Considering Tambu's new environment: a hostel with facilities, a city-scape, an office job, public transportation, and then considering her old environment: a homestead with no plumbing, manual labor, random trips to town if you're lucky, I cannot help but think that Tambu has forgotten her roots and just how far she's come in the world. Indeed it isn't a happy place. Let's face it; it never has been. But without doubt, the circumstances have changed and her physical surroundings are a step-up from where she grew up.
Had she jumped directly from the homestead to Harare, I believe she would be much more content with her "mediocrity". I think that her time at Babamukuru's and then at Sacred Heart may have spoiled her after all. She ended up becoming more like Nhamo than she ever would have dreamed. She makes the same comparisons of the combi as he did with the bus from the mission to the homestead.
Her time at Sacred Heart was difficult for multiple reasons, as we all know, but I contend that the worst thing was the fact that her hopes were raised and then dashed so severely. After all we know that it was mostly because of her not receiving the award that the rest of her studies failed. I believe that, had she won, she would have found a way to adjust to the notes given to her as her only means of science education as opposed to have a class setting. We know that she was struggling with it from the start, but as soon as she didn't get her award, "[she] read Angela's notes that day and comprehended even less than usual" (p. 155).
That being said, I think it is for these reasons that Tambu saw Harare the way she did: through eyes with lenses of dejection and self-disappointment.
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I completely agree with the point you make on Tambu's outlook on her situation. This outlook is also extremely similar, I believe, to the manner in which we view her ultimate circumstances in the end of the novel as well. Going from the highest O-Level Student at Sacred Heart to one not even recognized as one of the many distinguished to make the honor roll, would cause anyone to the unfairness of her situation. Then, seeing how high she could have reached and ended up (like in the position of Tracy) as opposed to the job she actually ended up with, and even ended up losing, just makes image we have formed of her life even less appealing and unfair. Despite this extraordinary amount of injustice she had received, however, we should also note how far she has come in comparison to many other girls from such a background as hers, like her sister. Though not as fortunate as many others in life, such as the white girls she went to school with, looking at it from a broader perspective than simply that from Sacred Heart, she truly had made somewhat of a place for herself in society and in life. Thought maybe not necessarily as good as her circumstances could have been, things certainly could have been much worse.
ReplyDelete“I believed that communing with Mrs May did something for me as I had not bonded with anyone in Twiss Hostel….Mrs May made me feel a part of life, even if it was a life ignominious and incognito at best…and at worst a life at the margins of it, at the centre of exclusion. So I become soldered into scenarios I reluctantly found myself part of.”
ReplyDeleteI think this best depicts where she feel she fits, at this point. Even though we've arrived at "New Zimbabwe," Tambu has no choice but to continue to feel like the other, the person in-between (neither the rich snobs nor the mediocre undistinguished). She hasn't flown into the highest of successes or fallen to the point where it's impossible to have leverage. She's frozen, just like Nyasha, but she has definitely failed to see how far she's gotten. These conditions, however, are damaging but they're comfortably familiar to her. Thus, I can't say that her actions, or lack thereof, are ways of suppressing trauma. She recognizes that things could be worse. These damaging conditions are the only things she's been exposed to. Even if these situations arise, continuing to produce misery and depression, they connect her to the social, allowing her to understand that it is reality.