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Brian Obiri-Asare reviews This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga

October 9, 2025 / MASCARA

This Mournable Body

by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Faber and Faber

ISBN 9780571355525

Reviewed by BRIAN OBIRI-ASARE

 

Right from the get-go, in the third instalment of her Tambudzai series, Tsitsi Dangarembga pinpoints the terrain upon which This Mournable Body will unfold. The novel opens with Tambudzai, now middle-aged, recently unemployed, and mighty hungry for status, checking herself out in the mirror. A hideous image, a fish, with ‘purplish eye sockets, it’s mouth gaping, cheeks drooping,’ (p3) stares back. Caught in an irrepressible surge of dysmorphia, Tambudzai sees a creature she wants nothing to do with. A black woman, barely navigating the thrum of 1990’s Harare, she’s all at sea. The result is tragic. Her perception of herself and her actual self are discordant. Yet, somehow, this tragedy is generative. It allows a propulsive question – how will this divided self heal? – to sit behind one’s eyes throughout the misadventures that follow. 

By cultivating this space, by allowing this question the room to unfurl, Dangarembga takes a risk. Unlike the teenager languishing in a convent boarding school in The Book of Not (where ‘closeness to white people… ruined [her] heart’), the adult Tambudzai is far more intriguingly complex. The source of her malaise isn’t as clear cut. Is it mental illness? Internalised racism? At times she’s perverse, at times she’s pitiable. What’s apparent is that she’s on a journey, leaning towards and then leaning away from the vexed allures of assimilation. In a memorable early scene, a woman in ‘sky-high heels’ (p20) falls while trying to climb into a crowded minibus. Nobody offers a helping hand. Instead, the woman is jeered at. Objects are hurled her way, insults too. She’s stripped of a revealing dress. And in the middle of this attack, the woman spots Tambudzai. There’s a flicker of recognition as they both reside at the same hostel. The woman wordlessly pleads for help. Unable to meet and hold her gaze, Tambudzai looks away and drops the stone she was about to throw. Times have changed. Tambudzai’s now a woman who’s free and separate and enmeshed in a rich and complicated social tapestry from which she has much to learn. 

To be fair, Dangarembga’s risk-taking is familiar. Ever since her esteemed debut, Nervous Conditions, she’s sought to push the African novel into stimulating feminist directions. Way before Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shed light on the lives and concerns of middle class African women, Dangarembga was already on the scene. Her female characters, however, in their unique way, have always seethed, raging against expectations, family, work, school, men, other women, always incandescent, always bristling with life. In this sense, with her focus on what bubbles beneath the surface in polite society, she follows in the pioneering footsteps of her compatriot Dambudzo Marechera. 

This comparison with Marechera is apt given This Mournable Body’s dizzying storytelling form. Second-person narration dominates throughout and the ‘you’ pronoun floods the reader, pressing them into the unasked-for-role as Tambuzai’s double: ‘You drop your gaze,’ (p.24) starts a passage shortly after the minibus episode, ‘but do not walk off because on the one hand you are hemmed in by the crowd. On the other, if you return to solitude, you will fall back inside yourself where there is no place to hide.’ Paired with the simple present tense, the effect of this perspectival mélange is both uncanny and compelling. As a reader ‘you’ are implicated in Tambudzai’s alienation and by virtue of reading her unfolding story ‘you’ participate in that alienation. 

You’re stuck with her. Through three sections, “Ebbing”, “Suspended”, and “Arriving”, you follow Tambudzai through a series of misadventures. You follow her as she leaves her hostel accommodation in shame, finding a room in the house of Mai Mayanga, a devoutly religious widow whose husband was a successful businessman. You follow her as she attempts to build herself back up, putting her education to use by securing work as a teacher. You’re there when she assaults a student, granted a front row seat to an explosion of repressed anguish, rage and frustration. You witness her mental breakdown, her brush with madness, and her sedated stay inside a mental hospital, where her fears appear to her as a hyena, laughing at her:

‘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.’
(p.127)

There’s no escape. Dangarembga forces the reader inside Tambudzai’s divided mind and to experience the chaos of her racing thoughts and self-preserving actions. Now, one’s tolerance for such intimacy may understandably vary. After all, a novel stands or falls on its capacity to tell a good story, and to create and reveal elements that make such a story resonant, not on authorial experimentation alone. And on this note, This Mournable Body, at times comes up short. There’s minimal narrative tension. And although Tambudzai is refreshingly true to life, her tragic, at times comedic, inability to shake off her funk becomes a drag. For example, after her release from the mental hospital promises a new beginning, one where she moves in with her cousin Nyasha, her husband Leon, and their two kids, who have all returned to Zimbabwe from a life in Germany, this promise soon withers. Old habits do indeed die young and Tambudzai is no exception. After her breakdown she’s still the same cloyingly self-obsessed, vain, and deluded woman. But this stasis may indeed serve a higher purpose. For Dangarembga is not out to craft the perfect technical novel – she’s out to exaggerate, amplify, and repeat herself so as to breathe life into Tambudzai’s floundering between the twin poles of possible redemption and wilful self-destruction.

The insertion of good dollop of dramatic irony in the final section, “Arriving”, adds a welcome touch to the see-sawing rhythm of Tambudzai’s personal narrative. A chance encounter with Tracey, an old school friend and colleague who ‘couldn’t reconcile what [she] was doing with what [she] believed in,’ (p.236) leads to a cushy job at Tracey’s environmentally friendly tour company. Initially, it’s all sweet: 

‘as tour supervisor of Green Jacaranda, you are still Zimbabwean enough, which is to say African enough, to be interesting to tourists, but not so strange as to be threatening.’ (p.279)

But like clockwork, this newfound normalcy soon starts to unravel. When her colleague Pedzi dreams up “Ghetto Getaway”, a chance for Western tourists to sample authentic urban African living, Tambudzai, ever competitive, dreams up “Village Eco Transit”, a cooked scheme that takes her back to her homestead, which undergoes a makeover so that Western tourists can enjoy an equally authentic experience of rural Africa. 

It’s here, finally, and perhaps too late, that narrative suspense ratchets up. Tambudzai’s journey homes forces her to confront herself. The question sitting behind the readers eyes throughout – how will this divided self heal? – comes into sharper focus. And the result, without spoiling too much, is an insight into the destructive impact of trying and failing and trying to get ahead in life. Conceptually coherent and emotionally rewarding, Dangarembga, through her protagonist Tambudzai, offers a mirror through which the stubborn messiness of post-colonial Zimbabwe finds a telling shape. It’s the 1990’s and it’s no longer Rhodesia, yet ordinary citizens are still encumbered by embedded racist oppressions, chafing under ZANU-PF rule. Distrust simmers and the wounds from a fiercely fought guerilla war still linger. This is the context that shapes Tambudzai both emotionally and spiritually. And it’s something to reflect on and savour.

Cited.

 

BRIAN OBIRI-ASARE is a Ghanaian-Australian writer working across poetry, prose, and drama. His recent work has appeared in Westerly, Esse Magazine, Southword, The Subuurban Review and other spaces.