A Marechera Anniversary

Marechera died on August 18 in 1987; that's the year I was introduced to his work by someone from Chakavanda village in Mazvihwa. I was an ambitious secondary school student who already walked around declaring (often silently), that I was a writer. I had already written plays for my school, had scribbled two or three novels, all of which had been consumed by a ready audience of school mates. And he--this man from Chakavanda--returned from Harare one day and, handing me House of Hunger, said, "Here is a book by a genius; you are a writer, read it." And, indeed, I read it: the picture I have of the protagonist fighting a group of white male students at the University of Rhodesia comes from that first reading, the way it was described, the bulldozing, the raining of fists.

I read that House of Hunger and understood very little, yet I was happy to own a book by someone the man from Chakavanda had described as a genius. Come to think of it, this man was at a teacher's college somewhere in Harare (perhaps Belvedere), and he was admired by many in the village (a prospective teacher who was actually getting trained for the job in Harare: most of our teachers were temporary, meaning they had not had any training, but they had passed their O-Level or A-Level at a mission school somewhere). I appreciated the honor of being the first among my peers to read Dambudzo Marechera...

Now, I just revisted Cemetery of Mind--since it's the first one I locate on my shelves whenever I look for Marechera's books--and I opened to page 189 with the poem "Only the Mountainclimber Can Tell Us". When I read it back in 2007, a time I was writing a lot of poetry drafts, I was inspired to create a poem in the margins of the page. First, I crossed out "the" in the title and above "Mountainclimber" I inserted Chisiya so that the new title read "Only Chisiya Can Tell Us". I had a poem...

Chisiya is a common feature in the things I write. It's, as Chenjerai Hove would say, the hill to whose sounds my heart was attuned as I grew up in Mototi. Our home was situated between two hills, Chisiya and Chigorira, and it was the Chisiya whose rhythm I heard (or in Marechera's words: "You see rhythm / where only frets misery"); the other hill, Chigorira, was a source of nightmares because when I was much younger, I had thought I saw the rocks moving at night, or they had seemed to ape my every movement...then years later, I would be attacked by a swarm of Chigorira bees which later gave up on me, found me uninteresting and left me to swell in peace.

So here goes the rest of the poem as inspired by Marechera:

Only Chisiya Can Tell Us

I see the rhythm of Gweshumba range
On the spine of a sleeping lion
when the sun danced
on New Year's Day
after mother said,
"Wake up children!
Go to the summit of Chisiya
Glue your eyes to the rays
until you sprout and twist
to the new rhtym of the sun"

So on that day
the sun treated us
to a free show, but no sprouts came.
Still, we descended the hill
ready to climb the endless Gweshumba ranges.


I wrote it, left it like that, never revisited it until today.That's what I like about re-reading Marechera and other writers I like, they aways inspire something...

And now to one of my favorite passages in House of Hunger :

"Life stretched out like a series of hunger-scoured hovels stretching endlessly towards the horizon. One's mind became the grimy rooms, the dusty cobwebs in which the minute skeletons of one's childhood were forever in the spidery grip that stretched out to include not only the very stones upon which one walked but also the stars which glittered vaguely upon the stench of our lives."