Remembering Dambudzo Marechera and Talking about Zimbabwean Literature
Over at Ivor W.Hartmann's Facebook fan page, some Zimbabwean writers and readers are remembering Dambudzo Marechera (June, 1952-August, 1987). The man has had a profound influence on Zimbabwean literature, and a lot of the contemporary writers in would attest to having once or twice entered the Marechera mode as they worked on their writings. I did it, especially during those University of Zimbabwe years, when we were finally introduced to Zimbabwean (African) literature. Just being seen with a copy of House of Hunger felt great. To be a serious writer was to be like Marechera.
And years later, reading Marechera away from home, I would come to realize that Marechera was a state of mind, a creative mind, but I also learned to separate his art from his personal life. The art remained attractive, and reading it repeatedly had many benefits. Marechera is great literature for the immigrant condition, whatever that is, but Marechera the man ceased a long time ago to be a role model, and now, twenty years after his death, I am reading him as a young man who was profoundly talented, and he would have done better had we (society, Zimbabwe, Britain, himself..)not let him down.
Someone handed me a copy of House of Hunger in August 1987 and said, "I hear you call yourself a writer. Read this!" That was in Mazvihwa, before I moved to Harare for my A-Level. I am grateful to the man from Chakavanda who gave me the book and said, "Keep it. I will get another copy when I go back to Harare." I didn't know then that Marechera had died, so unlike some budding writers of my age who lived in Harare and got to meet him, I met only the work and embraced it.
Do I have my Marechera moments when I write? Plenty. He gave Zimbabwean fiction the licence to be obscene (and reading him as a teenager, I found him worth pursuing), the propensity for profanity. But he did more: he gave us a glimpse into life outside of Zimbabwe, a life lived by a marginalized, exiled Zimbabwean. Marechera also demonstrated the power of reading. One of the reasons most readers would just own but not read his works is its frame of reference, the literary icons it invokes, all of it influenced by what he had read. He gave the impression of a "smart writer", and would probably have won one of those genius awards conferred in America had he been in the right place at the right time. But in his work, some of which is heavily autobiographical, time is of the essence, the nowhereness and everywhereness of the human spirit. American writing had already remaindered his House of Hunger, which sold no more than a few copies. He was coming to America at the wrong time, after the Beat Generation, when there was, in the literature, either a return to some literary decency, or some flight into new forms of the avante-garde; in short, he was not doing anything that San Francisco, in its literary drunkness, had not done. A follower of Marechera, I would be distressed to learn of his total absence in American bookstores.
The influence of Marechera is so strong that most critics try to measure everything published by a Zimbabwean author against Marechera. Labels like "the Dambudzo Marechera of Shona literature", the "Dambudzo Marechera of Bulawayo literature," " the new Marechera", perhaps "the female Dambudzo Marechera", and others appear in the criticism. Often, such labels are well-deserved, and as Memory Chirere would say, you can't complain if your work is compared to someone like Marechera, it is all good.
So to remember Marechera, I pulled out my copy of Cemetry of Mind and went through some of my favorite poems. Not too long ago I was reading Black Sunlight, which I have been reading on and off since 1990. It reminds me of Chimanimani, where I did my first successful reading of the book when I was a teacher at Ndima Secondary School.
With the rise in Zimbabwean writing in the past five years, it is now possible to be wrapped up in the new works and forget about the habitual return to Marechera. Much of the new work carries traces of Marechera (never the full man, because that's unattainable; each writer is a distinct voice). In Mlalazi, who has been associated with Marechera, especially in his short stories, you get the unashamed depiction of the profane and exposure of vulnerabilities. In Many Rivers, fists fly and flies open on short notice; there is a glimpse into vagrant life, and wanderers abound--life on he fringes of society, as people pursue the South African Dream.
Nowhere is the decay of dreams and the descent into destitution is shown more than in Brian Chikwava's Harare North. If read right, the story moves way beyond humor and satire and becomes about the helplessness of an individual stuck in an environment he does not understand. Contrary to his beliefs, the narrator is a victim of his circumstances, more so a victim of his lack of survival skills. In immigration terms, he might be viewed by some as a visa wasted, a man devoid of ambition. I him to be more disturbed (mentally) than any of the characters Marechera ever created and the deterioration of importance, his very being, sets him apart from many of the Marechera protagonists.
As I remember Marechera today, I am reading Many Rivers, which has already exposed me to the corruption of Johannesburg, where no one can be trusted. Unfortunate events pile up at a rate unprecedented in Zimbabwean writing, and the book is its author's official entry into genre fiction, a crime thriller which shocks you at every turn. Characters are introduced and killed rapidly, and our protagonist has barely finished crossing one dangerous river when he has to cross another. Merciless crocodiles infest these rivers, but remember, crocs don't attack to be malicious--that's their nature; that's how they survive ( Thus, you don't blame them for attacking; you are tempted to blame the victim.) Mlalazi's Johannesburg is a survival-of-the-fittest jungle, and until Qinisela realizes this, his life is in great danger; and when he does, the real danger begins.
