Lucia had been brought up in “abject poverty” but “her spirit had experimented with living and drawn its own conclusions” (127). Lucia’s poverty places her in the position of a subaltern within the narrative of Tsiti Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. At the level of criticism, therefore, the expectation formed about Lucia as a subaltern is that she has neither voice nor agency. A close scrutiny of Lucia’s spirit, however, reveals a process of thinking that is meaningful to our understanding of the development of her subjectivity.