Now you understand. You arrived on the back of a hyena. The treacherous creature dropped you from afar onto a desert floor. There is nothing here except, at the floor’s limits, infinite walls. You are an ill-made person. You are being unmade. The hyena laugh-howls at your destruction. It screams like a demented spirit and the floor dissolves beneath you.
This Mournable Body is, as I have learned, the third volume in a trilogy (following Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not) by Tsitsi Dangarembga, and I have come to it as a standalone after it was shortlisted for the 2020 Man Booker Prize. That has made for a challenging reading experience. All three volumes follow the life of Tambudzai (“Tambu”) as she comes of age against the backdrop of Zimbabwe’s War of Liberation. The first two volumes cover Tambu’s education and early working life, and as This Mournable Body begins, she is approaching middle age, unemployed, unmarried, living illegally in a youth hostel, and without knowing that in the previous novels Tambu was presented as clever, ambitious, and driven, she comes across now as listless, disengaged, and fairly unlikeable; she has nothing but she’s not working towards anything. As the novel progresses and Tambu acts like the world owes her more than she has, I couldn't tell if her memories of being an excellent (if unrecognised) student and an award-winning (if uncredited) copywriter were a matter of Tambu being an unreliable narrator or if she was dropping hints as to what made her the kind of hopeless woman we see today. The language is tricky (many passages needed more than one read, not to mention the second person POV), the plotting elliptical, Tambu’s mind unknowable, but by the time I got to the end of this, I felt some important truths had been slowly revealed to me; truths about what it was to be a woman in the 90’s in this post-colonial, patriarchal, unstable country. I would gladly go back and read the first two volumes in this trilogy, but I’m not unhappy about the added interest that the uncertainty around Tambu’s past provided here as a standalone, standout, read.
When you are several steps away they turn to each other. They suck air in through their teeth in harsh hisses. Five. This is your thought. Against a market. Five. Against a city, a nation. A planet. Women. Five. What do they think they can achieve? They can hiss as much as they wish.
Dangarembga took the title for this novel from the article Unmournable Bodies, written by Teju Cole in The New Yorker in the wake of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre and concerning which victims of violence we in the West deem most “mournable”. (In reference to the connection, Dangarembga has said, “Basically I asked the question whether, if we could mourn the circumstance of certain living bodies we might not create a better world. At the same time those living bodies also need to mourn themselves in order to begin to heal and move forward.”) A series of big events happen in Tambu’s life in This Mournable Body, and while I didn’t always understand her actions (or inactions), I eventually realised that as a woman (and, oh, how the women are abused in this book) and as a Black Zimbabwean (living still in the shadow of her more powerful white neighbours), she was suffering a form of PTSD from living through the war; and while she may not have been a combatant (as many of the other women in the novel were), hers was a body deserving of mourning; from herself as much as from those around her. This was an incredibly interesting narrative, even if I had to sometimes work to find the meaning, and ultimately, I thought the whole story ended perfectly.
She says your education is not only in your heart anymore: like hers, now your knowledge is now also in your body, every bit of it, including your heart.
I hope I do remember to go back and read the rest of this trilogy (so many books, so little time); Tambudzai is an incredible character, and an incredible lens through which to study this time period in Zimbabwe’s history, and I would love to meet her back when things were looking so bright. I would not have been unhappy had this won the Booker.
The Man Booker 2020 Shortlist
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook
I've listed the titles in the order of my own enjoyment, and although my favourite from the longlist (Apeirogon by Colum McCann) didn't make the cut, I am not unhappy that Shuggie Bain won. This is the first time in years that I didn't try to read the longlist and I'm glad I didn't bother; what an uninspiring collection overall.
