(This explosive, award-winning novella of growing up in co...)
This explosive, award-winning novella of growing up in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), told in exquisite, imaginative prose, touches the reader's nerve through the author's harrowing portrait of lives disrupted by white settlers, a young disillusioned black man, and individual suffering in the 1960s and 1970s. Marechera's raw, piercing writings secured his place in African literature as a stylistic innovator and rebel commentator of the ghetto condition. While The House of Hunger is the centerpiece of this collection, readers are also treated to a series of short sketches in which Marechera, with angry humor, further navigates themes of survival, madness, violence, and despair.
(In an unspecified setting the stream-of-consciousness nar...)
In an unspecified setting the stream-of-consciousness narrative of this cult novel traces the fortunes of a group of anarchists in revolt against a military-fascist-capitalist opposition. The protagonist is photojournalist Chris, whose camera lens becomes the device through which the plot is cleverly unraveled. In Dambudzo Marechera’s second experimental novel, he parodies African nationalist and racial identifications as part of an argument that notions of an ‘essential African identity’ were often invoked to authorize a number of totalitarian regimes across Africa. Such irreverent, avant-garde literature was criticized upon publication in Zimbabwe in 1980, and Black Sunlight was banned on charges of ‘Euromodernism’ and as a challenge to the concept of nation-building in the newly independent country.
(Outcasts inside a ruined and deserted faculty building te...)
Outcasts inside a ruined and deserted faculty building tell of their experiences in the post-colonial disaster zone. The story reflects the writer's experience of migrancy, and his refusal of the security of belonging - either to an "African identity" or to the international literary elite.
(This is a book of poems by Dambudzo Marechera, representi...)
This is a book of poems by Dambudzo Marechera, representing the whole spectrum of the young writer's growing literary maturity. The poems sparkle with Marechera's unique wit, always quickened by his uncanny ability to use language to subvert all conventional cultural and political pieties. "Cemetery of Mind" demands serious attention and reveals, through the sharpest of the poet's voice, the real world inside us all.
(This is a stunning collection of Marechera's last writing...)
This is a stunning collection of Marechera's last writings, evoking city life with its many disparate facets - from the glittering fashion shops in First Street Mall to the tramps in the alleys, and in Marechera's only known piece in Shona, "The Servants' Ball." What at first sight seems peaceful and harmless, is suddenly disrupted by flashes of madness for, in Marechera's universe, everyday life is always haunted by the nightmares of Zimbabwe's past. In the "Concentration Camp," Marechera gives a poetic, deeply felt voice to the dread experienced by former inhabitants of the "keeps," the restricted villages of Zimbabwe's War of Liberation. Often he takes a child's view to measure the horrors of adult society. Gentleness paired with sarcasm marks his hardly known children's stories.
Dambudzo Marechera was a Zimbabwean novelist, short story writer, playwright, and poet. He won critical acclaim for his collection of stories entitled The House of Hunger (1978), a powerful account of life in his country under white rule.
Background
Charles William Dambudzo Marechera was born Tambudzai Marechera on June 4, 1952, in Vhengere Township, Rusape, Zimbabwe (then known as Southern Rhodesia) to the family of a mortuary attendant Isaac Marechera and a maid Masvotwa Venenzia Marechera. He was baptized Charles William Marechera. He grew up in Vhengere Township when Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia, one of the last holdouts of white colonial rule on the African continent. The third of nine children, his original birth name, “Tambudzai,” meant “the one who brings trouble.” Trouble came to the family in other forms, however: when he was 13, his father was struck by a car and killed, which plunged the household into poverty. The first book Marechera ever owned was a children’s encyclopedia from the Victorian era that he had discovered in the town garbage dump. They were evicted and lived in a squatters’ settlement for a time, and Marechera’s mother was forced to support the children by working as a prostitute. Such traumas caused Marechera to develop a stutter, which made him the target of schoolyard taunts.
