Dambudzo Marechera's Black Sunlight: Carnivalesque and the subversion of nationalist discourse of resistance in Zimbabwean literature

Abstract

Summary This paper examines Black Sunlight (1980), a novel by Dambudzo Marechera, in the light of critical reappraisal of narratives of national resistance in the 1990s in Zimbabwe. Black Sunlight was published in 1980, the year of Zimbabwe's independence when most black Zimbabweans viewed the coming of that independence as the vindication of Nehanda's prophecy that her “bones” shall rise and Africans will rule themselves. Novelists such as Edmund Chipamaunga in A Fighter For Freedom (1983) and Garikai Mutasa in The Contact (1985), were to use their fiction to fabricate, justify and present nationalist resistance as the “natural”, and uncontestable ideology of decolonisation in Zimbabwe. In contrast, in Black Sunlight, Marechera is radically singular in his use of the carnivalesque in order to resist ideologies of Zimbabwean cultural nationalism based on single notions of the “African image”. This paper argues that the subversion of nationalist discourse of resistance in Zimbabwean literature that Marechera authorises in Black Sunlight stems from the author's desire to generate narratives of postcolonial resistance which encourage literary open‐endedness, and incompleteness as a strategy to anticipate cultural change. This project enables the author to construct an idiom of resistance that is aware of the provisionality of the values it underlies.