceptance that one is actively in charge of wider discourses of change but also subservient to the status quo. Arising in the first few centuries of Islam, Sufism spread rapidly as both counter-culture to a politico-judicial, highly-specialised doctrinal Islamic learning, and an assimilative culture of Muslim faith, (and still healthily if sometimes furtively exists in the same tradition). “How can we grasp”, asks Chantal Mouffe (in the context of women’s movements within national liberation struggles), “the multiplicity of relations of subordination that can affect an individual if we envisage social agents as homogenous and unified entities? What characterizes the struggles of these new social movements is precisely the multiplicity of subject-positions which constitutes a single agent, and the possibility for this multiplicity to become the site of an antagonism and thereby politicized” (Qtd. in Sugnet 34). Being aware of oneself as both agent of and accessory to social change, of being part of a counter-culture that lies in propinquity to the mainstream culture, and as being formed by this national culture, that national culture and the necessary overlap between them, requires potentially understanding in Ahmed’s words that ‘we always embody in our multiple shifting consciousnesses a convergence of traditions, cultures, histories coming together in this time and this place’ (26).

More territorially, another river weaves through Ahmed’s memoir, and that is the Nile, considered in Egyptian heritage from folk songs to classic literature, from everyday expressions to national songs, and from Pharaonists to Arabists, as quite literally the gift of life.⁸⁴ Herodotus once said or is reported to have said, as every Egyptian schoolchild knows, that ‘Egypt is the gift of the Nile’, and Egyptian schoolchildren are not allowed to forget it even if in many schoolbooks Herodotus’s name itself often goes unmentioned. The ‘key of the Nile’ or the ‘key of life’ is represented in hieroglyphs by the ‘ankh’ symbol (☥) and is often depicted in the hands of the deities of the afterlife offering resurrection to the deceased. Although the meanings of the Ankh sign are still contested⁸⁵ it is often taken to refer to the pivotal role of the Nile in the civilisations that have lived on its banks.

The Nile with its life-giving properties regulates Leila Ahmed’s Cairene childhood for her family house is framed by “lush and tranquil countryside” watered by the Nile on one side, and desert on the other (15). Caught at the conjunctions of histories Ahmed frequently refers to, the house with its garden stands between the (timeless) desert and the encroaching urban sprawl of Cairo, but also ten minutes away from the ancient obelisk of Heliopolis, and the ancient tree of Matariya, where Mary is said to have rested on the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt. Ahmed’s childhood landscape seems to conjure up major discourses of the early Egyptian nationalist movement: the intertwined ancient histories and stories of Islam, Judaism and Christianity (and those with the –Hellenized– Pharaohs), and the chaotic sprawl of the modern capital growing with alarming, unplanned speed as a series of ‘cities’, each overwhelming the other. Cairo’s resident Europeans to whom it mostly owes its ‘belle époque’ are suggested too in the mention of Heliopolis, an ancient site but also an affluent neighbourhood built by a Belgian aristocrat.

The Nile or more generally the river in Africa has held a central place in world writing from antiquity onwards.⁸⁶ In Said’s analysis the river in Africa has figured in novels emblematic of relations between Africa, Asia and Europe such as The Heart of Darkness (1899), further taken up by Tayyib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1956) and Ngugi wa Thiongo’s The River Between (1956). As such, A Border Passage offers an implicit textual Nilean link in a literary tradition of intertwined African-world histories resonant with migrating cultures, both ancient and modern.⁸⁷