From 1965 on Rhodesia was under an official state of emergency, and violence was common as black nationalists battled with a racist white government to gain some measure of political representation. The troubled atmosphere brought further unease to Marechera’s life. Though he was a solid student, he began to suffer from hallucinations and a marked paranoia.
Education
Dambudzo Marechera attended St. Augustine's Mission, Penhalonga, where he clashed with his teachers over the colonial teaching syllabus.
In 1972 Marechera won a scholarship to the University of Rhodesia, but he was expelled the following year for taking part in campus protests against the Rhodesian government. His professors then recommended him for a scholarship at Oxford University in England, and Marechera began at New College in 1974. His time in England was troubled, for he drank heavily and was often disruptive on campus.
An American summer school at New College even threatened to pull out of Oxford because of his behavior, and a scholarship program for African students was canceled altogether because of him. He was finally ejected in March of 1976 after he set a fire on college property; there was no real damage, but he was given the choice of voluntary psychiatric treatment or expulsion and chose the latter. School psychologist diagnosed him with schizophrenia.
After his expulsion from Oxford, Marechera hitchhiked to London and claimed to have lived in a riverside tent there while he wrote The House of Hunger, a novella and some short stories. With a theme that questioned what had happened to his generation - that of the first politically conscious, educated Africans - the book caused a literary stir and won several impressive reviews when it was published by the esteemed Heinemann publishing house in 1978. It was championed by well-known writers and earned the Guardian newspaper’s prize for debut fiction the following year.
Despite his newfound literary acclaim, Marechera continued to behave erratically. At the Guardian prize ceremony, he excoriated the participants for what he claimed was their hypocrisy and threw china at the chandeliers at one point. His personal life remained chaotic, and he lived in friends’ apartments for some time or even in squats, subsisting on advances from his publishers or small financial grants from arts organizations. He sent a total of four manuscripts to Heinemann, but only one was accepted for publication, plunging him into deeper despondency. Of those other three, The Black Insider was published after his death, but the other two, “A Bowl for Shadows” and “The Black Heretic,” have since disappeared.
The second manuscript Heinemann chose was a novel, Black Sunlight, which was published in 1980. Its story revolves around a photographer from Zimbabwe who travels across his war-ravaged country and discovers a warren of caves that a guerrilla army is using as its base. This second opus was not as well received as his debut work, and Veit-Wild, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, explained that its primary fault was one of narrative structure: “Without a coherent plot, the narration moves from reality to surreality; the narrator is confronted with the most incomprehensible and fantastic events and objects until he drowns in a world of surrealistic visions.”
Not surprisingly, Black Sunlight was banned in Zimbabwe as blasphemous and obscene, though the country finally achieved the independence that same year. In a celebration of the political milestone at the Africa Centre, Marechera needled his assembled fellow expatriates by appearing in traditional English hunting regalia. In 1982 he returned to Zimbabwe with a television crew that was filming The House of Hunger for British television, but Marechera argued with the director and was banished from the set. He decided to stay in Zimbabwe but spent the remaining five years of his life in an alcoholic stupor. He wandered the streets of the capital, Harare, and slept at times in doorways or in the city’s Cecil Square, often with his typewriter on his lap. He produced one more work that was published during his lifetime, the experimental literary project Mind-blast; or, The Definitive Buddy, a collection including a diary from his park-bench days, three plays, several poems, and a prose narrative.
Mindblast, published by the College Press in Harare, gave Marechera a fresh generation of admirers, “mainly high-school and university students,” noted Veit-Wild’s Dictionary of Literary Biography essay. “Children of a new era, they identified with his antiauthoritarian behavior and biting social satire.” In 1984, the year Mindblast was published, he settled in his own Harare apartment but continued to run afoul of authorities, both academic and otherwise. He was arrested at the Zimbabwe Book Fair and held for several days, and publishers in Harare rejected two novellas he submitted as well as his poetry. In January of 1987, he was diagnosed with AIDS, and died of pneumonia the following August. His death elevated his reputation among Zimbabweans of all ages, and trust was established the following year to promote his work and lend support to new emerging writers in the country.
