This Mournable Body: A Novel

"This is part of a trilogy that Dangarembga began 30 years ago. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year. I really wanted it to win. It’s the third book of the trilogy which tells the story of a character called Tambudzai, whom we meet as a really bright girl living in colonial Rhodesia in the first book, Nervous Conditions . At one point, Tambu thinks she could be anything she wanted to be. But that’s an impossible dream in pre-independence Zimbabwe. And then you have This Mournable Body , which is set after independence, where everything is just getting corrupted and relentlessly going wrong. Tambudzai emerges as this sort of Beckettian/Kafka-like character, but she’s a black woman in Zimbabwe and has her own version of the modernist story. She is not a likeable character. She does not play the human rights game, particularly in the way that some post-colonial fiction is often read by the West. She’s not having it. Things don’t get much better. What the book does so brilliantly is make the reader one with her. You get her perspective; you get her point of view, and you want her to do well; but at the same time, the book puts you in the position of being in a situation where nothing is getting better. Nothing is changing. Everything is grim. So, there’s a sense in which, like Beckett or Kafka , Dangarembga can throw reality at you without supporting structures, but allows you to take that as the reality. This Mournable Body also addresses the question of whose life is grievable in an unequal world. Judith Butler has written beautifully about this in Precarious Life , that some lives are not deemed worthy of mourning. We’ve seen this with the refugee crisis, we see this in contemporary America, we see this in how many disposable lives there are today. And in answering that back by saying, look ‘this is a mournable body’ Dangarembga is refusing to play the sentimental pathos game. She’s not going to play; she’s not going to be extra virtuous. She’s not going to give you a redemptive story. It’s this body in this world, in this unrelenting reality that is mournable. Again, I think it’s just extraordinary. It’s compelling to read and difficult to read. The other thing she does, which is so smart, and very few writers can get away with, is that she uses the second person throughout. She writes at the beginning: “There is a fish in the mirror, the mirror is above the washbasin in the corner of your hostel room, the tap cold only in the room is dripping still in bed, you roll onto your back and stare at the ceiling, realizing your arm has gone to sleep, you move it back.” So, the whole book is written both from inside the key character’s head, but directed towards us as the reader. I think it’s been written for Zimbabwe. I don’t want to speak for Dangarembga at all, but I think it’s also been written for black women. There are a whole group of writers who are telling truth not just to power, but to reality at the moment, who are amazing realists. I’d put Claudia Rankine in this in this category as well. They are women who are exploring anger—Black women exploring anger—and articulating anger in a way that bears comparison to Levi and Arendt. There’s a precision and careful description involved in doing that. That’s why some of the most exciting writing is coming from places like Zimbabwe, but also from the States. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Dangarembga is a filmmaker, as well. That’s why she’s got such a good eye. She’s currently facing charges in Zimbabwe for protesting against the government’s corruption, but particularly its corrupt handling of the COVID epidemic, and its use of crony contracts, which turned out to fictions. She had COVID. The government said that it had built this great private hospital. She was really ill, and she took herself there – it wasn’t there. So, she started protesting, and was arrested and charged. This was all after she’d written This Mournable Body , but the whole thing that the book proposes about what counts as a life, and what it means to stubbornly insist on that life, was also relevant to her protest over COVID. What all the writers I’ve chosen here are good at is saying, ‘You have to face up to reality. And reality is completely outrageous.’ We keep on hearing, again and again, that loads of people are reading fiction in the pandemic, because they want to escape reality. I would say, ‘No! The best writers are getting us to understand a reality that we should in no way reconcile ourselves to. That’s the point. We have to be able to comprehend and understand it.’ I think Dangarembga has always done that brilliantly. But this novel I think is the best of the trilogy. It’s astonishing. The book came from two places. It came first from the classroom, as books do. I taught a course, with the 18th century literature scholar Ross Wilson, at the University of East Anglia ten years ago, on literature and human rights. Students were attracted to that course because they wanted to talk about the issues we’ve been talking about today. But they were also restless because it was just at the moment when higher fees had really kicked in, the neoliberal university was packaging everything in new ways, graduate jobs were going, and austerity was cooking. So they were very jibby students, which was very instructive for me. And, at that very same moment, we also had the new rise of nationalism and a new set of human rights challenges. It became very fashionable to criticize human rights, both from the left, but also and mainly on the right—which is still enjoying playing phony culture war games around human rights (as though everyone gets up in the morning worrying about the Human Rights Act, which they most certainly don’t). Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So, I had the weird experience of teaching something that seemed to be vanishing at the same time. That was the subject of the first couple of chapters of that book. And because the thing that I was teaching—human rights—was disappearing, I did more journalism and local public engagement work in that period, and that’s where the other essays come from—from journalism or, more precisely, from publicly trying to find my way back into talking about the things that I thought were, and that I still think are, being threatened. In the end, I do think that if you’re in a culture that degrades the humanities, that degrades reading, that degrades literature, if you’re a defender of human rights, you need to wake up. If we’re not going to fund the humanities, if we don’t think reading is important, if we don’t think having these conversations is so important—and it seems increasingly that we don’t—we’re in trouble. Those are things I will go out to defend, and I don’t care if I sound naive. I’ll get up that mountain and I’ll die on it."

"In a way, that exemplifies how broader politics can be connected with the creativity of an individual. We found This Mournable Body to be a haunting and heartbreaking novel. It features the breakdown of the female protagonist as well as the breakdown of the country, and the ways in which they are linked. It’s written in an unusual second-person style, which is kind of cinematic and works brilliantly. It’s both an intimate story and a universal story: about an intelligent person having to deal with, and being enmeshed in, the mediocrity of what’s around her, the injustices, and yet having to keep going somehow through it all. Yes, but in a way one doesn’t even have to know that it’s part of a trilogy. The book stands alone, in my opinion. It’s a novel that deals with the same central character that was in the author’s first novel, which was – as you say – published in the eighties. So This Mournable Body is historical, but is also contemporary, in terms of its scope. “We didn’t check passports or work permits or birth certificates. We read the books” That’s one of the interesting things about the novels on the shortlist – many of them seem to be dealing with more contemporary society than with the historical."