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.