Jan 23

Jan 23 This Mournable Body (Nervous Conditions, #3)

Author: Tsitsi Dangarembga
Publisher: Graywolf Press (US edition)
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A searing novel about the obstacles facing women in Zimbabwe, by one of the country’s most notable authors

Anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai finds herself living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. For reasons that include her grim financial prospects and her age, she moves to a widow’s boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.

In This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga returns to the protagonist of her acclaimed first novel, Nervous Conditions, to examine how the hope and potential of a young girl and a fledgling nation can sour over time and become a bitter and floundering struggle for survival. As a last resort, Tambudzai takes an ecotourism job that forces her to return to her parents’ impoverished homestead. It is this homecoming, in Dangarembga’s tense and psychologically charged novel, that culminates in an act of betrayal, revealing just how toxic the combination of colonialism and capitalism can be.

TL;DR Review

This Mournable Body is a poignant finish to Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions books. It’s a searing look at colonialism with a narrator I feel I could reach out and touch.

For you if: You want to read more literary fiction by and about African people.

Full Review

“You feel you are creeping up over the edge of a precipice and that this cliff beckons you; worse, that you have a secret desire to fall over its edge into oblivion and that there is no way to stop that fall because you are the precipice.”

I read This Mournable Body because it was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. I read Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not just before this one, too. It’s hard to review just TMB and not the trilogy as a whole; people say that you can read TMB as a standalone, but now that I’ve read them all and spoken to people who did, I would definitely recommend reading them all.

TMB picks up where the last book left off: with Tambu living in a hostel, unemployed. In this book, we follow the next stage of her life as she continues to seek better for herself but crumbles under the weight of the pressure she and the world put on her, rises again, crumbles again. It’s frustrating and full of weight, heartbreaking and illuminating.

It’s important to note that I am so far from this book’s intended audience as to render my opinions almost useless; this is a story told by a Zimbabwean woman for Zimbabwe. It’s about colonialism, for an audience sill grappling with relatively recent colonization. It’s about duality, and racism, and the definition of self in a world that holds no space for you. And so while there were some moments that felt slower or less accessible to me, that is likely not the case for readers in the actual intended audience, which is glorious and fascinating and the beauty of literature.

I am really, really glad that I read these books, and I recommend them.