Some of Marechera’s works appeared in the years following his death. Cemetery of Mind is a 1992 collection of 140 poems and an interview with him conducted by Veit-Wild. In some of its verse, he wrote about the sudden onset of his illness, and World Literature Today’s Ojaide found that here Marechera “remains shocking and defiant of society in the final poems, one of the most moving of which, ‘I Used to Like Tomatoes,’ describes his sickness in highly imagistic and exhilarating language despite the gloom.” Ojaide asserted that though Marechera was known for his prose, his talents as a poet were also commendable.
Dambudzo Marechera's book Mindblast or The Definitive Buddy criticizes the materialism, intolerance, opportunism, and corruption of post-independence Zimbabwe, extending the political debate beyond the question of nationalism to embrace genuine social regeneration.
Views
Quotations:
"Here in Harare the things held against me would have been totally invisible to a Londoner. My unconventional dress and my dreadlocks would not have raised an eyebrow, my ‘iconoclastic’ statements about ‘everything’ would have been drummed on deaf ears - no one would give a damn how I lived as long as I was bearably legal. Here in Harare, it was different. Expectations were crudely materialistic, less to do with the spirit but more with the price of the matter."
"If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you."
"Satiated with the great purposelessness of it, we gently belched nerve gases into the next generation."
"When all else fails, don't take it in silence: scream like hell, scream like Jericho was tumbling down, serenaded by a brace of trombones, scream!"
"Here we have a deliberate campaign to promote Zimbabwean culture: everyone is talking about it, building it, developing it. When politicians talk about culture, one had better pack one’s rucksack and run, because it means the beginning of unofficial censorship…. When culture is emphasised in such a nationalistic way that can lead to fascism. When in Nazi Germany culture started to be defined in a nationalistic way, it meant that all other people, all other nations were stupid; it meant intellectuals, painters, writers, lecturers, being persecuted or being assassinated. In this sense, all nationalism always frightens me, because it means the products of your own mind are now being segregated into official and unofficial categories, and that only the officially admired works must be seen. All the other work we must hide or tear up."
Personality
Like his work, Marechera’s entire life was showy performance. He continuously reinvented himself by donning costumes, making shocking statements and creating myths about his person. Liberation from colonization, Marechera believed, could only happen by making self-reinvention a way of life, adopting a fluid chameleon identity that resisted being defined, categorized and spoken for. Marechera suffered from alcohol addiction.
Quotes from others about the person
“He is highly imagistic, fresh, shocking, and delightful, despite the pervading angry and sad mood in his poems.” - The World Literature Today
Connections
Some accounts suggest that Marechera married a British or a German woman but not much is known about the union.
Father:
Isaac Marechera
Mother:
Masvotwa Venenzia Marechera
Friend:
Charles Mungoshi
Acquaintance:
Flora Veit-Wild
References
Contemporary Authors, Vol. 166
This volume of Contemporary Authors contains biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers.
1998
Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on His Life and Work
In this documentary reader, Flora Veit-Wild offers a multi-faceted portrait of a man whose life was as tortured as his fiction. Through a wide-ranging collection of personal interviews, memoirs by friends and fellow writers like Nadine Gordimer, previously unpublished manuscripts, photographs and memorabilia she explores the man and the myth.
2004
Reading Marechera
It is this universe of literary thought that one can see written into the fiction of Marechera that this collection of essays sets out to interrogate.
2013
Moving Spirit: The Legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in the 21st Century
This multimedia collection is inspired by the life and work of the Zimbabwean cult writer Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987). The book demonstrates the growing influence of Marechera among writers, artists, and scholars worldwide.
No Room for Cowardice: A View of the Life and Times of Dambudzo Marechera
In this book, Pattison engages with these major events in Marechera's life but concentrates mainly on his writing. Earlier criticism about Marechera's writing was primarily directed at his life rather than his writing and this book aims to address this imbalance.