In 2015 Teju Cole wrote an essay for the New Yorker titled Unmournable Bodies. The piece was written in the wake of the terrorist attack in Paris in which 12 people were murdered at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The publication was targeted for its irreligious representations of the Prophet Muhammad.
Cole sees the overwhelming and unquestioning support for the victims of the attack as indicative of western society’s belief in radical Islamism as the one true enemy. Yet we fail to pay due attention to other significant acts of violence: “abductions and killings in Mexico, hundreds of children (and more than a dozen journalists) killed in Gaza by Israel . . . internecine massacres in the Central African Republic, and so on.”
She takes up lodgings at the home of an elderly widow where sexual assault by one of the male lodgers is an anticipated and expected part of life
Terrorist attacks are well-publicised by the mainstream media and provide us with visible victims. They also detract our attention from the atrocities perpetrated by western nations, which are never referred to as acts of “terrorism”.
But what of the quotidian violence we inflict upon each other? The horror of simply being alive and trying to make our way in the world involves a suffering that goes largely unreported. The novel is a form where tales of ordinary struggles are treated with the weight and attention they deserve.
Loved vs abused
This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga comes 30 years after her acclaimed debut, Nervous Conditions. Her first novel was set in the 1960s and 1970s during the Rhodesian civil war. It is the story of a teenage girl, Tambudzai, who is determined to gain an education and escape her impoverished background. Set three decades later, This Mournable Body sees Tambu living in a chaotic and squalid youth hostel in downtown Harare. The women in the hostel “vie with each other to be the best loved or worst abused by their respective boyfriends”.
Tambu has abandoned her job at an advertising agency: “Your age prevents you from finding another job in the field, for the creative departments are now occupied by young people with Mohawk haircuts and rings in eyebrows, tongues, and navels.” Her entire inner life boils over with such bitterness. She takes up lodgings at the home of an elderly widow where sexual assault by one of the male lodgers is an anticipated and expected part of life: “if you ask all women . . . then you will know it’s what nearly every one of them puts up with”.
The voice is relentless and cruel and there is no respite for the reader, but there are also moments of beauty
She condescends to take a job as a teacher but the stress of the role is too much for her and, after she violently attacks one of her pupils, Tambu suffers a breakdown. A chance encounter with a former colleague from the advertising agency, a white Zimbabwean by the name of Tracey, leads to a job with a fledgling eco-tourism company. Tambu can almost taste the advancement she craves: “you will garner recognition for work well done, and with this acknowledgement will finally come the upward mobility you are so hungry for”.
Fires of resentment
But there is nothing like almost getting what you want to fuel the fires of resentment and Tambu battles the other employees in the company for primacy. Her work eventually leads her back to the homestead where she spent her early years and she must once again confront her family. They are brought in as participants in the eco-tours and must perform a bastardised version of their culture for the gawping European onlookers who will only be satisfied by absolute “authenticity”. The pain and suffering Tambu endures is deeply rooted in her body, and in the very place where she was born and which she cannot escape: “Your umbilical cord is buried in the homestead; in the empty space that widens within at every step, you feel it tugging.”
The entire novel is written in the second person so the effect is at once direct and distancing. The narration is unflinchingly frank about every one of Tambu’s thoughts and feelings: “You are concerned you will start thinking of ending it all, having nothing to carry on for: no home, no job, no sustaining family bonds. Thinking this induces a morass of guilt.”
The voice is relentless and cruel and there is no respite for the reader, but there are also moments of beauty. At one point the widow landlady’s weak singing voice is described: “The tunes trickle out of her like the tired flow of a silted river.” But even the most evocative descriptions are merely deployed as armour. In a world where so much suffering is so easily ignored, Dangarembga has written a book so powerful and compelling she makes it impossible for us to turn our face away.
