From the ash heap of literary history there are some distinct whispers, a few cracklings unheard or ultimately forgotten. The great unknowns of modernist literature has found a new audience due to the diligent efforts of publishers like New York Review of Books and New Directions. American's can now experience the works of great (and relatively) unknown books like Last Words from Montmartre by Qiu Miaojin or the selected works of Pierre Reverdy with flowing and loving translations. However the entire African continent seems to be a blindspot in the development of international literature. While European novelist and poets are slowly becoming discovered and critics are singing their praises, my literary hero Dambudzo Marechera remains a solitary scream without chorus.
Despite the size and diversity of Africa, Americans have a tendency to reduce all the complexity of the entire continent into a single idea. I don't know how many times I seen the shrunken shape of Africa on a map in high school. In fact I didn't really care to understand Africa like most Americans (black or white). And for good reason in an effort to minimize the continent's wealth (mineral, cultural etc.) Americans reduce the entire 11,668,599 square miles to poverty, hunger, religious extremism and strong man leaders. And while most of those things are true (in some areas and regions) it masks the diverse experiences "Africans" live. The scarequotes are necessary. When it comes down to it, the idea of "Africaness" is a recent phenomenon (a reaction) to show solidarity for the decolonization efforts of the 60s and 70s. But if one was to go to say Nigeria, a common Nigerian would not consider themselves "African". No, they will be Yoruba, Igbo, Ibo --- they would identify as their tribe. Or, to deepen the complexity, even within those tribes there are specific caste systems which are an effect of the slave trade, which had only been outlawed (BY THE BRITISH) in the 1940s.
Our misunderstanding of Africa is demonstrated in the ways we consume their literature. The novels that are quickly printed by publishing houses are written by the gentry classes of their respective countries (Adiche.) And if it isn't that we have Achebe and his modernist view of Igbo culture demonstrating the fall of a warrior class gone in the head with corruption. Through the novels of Achebe it is very easy for the average Western reader to justify the fall of the Igbo hierarchy by the Christians primarily because we don't teach the sequel No Longer at Ease. American's exposure to Africa has always been conditioned by how white people want to see it. We get a conservative understanding of the so called "land of savages". We are sold Amos Tutola's novels with a gleeful laugh at the pidgeon inglish. This willful blindness functions like cataracts. There are cures, but because the American refuse to see they are suffocated in a heap of broken images, reunited by unchallenged metanarratives. This is where Dambudzo Marechera comes in.
Dambudzo Marechera grew up in an open
air prison in what was then called Rhodesia. He received his literary education from an Anglican
school and the few books he managed to find from a garbage dump.
Despite his poverty his high marks in school secured a scholarship to the University of Rhodesia during a time of great
political upheaval and later was exiled to Oxford University to continue his
education.
Rhodesia, or what would later be called
Zimbabwe was going through a political revolution from the black
Africans against the white establishment headed by Ian Smith. Like
South Africa, Rhodesia was an apartheid state replete with all the
markings of a policed state: Curfews enforced by roaming paramilitary
death squads, separate and unequal places of employment, education
and living. The Black working class worked under the boot of the white ruling
elite to extract as much mineral wealth from the nation as possible. In Ian Smith's Rhodesia an 18 year old White primary school student could smack a 30 year
old Black man and call him boy and the only response the student would receive is a meek whimper.Black women were seen only as sex objects and often didn't receive an education because it was believed they would only get pregnant before they finished. Men measured their love for their women with public beatings, for if they didn't others would question their passion. . This
is the society described through the prismatic prose of Marechera in
"The House of Hunger".
The book House of Hunger is made up of
the self-titled novella and collection of short stories. The novella
(which I am mainly concerned with) was written during his time at Oxford University , alienated from both the Black
and White working class and his wealthy lazsaie faire classmates. When he
arrived at Oxford he was surprised to find that the segregation of
society wasn't based on race but on class. And perhaps his biggest
surprise was that because he was a student that attended Oxford, he
himself was a part of the ruling class.For the majority of working class were hired by students in Oxford to do all the menial task they couldn't be bothered to do. Marechera got hip to this only after getting a beating in a working class pub for crossing the invisible line.In the end, the absurdity of living in Oxford affected his studies and his sanity. Although his professors were struck by his brilliance, his free interpretation of syllabi (i.e reading whatever the hell he wanted) and general anarchic attitude towards the school left him isolated and often punished. In an attempt to emancipate himself from the oppressive structure of the school, he unsuccessfully tried to set the university on fire. This resulted in an ultimatum presented by the Dean :either he submit himself to a psychiatric facility (which would be fully paid for by the University) or be expelled. He chose the latter, later claiming that Oxford was mind raping him. Thus the rest of the time he spent in Britain he was homeless and dodging the police in fear of being deported back to his native country at war. To stay off the streets he slept on fellow artists coaches until he met a poet that gave him a room in is small flat. It was there where he finished "The House of Hunger."
