This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
After leaving a dead-end career, Tambudzai finds herself living in a dilapidated youth hostel in the heart of Harare, worried about her future. She relocates to a widow’s boarding home due to a variety of factors, including her bleak financial outlook and advanced age, and eventually finds employment as a biology instructor. But she encounters a new humiliation at every step of her attempt to build a life for herself, and eventually, the agonizing gap between her everyday reality and the future she had pictured for herself pushes her to breaking point.
In This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga explores how the potential and promise of a young girl and a developing country can deteriorate with time and turn into an acrimonious and hopeless battle for life.
This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
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The article “Unmournable Bodies” by Teju Cole from 2015 served as the basis for Dangarembga’s title. This was my first encounter with Dangarembga, and I now realize that she has written another work from the 1980s called Nervous Condition with the same protagonist, Tambudzai Sigauke.
The background of TMB moves from the American Revolutionary War to colonialism, Rhodesia’s liberation, modern-day Zimbwabe, and the freedom warriors and the country’s contemporary strife-ridden population. War-related PTSD in Tambu has developed a life of its own. Dangarembga also refrained from involving us in her personal politics. I would firmly contend that no writer can adopt a second-person POV as exceptionally and naturally as she does because of how unique generis her style of writing is.
How is it both artistic and non-artistic at the same time? The author uses a delicate mix in this passage. Tambudzai, a native of the village, left to pursue a formal education at a university while residing in Harare. Her worst phase of life was brought on by her decision to become a biology teacher, which resulted in a rupture. Tambu, who is now in her mid-thirties, is a driven individual with unresolved wartime concerns; many of those who were infants at the time are now suffering, untreated, and ill-adjusted. She carries the burdens of guilt, anxiety, grief, and occasionally, disassociation. She overcame a never-ending cycle of trauma.
Tambu is constantly bothered by her comparisons to other people and her desire for upward mobility. She went to a private, prestigious high school but was overshadowed by less gifted white people. Similar interactions happened both on campus and off. Tambu’s former demons have not been confronted and vanquished. The author uses bracing figures of speech to illustrate how these traumas are traumas in the truest meaning of the word, and how their ghosts continue to haunt her and others around her in various ways.