I have also had a taste of The Man, Shaggy Leopard, and the Jackal by Ignatius Mabasa. It is a collection of folktales that feature people and animals. So far I have read "The Flying Hyena" and enjoyed the depiction of hyena's deceptive character. Mabasa is the master of stylistic innovation, as we have seen in his novel Mapenzi, which freed the Shona novel from the fear of taboo subjects. Well, in this collection Mabasa utilizes the same African folkloric tradition we are familiar with, but goes a step further to "urbanize" it. I couldn't help laugh when hyena surprised me with a request for scrambled eggs, and in the title story, jackal owns an MP4 player. Tell me a sentence like this does not take you to another place: "Jackal blew a pink bubble from his chewing gum" (15). I can tell you this innovation, directed at a wider audience, seems to be working. My twelve-year-old son, who is reading the book currently, has given the best reader response: "These stories are cool."
Not only are the contemporary Zimbabwean writers moving in the direction of brave, open (as in frank) writing, they are also pursuing more practical means of reaching a wider audience. I am reminded of the detective writings of Masimba Musodza which lend themselves to serialization, the award-winning sci-fi stories of Ivor W. Hartmann, and the growing fork tale rendered in English. There is a readiness, it seems, to maintain serious literary tradition, while venturing into genre. To some readers, these divisions don't matter, because by nature, reading is a multi-genre process.
Employing the artistic spirit Marechera exemplified, new Zimbabwean writing bravely explores the Zimbabwean experience, at home and abroad. There has been a boost to the literature, thanks to brave little presses--Weaver and 'amaBooks in Zimbabwe, Lion Press in the UK--that have defied the current economic hardships. There has been a growing popularization of Zimbabwean writing by writers like Yvonne Vera, Petina Gappah, Brian Chikwava, Alexander McCall Smith, and others. Some of the writing is very good, a great deal of it is bad, but the epansion of writing demonstrates a glaring need for artistic expression, and with art comes reponsibility, and with responsibility, the desire to produce high quality writing. The phrase I hear frequently is: this is the time for Zimbabwean literature. But I am also hearing Nigerians, Ghanaians, Kenyans, South Africans, saying the same thing for their literature. Perhaps, what's obvious is that this is indeed Africa's time, and the new writing coming out of the continent is declaring its independence and presence in the global literary mix. That's the spirit writers like Christopher Okigbo, Yvonne Vera, Dambudzo Marechera, Ken Sarowiwa, and others were attempting to exemplify.
There is this enduring question I am always tempted to ask: If Marechera hadn't died young, where would his writing be today and how large would his influence to younger African writers be?
And years later, reading Marechera away from home, I would come to realize that Marechera was a state of mind, a creative mind, but I also learned to separate his art from his personal life. The art remained attractive, and reading it repeatedly had many benefits. Marechera is great literature for the immigrant condition, whatever that is, but Marechera the man ceased a long time ago to be a role model, and now, twenty years after his death, I am reading him as a young man who was profoundly talented, and he would have done better had we (society, Zimbabwe, Britain, himself..)not let him down.
Someone handed me a copy of House of Hunger in August 1987 and said, "I hear you call yourself a writer. Read this!" That was in Mazvihwa, before I moved to Harare for my A-Level. I am grateful to the man from Chakavanda who gave me the book and said, "Keep it. I will get another copy when I go back to Harare." I didn't know then that Marechera had died, so unlike some budding writers of my age who lived in Harare and got to meet him, I met only the work and embraced it.
Do I have my Marechera moments when I write? Plenty. He gave Zimbabwean fiction the licence to be obscene (and reading him as a teenager, I found him worth pursuing), the propensity for profanity. But he did more: he gave us a glimpse into life outside of Zimbabwe, a life lived by a marginalized, exiled Zimbabwean. Marechera also demonstrated the power of reading. One of the reasons most readers would just own but not read his works is its frame of reference, the literary icons it invokes, all of it influenced by what he had read. He gave the impression of a "smart writer", and would probably have won one of those genius awards conferred in America had he been in the right place at the right time. But in his work, some of which is heavily autobiographical, time is of the essence, the nowhereness and everywhereness of the human spirit. American writing had already remaindered his House of Hunger, which sold no more than a few copies. He was coming to America at the wrong time, after the Beat Generation, when there was, in the literature, either a return to some literary decency, or some flight into new forms of the avante-garde; in short, he was not doing anything that San Francisco, in its literary drunkness, had not done. A follower of Marechera, I would be distressed to learn of his total absence in American bookstores.
The influence of Marechera is so strong that most critics try to measure everything published by a Zimbabwean author against Marechera. Labels like "the Dambudzo Marechera of Shona literature", the "Dambudzo Marechera of Bulawayo literature," " the new Marechera", perhaps "the female Dambudzo Marechera", and others appear in the criticism. Often, such labels are well-deserved, and as Memory Chirere would say, you can't complain if your work is compared to someone like Marechera, it is all good.
