Azizi: Gender, Relationality, and the Embodiment of Mawazo in Tanzania

Abstract

This piece traces the intercorporeal embodiment of an ailment in Tanzania called mawazo, the Swahili term for “ideas” or “thoughts.” As a condition, mawazo is somewhat akin to stress: a cumulative compounding of many problems (shida nyingi) that leads to confused, muddled, and tangled thoughts, as well as physical symptoms like painful, inflamed eyes. Over my three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Iringa, Tanzania, my female collocutors who suffered from mawazo would often trace its origin to familial and marital problems, including their husbands’ infidelity, abuse, alcoholism, or squandering of money. This fictionalized narrative presents the embodied intensities of mawazo and the ways it congeals diffuse pains, hardships, and injustices, past and present. At the same time, I also show how Tanzanian women empower and support one another across generations, natal and affinal relations, friendships, and communities. The story simultaneously attends to the bodily and affective injuries that gender inequality inflicts—as mawazo and in many other registers—and to the ways that women construct lives filled with joy, care, and love.