Who is this middle-aged woman who wakes up in the back of her room, in a girls’ boarding house? From the outset, through the slowness of her movements and the difficulty she experiences in preparing, we feel an immense burden weighing on her. In small touches, the precariousness of his situation is revealed, accentuated by a second-person narration which bluntly challenges him and, in doing so, also takes the reader to task.
“Still lying down, you roll onto your back and stare at the ceiling. You realize that your arm is numb and you shake it back and forth with your good hand until the pain erupts in a burst of tingling. It’s interview day. You should be up by now. »
The Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga thus powerfully structures her novel, This Body to Cry, based on the harsh and disturbing intimacy of its central character. Initially published in 2020 under the title A Mournable Body, finalist for the Booker Prize, the book which has just been brilliantly translated into French by Nathalie Carré is the last in a trilogy begun in 1998 with Nervous Condition (A fleur de Peau, translation Etienne Galle, ed. Albin Michel, 1991).
Each time we find the heroine Tambudzaï Sigauke, who in this last part has become this body, whose muffled voice judges the wanderings since one day her destiny changed: “When you were young and combative, when you cultivated corn in the family field and you sold the ears to be able to pay your school fees, you were different from who you became. When and how did everything change? »
Displaced geographically and socially
It will be a question of tracing the thread of this life begun in a small village in Zimbabwe and continued thanks to the springboard of studies to the capital, Harare, city of all the hopes, but also of all the setbacks of Tambudzaï. Displaced, she is not only geographically but also socially, she who, coming from the rural world, worked as an editor in an advertising agency. We also discover her professionally displaced because she has been faced with unemployment for many months.
Also her lack of enthusiasm in the morning at the prospect of a job interview can be understood as an indication of her fear of a new failure against which she mithridatizes herself. Without work, she risks losing her housing, which is in principle reserved for women younger than her. Without money, she cannot return to her family from whom she has always hidden her difficulties, preferring to maintain the image of a life of ambition and success.
To this status of displaced person – which also echoes the population movements which marked the colonial history of Zimbabwe – the novelist skillfully adds different other layers to her character. Faced with loneliness, shame and the guilt of having failed, Tambudzaï weakens physically as well as psychologically.
“During the first calls for interviews, you exult, dressing with primness each time, putting on your Lady Di and your favorite outfit in which – it’s encouraging – you now float. (…) You want to subtract 20 years from your age and shout: Hey, here I am, brand new, rebuilt; Look at me, I’m just starting out! »
A country forced to lower its ambitions
One day, however, the wheel finally turns, the professional world opens up again for Tambudzaï, but the latter has unfortunately reached her own limits. A feeling of self-hatred has developed within her and inhabits her to the point of leading her to extremes, from physical violence against others to betrayal of her loved ones…
With this character of a woman in distress, the incarnation of the poverty which affected thousands of Zimbabweans in the 2000s, Tsitsi Dandarembga captures with poignant irony the economic disaster suffered by her country. Because This body to cry is as much that of its heroine, Tambudzaï, as the social body as a whole, won over by the serpent of defeat and whose scavengers await, laughing, the total and definitive defeat.
“The hyena laughs at you as you walk through the gate. Once again, it has insinuated itself as close as possible to your skin, ready to tear away the last shreds of certainty that you have preserved the moment you fall. »
A country forced to lower its ambitions, without any help from other States to save it. An eloquent scene will mark readers in this regard: the one where an attractive-looking young woman tries to board a bus to return home. At the sight of her, the crowd becomes acerbic, the men make fun of her shape, her skirt considered too tight and too short, and through irony they all attack her to the point of undressing her.
Although he recognized Gertrude, one of his roommates, Tambudzaï did not try to help her. On the contrary, acquired by the violent every-for-himself nature of everyday life, she grabs a stone and prepares to stone the body of her neighbor who has fallen to the ground. A body suddenly in distress, like his and miserable enough to cry. “You want to see the shape the pain takes, map its veins and arteries, tear the epidermis and all its blood vessel patterns from the body. » The body of a woman as of a declassified country.