“False teeth too, eh? … False identity too, eh?”: Postcolonial identifications in Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger

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ABSTRACT This article reads a selection of stories from Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger with a focus on images of teeth. Combining a psychoanalytic model with elements of the abject, it argues that Marechera frequently invokes images of displaced or broken teeth as a physical marker of the psychically fragmented self. It reads Marechera’s use of teeth imagery as a means of dismantling psychoanalytically informed models of identification that rely on fixed identities and participate in a colonial dialectic of recognition. It argues that teeth, which are displaced during moments of identification with authority figures such as parents or soldiers, provide clear examples of the fragmented self that refuses to stay in place or cohere to a singular, fixed identity. As such, these moments of identification can be read as a form of resistance to the colonial structures of apartheid that form the backdrop of much of Marechera’s writing.