This Mournable Body

I recently re-read Tsitsi Dangaremba’s prescient novel, Nervous Conditions, together with The Book of Not and the cinematic This Mournable Body, the subsequent parts of the trilogy written over 30 years and covering the period from 1968 to 1999 in Zimbabwe. In parallel I had the great privilege of meeting Tsitsi as part of Littlegig Lamu, and found her to be as startlingly precise in person as on the page. Her capacity to both see and reveal the systemic, and to hold the (often unsympathetic) individual clearly in view is instructive of a compassion we all need to cultivate in a world of othering.