In an article on women’s writing from Zimbabwe including Dangarembga’s, Mabura argues that various works “exhibit a de-silencing of women through landscape and a finding of womanist spaces of refuge in it, spaces that are liberatory and enable women to perform a psychological, economical, and even a bodily emancipation” (88). For Tambu the river Nyamarira locates her place in the world, bringing in a ‘convergence of traditions, cultures, histories’ to show her ‘multiple shifting consciousnesses’. In Zimbabwe, which is nested within four major river systems, and as is the case in most strongly agricultural societies, rainfall, rivers and great expanses of water are highly sacral places. For Tambu the river Nyamarira, her first landscape and the widest, borders the homestead and defines her life in different ways. It is where the women water the gardens they grow for food, and fill water drums for drinking and cleaning, carrying them home for their families. It is a spiritually magical place, the place for revitalisation and cleansing, like a pre-Christian, or more specifically in this context, pre-colonial form of baptism. It is a source of childhood freedom and adventure for Tambu, of life ‘before the white wizards came’ (and after which, bathing in public places would be considered indecent or primitive), a symbol of time immemorial and the sheer love of the land. For these reasons Tambu loves its ‘deep cool places’ that men and children use for bathing, and when still brave enough, before her “breasts grew too large”, she would on impulse take off her dress, which was her only piece of clothing, jump into the river “and swim blissfully” (4). This is the Nyamarira she elegizes as she leaves for the mission, perhaps realising subconsciously that it would problematise her relation to her native land. This is the Nyamarira she comes back to, at the end of the book, to bid farewell before she leaves for senior education at the Sacred Heart College.

Nyamarira also depicts her first choices between submission and resistance. It is at the banks of Nyamarira that Tambu will first show aversion to being restricted to the ‘women’s places’. The river there has the same life-giving properties as its other spots, for Tambu’s mother and aunt themselves head to this place of sisterhood to ward off debilitating illness, but it also constructs the gendered burdens of ‘women’s work’ (bearing and raising children, housework, and providing water for the whole family), a life that Tambu refuses to be trapped in. It is literally with Nyamarira’s blessings that Tambu sows the seeds for her first major act of resistance. She brings water from it for her own garden, planted to raise her own school fees despite her family’s objections, by rerouting the water from its regular path and teasing it into two tiny “sisterlets” to water her small patch. With this action the landscape begins to narrow from the wide unboundaried expanse of cool rivers and beaten wooded paths to the smaller, usually poor plots of land cultivated by black Rhodesians for small-scale agriculture and to sustain their families. For this vision, however, Brandes’s proverbial ‘telescope’ needs to zoom in.

Landscapes cultivated for utilitarian purposes or farmed spaces stand as a source of prosperity through one’s hard work, and link the women to the nation through territory: the river systems, to varying degrees and in different respects, being national landscape symbols of Egypt and Zimbabwe. The link between women and agrarian land is doubly significant because land rights, distribution and redistribution have been for almost two centuries a vital part of political, economic and, subsequently social restructuring under colonisation and decolonisation.

In Ahmed’s text, although there is less of a direct link to manually working the land, laws towards farmed land make and break her family’s fortunes. Her Turkish/Circassian mother’s wealth comes from their lands in al-Fayyum “the rich, fertile oasis a hundred miles or so southwest of Cairo” (93). This island of prosperity where her grandfather farmed grapes, oranges, lemons, bananas and tangerines (106) is of course to be sequestered by Nasser who, upon coming to power, ‘righted’ the injustices of the system of land ownership with his vicious land reforms, or more accurately, played what would become his ‘agricultural popularity card’ by stripping rich landowners of their land and re-distributing it among certain Egyptian communities.⁸⁸ By dispossessing them of most of their farmland, nationalisation largely impoverishes Ahmed’s family, and by dispossessing them of the house, it brings down the walls of the harem (the women’s part of the estate). On her paternal side, Ahmed’s father had achieved financial prosperity and social affluence from the land, having been a distinguished hydro-electric engineer and chairman of the Nile Water Control Board. In what Ahmed describes as “a heroic attempt to avert catastrophe and preserve for future generations the riches that Egyptians had enjoyed, and depended on, for their lives and their civilization since the beginning of time” (20), Ahmed’s father opposes the High Dam (Nasser’s industrial popularity card) for ecological reasons. This incurs Nasser’s wrath and sets off her father’s persecution and subsequent loss of career and fortune, and gradually, his drawn-out illness and death.