Marechera-Mungoshi Lecture
I facilitated a discussion of Charles Mungoshi and Dambudzo Marechera today at Cosumnes River College. It was a humbling experience.
I gave the talk under the umbrella topic: Post-colonial literature: Reading Charles Mungoshi and Dambudzo Marechera. This gave me the opportunity to start by reviewing post-colonial theory, focusing on names likes Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. These are scholars I have studied and sought out in the early 2000s, those grad. school years when I had the time to travel to universities across the US to meet "fellow" post-colonial scholars. Spivak was (and, may still be) at Columbia University in New York City, where Edward Said (he died in 2003) was teaching as well; Bhabha was just getting ready to leave University of Chicago for a stint at UC Irvine before his move to Harvard, and Appiah was at Harvard. This part of the talk was a nice reflective moment, but I had to get into the literature of Mungoshi and Marechera; otherwise, I would spend the whole time talking about theory.
I stood there thinking Marechera wouldn't be very happy with the label post-colonial. He never liked these arbitrary labels (hated being called an African writer); he was a writer, and that was it. Mungoshi, on the other hand, exemplified from the beginning of his career the quality of talent and responsibility, that notion of the writer as seer. He was writing on issues that affected and were accessible to the target audience. That he chose to write in both English and Shona, I pointed out, was evidence of his concern to function as the voice of the people.
My best Mungoshi story is "The Setting Sun and the Rolling World". In the story matters of life and death are dealt with through the sympolism of the land, light and darkness. Mungoshi employs striking symbols of dust, earth, and land, and as I was reading the story for the lecture I began to notice the deliberate use of "dust" to represent death and "land" to represent life and hope.
Old Musoni has worked on the stony earth for many years and believes it is this land from which the family will always get its subsistence. In sharp contrast, his son, Nhamo, sees hope elsewhere. Educated, he cannot continue to rely on the land but must leave and go to an undisclosed place (I am always tempted to think that he is going overseas, because, who knows, I can be a Nhamo character, but he may also be headed for the city). Nhamo begins to oppose the rules of tradition, a Marechera character in the making.
I have never discussed Mungoshi and Marechera in the same context, but this lecture worked very well. Nhamo could very easily turn out to be a Marechera at Oxford, rebelling against the rules and ending up getting expelled. We can already see in Nhamo the rebelliousness that we see in the character of The Black Insider, but we don't want to get into this yet, do we? Yet we should mention the uneasiness that the father-son encounter creates, which Mungoshi weaves effectively with his use of the subplot of what the two don't get to say to each other.
We had fun talking about Mungoshi. Brilliant writer, the group agreed; then the questions began. I pointed out that Mungoshi helped shape Zimbabwean literature. He, like Hove and Chinodya, was a canonizer of the literature, a trend setting writer who also worked for the publishing industry. He worked for the Literature Bureau, that notorious organization about which we were supposed to be grateful, but which turned out to be an obstacle to the growth of our Shona and Ndebele literatures. It's program of promotion by censorship stunted the growth of the local language novels (this would take several days to explain, but my audience understood).
Amazingly, Mungoshi, publishing with companies like Mambo Press, was able to produce works that defied the kind of control that his employer was created to produce. He still managed to produce thematically and stylistically innovative novels and short stories, landmark events (those works) which would shape the the future of writing in the country.
A few weeks ago, Ruby Magosvongwe, a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, labeled Mungoshi the father of the Zimbabwean short story in her declaration that Zimbabwe is a short story country. Since her speech, I have re-read "Coming of the Dry Season", "The Accident", "The Setting Sun and the Rolling World". These, and more of Mungoshi's works, have stood the test of time. From the beginning, Mungoshi emphasied good writing and produced works that show a great sense of responsibility, stories that are African in perspective and universal in appeal. But in all his works, he never reached the degree of experiementation that we see in Dambudzo Marechera. We are not saying that's a weakness.
I introduced Marechera as the opposite of the Mungoshi approach, stating the obvious, since the differences were evident in the stories in front of us. I used excerpts from The Black Insider, and read excerpts of his interviews. Marechera the writer fascinated the group, his risk-taking was applauded, and the fact that most readers are beginning to appreciate what Marechera stood for (although he would have argued against standing for anything) is something worth noting.
Most of the time we were content discussing autobiographical details more than we delved into Marechera's excerpts, and that worked well because had we discussed the stories fully, we would have found ourselves where we began--autobiography. The Black Insider is the most self-seflective, the most "inside", the most dialogic, of Marechera's fiction. It has the effect of making you think you are listening to its writer whispering. In The Black Insider Marechera immortalized himself and through it will continue to reach readers willing to spare some time to listen. You don't read Marechera, you listen to him reading himself (I didn't say this, but I should have).
But in what ways is Marechera post-colonial? He is post-colonial if you look at his works as critiques of post-colonial reason.
And I will stop here for now.
