Abstract
The paper examines the intersections of age, race and gender discrimination in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body, the final installation of a trilogy that begins with Nervous Conditions (1988), told in the first-person narrative of Tambu Sigauke. I examine the applicability of Simone de Beauvoir’s social and personal dimensions of aging to an African context. In The Coming of Age (1970), de Beauvoir describes aging as “semi-death” that erases women’s agency. Displacement and feelings of fragmentation are exemplified in the opening sentence of This Mournable Body—fittingly told in the second-person—where the supposedly “ancient” Tambu is made to feel, racially, like a tourist as well as a fish out of water in an apocalyptic, postcolonial Zimbabwe that places her in a bowl. Like de Beauvour, Tambu smashes every mirror she can, even as she remains the torn woman from the second installation of the trilogy, The Book of Not (2006). It is only when Tambu taps into the power of her mature body and mind—as well the mature bodies and minds of women like her mother, cousin and aunt—that her environment opens up to the possibility of Black women as drivers of meaningful transformation as she, like de Beauvoir, refuses to “dutifully retire to the shelf,” thus becoming “more of a person” (The Book of Not), fighting not just for her own sanity, but the sanity of a Zimbabwe limping towards freedom.
Presenters
Gugu HlongwaneAssociate Professor, English Language and Literature, Saint Mary's University, Nova Scotia, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
POSTCOLONIAL, AGEISM, RACE, GENDER, RESISTANCE, JUSTICE, TRANSFORMATION
