Dangarembga’s inspiration for the title is from a 2015 Teju Cole essay, “Unmournable Bodies.” (You can read this brief but weighty essay online). This was my first foray into Dangarembga, and now I know that she has a previous book, Nervous Condition, from the 1980s, which includes the same protagonist, Tambudzai Sigauke.The backdrop of TMB proceeds from the war for Independence, from colonialism to the liberation of Rhodesia to modern day Zimbwabe, and the freedom-fighters and current strife-filled citizens. Tambu’s PTSD from the war has taken on a life of its own. And Dangarembga didn’t drag us into her personal politics. Her way of writing is so uncommon/suis generis that I’d confidently argue that no writer can take on second person POV as exceptionally and naturally as she does.How is it both artful and artless simultaneously? It is the subtle combination that the author utilizes.. Tambudzai is from the village and is the one who got away to get a formal education from university and lived in Harare. She became a biology teacher, which ended in a rupture, provoking her worst period of life. Now in her mid-thirties, Tambu is an ambitious woman with unresolved issues from the war; many who were babies then are suffering, untreated, maladjusted. Guilt, anxiety, sorrow are burdens she carries--and periodically, disassociation. She survived continuous, unrelenting trauma.Tambu yearns for upward mobility, and her comparison to other people nags her day after day. She attended a private, elite high school, but was overshadowed by white students less talented. Similar encounters occurred at university and beyond. Demons from Tambu’s past have not been confronted and subdued. They are traumas—in the literal sense of the word, too, and their ghosts live within her and around her in many different forms, which is exhibited in in the author’s bracing figures of speech. Tsitsi uses animals to full metaphorical power, as well as body parts, including the womb:“...the snakes that hold your womb inside you open their jaws at the mention of war. The contents of your abdomen slide toward the ground, as though the snakes let everything loose when their mouths opened. Your womb dissolves to water.”For every new internal border crossing and reach to break the glass ceiling, there is the stuff of kid’s nightmares gone adult, and it follows Tambu everywhere, haunting her with all-consuming fear, withdrawal, isolation. Floors, ceilings, walls—their borders are often extended or dissolved. Ambition is tested, her sense of self wavering. Coping is a challenge; she manifests pain by existing apart from her body. Tambu peers in from a crack in the ether, decompensates by disassociating.Tambudzai carries her soul’s burdens in metaphorical images that can tear the reader apart. The first line of the first page is “There is a fish in the mirror,” reflecting herself. Animal metaphors penetrate the pages as encroachers—hyenas, snakes, ants, and more-- and viscerally so. “You arrived on the back of a hyena. The treacherous creature dropped you from far above onto a desert floor. There is nothing here except, at the floor’s limits, infinite walls.” “You are an ill-made person. You are being unmade. The hyena laugh-howls at your destruction. It screams like a demented spirit and the floor dissolves beneath you.”“Mealie meal” given to Tambu by her mother, indirectly, precipitates Tambu’s inner brawl to stow or shed it. Her gestures and mordant wit adds a dimension to how she perceives her relationship with her maman and the rest of her family, as well as her colleagues, country and social hierarchy. How to balance the desire to succeed with kindness? It’s ripping her into pieces.Her sister lost a leg in the war and “Yes, I went and I am here but I never came back. Most of the time I’m still out there wandering through the grass and sand, looking for my leg.” Tsitsi’s use of the grotesque, the severed body parts, augment the borders of our bodies—how they become borderless in war. Life begets death begets life.These external symbols and figures crack something else open for the reader. Not only does Tsitsi think outside the box, her box is lightyears and constellations from convention. Tambu’s body and out-of-body intervals are both staggering and emotionally compelling. She is mournfully conflicted--is she accountable for her pain, or did her circumstances create this torment?Advocate for herself. Break the glass ceiling. But what if those shards fall and hit the ones you love in the flesh? Does ambition allow blindness instead of kindness? Tambu’s story is not easy to read, because there’s so much crushing pain, deep discouragement, and despair. Alienation, fear, shameless FOMO, shameful failed successes. But it is written in a picaresque style, also, that moderates the multiple tragedies. Redemption and reparation are just as noteworthy. The fraught heroine is unforgettable. THIS MOURNABLE BODY will make my top ten list of the year.