Disaffection and <i>You</i>-Narration in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Tambudzai Trilogy (1988–2018)

Abstract

This essay explores the representation of unfeeling, or disaffection, in narrative form through the writer Tsitsi Dangarembga’s critically acclaimed ‘Tambudzai trilogy.’ The narrative form I focus on is the shift in grammatical person of nar­ration from the first person I to the second person you. The first instalment, Nerv­ous Conditions (1988), opens with the defiant voice of its first-person narrator and protagonist, Tambudzai, but soon begins to oscillate between first and second person for self-reference. By This Mournable Body (2018), Tambu’s loss of selfhood is reflected in the narrator’s obstinate refusal to emerge as an ‘I’ at the level of discourse. I argue that Dangarembga inscribes Tambu’s institutional racial other­ing in you-narration and that this self-estrangement parallels the mode of unfeeling that Xine Yao (2021) calls “unsympathetic Blackness.” The trilogy, in line with recent work by contemporary scholars turning away from feeling towards nega­tive feeling or the negation of feeling, unpicks the seams of a Western affective politics of sympathetic recognition.