“Booker Prize 2020: 6 Books shortlisted for this prize.
“This Mournable Body”: In order of reading book number 3.
In order to follow this event, I am writing articles on all six of the short listed books and will propose my winner before the official announcement.
Visit the official site for more details: Booker Prize 2020
Christine has that layer under the skin that cuts off her outside from her inside and allows no communication between the person she once believed she could be and the person she has in fact become. 
The one does not acknowledge the other’s existence, the women from war are like that, a new kind of being that no one knew before, not exactly male but no longer female. It is rumored the blood stopped flowing to their wombs the first time they killed a person
In this book set in Harare in late 1990’s Zimbabwe, Tambu is trying to exist in a world that has no place for her. Tambu’s education at a Catholic school during the fight for independence has left her with no direct experience of and thus no real links to the generation that fought this war and the war of independence in Mozambique, represented in particular by Christine, illustrated in the opening quote who comes from the same village as Tambu’s family and who is sent to Harare to protect her aunt, Tambu’s landlord, from her aunt’s own sons who want to dispossess her. Tambu is also in her late thirties, too old for the younger generation that make it difficult for her to find a new job in copy writing:
You tortured yourself in the early days…with the idea that you have no one but yourself to blame for leaving your copy writing position. You should have endured the white men who put their names to your tag lines and rhyming couplets. You spend much time regretting digging your own grave over a matter of mere principle. Your age prevents you from obtaining another job in the field for the creative departments are now occupied by people with Mohawk haircuts and rings in eyebrows, tongues and navels.
Tambu tries to take some distance from what is happening to her by narrating this story in the second person referring to herself as “you”, as she first rebels and so loses her copy writing job, she is then forced to leave her hostel because she is too old, moving into Christine’s aunts lodgings and slowly poverty encroaches on her:
Once a week you go shopping at a tiny supermarket as depressed in its appearance as you are. Leaving the yard you force a spring into your step in order to walk to like a woman with lots of dollar bills lying in the bottom of her bag inside the shop pretense suffocates you as though you were wearing a too tight corset. Completing your purchases you do not want to go out again because your bag bulges with budget pack plastic bottles smallest size sachets and minute boxes cooking oil, glycerin for you skin, candles for power allergies, matches, everything broadcasts your poverty.
Tambu cannot just go back home as her mother lives in a remote village in very difficult conditions. After an incident during a temporary teaching job, when she attacks one of her students, she is eventually rescued from a psychiatric clinic by Christine and one of Tambu’s aunts, both veteran fighters, and is taken to live with her cousin Nyasha. Through living with Nyasha, Tambu realises that life isn’t easy for other’s and gains in her own self esteem, feeling for the first time in her life “superior”. Nyasha is married to “cousin brother-in-law”, a german and her stay in Europe and return has ill prepared her for Zimbabwe:
You have entered a new realm of impossibility, worse even than the discovery that your cousin has been placed on the slide to impoverishment in spite of her degrees in Europe. You had not believed there was such a thing on this earth as a European without means or money. Now in her reckless manner Nyasha has married one she has made him your relative.
Tambu, through a job in the tourist industry, eventually comes back to her native village, we understand something of the difficulties of her relationship with her mother but this return seems to bring something of the seeds of being able to accept herself and her life. This was a story of a delicate woman, we don’t know if she will find a “raison d’être”, but she is a survivor, an engrossing read.
First Published in English as “This Mournable Body” by Faber & Faber in 2020
South of Paris books 
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