An Apple for the Teacher? Femininity, Coloniality, and Food in Nervous Conditions

While preparing for an intertextual reading of women's oppression and resistance1 in Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel Nervous Conditions, I found a video documentary which offered to simplify the task. This video, With These Hands: How Women Feed Africa is unsurprisingly neo-colonial and one dimensional, but it offers an interesting place to begin the complicated process of reading and writing about Dangarembga's more complex and progressive constructions of African feminist resistance. Both With These Hands and Nervous Conditions investigate connections between African women, food production, and symbolic uses of food. Also, the dangerous assumptions employed by the video reappear within the text of the novel as some of the many forces which the female characters must understand and negotiate.