Conditions of Not: articulations of transition in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not

Abstract: This paper focuses the effects on the identity of an individual character who is caught in the crossfire between conflicting cultural and political identities. In her novel of 2006 The Book of Not, the Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga articulates this problem area through the representation of the main character Tambu.

Drawing on postcolonial theory, cultural studies and psychoanalytic-linguistic theory, the paper addresses Tambu’s first-person narrative of the political transition from apartheid Rhodesia to majority-rule Zimbabwe as well as her own transition from the identity of a culturally displaced village girl in a war zone to that of a struggling young city professional in the supposedly non-racist Zimbabwe.  In tracing the trajectory of Tambu’s development the paper discusses the contact zones of the village, a secondary school, a city office and a residential hostel. These transitional processes are, for the main character, fraught with loss of meaning and an increasingly fragmented sense of cultural and personal identity.

Insofar as modernity includes the transition from tradition-based clan societies to individualist city life and the fragmentation of the idea of unified self-identity, Dangarembga’s novel is one of many contemporary African articulations of global modernity.