Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Nyasha's Confusion
An eating disorder is mental, no matter what a woman is going through eating is something that can always be controlled. Ma’Shingayi's refusal to eat earlier in the novel is not the same as Nyasha's refusal to eat, however, they have the same underlying reason. What they eat and how much is something they can control. Ma’Shingayi feels as if everything has been taken away from her by Babamukuru and Maiguru, because she is saddened, eating is something she chooses not worry about. Nyasha, on the other hand, is constantly dealing with her identity; does she form to the European ways that she was engulfed in or does she resort back to her roots and abandon her new found education? The battle of finding the balance is a tough one for Nyasha, its something she cannot control, but her eating habits are. Education, or colonization, can absolutely trigger this disorder as well as the sexism that occurs. This is evident in Nyasha's life due to the fact that she became fully accustomed to the European lifestyle but was forced to come back to the culture that she was told to forsake in the first place so she could gain her "proper education". Who wouldn't be confused and feel as if they had no control over their own life. Tambu depicts this perfectly in the description of the bathroom. She is utterly disgusted with the bathroom only after living at the mission, the reader must then consider how Nyasha must feel after being in a completely different country for so long. Once Nyasha has tasted a bit of the sweet life in Europe, why on earth would she want to come back to the homestead. Refusal to eat is not the only path that these women could have taken to "rebel" against their culture, but in a world where women do not succeed, refusing food is the only way to not end up on the street or dead, it is the only bit of control that they have.
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I could not agree more with you on this post. Easting disorders hit hard for me because I have had many friends suffer from them. Growing up as a competitive gymnast, I knew many girls that did have eating disorders because they claimed it was the one thing in their life they could control. Workout hours were long and coaches were not always nice. Many of the girls did not have a regular school schedule because of our practice schedule. The girls that did suffer always said they felt at place in the gym, but when things did go wrong there, they felt like they were losing control of reality. I think this is exactly what Nyasha does. She was uprooted from her homeland and brought to England to live a new life. She was losing control of reality. She had to readjust and find something stable. Eating is a stable habit, everyone eats, everyday. As we have seen, food is a crucial part of this culture and seems almost as important as family itself. Since Nyasha feels as if she cannot revolt against her family, she might as well revolt against the next more important thing, food.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to expand on the concept that eating disorders are indeed mental, but that this isn't a fact which should lessen its control over the person who has it. While an original intention might be to control one's environment or rebel in a way which should be noticeable and meaningful, I think that there is a certain threshold which gets crossed from whence it is difficult to return. Nyasha shows us a good example of this because we see her absolute psychological and biological (physical) deterioration. I think that she took the "rebellion" to the extreme and got to a point where she couldn't see pass the obvious destruction she was causing to herself. Eating disorders begin as a desire to control, but they really end up controlling you. Had she been in a Western society, they could have confronted the issue head on and tried to bring Nyasha back to a level of sanity and health, but clearly we saw that the African doctors were hardly even willing to accept that Nyasha's problem was one of mental breakdown (and depression as well), expressed through refusal to eat.
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