ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 continues to examine Dangarembga’s writing as it turns to examine the main character Tambudzai throughout her trilogy consisting of Nervous Conditions (1988), The Book of Not (2006), and This Mournable Body (2018). This chapter, along with subsequent chapters, moves on to analyze forms of abnegating one’s responsibility. Tambudzai differs from the other characters studied in previous chapters as she is gradually turned into a dislikable and irresponsible character over the course of the trilogy. In this chapter, I analyze how ideological indoctrination enables banality or flattening of one’s thinking and one’s moral responsibility toward others. I read this in connection to Mbembe’s analysis of the complex psychic life of power in the (post)colony. Along these lines, in Nervous Conditions, Tambudzai is seduced by the colonial culture and the wealth it promises, and she therefore turns away from her origins, as she desperately wants to escape the painful kernel of her existence: deep colonial and patriarchal wounds. In the later novels, her ideological spell is shown to become a steadfast escape from moral complexities as she prioritizes economic success. However, Tambudzai is also depicted throughout the trilogy as a tragic character who misrecognizes herself as a potentially successful character in a racist world. Ideology, as it is based on the subject’s (in this case Tambudzai’s) misrecognition, is also connected to false promises that might lead to strong disappointments. Along these lines, This Mournable Body represents the neoliberal survival game in the midst of acute economic desperation in turn-of-the-century Zimbabwe, and in my reading of the novel, I turn to Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment, which Wendy Brown has discussed in connection to the false promises of liberalism. I bring this discussion to the Zimbabwean context of drastically uneven development and claim that Dangarembga’s representation of Tambudzai’s misrecognition and subsequent deep anger and ressentiment painfully captures how subjects are led to understand that they can achieve their dreams in such conditions when, in fact, they are bound to fail. Tambudzai’s desperate need to succeed is further represented in connection to the neoliberal notion of responsibility, which, as a concept, does not morally bind the subject to the wellbeing of those in her surroundings, but instead justifies the subject’s self-centeredness. Dangarembga’s trilogy, then, expresses a more critical understanding of the role of an individual when compared with the novels I examined in earlier chapters of the book. However, at the end of the novel, Dangarembga juxtaposes this extreme individualization with the concept of Unhu, focusing on social responsibility, and hence posits an alternative for understanding social responsibility in contemporary Zimbabwe.
