The Marechera Moments we Remember

Reading Marechera at the Sacramento Poetry Center, February 2008.

The state of Zimbabwean literature would make Marechera proud if he was alive. The writing has reached the level of creative risk that Marechera was already experimenting with in the 70s and 80s and most readers then,African and to a great extent American (Marechera's House of Hunger was a commercial failure in the United States) could just not get to the heart of what Marechera was trying to do. But contemporary Zimbabwean writers seem to have gotten IT, and our readers, most of whom are outside of Zimbabwe, like his were, seem ready to see what's coming out of Zimbabwe these days. He would have been proud.

We are proud of him too. And on May 15, Oxford University (which expelled him in the 70s) will be honouring the man and his works. Marechera scholars from all over the world are presenting papers at the conference and a new House of Hunger edition will be released by Ayebia, alongside Brian Chikwava's Harare North.

Most contemporary Zimbabwean (and other African) writers have been influenced by Marechera in one way or another. They have their Marechera moments, traces that appear in their personality or in their writings.

So what would National Poetry Month be without reading and sharing Marechera? Yesterday I spent several hours at the San Francisco International Airport, and while waiting I read Cemetery of Mind. I have read some of the poems so many times that I seem to have reached the stage of not being able to find anything new in them. But then another phenomenon has taken effect: now I read them to find the familiar, to tell myself, "Yes I knew this already." Or to be reminded of the last time I read a specific poem, to be reminded of where I was, who I was with me, and why I was reading Marechera.

So when I started reading "Liberty" I remembered that the last time I had read it was in a dentist's office. In Zimbabwe at the time, Tsvangirai and Mugabe seemed "locked in strenuous struggle/...two men.../settling the difference of their separare/ideologies, but each now alone/bent on his prey".

Whenever I read "Pledging my Soul", it reminds me of the first time I read it in Harare, at a time I was getting intrduced to what would become (to me and my peers) African literature. Then the poem made me imagine what it must be like, how it must feel, to be outside of Zimbabwe, the homesickness, etc. Then years later, reading the poem away from Zimbabwe, I started remembering that first time I had read it in Harare. I was in a CABS line to withdraw my UZ payout.

But there are other times I could remember too; for instance, the second time I was invited to read as one of the featured poet at the Sacramento Poetry Center. Before I presented my work, I read Marechera, and the audience seemed moved by "Pledging my Soul".

The first Marechera poem I ever memorized is "I am the Rape" whose rhyming scheme intrigued me. Looking at it now, I see its glaring simplicity, but I still can't get over the beauty of "Goodness is not ground out of stone/Evil neither", or earlier on: "My lips have rhythm/my lips an anthem.../my feet flight". It was just so easy to memorize and imitate them. Now I skip it because it's too familiar, and usually I pause at "Smash, Grab, Run" and notice "I am the hundreds of putrid meat in English prisons/In derelict houses, in borstals, the million of condemned/meat/who let the gim minutes unleash their canned grime". I find myself connecting these lines to the horrors of Brian Chikwava's Harare North, where the narrator, already described as "unreliable", when it seems some UK readers just don't understand him, walks us through the dereliction and grime of the bad parts of Brixton.

I am moved by the Harare poems. Of course, most of them seem out of place in the collection, and this fact may be attributed to the volume editor's choice more than they represent Marechera's organizational and inclusion preferences. But they are good pieces, highly autobiographical, and sometimes not even moving beyond lists of what could have become more developed poems. If Marechera were to get a chance to revise Cemetery, he would probably start by working on the Harare Diary pieces. Or another way to look at them is that they are a good enteraining break from the heavier sections. Maybe they were just simply little diary entries meant to be developed later. Or not.

But I like the university union pieces the way they are, and this piece just has to be seen as brilliant; "The century, lean long leg/forward/Dances into yesterday./I will miss her very much." Imagine if it had ended with "Dances into yesterday"? But this was in the eighties and Marechera was aware, like everyone else, that the twentieth century was nearing its end. Zimbabwe was still euphoric as a country, and dancing resonated with many people.

Yesterday I read the whole section entitled "The Kamikaze Pilot Returns" and found out I still like "Christamas 1983". Its strength is in how it treats the message of how the world is ready to give us paranoia, whether we are in Harare, West Berlin, London, San Francisco, Dubai. I still enjoy the lines "On a bar stool, the man on my right/And the man on my left/Are both listening to what I have not yet said/Which their itching handcuffs would have me say". In Harare, Marechera had reason to feel always watched, since as an independent writer, he had some state enemies.

"The Trees of this City" is depressing, but each time I read it I think of how prophetic it was, predicting the chaos that Zimbabwe would get into, where burdened trees would be "too harassed by the rigours of unemployment/The drought-glare of high rents/And the spiralling cost of water and mealie meal." Of course, the poem ends on a personal note: "Trees under which, hungry and homeless, I emerge...."

The highlights of my April 6 reading of Cemetery of Mind are the poems "Sunday it's Raffingora" and "A Shred of Identity". In the first one, I have underlined the following lines:

"But by haunting vision of "Out of Hunger a Terrible Art"
Faster driving faster into Harare's split-atom bursts
of streets."

In "A Shred of Identity", I underlined the following:

"They seem to know their selves
While I like a madman continue to decipher
The print on a shred of blank paper
The print that is to become the poem behind this poem" .

No need to explain these; they are the kinds of lines some people will dismiss as clever, while others will write long theses. I would be sitting there with a proud smile, nodding as if I have some secret message of what Marechera meant. Yes, there is a part of Marechera we begin to own, once we have read a few of the works well.

It seems possible then that some contemporary Zimbabwean writers have their Marechera moments; they are moments you cannot escape, but may repress; they are a result of a kind of Marechera Effect that we seem unable to escape, and this kind of escape would not even be a viable option. So then some of us will use any excuse to carry a Marechera book along--I have a tendency to carry him when I go to places where lines will be long. The two-and-half hours at SFI airport seemed like a mere thirty minutes, when I didn't even meet my goal of reading the entire length of Cemetry of Mind.

The edition of Cemetery of Mind I have was published by Africa World Press. While not available in US bookstores, it can be ordered online. It's a treasure, especially the "Amelia poems", which I deliberately tend not to discuss anywhere.