THIS MOURNABLE BODY

By Tsitsi Dangarembga

284 pp. Graywolf Press. Paper, $16.

In 1988, when Tsitsi Dangarembga’s acclaimed novel, “Nervous Conditions,” came out, I was 19 and living in a woman’s youth hostel in Harare, Zimbabwe, while attending secretarial college. I’d never be a writer, my father said, but I may as well learn to type. The misery of that hostel, the crushing sexism implicit in that secretarial course — I was feeling it all.

Into that depressed season came this brilliant gem: A school friend lent me a copy of “Nervous Conditions”; it’d been published in London and, although Dangarembga is a Zimbabwean writer, it wasn’t yet available in Harare. I lay on my thin bed in that hostel, which reeked of boiled cabbage, and read and reread that novel as if my life depended on it, which in a way it did, if life is who you are and what you do with the possibilities available to you.

“Nervous Conditions” made clear that the systematic racism and sexism — the violent facts of my own white settler childhood in pre-independence Rhodesia — weren’t accidents but arrangements, structures that we’d all built together: the whites flogging the blacks, the near slave-labor wages.

Dangarembga’s novel wasn’t just an urgent story beautifully told; it was also a work of demolition. Narrated by a restless teenager, Tambudzai (“Tambu”), “Nervous Conditions” takes place in civil war-ravaged Rhodesia during the 1960s and ’70s, on an impoverished homestead and at a mission school near the border town of Umtali (now Mutare), close to the farm on which I’d been raised. It recounts Tambu’s determination to get an education and to escape the poverty she was born into.