Papers

Jennifer Armstrong (University of Western Australia)
"Marechera's shamanistic approach to reading history"

The paper will look at Marechera's take on Britain and post-independence Zimbabwe. It will show how he uses a shamanistic approach to reshape and reframe our perceptions of history, and if possible to redirect the future, itself. His approach is shamanistic in that he seeks to restore health to the soul-sick by intervening at a pre-Oedipal stage of awareness.

Jane Bryce (University of the West Indies)
"'Bits and pieces I picked up and pocketed':
The tangential feminine in Marechera's fiction"

Known for his combative and menippean writing style, Dambudzo Marechera has not infrequently been taken to task for his apparently negative portrayal of women. The poet Chenjerai Hove, for example, was of the opinion that: 'In this poetry woman is the mother of "bastards", the "bitch" or the "wench". This portrayal betrays the struggle to improve women's position in society.'

This paper will take an opposite view - that Marechera's multiplicity of disguises included feminine personae, through whose abused bodies he expressed a deep empathy with the suffering and exploitation of all victims, including women. At the same time, sex is invariably depicted in his work as one of a continuum of violent acts perpetrated on the weak and those unable to defend themselves.

Through a focus on particular short stories, the paper will dismantle the critique of a negative femininity, recontextualising it within a world view which sees the feminine as potentially subversive of masculinist and patriarchal power.

Memory Chirere (University of Zimbabwe)
"Marechera-mania and Zimbabwean Literature"

This paper explores a multifaceted phenomenon tentatively called “Marechera-mania” that has gripped some prominent young Zimbabwean writers who started writing earnestly in the 1990's. These writers have either associated themselves with Marechera, or have been associated, by others, with his writing style or ideas as a launching pad into their own careers. But more important is how they have tended, variably, to give Marechera very interesting new leases of life in whatever independent directions they have been taken as writers. Robert Muponde is the most prominent of the “Marechera apostles”. His short stories in No More Plastic Balls echo Marechera in their vigorous language and an in-depth exploration of violence and victimhood. Ruzvidzo Mupfudza’s early works like "Cancer" echo Marechera’s "The Christmas Reunion" in its excruciating introspective search for meaning in a world where family ties are fast collapsing. The early Nhamo Mhiripiri’s work exudes Marecherean existentialism as it explores the complex spirit of the township as in The House of Hunger. The others are the late Phillip Zhuwawo and the much younger Tinashe Mushakavanhu.

Gerald Gaylard (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa)
"Love in the time of illness: Marechera's love poetry"

Dambudzo Marechera was radical in every sense of the word, and no less so in his love poetry which was unprecedented, particularly in black Zimbabwean literature just after independence in the early 1980s. Whilst there has been interesting recent work on Marechera, for instance on his writing about war, his love poetry has received scant critical attention. This is regrettable both because of the paucity of love poetry in the Zimbabwean context and because Marechera dealt so insightfully with the intricacies of relations between self and other within a racialised and claustrophobically bordered world. This paper aims to rectify this by a careful examination of his love poems, in particular the "Amelia" sequence and "My Arms Vanished Mountains" from Cemetery of Mind. The paper shows that Marechera's insurrectionary quest for psychosexual freedom in this poetry involved a number of important literary interventions. He had to be prepared to challenge gender roles, and in particular any sense of himself as a conventional heterosexual male and the idea of femininity as passive. He had to be prepared to both use and abandon any and all traditions, particularly those that associated identity with sexuality with power. He had to embrace alterity, particularly in the form of European others, which led him into a dangerous Kristevan territory of jouissance and abjection, what he calls in his introduction to the "Amelia" sequence "the delight of pure sexual pleasure...when thought and calculation are banished out of sight. A melodrama of the voluptuous" (167). And, finally, he had to find a new and appropriate style and register in which to write this new form of love. The result of these interventions was a poetry dynamic in its refusal to be dominated by history, its anti-racism and its suggestion that love involves a curiosity about and exploration of otherness, a suggestion ahead of its time in many ways.