Now what separates Dambudzo Marechera from other writers at the time in Africa (and even today) was his search for truth. Rather than enforcing a nationalistic project of upliftment, Marechera chose to depict the revolution and the life of those trapped under apartheid in brutally realistic detail. The naturalist dread that drives the life of the basest of society is mixed with the semi-surreal utterances of the subconscious. Some moments of the novella reads like prose poetry like:
“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. Gut-rot, that was what one steadily became. And whatever insects of thought buzzed about inside the tin can of one's head as one squatted astride the pit-latrine of it, the sun still climbed as swiftly as ever and darkness fell upon the land as quickly as in the years that had gone.
The lives of small men are like spiders' webs; they are studded with minute skeletons of greatness. And the House of Hunger cling firmly to its own; after all, the skeletons in its web still had sparks of life in their minute bones.” (4)
Just as the title implies "The House of Hunger" is both a place and a state of consciousness in which the main character and the entirety of revolutionary Rhodeisa was trapped in. The phrase itself acts as a refrain in the discordant novella. There is seemingly no structure to plot. No form to rigidly keep the narration stilled. It reads like panicked breathing. A whimper that ends in a scream. What could be said of the plot is quite reductive. Sex, trauma, grenades, beatings, secret police,torture. What could be said? This book demonstrates an avant-garde reflective thought that cannot be compared to anything on the contienet and if anything only demonstrates the lack innovation that has followed him. Marechera depicts a cyncism and a skeptical thought that not even the most agonizing agitprop literature could muster:
"But the best lesson we had in hardihood were not from the example of the males. There were more male than female lunatics; more male than female beggars; more male than female alcoholics...And they seemed to know that the upraised black fist of power would fill up more lunatic asylums than it would swell the numbers of our political martyrs. And when the Pill fell like manna from god's bounty----Here is another good one:
But the young woman's life not at all an easy one; the black young woman's. She is bombarded daily by a TV network that assumes that the black women are not only ugly but also they do not exist unless they take in laundry, scrub lavatories, polish staircases, and drudge around in a nanny's uniform. She is mugged every day by magazines that pressure her into buying European beauty; and the advice columns have such nuggets like ' Understanding is the best thing in the world, therefore be more cheerful when he comes home looking like thunder.; And the only time the Herald mentions her is when she has--as in 1896/7---led an uprising against the State and been safely cheered by the firing squad or when she is caught for the umpteenth time soliciting in Vice Mile." (50)
"Actually, class-conciousness and the conservative snobbery that goes with it are deeply rooted in the African elite, who are in the same breath able to shout LIBERATION, POLYGAMY without feeling that something is unhinged" (44)
For most, African literature is all about the pride of the past, a tool in the liberation of the people Thus the literature always favors tradition which continues to enslave women and maintain the social order. Marechera subverts the reader's expectations with each page. At times he is scatological and childish (Somewhere a toilet flushed; and drowned the whole room (39)), at another he describes the brutal beating of his sister-in-law with whom he had an affair with (which he regrets terribly). The shifting state of the narration is a demonstration of trauma at work in the consciousness of the main character.
Marechera has described his work as an electroshock therapy to dormant empathetic and imaginative portions of the brain. For it is through reading his work he hopes that through the quick and successive shocks to the system of one's perception would result in a disorientation of all ideas. The rigid structures melded and steeled through years of instruction and indoctrination would be flipped. Up is down, bad is good and the morals and ethics of the past will become questioned; therefore, Marchera's work is revolutionary by all definitions.
To give a clearer picture of the trauma, in this quote the narrator (Marechera) explains the dilemma of language:
"English is my second language, Shona my first. When I talked it was in the form of an interminable argument, one side of which was always expressed in English and the other side always in Shona. At the same time I would be aware of myself as something indistinct but separate from both cultures."