So to remember Marechera, I pulled out my copy of Cemetry of Mind and went through some of my favorite poems. Not too long ago I was reading Black Sunlight, which I have been reading on and off since 1990. It reminds me of Chimanimani, where I did my first successful reading of the book when I was a teacher at Ndima Secondary School.
With the rise in Zimbabwean writing in the past five years, it is now possible to be wrapped up in the new works and forget about the habitual return to Marechera. Much of the new work carries traces of Marechera (never the full man, because that's unattainable; each writer is a distinct voice). In Mlalazi, who has been associated with Marechera, especially in his short stories, you get the unashamed depiction of the profane and exposure of vulnerabilities. In Many Rivers, fists fly and flies open on short notice; there is a glimpse into vagrant life, and wanderers abound--life on he fringes of society, as people pursue the South African Dream.
Nowhere is the decay of dreams and the descent into destitution is shown more than in Brian Chikwava's Harare North. If read right, the story moves way beyond humor and satire and becomes about the helplessness of an individual stuck in an environment he does not understand. Contrary to his beliefs, the narrator is a victim of his circumstances, more so a victim of his lack of survival skills. In immigration terms, he might be viewed by some as a visa wasted, a man devoid of ambition. I him to be more disturbed (mentally) than any of the characters Marechera ever created and the deterioration of importance, his very being, sets him apart from many of the Marechera protagonists.
As I remember Marechera today, I am reading Many Rivers, which has already exposed me to the corruption of Johannesburg, where no one can be trusted. Unfortunate events pile up at a rate unprecedented in Zimbabwean writing, and the book is its author's official entry into genre fiction, a crime thriller which shocks you at every turn. Characters are introduced and killed rapidly, and our protagonist has barely finished crossing one dangerous river when he has to cross another. Merciless crocodiles infest these rivers, but remember, crocs don't attack to be malicious--that's their nature; that's how they survive ( Thus, you don't blame them for attacking; you are tempted to blame the victim.) Mlalazi's Johannesburg is a survival-of-the-fittest jungle, and until Qinisela realizes this, his life is in great danger; and when he does, the real danger begins.
I have also had a taste of The Man, Shaggy Leopard, and the Jackal by Ignatius Mabasa. It is a collection of folktales that feature people and animals. So far I have read "The Flying Hyena" and enjoyed the depiction of hyena's deceptive character. Mabasa is the master of stylistic innovation, as we have seen in his novel Mapenzi, which freed the Shona novel from the fear of taboo subjects. Well, in this collection Mabasa utilizes the same African folkloric tradition we are familiar with, but goes a step further to "urbanize" it. I couldn't help laugh when hyena surprised me with a request for scrambled eggs, and in the title story, jackal owns an MP4 player. Tell me a sentence like this does not take you to another place: "Jackal blew a pink bubble from his chewing gum" (15). I can tell you this innovation, directed at a wider audience, seems to be working. My twelve-year-old son, who is reading the book currently, has given the best reader response: "These stories are cool."
Not only are the contemporary Zimbabwean writers moving in the direction of brave, open (as in frank) writing, they are also pursuing more practical means of reaching a wider audience. I am reminded of the detective writings of Masimba Musodza which lend themselves to serialization, the award-winning sci-fi stories of Ivor W. Hartmann, and the growing fork tale rendered in English. There is a readiness, it seems, to maintain serious literary tradition, while venturing into genre. To some readers, these divisions don't matter, because by nature, reading is a multi-genre process.
Employing the artistic spirit Marechera exemplified, new Zimbabwean writing bravely explores the Zimbabwean experience, at home and abroad. There has been a boost to the literature, thanks to brave little presses--Weaver and 'amaBooks in Zimbabwe, Lion Press in the UK--that have defied the current economic hardships. There has been a growing popularization of Zimbabwean writing by writers like Yvonne Vera, Petina Gappah, Brian Chikwava, Alexander McCall Smith, and others. Some of the writing is very good, a great deal of it is bad, but the epansion of writing demonstrates a glaring need for artistic expression, and with art comes reponsibility, and with responsibility, the desire to produce high quality writing. The phrase I hear frequently is: this is the time for Zimbabwean literature. But I am also hearing Nigerians, Ghanaians, Kenyans, South Africans, saying the same thing for their literature. Perhaps, what's obvious is that this is indeed Africa's time, and the new writing coming out of the continent is declaring its independence and presence in the global literary mix. That's the spirit writers like Christopher Okigbo, Yvonne Vera, Dambudzo Marechera, Ken Sarowiwa, and others were attempting to exemplify.
There is this enduring question I am always tempted to ask: If Marechera hadn't died young, where would his writing be today and how large would his influence to younger African writers be?
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