Nhamo Mhiripiri (Midlands State University, Zimbabwe)
"Visualising Marechera and seeing the self-performer: Marechera on film and video"

Filmic documentary is an artistic method whose importance in the presentation and re-presentation of Dambudzo Marechera has not been adequately investigated. Marechera has appeared in both film and video documentary, 'acting' himself, as in the first part of The House of Hunger (1984) by Chris Austin, and in interviews such as Olley Maruma's After the Hunger and the Drought (1985). There is also unedited footage of Marechera being interviewed by Ray Mawerere. These three audio-visual documentaries are important in ascertaining what popular impressions of Marechera they capture, project, reinforce or demystify, and whether they perpetuate the image of the eccentric, mad, wild man. Marechera is best remembered as a writer rather than an 'actor'. When he was contracted to act himself in The House of Hunger, the visuals show him as a fired up, angry, but very articulate young exile in Britain. He is full of life and his body deportment exudes confidence and defiance. A somewhat similar mood and articulation of topical issues is extended in Olley Maruma's After the Hunger and the Drought. The footage collected by Ray Mawerere tells a different story with a visibly ailing Marechera, calm and mellowed, at his workplace at Speciss College. He has a bad bout of flu but still carries himself with pride and dignity. Here he is no longer signifying the mad fiery writer anymore. Whilst Marechera has not yet resigned to death, a reflexive video viewer can see the man who wrote somewhat morbid poems such as "I used to like tomatoes" and "Who the bastard is death". Those lines are rife with a premonition of death and a sense of betrayal with the physical human body as a fragile and mortal frame on which "Time" and "Fate" make their own wry inscriptions. Certainly, in the filmic and video spoken words are important, but the way he dresses and carries himself, his poise and outward appearance are of semiotic significance that need attention. The film clips are existential texts which narrate a story that though ambiguous in its own right, complements and corroborates what Marechera said and wrote, confirming, inventing, reinventing or simply rejecting the popular myths about himself.

Anias Mutekwa (Midlands State University, Gweru, Zimbabwe)
"Intellectual Anarchism , Anarchic Intellectualism’, Reading Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger, Mindblast and Black Sunlight

Dambudzo Marechera, the artist , is the archetypal post-colonial migrant, the hybrid , gifted with a second sight .Marechera’s works , by and large, are reflective of this second sight of the postcolonial migrant, artistically and semantically that is. This article aims to investigate the above works by Dambudzo Marechera in the context of intellectual anarchism and anarchic intellectualism to reveal the the author’s sense of futility in everything. In his world nothing is allowed to succeed and the only constant and exception to this rule is change itself. Marechera’s status as a migrant allows him to be both the insider and the outsider regarding the various discourses , national and cultural , concerning the coming into being of the Zimbabwean nation and post colony.His vision is therefore cutting and penetrating and in many ways his art and vision prove to have been ahead of their time.From the ambivalence of the anti-colonial discourses to the grotesqueness of the post colony Marechera’s critiques show an open-endedness that negates closure and anticipates change. He refuses to idolize and gratify chauvinistic national discourses and ideologies and instead fractures them and shows the temporariness of the values that underlie them. Marechera in his anarchic vision does not seek to teach but rather to provoke , prick and subvert though his art.His art therefore has appeared to some as un African , artistically and thematically, and combined with his bohemian lifestyle, he became a figure of immense curiosity and generated a lot of controversy.

Tiro Sebina (University of Botswana, Gaborone)
"Literary Adventures: Inter-textuality in Marechera’s Fiction"

The paper sources illustrative examples from The House of Hunger, Black Sunlight and Black Insider and ScrapIron Blues and some of Marechera ‘s essays and interviews to demonstrate how inter-textual kinetics in operate in Marechera’s fiction. A feature of Marechera’s writing that I find appealing is the profusion of literary allusions in his works. The most striking attribute of Marechera’s personality and creative output is evidence of prodigious reading. The writer as a self-conscious student and reader of literature possessed a voracity for reading that is remarkable. Marechera’s works engage in animated banter with a whole raft of writers. Marechera’s fictional strategy is characterised by impish invocation of literary antecedents. Marechera’s writings are replete with literary echoes. Marechera’s narrators and characters are mostly troubled students with artistic and literary aspirations. Near the beginning of The house of Hunger (1978) the narrator reckons, “All the black youth was thirsty. There was not an oasis of thought which we did not lick dry...”(1978: p.2) High school students and future martyrs of the cause of national liberation delight in reading Dostoevsky, Chekov, Turgenev, Pushkin and Gorky while bullies and sleek police informers brag about reading Aimé Cesairé , Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Senghor and Christopher Okigbo. In the light of my own experience as a student and teacher of literature in English and a Dambudzo Marechera enthusiast, I find Marechera’s candid work to be an effective apparatus for fostering habits of alert, fearless, sensitive and critical reading among students of literature and the community of readers in general. Any reader who follows Marechera’s irreverent path through the verdant garden of literary references is in for an invaluable literary treat.

