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Summary
Summary
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 BOOKER PRIZE
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.
Author Notes
Tsitsi Dangarembga is the author of two previous novels, including Nervous Conditions , winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. She is also the director of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa Trust. She lives in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in Zimbabwe at the end of the 20th century, Dangarembga's heartbreaking and piercing latest follows Tambudzai-the protagonist of her novel Nervous Conditions-as she wearily approaches middle age. After leaving an unfulfilling job at an advertising agency, Tambudzai finds herself living in a Harare youth hostel. She moves from position to position and home to home after leaving the hostel ("Concerned not to let your newest opportunity float away, you are constantly on the lookout for handholds, like low-lying branches above a raging river, which you can grasp first to balance yourself and, subsequently, to heave yourself upward"), alternating between pridefulness and woeful self-hatred-eventually taking a job teaching biology at a girls' school that requires no specific training-and fantasizing about the life she'll someday lead. When her former boss from the advertising agency offers her a position at a glamorous new ecotourism venture, Tambudzai leaps at the opportunity, not realizing how low she will be asked to sink, turning her rural background and her national culture into photo opportunities for European visitors. Tambudzai is an outstanding and memorable character; her struggles always feel real, even with the use of a second-person point of view. This is a smartly told novel of hard-earned bitterness and disillusionment. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
There is a moment in this magnificent novel when the central character Tambu, for once showing herself some compassion, wonders who she has become: "When you were young and in fighting spirit, growing mealie cobs in the family field and selling them to raise money for your school fees, you were not this person you have become. When and how did it happen?" Many readers will be familiar with young Tambu from Tsitsi Dangarembga's classic 1988 novel Nervous Conditions, set in late 60s and 70s Rhodesia, before the country gained its independence from Britain in 1980 and became Zimbabwe. Young Tambu's endearing, defiant voice soared with a declarative "I" as though to announce, gloriously, her presence in the world. Adult Tambu, the narrator of Dangarembga's remarkable sequel, tells her story in the second person, as though she cannot believe what has become of her life and wishes to distance herself from it. As the novel opens, she is being pushed out of a hostel for young women by the matron, the patronising Mrs May, who reminds her cheerfully that she has "broken the rule of age". For Tambu the hostel has a terrifying symbolism - it is a cocoon in which young, spry women find their wings, but from which she, now in her late 30s, must be nudged into precarious flight. Her uncertain journey takes place in the city of Harare, in late 1990s Zimbabwe, when the young country was also beginning to flounder. The novel skilfully paints this backdrop for the reader: politics has become a lucrative business built on a corrupt system of patronage; the city is now a cesspit of litter thanks to an inept municipality; and racial tensions are beginning to mount, with war veterans invading white-owned farms. Educated but unemployed, Tambu sees other women as adversaries in a game of success she is not certain she can win. This is no more evident than when, having found work teaching at a girls' high school, she is overtaken by "a smouldering resentment" towards her students for their untrammelled, youthful optimism. In a vicious rage, she attacks one of them, the unruly Esmeralda, rendering her deaf in one ear. Tambu has no memory of the incident and subsequently finds herself in a psychiatric ward. Dangarembga's sentences are chromatic, rich and impressively precise with wonderful detail, capturing Tambu's elusive struggles to slough off her heavy past. "You have failed to make anything of yourself," she says of herself, "yet your mother endures even more bitter circumstances than yours. How, with all your education, do you come to be more needy than your mother?" The sources of Tambu's troubles are as much existential as they are social, and during moments of frustration such as these the language takes on a Kafkaesque sensibility. The figure of Tambu's mother haunts her throughout the novel, at one point manifesting as an eerie series of "small, misshapen" persons biting her thumb whom Tambu