“To Lucia with love”: Lucia as educator in nervous conditions

Abstract

Lucia had been brought up in “abject poverty” but “her spirit had experimented with living and drawn its own conclusions” (127). Lucia’s poverty places her in the position of a subaltern within the narrative of Tsiti Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. At the level of criticism, therefore, the expectation formed about Lucia as a subaltern is that she has neither voice nor agency. A close scrutiny of Lucia’s spirit, however, reveals a process of thinking that is meaningful to our understanding of the development of her subjectivity.