Brendon Nicholls (University of Leeds)
"Dambudzo Marechera: A Reflection . . . Or Two"

Dambudzo Marechera is as well-known for his eccentric autobiography as for his prodigious writing talent. Yet, despite his occasionally outrageous behaviour, many Marechera scholars have been reluctant to contemplate how his fiction might be structured by psychical unease, or to make a pathological subject available to African literature. I shall argue that Marechera’s endless self-fictionalisations, and the doppelgangers that we encounter in his fiction, evidence a desire to play every part going. This narcissistic desire is produced by Marechera’s relationship with the book and by the impossible structure of colonial recognition that the book sets in place. The doublings and the idealized versions of self in Marechera’s novels are consistent with larger fantasies of relocation and self-translation that the book inspires in him. Hence, the book becomes a site of ideal self-imaging, but one in which the moment of self-inscription is only ever partial and fragmentary. Using the work of Homi Bhabha, I shall argue that Marechera’s pathologies and fictional strategies form part of the same narrative of colonial transgression.

Carolyn Hart (London Metropolitan University)
"A Postmodern at the Margin: Language Innovations in Marechera’s Texts"

Dambudzo Marechera is considered by many critics to be a postmodern writer. However, his subject matter and his intent to experiment with the English language in order to counteract racism and sexism make Marechera’s texts different to those of most European and American postmodern writers. Marechera’s texts were published with the Heinemann African Writers Series (AWS), which was until 2002 the main publisher of African texts of the twentieth century that received international distribution. The standards for publication with the AWS and publishers in Europe generally called for serious texts using standardized English and the exploration of serious social issues, rather than popular texts written primarily to sell and entertain. In most of the texts published by the AWS, therefore, not only are graphic sex scenes lacking but also the exploration of sexuality is lacking. Marechera’s texts are among a few experimental texts that provide an exception to the rule in the AWS. He used experimental language that subverts standardized English. He also created a wider range of expression regarding sexuality and the body than in “serious” social realist texts, but yet a different type of expression than that which is in popular or mass literatures. Marechera’s texts may be considered “hybrid” in their blending of forms, and Marechera himself believed that boundaries of genre and geography are inadequate to categorize texts. However, Marechera also was aware that in his texts he resisted “imported” standards of the West including straightforward, linear thinking. This paper discusses Marechera’s own theoretical position regarding his writing and how his innovations in language and aesthetics represent his identity as an African from a Zimbabwean township. Through this discussion, the paper aims to show the unique contributions Marechera’s texts made to the AWS and more generally to African literatures published in English.

Özlem Görümlü (Dokuz Eylül University, Turkey)
"The Portrayal of Marechera as a Young Writer: Rereading The Black Insider from the Reader’s Perspective"

The South African writer now living in Britain, Lauretta Ngcobo, comments that writers and artists value the importance of sharing their experiences with others. She says,

What validates the experience of an artist is knowing that somewhere out there someone will acknowledge and share your deepest thoughts, your joys, your pain, your muses. Yet, in South Africa we have lived for a very long time in stifling isolation of our separate worlds both as individuals and as groups. Only now do we, as South African writers and artists, self-consciously grope and reach out to find fellow South African kindred sprits.

The aim of this paper will be to study Marechera’s Black Sunlight in relation with the idea in Ngcobo’s statements from the reader’s standpoint. That is, his experiences whether political or personal or both, appeal the reader in search of the “self”.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu (University of Kent, Canterbury)
"Dambudzo Marechera and the Zimbabwe Crisis"

This paper seeks to engage with the significance of Dambudzo Marechera’s prophetic insight, his skepticism of the ambitions of the de-colonization project and why his original, urgent voice was, and still is, so appealing and essential. With his works and biography as guides, I will show how Dambudzo Marechera developed his voice and thereby became the voice ringing in Zimbabwe’s conscience. The postcolonial vision espoused in his works problematises the notions of nationhood, ideology and society in Zimbabwe. There’s an acute awareness and disappointment in him that what many freedom fighters had died for in the liberation was not being realized. The freedom train had been hijacked as a gravy train for a powerful minority. Corruption was rife. Violence, abductions and killings of dissenting voices prevalent, the average Zimbabwean was a beggar still and yet ironically the colour of leadership was no longer white. Zimbabwe looks bleak as it was for Marechera in the late 70s and early 80s. And this is the very kind of state that angered him, and influenced his violent resistant writings captured vividly in his seminal text The House of Hunger (1978), which is a relevant metaphor of what Zimbabwe has become. I am not so much interested in the biography as such, but in the substance of his ideas and whether or not they present a historical understanding of the present Zimbabwe crisis. The question often asked is: what would Dambudzo Marechera be saying about the present state of affairs in Zimbabwe? An answer to that leads to more relevant questions: what is the relationship between writers and politics in Zimbabwe? Are writers obligated to intervene in their society, to criticize or at least comment on it? I want to argue that Marechera’s brief writing career was a struggle of the possibilities and limits of public involvement.