tries frantically to shake off. While in the psychiatric ward, Tambu is visited by women from her past: her Aunt Lucia, who fought in the liberation war, and her English-educated cousin Nyasha, who has moved back to Zimbabwe from Europe. She tries to shrug them off, but they radiate a poignant love and sisterhood, as well as a weighty sense of the unspoken, carrying oblique references to the betrayal of the war's ideals by present-day Zimbabwe. It is perhaps her relationship with Tracey Stevenson, her high school classmate, that reveals to Tambu just how desperate she is to make something of herself. Tambu associates Tracey, a white Zimbabwean, with a traumatic past rife with racism and humiliation. Nevertheless, when Tracey offers her a job in her ecotourism business, Tambu turns her village into an ecotourist site. But it comes at a price; the women of her village must stage an "authentic African experience" for European tourists by dancing with their torsos bare. It is an outdated form of ethnography, reminiscent of the colonial fetishisation of the primitive "native", belonging to a bygone era. In a dramatic, brutal, unforgettable scene, Tambu is finally confronted by her mother in the village, forcing her to confront herself. This Mournable Body is a sublime reckoning with the young, sparkling Tambu of Nervous Conditions by her wry, adult self, and by a young postcolonial nation with the betrayal of its convictions. Betrayal acts in the novel as a revolving prism. It is through distancing herself into the second person that Tambu allows her language to betray her, in this way letting us, and herself, into those places that are tender to touch. Three decades on, Dangarembga has written another classic.
Kirkus Review
A haunting, incisive, and timely glimpse into how misogyny and class strife shape life in post-colonial Zimbabwe.Returning to characters she first introduced in her debut novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), Zimbabwean author Dangarembga situates us in the mind of Tambudzai Sigauke, an educated but insecure and selfish young woman who is plummeting rapidly down her nation's class hierarchy. Bitter after leaving her job at an ad agency "over a matter of mere principle," Tambudzai takes up residence at a hostel while she hatches a scheme to claw her way back up the social ladder. Her scheming eventually takes her to a high school teaching job, where the pressures of teaching unruly students tax her fragile mental health. Driven to rage by her inability to command her students' respect, Tambudzai brutally beats and injures a student named Elizabeth Chinembiri. The event triggers a mental breakdown and sets Tambudzai on a tragic collision course with her estranged family. Narrated in the second person from Tambudzai's perspective, the novel collapses the distance between its readers and its antihero ("You spend most of your time sitting on your bed, brooding over your new misjudgement"). The effect is claustrophobic and alarming, as the reader becomes implicated in Tambudzai's connivingand sometimes outright immoralbehavior. When she participates in a mob's fevered sexual assault of a female hostel roommate, conspires to lure a married man into infidelity, or steals vegetables from her landlady's garden, it's not just Tambudzai who performs these actionsit's you. Tambudzai's behavior is so persistently self-centered that she can be somewhat flat and unappealing; social advancement is her only motivation, and it can be difficult to sympathize with a character whose moral compass is so degraded. Her flatness is easy to overlook, however, because this novel's true protagonist is the entire nation of Zimbabwe. Tambudzai becomes a stand-in for a society struggling to gain its footing and maintain its soul amid the trauma of civil war and economic and political instability. In terse, stark prose that paints a brutally realist portrait of post-colonial Zimbabwe, Dangarembga turns an appraising eye upon her nation in order to investigate the various inequalities that lie at its heart. This novel's Zimbabwe is a nation populated by cruel mobs, exploitative entrepreneurs, and mercenaries who care only about themselves. Her incisive realism is most effective when dealing with misogyny, especially the vicious violence inflicted on women's bodies. The mournable body of the novel's title turns out to be the collective body of Zimbabwean women.A difficult but ultimately rewarding meditation on the tolls that capitalism and misogyny take on a fledgling nation's soul. