Nervous Conditions

I just finished reading a book called Nervous Conditions. The actual story focuses on two girls (cousins) from Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) who are coming to terms with being women and obtaining an education in a male dominated society. However this book has two other underlying themes: being black in the colonial state, and revolting against colonial control. In a way, the main characters' struggles within their homes, towns, and schools are a microcosm of what was occurring in the society under colonial rule.
What struck me the most about this book is the fact that in the end you're not sure whether either of the girls - Tambu and Nyasha - overcome their issues. As I continued to read the book, I could feel the excitement that Tambu felt when she arrived at the mission (it reminded me of when I first arrived in UC Davis), and the frustrations Tambu and Nyasha felt as they fought male domination and assimilation.
The book is written in a way that - if you're following the story line closely and playing out the book in your mind - you also begin to feel "nervous." The end leaves you hanging; longing for closure, a happy ending.
You get a sense that Tambu succeeded NOT because she became emancipated, but because she adopted the colonial paradigm, and based on that paradigm she was a success.
One of my favorite books used to be Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Reason: Edna "awakens" and finds a whole new way of living. She goes through a well laid-out and clear change. Things follow a natural progression, and even if Edna reverts back to her old life, she is still a changed woman. However, in real life things hardly progress in such a linear manner.
The ambiguity in Tsitsi Dangaremba's novel is more realistic. Life doesn't usually have a clear plot, one climax, and a conclusion. It takes more than one awakening to change, and who's to say that moments of "awakening" will always result in paradigm shifts?
Dangaremba's characters demonstrate how many of the things a formal education teaches us to value can conflict with what our family and community expects us to value - and how societal expectations can also conflict with what we expect of ourselves.
The struggles of Tambu and Nyasha do not appear to have a conclusion because such struggles and "burdens" (as Tambu calls them) can rarely be narrated with a sense of closure.