Tsitsi Dangarembga’s debut novel, Nervous Conditions, was a critical sensation in the years after its 1988 publication. The first novel published in English by a Black woman from the then newly-independent country of Zimbabwe, it introduced readers to Tambu, a young Shona girl who gets an opportunity to attend two schools in succession that allow her to escape the subsistence farming life of her rural family. The nervous part refers to her difficulty navigating the culture shock she experiences at the second school, where she is a classmate of wealthier white students, and her realization of the grim facts of a post-colonial country where race and gender discrimination remain pernicious forces in everyday life.
Tambu returned to Dangarembga’s two subsequent novels, including 2020’s This Mournable Body, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (eventually won by the Scottish novel Shuggie Bain). By this time, Tambu is an adult who has just left a reasonable job in an advertising firm because she was tired of white colleagues taking the credit for her copywriting work. This leaves her a bit adrift, looking for a job and for new housing, and the search for both dominate this novel, one where Tambu eventually returns to the village of her birth and confronts hard realities about how much her journey to the capital, through education and professional jobs, has separated her from her family and her roots in the country.
Where Nervous Conditions was hopeful, This Mournable Body is bleak and unstinting, coming as it does in the immediate aftermath of the coup that ended dictator Robert Mugabe’s 37-year reign, installing a successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who has engaged in violent suppression of dissent. (Dangarembga herself was arrested while participating in protests against the government last summer, after this book was published.) Zimbabwe of 2020 is not free, and after a rapid economic expansion at the start of the last decade, the economy has contracted again in the last two years.
(My own interpretation of this book, and really of most post-colonial literature, always comes through a scratched lens, but with that caveat I still offer it here.)
The pessimism of This Mournable Body is unmistakable from the start, in start contrast to the cautious strand of hope throughout Nervous Conditions, but Zimbabwe has changed, and I would assume anyone living there in the last three decades might have seen their own optimism diminished by the country’s lack of progress. Liberation from Britain’s oppressive colonial regime didn’t solve their economic problems, nor did the end of Mugabe’s despotic rule.
Tambu’s two quests in the book – primarily for a new job, with the first one going awry because of her mental health troubles, and the second creating new conflicts in her mind that she has to confront – mirror two of the major problems in any developing economy: the lack of opportunities for stable employment, and the lack of adequate housing. Tambu’s trouble finding work, and the way she loses the first job she finds, are both emblematic of a post-colonial society that retains the racial and economic caste systems of the colonial era, while her trouble finding stable housing reflects the same factors as well as the ongoing gender discrimination of her culture, the latter of which was as much a theme in Nervous Conditions as it is here – but now she sees women as rivals, for professional success and for the limited pool of successful (loosely defined) marriage partners.
This Mournable Body is mostly told in the second person, rather than the first person of Nervous Conditions, which adds to the novel’s sense of ennui and disaffection; Tambu often writes as if she can’t believe her fate, or as if she can’t accept the choices she’s made. Eventually she takes a job with a former workplace frenemy, the white woman Tracy Stevenson, who has founded an ecotourism business, which leads Tambu to sell out her native village in an ill-fated scheme that will ultimately bring her present into conflict with the past she’s tried to leave behind. It’s a powerful if bleak image, and a stark look at both the enduring legacy of colonialism in newly independent African states and the distance women still have to go to achieve any measure of equality with men in these same societies.
Next up: I just finished another novel from the Booker shortlist, Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King, and startedDavid Mitchell’s number9dream.