Original Research - Special Collection: Zimbabwean Scholars in Dialogue

The semantics of gender, politics, and religion in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body

Esther Mavengano
HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies | Vol 80, No 2 | a9030 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v80i2.9030 | © 2024 Esther Mavengano | This work is licensed under CC Attribution 4.0
Submitted: 19 May 2023 | Published: 22 April 2024

About the author(s)

Esther Mavengano, Department of English and Media Studies, Faculty of Arts, Culture and Heritage Studies, Great Zimbabwe University, Masvingo, Zimbabwe; and Research Institute for Theology and Religion, College of Human Sciences, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa; and Department of English, Institute of English and American Studies, Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow, Techische Universitat Dresden, Dresden, Germany

Abstract

Zimbabwean literature produced after the attainment of independence has been predominantly engrossed with thematisation of the postcolonial subaltern subjects’ existential conditions, enunciated together with gender politics, religion and socio-economic environment that frame politics of difference, and sites of suffering or resistance. These tropes remain absorbing and critical even in contemporary female-authored novels that also engage with a deeply fractured modern-day Zimbabwe. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel, This Mournable Body, offers important site to debate the enduring concerns of gender inequalities, politics, and religion. A stylistic approach is adopted to identify the semiotic construction of the text and discuss the different styles that are deployed to foreground central tropes in the novel. The adoption of stylistics as an underlying conceptual model locates this current study in the interdisciplinary research which brings together gender, applied linguistics, poetics, politics, and religion, in order to provoke new ways of reading the dialogic and polyphonic elements of the text. The study contends that the politics of difference is an unsettling subject that profoundly impacts on gender relations and religio-political practices in a milieu where precarity is a major defining feature of the subaltern sections comprising women and the marginalised poor. Thus, the novel’s title figuratively foregrounds the (un)mournable bodies of the people, who are both dehumanised and heavily burdened by surviving at the margin.

Contribution: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel, This Mournable Body demonstrates a deep concern with the plight of the subaltern people in a gendered society and how their conditions of the Othered bodies are further amplified by both religion and politics in present-day Zimbabwe. Thus the study contributes to the mounting discourses about politics of fragmentation and binary practices, and the ensuing agony suffered by the sidelined persons. The adopted stylistic reading of the focus novel underscores the interdisciplinary urgency to literary interpretative process.


Keywords

gender; linguistics; stylistic perspective; religion; poetic discourse; semantics; semiotics; style

Sustainable Development Goal

Goal 5: Gender equality

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