Introduction

Dambudzo Marechera, 1974.
Courtesy of New College, Oxford.

Dambudzo Marechera was a performer. Throughout his life, he continuously reinvented himself by putting on roles, donning costumes, and creating myths about his person. This was what he saw as both the inescapable effect of colonization, and a reaction against it. To Marechera, being colonized meant being a 'mimic man' destined to imitate the colonizer. Yet he believed that liberation from colonization could happen through making self-reinvention a way of life, adopting a fluid identity that resisted being defined, categorized, and spoken for.

It is therefore appropriate that Marechera be remembered through a creative engagement with his literary output. There can be no more suitable time than now to celebrate the work of Marechera, whose scathing views of the moral corruption of the African postcolony have been grimly borne out in Zimbabwe. Dambudzo Marechera: A Celebration will be a multi-media festival to recuperate the memory of the author in Oxford, where his writing first emerged after his expulsion in 1976. Marechera's experimental interpretation of the colonial and postcolonial experience has been recognized as a significant instance of African modernism and postmodernism that links him with such writers as Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo and J. M. Coetzee and demands new retellings of African literary history. His post-nationalist vision, an alternative to cultural nationalism long before its currency in postcolonial theory, is highly relevant to the concerns of postcolonial studies today, as the continued critical interest in the writer indicates.

Marechera's avant-garde writing, however, is known for resisting containment inside a theory; subversive and iconoclastic, it creates new meanings and paradigms, and eagerly hurls expletives at the Western academy. In encouraging creative interpretations of Marechera's work through theatre, film, music, or the fine arts, Dambudzo Marechera: A Celebration suggests that the singularity of Marechera's engagement with language demands an active, inventive, performative response to do it justice. The festival will therefore have a double emphasis: scholarly and creative. Set in Trinity College and Wadham College in the heart of Oxford, it will move between various venues to accommodate conference presentations, theatre plays, film screenings, a fine-art exhibition, a concert, and other events.

The festival will celebrate contemporary African writing and the general creativity that still survives under the extreme conditions of poverty, censorship and state-sponsored violence in Zimbabwe. In May 1986, three months before his death, Marechera expressed a vision for Zimbabwean writing for the 21st century. To survive, he said, Zimbabwean literature would have to

compete with anything published in New York, in London, in Paris, in Tokyo, and so on. This means bringing up what has already been achieved to the stage where there will no longer be any need to talk about 'Zimbabwean literature' or even about 'African writing', where literature will simply be international. […] I think we need a deeper exploration of the human psyche. And this means stripping away all those easy attitudes we used to have. Like black versus white, reactionary versus progressive, and dragging literature into that rather shallow battlefield. I think we need to explore those neuroses which hamper our day-to-day dreams, imaginations, our longings for new myths… I mean, with Independence, all the old myths are now irrelevant. We've got to create the kind of myths which will actually see us into the 21st century.

Dambudzo Marechera: A Celebration will take this vision seriously. Bringing together renowned international scholars, writers, and artists, it will emphasize transnational cultural interaction, creative freedom and free movement across national borders, of which Marechera was an embodiment, analyzing the meaning of 'African literature' in the 21st century.