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“You feel you are creeping up over the edge of a precipice and that this cliff beckons you; worse… that there is no way to stop that fall because you are the precipice”, writes Tsitsi Dangarembga in This Mournable Body, the final entry in her trilogy surrounding the life of Tambudzai Sigauke (“Tambu”). Tambu is now a middle aged woman who has fallen into desperate circumstances once again, living in a young women’s hostel in Harare, Zimbabwe after quitting her lucrative job writing advertising copy after years of receiving racist slights from her white colleagues. Tambu becomes increasingly concerned with her finances, after moving to an attic room in the home of a local widow, working first as a teacher then falling once again into unemployment. She eventually takes a job with her former white colleague from the ad agency, Tracey, who has started an eco-tourist organization, where Tambu finally gets a taste of professional success befitting of her education, but is forced to confront painful truths about her family and her home.
Told in the detached second person voice, this novel makes clear how the earlier events of Tambu’s life, which make up the respective plots of Dangarembga’s previous novels, Dangerous Conditions and The Book of Not, have totally disillusioned the protagonist. The war to liberate the Rhodesians from British colonialists in the 60’s and 70’s took a great toll on Tambu’s family: her sister lost a leg, and many relatives lost their lives, all while Tambu was away receiving a boarding school education befitting of a European colonist. All of Tambu’s life seems a push and pull between these two worlds, the violent struggle of post-colonialist poverty in Zimbabwe, and the privileged world of secondary-school educated white Zimbabweans. Tambu is a witness to both, but never a full participant in either: she was separate from her family’s struggle for liberation and the fighting in her Shona village, and she is constantly struggling to break into the spaces occupied by educated white Europeans.
The novel watches Tambu climb economically an socially, only to face new challenges at each and every step. Every one of her triumphs is followed by some sort of catastrophe, where Tambu’s best efforts to assimilate are thwarted. Tambu’s employment at Tracey’s ecotourist venture Green Jacaranda is the perfect encapsulation of her struggle to find a place between the two disparate worlds of post-colonialist Zimbabwe. Tambu is put in charge of a project to introduce tourists to the customs of her home village, allowing them to stay there and meet the locals. Tracey specifies that in advertising the village visit, “you can’t say village. … That kind of promise doesn’t work these days either. It’s got to sound like fun, not under development, soil erosion and microfinance.” Tambu is aware that the project is its own colonialist venture, exploiting the local culture for its exoticism while ignoring its history, and this bind greatly informs the conclusion of the novel.
In This Mournable Body, Dangarembga has penned a tumultuous but satisfying conclusion to her trilogy of Tambu, a Shona woman who escaped the independence struggle to be educated in prestigious secondary schools, only to find that her degree did not make her exempt from the violent racism and economic subjugation of post-colonialist Zimbabwe. This is a novel about victimization, about what is means to be both a victim and a victimizer, and the many casualties wrought by colonialist intervention. A deeply compelling portrayal of the many double binds of the racist ideas that underpin the colonialist world, and an intensely human look at the suffering these ideas provoke.
Further Reading: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s two previous novels that trace the earlier life of Tambu are equally wonderful: The Book of Not and Dangerous Conditions. If you liked this one, you also may enjoy Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s Stay With Me. (Read my review here).