أطراس
Volume 7, Numéro 2, Pages 241-250
2026-07-15
Maternal Imperatives And The Daughter’s Moral Burden In Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions
Authors : Elkaleh Safaa .
Abstract
This article interrogates the ethical consequences of maternal endurance in Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, focusing on how practices of care, survival, and silence shape the moral formation of the daughter within colonial and patriarchal conditions. While maternal resilience has often been celebrated as unambiguous strength in postcolonial feminist criticism, this study asks how endurance becomes moral authority and how children are positioned as ethically responsible for sustaining familial survival. Drawing on feminist ethics of care, narrative ethics, moral philosophy, and affect theory, the article undertakes a close textual analysis of relational obligation as structured through caregiving, emotional restraint, and forgiveness. It demonstrates that maternal endurance legitimizes authority, produces forms of moral indebtedness, and relocates emotional and ethical responsibility onto the child. Silence operates not as absence but as a deliberate ethical practice through which children learn to manage suffering not of their making. Forgiveness, repeatedly framed as an obligation rather than a freely chosen ethical act, shapes the child’s moral consciousness prior to recognition of harm. By centering the child as an ethically burdened subject, this article reveals how narratives of maternal resilience are sustained through the quiet ethical overextension of daughters. The study contributes to postcolonial feminist scholarship by showing that ethical formation emerges not only from structural oppression but also from the intimate redistribution of care, obligation, and moral responsibility.
Keywords
care ethics, childhood responsibility, ethical formation, maternal endurance, narrative ethics, postcolonial feminism, relational obligation
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