Here lies the major dilemma in Marechera's life and in his work. He is completely locked out of Anglophonic culture that was forced upon him because he is a Black African. And he is also alienated from his culture due to his colonized anglophonic mind (perhaps the greatest trauma of all). So he is a person locked between two cultures, one that sees him as a traitor and another that he has embraced through his schooling and passionate love for English literature.
I share this very feeling. The major difference being that whatever tribal or so called "African" culture had been carved and raped out of my family generations ago. So, now, here I am, a 25 year old black man, a descendant of American chattel slavery, reading Percy Byshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Totally in love with the decadence of Arthur Rimbaud and Edgar Allan Poe. I've been completely locked out of whatever tribal heritage I (may have) had. I have some incomplete knowledge of my lineage (beyond my grandfather being a sharecropper things are quite hazy) and yet I can't fully claim this essence of blackness which often permeates our culture. I mean I can claim it in the sense that is skin deep literally and figuratively, but when it comes down to it even my father says, I am not really down with it (despite the fact that he has less melanin than me). For going to college breeds a certain misunderstanding from others and within the self. I went to college to learn about the great white American and British authors. I hung a literary pantheon above my desk thinking that it would spark my writing. I felt for Franz Kafka. I harmonized with the Lake Poets' poesys. I did this with love and admiration even though I was locked out from much of the talks because of my skin color.
After Mike Brown was shot dead by police and left in the streets for hours; things changed. A reactive push to recognize race became too impossible to ignore. The state sanctioned violence kept happening. Death became my body, my color. I turned towards Franz Fanon and Richard Wright for answers. They spoke in words of violence and revolution. I looked back at my Bachelors degree and wondered where were all the people with melanin. I read Toni Morrison. A great conservative writer(who was friends with Oprah). I also read a smattering of the Harlem Renaissance with all the bloody raw red agitprop stuff that made them more palatable. Hell I even read the red poems of Langston Hughes, but there was never any bite to any of it. It was all just chalked up to the incoming Communist influences in New York. There was no mention of the police raids. The extrajudicial killings that featured prominently in Harlem. Some how I learned more about the poser Jack Kerouac than I did about James Baldwin. In fact the only time I came in contact with Baldwin was from my own private research into Native Son, which we also read primarily as piece of agitprop literature (something that James Baldwin intelligently called out in his thoughtfully reasoned the essay "Everybody's Protest Novel".)
Thus I inaugurated a search for Black writing (in its widest kind of definition) which led me to find Marechera.
Although I searched long and hard for Black literature that spoke to me I only found out about Marchera after hearing Billy Woods mention his name in a song. The fact that I had to find the so called "African Joyce" through an underground rap song demonstrates the meat of the problem. I was starved for knowledge of self and all I got was the same reheated conservative writers. I had fell into Pan-Africanism and looked for whatever unity I could find, but the more I read I only seen the incongruent nature of Africa and all the different cultures of people with darker hues. Perhaps this was part of Marechera's thinking as well.
After the publication of "The House of Hunger", Marechera was on the streets again. By the time he started writing his novel, Black Sunlight, he was living in a squatters commune with dissidents of all kind: from witches, to anarchist and bohemian artist.Living in Britain, in a commune, Marechera seen how segregation was based upon class and not just race, which lead him to a more international sense of politics and literature For Marchera any organization of people by a single person or group was too much for him to stomach. Boy, do I feel the same way now. (Now that all we have to root for is a Democratic Socialist with a profound misunderstanding of race and series of his clones, some with different sexual organs and higher melanin content)
Marechera ended up returning to Zimbabwe unwillingly with a camera crew to film a movie based upon "The House of Hunger". were filming the movie based upon "the House of Hunger". This launched a series of controversies in both Zimbabwe and Britain due to the unethical practices of director ,which often resulted in fights. For Marechera the film was produced and directed from the point of view of the white gaze and because there was no professional actors on set, Marechera believed that the director was intentionally playing the actors off as stupid savages by switching lenses and such. The film features a series of interviews with Marechera on his return back to the now reformed Zimbabwe under the control of ZANU PF, the guerilla army that succeed against Ian Smith's Rhodesian government. In these interviews it is quite clear Marechera is drunk as a skunk and reliving the trauma he so desperately tried to exorcise through the composition of the novella.
"Knowledge with the brilliance and hardness of a diamond, that's what I seek in my cauldron of life." (Mindblast 66)
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