This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga

This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tiny Overview

In Zimbabwe, we meet Tambudzai who has grown up in a rural village, and is now living in a hostel. She bounces around life, coming and going, but her past seems to haunt her. Facing discrimination and undergoing breakdowns, Tambudzai finding stability hard to come by.

Themes:

• Psychological Fiction
• Domestic Fiction
• Betrayal 
• Corruption 
• Trauma
• Gender
• Race
• Postcolonialism 

Context

This is the third installment to Dangarembga's series. It follows Nervous Conditions and The book of Not.

This Mournable Body, is a contrast title of Teju Cole's Unmournable Bodies. The essay was written in 2015, three years prior of Dangarembga's book. He addresses issues of free speech, specifically how Western societies do not recognise the victims who speak against their own states power.

Dangarembga argues that Tambu, the protagonist, and the lives of millions of other African women are cast aside - 'unmournable' by the Western world. Through this, she is advocating for us to look at what is going on, and live the struggles that Tambu and so many other women are going through in Zimbabwe.

My Waffling

This is a difficult book - definitely not one I should've started with but I did not have the biggest selection of books. It did not help that this is the third installment of a series done by Dangarembga, but other reviews have said that it can be read as a stand alone. Tambu is an unreliable narrator, which did not help my confusion, as I had to check that I did not miss pages. It felt like things happened in between chapters that were missed - and it turns out i was not the only person who felt like this.

The book was written in second person, which was definitely strange to me. I didn't even know books like this could exist. For example, instead of "I placed the coffee on the table and stirred it", it is "You placed the coffee on the table and stirred it".

In an interview with the Rumpus Book club, she explains, "I wrote it in the second person because that was the only way I could access the subject matter in a way that I felt made sense. I just didn’t have the heart to use the first person. I needed distance and I imagined the reader would to. On the other hand, I didn’t want to jump into the third person when the other two books were in the first. I also thought that might be too much distance. So I tried it out in the second and I liked the effect.

I could imagine books while I was a kid. But now I am older I can't. It makes reading difficult, especially for this. I could not follow what was happening. When I am more seasoned with reading I think I should come back and reread this.

2/5