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Zimbabwean author Dangarembga again follows Tambudzai, the main character of her acclaimed first book, Nervous Conditions (1998). Tambudzai now floats between temporary living situations before landing a job working for Green Jacaranda Safaris, an ecotourism company aimed at getting money from the hands of wealthy European visitors looking to witness the grittier realities of African life. To cover any suspicions of exhibitionism, the company markets itself as a way to sensitize guests to the perils of climate change on the continent. In an attempt to get ahead at her new gig, Tambudzai pitches an idea for a new tour: escorting travelers into her impoverished home village for a more rural African experience. While there, she orchestrates a dance performed by female family and friends that flops and only serves to humiliate her loved ones. Set in the immediate aftermath of Zimbabwe's hard-won independence, Dangarembga's third novel is an urgent and unforgettable tale of the dangers of capitalism and colonialism in the developing world.--Courtney Eathorne Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE SPLINTERING OF THE AMERICAN MIND: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today's College Campuses, by William Egginton. (Bloomsbury, $28.) Egginton, a professor at Johns Hopkins, regards the often militant discourse around identity with sympathy and concern. THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. (Penguin Press, $28.) Expanding on their influential Atlantic article, the authors trace the culture of "safetyism" on campus to a generation convinced of its own fragility, warning of potentially dire consequences for democracy. IDENTITY: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, by Francis Fukuyama. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) In a sympathetic analysis of identity politics, Fukuyama argues that the sense of being dismissed, rather than material interest, is the current locomotive of human affairs. THE LIES THAT BIND: Rethinking Identity: Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture, by Kwame Anthony Appiah. (Liveright, $27.95.) Appiah, a cosmopolitan by background and choice, says that we tend to think of ourselves as part of monolithic tribes up against other tribes, whereas we each contain multitudes. ARTHUR ASHE: A Life, by Raymond Arsenault. (Simon & Schuster, $37.50.) This first major biography of the great tennis champion, written by a civil rights historian, shows that Ashe's activism was as important as his athletic skill. He belongs on the Mount Rushmore of elite sports figures who changed America. DEAD GIRLS: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession, by Alice Bolin. (Morrow/HarperCollins, paper, $15.99.) Bolin's stylish and inspired collection centers on the figure - ubiquitous in police procedurals from "Twin Peaks" to "True Detective" - of the "dead girl," a character who represents a dominant American fantasy, inciting desire and rage in equal measure. THIS MOURNABLE BODY, by Tsitsi Dangarembga. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) In this accomplished sequel to "Nervous Conditions," her prize winning debut of 30 years ago, Dangarembga, a Zimbabwean author and filmmaker, finds her indomitable heroine, Tambu, single, middle-aged and unemployed but unbowed. NOTES FROM THE FOG: Stories, by Ben Marcus. (Knopf, $26.95.) In his latest collection, the ever inventive Marcus delivers taut, bleak, dystopian stories that are disturbing and outlandish yet somehow eminently plausible. MARWAN'S JOURNEY, by Patricia de Arias. Illustrated by Laura Borras. (MinEdition, $17.99; ages 5 to 7.) This sensitive, beautifully illustrated tale of a boy's journey across a desert, away from his war-torn homeland, ends with safety and dreams of return. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Library Journal Review
Not merely to survive but to improve her living conditions and help her family, -Tambudzai Siguake gets a good education and leaves behind the heartbreaking poverty she experienced growing up in late 1960s Zimbabwe. She overcomes many obstacles to obtain a professional job where her work will be recognized. After a few jobs go awry, she finds a position as a tourist agent with Eco Travel that brings the desired monetary rewards and a real sense of accomplishment. As the business expands to village tours, a direct, powerful clash with her native traditions and customs bring her the realization that she can trust only family. She gives up her dream of living on a fair, equitable basis with the white colonialists and capitalists who are moving Zimbabwe into an unwelcome future. VERDICT In this sequel to 1998's Commonwealth Writers' Prize-winning Nervous Conditions, which explored Tambudzai's childhood, Dangarembga writes with a graceful eloquence that keeps the pages turning quickly. One hopes a third book will continue the journey of this sympathetic character from an immensely talented author.-Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.