Far From Brooklyn

This novel has a really exciting first sentence and the first third of the novel pretty much delivers on the promise and thrill of that first sentence. Set in early ‘60s Rhodesia, it’s the story of a girl who not only faces the entrenched racism of that society, but also the entrenched bias against women.

From a structural perspective, the book has a problem, though.

It begins with the narrator, Tambu, kicking things off this way: “I was not sorry when my brother died.”

I mean, wow!

We learn, over the course of the next 75 pages or so, just why she wouldn’t be sorry. That is a good, simple and fascinating story to tell.

But (SPOILER ALERT) when the brother actually does die around one-third of the way through, it just lets the air out of the narrative, and the story becomes more about Tambu’s striving for an education and independence, a tale that’s not without interest but just less spicy, at least as told here.

Dangarembga is a really good writer, though, great not only at describing the world of Tambu–which is wretchedly poor and painfully near to various opportunities that would normally be denied to her if not for her gumption and intelligence–but she’s also unafraid of being cold-blooded, portraying Tambu’s ambition and desires straight up, even if that means she comes across as a less sympathetic hero of her story.

The title apparently comes from Sartre, who in the introduction to Franz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” wrote: “The condition of the native is a nervous condition.” The epigram is a little hard to figure, and its handling in the novel even weirder, inasmuch as Sartre is not identified – the quote is simply said to come from the introduction to “The Wretched of the Earth,” leading me to believe that Fanon wrote it.

I learned otherwise from a very interesting essay I found online from 1992: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0004.008/–with-their-consent-tsitsi-dangarembas-hi1-rendinervous?rgn=main;view=fulltext

In fact, that essay is sufficiently robust and thoughtful that I feel rather silly trying to add anything here.