Builds on her two earlier
Here Dangarembga’s writing is mature, less formal, vibrant and effortless in the complexity she layers into events and characters. She is often darkly funny and always deeply serious. The title of her novel was inspired by Teju Cole’s 2015 essay Unmournable Bodies, in which he commented on the grief and outrage in Paris after the attack on the French satrical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, noting that victims of violence in Africa were never given the same amount of attention.
Tambudzai, so full of ability and promise in Nervous Conditions, now goes through a period of suffering, which includes a stay in a mental hospital. Although she is still focused on her personal success, she gives up a well-paid job in an advertising agency, where she has had enough of being exploited and unrecognised. She takes a job as a biology teacher, but is infuriated by the bornfree girls she teaches, who are more interested in smoking, drinking and middle-aged men than in applying themselves to getting an education.
In her darkest hour it is the women of her village and her family who come to her aid, but eventually there will be a price. Dangarembga takes time to create these many female characters. In these harrowing times after the Chimurenga there are three widows and one lower-ranked wife of a polygamous politician, as well as female soldiers returned from war zones. They are managing to survive in Harare; politics is obliquely referred to in the milieu in which life has to be lived. Perhaps in these women Dangarembga brings us several mournable bodies. Most buoyant but not unscathed is Nyasha, now returned from Europe with two degrees, a white husband and two children. The first time she goes to Nyasha’s house, Tambudzai observes; “Your cousin begins to hum with the air of an empress returning to her fort after battle.”
The women war vets include Tambu’s Aunt Lucia, younger sister of her mother, as well as Kiri, from a neighbouring village, who takes news of Tambu home and brings a gift from her mother, a sack of home-grown and homeground mealie meal. Tambudzai cannot bring herself to fetch it from Kiri, nor, once she has it in her own room, can she bring herself to