Borders and Boundaries

It is interesting in “The Book of Not” to see the reoccurrence of “boundaries” and “borders”. We start off in “The Book of Not” with Tambu observing this encounter between Ntombi and Bougainvillea in which Ntombi asks “Bo” for some of her Nesquik and Tambu is worried that Ntombi may reach out and grab “Bo’s” nesquik, which would “pollute it”. So in the book, we are first confronted with the physical boundary: you can look and admire all you want, but you must never, ever touch.

Then there is the passage in which Sister Emmanuel calls all of the girls in Tambu’s dorm room into her office to discuss the government quotas. On page 72, it says “Nor could we help her as we were keeping our heads uncomfortably downcast, with our foreheads wrinkled and our eye sockets aching from swiveling our eyeballs up under our brows. For each one of us had learnt in infancy how to respect, but we had all, since that early teaching, discovered white people expected you to look straight into their eyes when you communicated.” I guess you could call this a communication boundary.

Then in the scene where the girls are listening to the fighting that is taking place at the boys school down away from them, an actual border is mentioned. Page 101 says “The dormitories at the besieged institution, because of the site the fathers from Ireland had chosen to build on, lay closer to the mountains than Sacred Heart, and so occupied a more beautiful part of the highlands. Unfortunatly, as a result of this location, Mt. Sinai abutted on the border with Mozambique, and was therefore more surrounded by peril than we were.” In this instance, this is another physical border, in the geographical sense.

It is interesting that in all these scenarios where there are borders/boundaries mentioned, there is also a mention of distress, whether it be on the part of Tambu or people around her. Dangarembga has done a fantastic job of representing “borders and boundaries” as liminal places where things are not behaving in a normal manner