At first, Nyasha establishes a reading regiment, including books her formal educators prohibited her to from reading while in England. In the process, she even discovers that there are English titles written by white English men considered unsuitable for the "peaceful" coexistence of the conquer and the conquered. As Tambu tells us, Lady Chatterley's Lover must have given her cousin insight on why an educated woman, such as Nyasha's mother, would silence herself and commit to the rule of "Big Man" in her house.
In turn, Tambu witnesses Nyasha refusing to pretend helplessness, or behavior like an addle-brain ed woman, "educated" to obey the "proper" protocol of females in a patriarchal family. Understanding her mother's situation is one thing. But Nyasha rejects the idea of her mother as a model for how she is to adjust to living in a household or community under the protective eye of those patriarchs of white supremacy.
By the end of Nervous Conditions, Nyasha, near death, refuses to eat. If the deliberate practice of "miseducation" caused her great suffering, Nyasha is determined to purge her body and she did her mind of the falsity of white supremacy. Hadn't teachers served to maintain a practice of purging her culture, her history, her spirit? Hadn't seen been taught the hate her own people? Hate herself?
As a human being born Black, Nyasha was to recognize herself as no more than a footnote in what counts as world history. If she hadn't risked troubling the cover up!
Nyasha will survive, with intervention, but not before she troubles the history she's been taught. Not before she begins to think critically, asking questions of herself and what she was made to swallow in those "approved" texts.
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