I recently read Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga for one of my literature classes. Like any assigned reading I was anxious to get it done and over with, but soon after starting the book, I found myself eagerly turning page after page so enveloped with the story I could not put the book down. The main character, a young girl named Tambudzai, recounts her life growing up as a female in 1960’s post-colonial Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe. The story follows her has she navigates a male-dominated society while simultaneously trying to provide herself with an education. The part I found particularly intriguing was when Tambudzai talks about her rebellious cousin Nyasha. Nyasha reminds me a lot of myself when I was younger, and if we are being honest still does. The line that really struck me was following a part of the book where the narrator watches her cousin and uncle get into a fight that escalates into a full physical brawl after her cousins stay out too late with a boy. The line goes:

“‘Nyasha’, I said as she walked past me, but she did not answer. I followed her to the servants’ quarters, where we sat, she smoking a cigarette held between shaking fingers and I feeling bad for her thinking how dreadfully familiar that scene had been, with Babamukuru condemning Nyasha to whoredom, making her a victim of her femaleness, just has I had felt victimized at home in the days when Nhamo went to school and I grew my maize. The victimization, I saw, was universal. It did not depend on poverty, lack of education or tradition. It didn’t depend on any of the things I had thought it depended on. Men took it everywhere with them.”

As a woman, reading passages like this did not enlighten me to a new concept, but it spelled out one I had always known but not had a name for - the sinfulness of femininity. Our sexuality, our menstruation, our emotions, all natural and beautiful things, are instead viewed as something to be ashamed of by the dominant male culture. Now, this is not to say that all men are oppressors and do not appreciate women, but to deny that men are viewed as superior in most cultures would simply be wrong. Why has this been so deeply engrained in our entire human society? Maybe men were scared of the power femininity held or maybe there is a more anthropological answer I haven’t yet learned. Whatever the reason is the one thing I do know is that women have nothing to be ashamed of. God, Allah, Krishna, whatever you believe in or don’t believe in created us women this way and we were made right like all things in nature. We don’t come out of the womb somehow broken and in need of fixing through prayers and submission to authority, we come out powerful and whole.

So what I believe is the greatest gift a woman can give herself is to forgive herself, not because she has done anything wrong but because through forgiving herself she can relieve all the guilt that society has put upon her to keep her quiet. By forgiving herself for the “sins” her femaleness carries, she can let herself be heard.