Worlds Inside Books

I read it for a class. It wasn't my favourite, but it didn't bore me either.

I have to admit that I didn't really understand what Tambu's problem was. She got everything she wanted in the end. We only had to read the book for that class, but we never analised it and it's not the kind of book I usually read, so I may have missed a lot of things, but I got the impression that the European education was supposed to have given Tambu the nervous condition the title refers to. However, that's not how I understood the book. Tambu got a taste of something more than what was available to her in her little village. Not better or worse, simply more. She enjoyed it and she felt that it set her apart when she went back to her village. But she had never fit in in the first place. She grew up and, while she didn't truly forget the bad things, the things she missed about her childhood were suddenly much more powerful than the bad things. And she romanticised that time.

I guess that the idea was to see the effects of colonisation, but what I saw was a girl who was given the chance to spend some time elsewhere and who liked certain things of that new life and then missed them when she went back home.

Also, I would like to know how Tambu's cousins forgot their native language in only five years. To add a bit of context, I didn't forget two foreign languages after not speaking them for longer than five years, which is why I'm honestly curious about this. Also, how their parents let them forget it if their intention was to return to their country.