Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman by Marjorie Shostak

“Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman” by Marjorie Shostak

In the book, “Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman,” written by Marjorie Shostak; is a culturally shocking and extremely touching book about a woman who had gone through many struggles and horrific tragedies in her life. This book also emphasizes the perspective of most of the women in the society. There are many striking issues in this book that the people of the !Kung tribe go through.

Marjorie Shostak, an anthropologist who had written this book had studies the !Kung tribe for two years. Shostak had spent the two years interviewing the women in the society. The !Kung tribe resided n the Dobe area of Northwest Botswana, that’s infused with a series of clicks, represented on paper by exclamation points and slashes. Shostak had studied that the people of the tribe relied mostly on nuts of the mongongo, which is from an indigenous tree that’s part of their diet.

Shostak, out of all the women in the tribe had made close connections with a fifty year old woman with the name of Nisa. The woman, Nisa, is what the book is about. The book is written in Nisa’s point of view of her life experiences while growing up in that type of society. Nisa’s willingness to speak in the interviews about her childhood and her life gave Shostak a solid basis on what to write her book on. Nisa’s life was filled with tragedies. She had gone through certain situations where Nisa loses two of her children as infants and two as adults. She had also lost her husband soon after the birth of one of their children. According to Shostak, “None of the women had experiences as much tragedy as Nisa…” (Shostak, 351).

Shostak, when interviewing Nisa, considers that in the beginning of the book, Nisa seems to exaggerate the stories from when she was an infant. Although the stories are exaggerated by Nisa, a lot of women can relate to her life even with the geographic distance between them or if the society is completely different. Women of the same age can relate to Nisa, or if they went through the same situations like her. Certain women, even in America, have gone through a situation where they had to bury their own child or if they have lost a husband.

This book had first started out by introducing the readers to what this book is going to sound like, which was the Introduction.