I gave the talk under the umbrella topic: Post-colonial literature: Reading Charles Mungoshi and Dambudzo Marechera. This gave me the opportunity to start by reviewing post-colonial theory, focusing on names likes Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. These are scholars I have studied and sought out in the early 2000s, those grad. school years when I had the time to travel to universities across the US to meet "fellow" post-colonial scholars. Spivak was (and, may still be) at Columbia University in New York City, where Edward Said (he died in 2003) was teaching as well; Bhabha was just getting ready to leave University of Chicago for a stint at UC Irvine before his move to Harvard, and Appiah was at Harvard. This part of the talk was a nice reflective moment, but I had to get into the literature of Mungoshi and Marechera; otherwise, I would spend the whole time talking about theory.
I stood there thinking Marechera wouldn't be very happy with the label post-colonial. He never liked these arbitrary labels (hated being called an African writer); he was a writer, and that was it. Mungoshi, on the other hand, exemplified from the beginning of his career the quality of talent and responsibility, that notion of the writer as seer. He was writing on issues that affected and were accessible to the target audience. That he chose to write in both English and Shona, I pointed out, was evidence of his concern to function as the voice of the people.
My best Mungoshi story is "The Setting Sun and the Rolling World". In the story matters of life and death are dealt with through the sympolism of the land, light and darkness. Mungoshi employs striking symbols of dust, earth, and land, and as I was reading the story for the lecture I began to notice the deliberate use of "dust" to represent death and "land" to represent life and hope.
Old Musoni has worked on the stony earth for many years and believes it is this land from which the family will always get its subsistence. In sharp contrast, his son, Nhamo, sees hope elsewhere. Educated, he cannot continue to rely on the land but must leave and go to an undisclosed place (I am always tempted to think that he is going overseas, because, who knows, I can be a Nhamo character, but he may also be headed for the city). Nhamo begins to oppose the rules of tradition, a Marechera character in the making.
I have never discussed Mungoshi and Marechera in the same context, but this lecture worked very well. Nhamo could very easily turn out to be a Marechera at Oxford, rebelling against the rules and ending up getting expelled. We can already see in Nhamo the rebelliousness that we see in the character of The Black Insider, but we don't want to get into this yet, do we? Yet we should mention the uneasiness that the father-son encounter creates, which Mungoshi weaves effectively with his use of the subplot of what the two don't get to say to each other.
We had fun talking about Mungoshi. Brilliant writer, the group agreed; then the questions began. I pointed out that Mungoshi helped shape Zimbabwean literature. He, like Hove and Chinodya, was a canonizer of the literature, a trend setting writer who also worked for the publishing industry. He worked for the Literature Bureau, that notorious organization about which we were supposed to be grateful, but which turned out to be an obstacle to the growth of our Shona and Ndebele literatures. It's program of promotion by censorship stunted the growth of the local language novels (this would take several days to explain, but my audience understood).
Amazingly, Mungoshi, publishing with companies like Mambo Press, was able to produce works that defied the kind of control that his employer was created to produce. He still managed to produce thematically and stylistically innovative novels and short stories, landmark events (those works) which would shape the the future of writing in the country.
A few weeks ago, Ruby Magosvongwe, a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, labeled Mungoshi the father of the Zimbabwean short story in her declaration that Zimbabwe is a short story country. Since her speech, I have re-read "Coming of the Dry Season", "The Accident", "The Setting Sun and the Rolling World". These, and more of Mungoshi's works, have stood the test of time. From the beginning, Mungoshi emphasied good writing and produced works that show a great sense of responsibility, stories that are African in perspective and universal in appeal. But in all his works, he never reached the degree of experiementation that we see in Dambudzo Marechera. We are not saying that's a weakness.
I introduced Marechera as the opposite of the Mungoshi approach, stating the obvious, since the differences were evident in the stories in front of us. I used excerpts from The Black Insider, and read excerpts of his interviews. Marechera the writer fascinated the group, his risk-taking was applauded, and the fact that most readers are beginning to appreciate what Marechera stood for (although he would have argued against standing for anything) is something worth noting.
Most of the time we were content discussing autobiographical details more than we delved into Marechera's excerpts, and that worked well because had we discussed the stories fully, we would have found ourselves where we began--autobiography. The Black Insider is the most self-seflective, the most "inside", the most dialogic, of Marechera's fiction. It has the effect of making you think you are listening to its writer whispering. In The Black Insider Marechera immortalized himself and through it will continue to reach readers willing to spare some time to listen. You don't read Marechera, you listen to him reading himself (I didn't say this, but I should have).
But in what ways is Marechera post-colonial? He is post-colonial if you look at his works as critiques of post-colonial reason.
And I will stop here for now.
Comments
"You don't read Marechera, you listen to him reading himself (I didn't say this, but I should have)."
At first glance, it sounds very plausible, but after that I am not so sure. This view gives the reader a very passive status and I'm not so sure that passivity was in DM's nature (either as a person or as a writer).
Regarding listening, I think you make a good point. I can add that I enjoyed writing the statement (although I did not say it at the lecture). In defense, I can say that listening (especially good listening) is not as passive as we often think... I was also thinking of doing the double practice of reading as if you are listening, hearing the voice as you read...