Book Review and Reflection of This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Reading Time: 3 minutes

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Introduction

This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga is the final instalment in the trilogy that began with Nervous Conditions and continued with The Book of Not. If you’ve read The Book of Not, or my review of it, you’ll know how heartbroken I felt for Tambudzai. I had hoped that things would finally go right for her in this last book. But This Mournable Body makes it clear: Tambu’s struggle is far from over.

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Book Summary

When the novel opens, Tambu is still living in the youth hostel where we last saw her in The Book of Not. Now the oldest resident, she’s expected to leave, but she has nowhere to go. Unemployed, emotionally drained, and estranged from her family, Tambu spends her days drifting, observing, and avoiding.

She eventually rents a room in a shared home run by an elderly widow. Her existence shrinks even further as she survives on dwindling savings and isolates herself from the world. With no job to keep her moving, she turns to people-watching and reminiscing about the girl she once was.

A moment of public humiliation jolts Tambu into a painful reflection:

“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? When you were amongst the brightest, in spite of running kilometres to school and studying beside a sooty candle? No, it couldn’t have been then either…” (p. 103)

Tambu realises that the place where she began to lose herself was the Catholic high school, the same one that nearly broke her in The Book of Not. Determined to reclaim her ambition, she begins searching for work again. But her mental health is rapidly deteriorating. This decline eventually leads to a breakdown and a reconnection with her cousin Nyasha.

I was particularly happy about this, as I got to learn more about Nyasha’s journey and gain some closure. In The Book of Not, Tsitsi Dangarembga gave Nyasha very little space, almost erasing her from the narrative. I was pleasantly surprised and deeply grateful to find Nyasha not only returning but also given entire chapters in This Mournable Body. Her life has taken unexpected turns, but knowing Nyasha from Nervous Conditions, her path makes sense. She is now a mother, a wife, and a woman still passionately committed to changing women’s lives in her community.

But how do things unfold for Tambu? Does she finally become the person she’s been striving to be? Does she find healing or closure? I’ll stop here. No spoilers, just a gentle push: read the book. It’s worth it.

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Reflection

This novel left me emotionally drained – I couldn’t believe everything that happened to Tambu. But as Nyasha once said in The Book of Not, when Baba Mukuru was chastising Tambu for not obtaining excellent grades, Life happened to Tambu. As difficult as it is to accept, this is the reality for many people. Life happens.

Several themes stood out to me:

• Tambu’s mental health – from the Book of Not, it becomes clear that Tambu had some serious mental health issues, which then become more pronounced in this book.
• Her estrangement from her mother: Tambu’s refusal to return home, then eventually going and her mother’s eventual role in the end is one of the complex and moving threads in the book.
• Tambu’s relentless pursuit of an imagined “better self”: Tambu works so hard to succeed, yet never seems to become “enough”, not for herself, anyway. That’s something many of us may recognise.

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Recommendation

If you’ve read Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not, you absolutely owe it to yourself to finish the trilogy. This Mournable Body is not an easy read, emotionally or structurally, but it is a necessary and brilliant one.

I experienced both the physical book and the audiobook. Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not are narrated by Chipo Chung, who did an extraordinary job. Adenrele Ojo narrates This Mournable Body; she has a beautiful voice and gives a heartfelt performance, but her accent and delivery don’t quite suit the Zimbabwean context. For this one, I recommend sticking to the print or Kindle edition.

Please note: this is a heavy book. It requires emotional patience and space to sit with discomfort. But Tsitsi Dangarembga’s writing has always demanded our attention, and This Mournable Body is a deeply powerful ending to one of the most important trilogies in African literature.