Dambudzo Marechera

Abstract

Charles William (Dambudzo) Marechera (1952–1987) was born in poverty in Rusape, Zimbabwe and died in poverty in Harare, Zimbabwe. He was and continues to be celebrated as an iconoclast, the “enfant terrible” of African literature, and a cult figure with many acolytes across the globe. He was born in and formed by White-ruled Rhodesia (renamed Zimbabwe when independence was achieved in 1980) but was also deeply influenced by eight years in the United Kingdom and an immersion in European literature. The House of Hunger (1978) is Marechera’s most famous and impactful work. It is a stream-of-consciousness novella, published with nine other satellite stories, that is a semiautobiographical engagement with Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. The novella is simultaneously beautiful and brutal. The House of Hunger won the prestigious Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979, and Marechera disrupted the awards dinner by dressing in an eclectic costume and throwing plates at the chandeliers. The book and Marechera were so celebrated that there was a Channel Four production that combined a biographical study of Marechera, documenting his time in the United Kingdom and his return to an independent Zimbabwe in 1982, and a film rendering of The House of Hunger. Unfortunately, there was an acrimonious break with the White South African filmmaker, Chris Austin. After his abrupt departure from the film project, Marechera stayed in Zimbabwe until his death five years later. In England and Zimbabwe, he wrote in a range of genres: prose, poetry, plays, essays, and even children’s literature. After the initial success of The House of Hunger, Marechera found it frustratingly difficult to publish his intellectual and esoteric work. Three books were published while he was alive (The House of Hunger, Black Sunlight, and Mindblast); three were published posthumously by his literary executor, Flora Veit-Wild (The Black Insider, Cemetery of Mind, and Scrapiron Blues). All six of these books were published between 1978 and 1994, but Marechera’s work continues to exert influence and make deep impressions on readers, whether formally trained or not, whether African or not. In addition to The House of Hunger, in Marechera’s essay “The African Writer’s Experience of European Literature” (1987), he embraces the influence of European literature on his own writing—a fidelity that is evident in his work and criticized by readers who prefer African writing that contributes to nation-building rather than privileges introspection. His essay demonstrates the breadth of his reading and the multifarious texts—from across the globe—that influenced all of Marechera’s work and captures his resistance to narrow labels that define writing and writers. Marechera continues to generate creative, critical, and theoretical responses from a variety of artists and thinkers from a range of locations—geographical, social, and racial, such as Yvonne Vera, NoViolet Bulawayo, China Miéville, Comrade Fatso, Helon Habila, and many more.