Unmaking agency: intersectionality and narrative silencing in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body

Abstract

In This Mournable Body, the voice of Dangarembga’s Tambu is strikingly missing. What happened to the protagonist whose voice pervades the narrative landscape of the earlier novels? This paper attempts to account for the authorial shift in narrative perspective. It engages the ‘unmaking’ of Tambu’s agency by deliberating on the causal factors through the framework of Intersectionality. By tracing Tambu’s subjectivity in the post colony back to her actions in Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not, this paper examines the implications of her co-constructing multiple identities. It argues that Tambu’s misjudgments, pathology, narrative erasure, silencing, disrupt her presence in this last trilogy, and her predicament also parallels the anxieties and travails of her fragile post colony. Further, the paper considers the constituents of agency within the postcolonial African cultural context, affirms that Dangarembga celebrates the power of women in the post colony, and shifts the criteria for agency to a new level of activism against oppressive neocolonial forces. More significantly, the author also aligns her women’s activism with Unhu communal ethics and practices. Overall, the paper establishes that Dangarembga’s political critique in This Mournable Body is evident in her representational choices which reinforce social awareness, individual accountability, and communal responsibility as the redemptive pathway for postcolonial African nations.

Keywords:

• Tsitsi Dangarembga
• This Mournable Body
• Intersectionality
• Postcolonial literature
• African women
• African feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Book of Not was published eighteen years after Nervous Conditions. See Madeleine Thien’s “Interview with Dangarembga”. Brick. A Literary Journal, 91, August 1, 2013. https://brickmag.com/an-interview-with-tsitsi-dangarembga/

2 Marisa Siegel ed. “The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Tsitsi Dangarembga,” August 22, 2018.

3 Patricia Hill Collins. “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas”. For other focal sites of intersectional inquiry, see also Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color.” Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (1995): 357-383. Crenshaw examines both structural and political Intersectionality as they affect Black women and women of color.

4 Deepika Bahri, “Disembodying the Corpus: Postcolonial Pathology in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s ‘Nervous Conditions’.” Postmodern Culture, vol. 5, no. 1 (1994). Bahri analyzes Nyasha’s role and use of her body as a “default site” of resistance “within the matrix of complex power relations” (para 10).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pauline Ada Uwakweh

Pauline Ada Uwakweh is Professor of Literature and teaches postcolonial African, African American, and World literatures in the English Department at North Carolina A & T State University, USA. She earned her Ph.D. from Temple University, Philadelphia; her M.A. from the University of Calabar; and her B.A. from the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. She is the author of Women Writers of the New African Diaspora: Transnational Negotiations and Female Agency (2023), editor of African Women Under Fire: Literary Discourses in War and Conflict (2017), co-editor of Engaging the Diaspora: Migration and African Families (2014), and author of Running for Cover (Onwubiko, 2010/1988), a story about the Nigerian civil war. She has published several articles, book reviews, and book chapters in professional journals, such as Research in African Literatures, African Literature Today, and Journal of African Literature Association. Some of her works have been published in critical books on African literature, including Emerging African Voices, Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta, Nwanyibu: Womanbeing in African Literature, and Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo. Uwakweh is a Fellow of the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program (CADFP).