Paper short abstract:

Focusing on Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel This Mournable Body (2018), a sequel to Nervous Conditions (1988), one of the most significant African Bildungsromane, the paper discusses how the promises of a postcolonial future fall short both on an individual and a collective level.

Paper long abstract:

Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga's This Mournable Body (2018), shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, was published exactly thirty years after her seminal novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), celebrated as one of the most significant African female Bildungsromane to date. The protagonist of both novels is Tambudzai, who grows from a promising, hopeful young girl in 1960's Rhodesia, on the brink of postcolonial independence, to a disillusioned, impoverished middle-aged woman without a proper job, prospects or any care for others.

Focusing on This Mournable Body, I will discuss how the great promise of independence falls short not only for Zimbabwe but also for Tambu herself, resulting in an anticlimactic conclusion for both. By drawing on and twisting Teju Cole's essay “Unmournable Bodies”, discussing the hierarchy of suffering as a phenomenon that is detrimental to non-white bodies, Dangarembga attempts to present Tambu's life as grievable. However, it is not through a process of formation and linear development required of the Bildungsroman genre that Tambu reaches the status of grievability. Although Nervous Conditions presented her as possessing the makings of future greatness, This Mournable Body introduces a person whose search for a new, postcolonial selfhood has left her embittered and lacking the ability to be kind to others. In my paper, I will argue that it is precisely Tambu's lack of goodness that should be seen as the source of her own grievability – a phenomenon that may be understood as particular to the postcolonial Bildungsroman in its specific historical setting.