06 Feb / This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga [in Booklist]
Of Dangarembga’s award-winning, semi-autobiographical Tambudzai Sigauke trilogy, only this finale gets an audio adaptation. Tambu struggled to be educated amid Zimbabwe’s decades-long civil war in Nervous Conditions (winner of the 1989 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize) and survived a convent education in The Book of Not (2006).
Here, Tambu is a not-so-young adult in Harare, unemployed despite her privileged schooling. She’s become desperately self-absorbed since losing her ad-agency job, scheming toward upward mobility. She settles for a teaching position, which ends in violence; recovers from a mental breakdown enabled by cousin Nyasha; and joins an ecotourism venture ready to commodify culture for the perfect photo op.
Adopting a liltingly accented English, the ever-versatile Adenrele Ojo embodies Dangarembga’s second-person narration with compelling agility, capturing Tambu’s multiple transformations through fragility, determination, disillusionment, and acceptance. She’s equally affecting with less prominent characters, smoothly sinister as a lecherous co-tenant, perplexed as Tambu’s German cousin-in-law, manipulative as Tambu’s boss, unbowed as Tambu’s aging mother. With Ojo’s enhancing delivery, audio producers should consider endowing Ojo’s voice to Tambu’s earlier titles as well.
Review: “Media,” Booklist, February 1, 2019
Readers: Adult
Published: 2018