Afam Akeh (Oxford Brookes University)
"Morbidity as Metaphor: Sensory Anguish in the Poetry of Marechera"

This paper locates and interprets Dambudzo Marechera in tradition, as a significant African contributor to the aesthetics of ‘rage’ in modern and contemporary poetry. Interest here is in the element of ‘rage’ as the definitive critical and creative agency for poets engaging cultural and psychic spaces and times. It examines particular features of the form, the anguished visionary tone and apocalyptic language, the foregrounding of exilic, postcolonial and other alienations, its abiding rebellion and hyperbolic representations of anarchic themes such as chaos, ugliness, degradation, profanity, violence and death, and its roots in cultural displacement and political denial or marginality. But interest in the subject goes further to attempt an architecture of the form as worked by the Zimbabwean poet. The Poetry of Rage, in Marechera and others, in its ‘reaction to’, ‘reflection of’ and imagined possibilities for a ‘redemption or renewal of’ location and experience, constructs for itself a realism which is a negation of the imposed official reality with its notions of Cartesian objectivity and normality. Sensory anguish, involving elements of ‘rage’ in both poem and poet, is represented as the self and its intelligent organs, including its creative capacities, reflecting and resisting existing irrationality and instability in experience. The poet of rage rejects the constructed official normality, and hears voices, sees things and feels pain others have learned not to hear or see or feel, certainly not with such heightened sensitivity and unbearable intensity, and sacrificially offers, sometimes tragically, to channel or model the decay for others in both work and life. What Marechera does with his anguished images and maddened poetics are of interest. Criticisms of the form’s idealism, extreme self-objectification or projection, and dark pessimism, are also considered in engagement with the poetry of Marechera.

Julie Cairnie (University of Guelph, Canada)
"Fuzzy Goo’s Stories for Children: Children’s Literature for a “New” Zimbabwe?"

I was first introduced to Dambudzo Marechera--myth and writer--by a child inMutorashanga, Zimbabwe in the late 1980’s. This young teen boy was reading Flora Veit-Wild’s monograph on Marechera (Baobab Books, 1988) during a school football game. Marechera had only been dead for a couple of years, but there was already developing a mythology around his life and work. His anti-establishment writing appealed to a range of Zimbabweans--including the young--in the seemingly heady days of post-Independence and before the more severe problems of the 1990’s. My theoretical perspective on the topic of Marechera and children is drawn from Ann Stoler’s work on childhood and empire, and recent work on children’s writing in sub-Saharan Africa. All of this work explodes the myth that childhood is a moment of forced (and welcome) withdrawal from the concerns of the world. In my paper I will look at Marechera’s Fuzzy Goo’s Stories for Children. I argue that these stories/poems--which don’t seem to conform to “suitable” reading material for children--in fact match in compelling ways the horror stories that contemporary Zimbabwean children are telling about their own lives (Our Broken Dreams, 2007) and the equally horrific stories that contemporary Zimbabwean writers are producing for and about children (Shimmer Chinodya’s Tale of Tamari, 2004). In short, my paper makes the point that Fuzzy Goo’s Stories for Children has significant relevance in the “New Zimbabwe”: it speaks to many Zimbabwean children’s experience of the blurring of the adult and the child; the collaboration of adult and child in literature of social change; and the place of children’s literature and art in social change.

Drew Shaw (Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London)
"Mercurial Marechera: Champion or Spoiler?"

Dambudzo Marechera is widely celebrated as a prophetic writer, a bold voice against tyranny, a champion of the marginalized and dispossessed - a modern African icon. But he has also irritated a multitude, rained on the parade of many worthy causes. As much as he has rolled back frontiers, delighted and inspired, voiced concerns of the voiceless, he has also thrown a spanner in the works of progressive ideals. In the words of "The Bar Stool Edible Worm", who says "I am against everything/ Against war and those against/ War..," there is something mercurial about Marechera. This paper will explore contradiction and inconsistency in the author’s work, asking whether he is more a champion or a spoiler when it comes to progressive politics, and to what extent he can be appropriated, if at all, to liberatory projects.

The paper will consider, especially, issues of gender, sexuality, and race, and the context of post-colonial Zimbabwe. While his writing is sharply critical of male domination and supportive of women’s emancipation, it is also, to a great extent, patently misogynist. Although it supports gay liberation initiatives, it is also nevertheless homophobic. While it is anti-racist, it has also upset those wishing to proclaim pride in their ethnic heritage. And it would seem Marechera’s anarchic sensibility militates as much against liberal democracy as it does against dictatorship. Unfortunately for those seeking to appropriate Marechera for worthy causes, I will argue, he cannot easily and unequivocally be assimilated to an emancipatory vision.

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