Dambudzo Marechera Research Articles

The Fourth Dimension. Dambudzo Marechera as a Dramatist – An Analysis of Two Plays

The Fourth Dimension. Dambudzo Marechera as a Dramatist – An Analysis of Two Plays

Opinion, Dialogue, Review

The Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera mobilizes recollections of childhood not only as an event in his adult life, but as a way of articulating a longing for new forms of social consciousness. Childhood itself is recalled both as narrative and source of narrative. As such it is a place and time of memory. It is not just a construct of writing, but a way of coming to terms with an enormous social experience. This article discusses the nature of childhood and its uses in Marechera's dystopian fiction. It demonstrates the ways in which Marechera's fiction revises sets of concepts that constitute ‘the child’ by portraying childhoods that point to the dissolution and reinvention of a symbolic order in a post-national African space.

‘Deviant’ innovations in Zimbabwean writing: From the racial divide to same sex desire

Since its inception in the colonial era, Zimbabwean writing has produced works which challenge officially accepted attitudes towards race, gender and/or sexuality. This article performs readings of four key post-independence texts which question established boundaries by problematizing ‘deviant’ desire. It shows how Dambudzo Marechera's Mindblast is path-breaking in its representations of interracial sex, and how the recent work of Shimmer Chinodya can be said to follow in Marechera's wake. Texts by Melissa Tandiwe Myambo and Nevanji Madanhire, on the other hand, move into the area of gender transgression, thus further destabilizing officially codified claims to ‘natural authority’.

BOOK REVIEW: Comp. and Ed. Nobantu Rasebotsa, Meg Samuelson, and Kylie Thomas. NOBODY EVER SAID AIDS: POEMS AND STORIES FROM SOUTHERN AFRICA. Cape Town: Kwela, 2004.

Reviewed by: Nobody Ever Said Aids: Poems and Stories From Southern Africa Lizzy Attree Nobody Ever Said Aids: Poems and Stories From Southern Africa Comp. and Ed. Nobantu Rasebotsa, Meg Samuelson, and Kylie ThomasCape Town: Kwela, 2004. ISBN 0795701845. This long-awaited collection is ground-breaking in its scope and courageous in its attempt to uncover taboos around the devastating disease of AIDS. As Njabulo Ndebele says in his introduction, "The power of this collection lies in helping to ensure that we will not have remained silent in the face of such enormous loss," which until now, with a few exceptions, has been the sum total of the literary writing about this disease in many African countries. In 2002, the Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency (SIDA) provided AIDS and Society Research Unit (ASRU) with a grant to run a creative writing competition and to produce an anthology of writings on AIDS, a project initiated by Meg Samuelson and Kylie Thomas, graduate students at the University of Cape Town. The competition was judged by Njabulo Ndebele, Professor and Vice Chancellor at the University of Cape Town, and the writer Ingrid de Kok, also a professor at the University of Cape Town. The anthology has been edited by Meg Samuelson, Kylie Thomas, and Nabantu Rasebotsa (University of Botswana) and was published by Kwela Books in 2004. The collection includes recognized names such as Antjie Krog, Sindiwe Magona, Achmat Dangor, and the recently deceased Phaswane Mpe, alongside writers who have never before had their work published. Short stories are presented with poems, which weave their way around a subject that until now has been much neglected. The poetry even includes work by Dambudzo Marechera, who died from AIDS in 1987 and whose featured poems were written during the last year of his life and by association seem to address not only his death, but AIDS directly, particularly in the poem "Which One of You Bastards Is Death?" The editors note that although his poems were "most likely penned before his diagnosis [. . .] they offer an uncanny premonition of his approaching death." It is poignantly important to remember that writers were dying from this disease as early as Marechera, yet it is still rarely mentioned in literary circles. Highlights of the collection also include Khaya Gqibitole's "Fresh Scars," which reiterates the purpose for publishing such a collection—"[T]here are just too many taboos in our society [. . .] the truth is the more we remain silent the more we will perish"—while others revisit familiar metaphors of national and postcolonial failures and loss of hope, such as stated by Kay Brown in "The Harvest": "I mourn for him, and for our blighted harvest." Depressing and yet beautiful, in terms of creating beauty from a confrontation with an unrecognizable foe, or a disease for which there is no hope of a cure, is Lesley Emmanuel's depiction of a wedding scene in which confetti is made from HIV pamphlets. The stories often blend a sense of fatalism with a distinct awareness of tragedy in the loss of beauty, romance, loyalty, and youth, as well as highlighting injustices toward women in prostitution, marriage, child-bearing, and divorce. [End Page 151] Oral songs and poems in indigenous languages are also included. For example, Johanna Nurse Malobola's "Death" is translated from isiNdebele, and the excerpt from Teboho Raboko's "Sefela—Migrant Worker's Poem" is not only translated from Sesotho but is accompanied by various definitions or terms of the disease from different cultures—"AmaXhosa call it kill-all / Basotho call it the lying-on-the-back disease"—showing a growing awareness and representation of AIDS among local people but also offering a commentary on the devastation wrought on a daily basis. Eddie Vulani Maluleke's title poem "Nobody Ever Said AIDS" is joyous in its beginning, describing drinking and dancing in the shebeens where women with "rouge red glossy lips" and "Tight red dresses" wait for "Jimmy / Petros / Jabu / To buy us a drink." She leads the reader into the hell that resulted "After they kissed the lips of red berries" and that "Nobody wanted to touch any more." She continues the tragedy: "Some of us...

Killing the Father: Childhood and Renewal of Self-Narrative in Dambudzo Marechera's Fiction

The contradictory impulses that characterise writing on Dambudzo Marechera's life and times were foreshadowed a long time ago in 1971 in an obligatory testimonial by his high school principal, Father Daniel Pearce, an Anglican priest. I discuss briefly the ways in which he maps Marechera's life, and suggest that he prefigured so much of its seeming intricacy and mythical qualities. Subsequent critics of his writing have only elaborated the contradictory templates of Father Pearce's hagiographic writing. What his critics have often missed in these writings and readings is Marechera's own effort at renewing his own self-narrative in the face of such readings of himself. The source of this narrative regeneration is in his recollection and uses of childhood to reflect on a longing for self-capitalisation, which is achieved by setting aside the narratives of the father (in multiple symbolic senses). His ideas of self-writing should be gleaned from his understanding and uses of childhood.

Dambudzo Marechera’s Zimbabwe: A Nation of Captives

It is a commonplace of African literary criticism that Dambudzo Marechera rejected nationalist identity. Yet, despite the constant interest in his writing, there has been little analysis of his representation of his nation. This paper examines texts by Marechera that portray Rhodesia/Zimbabwe as a concentration camp and, generally, a space of alienation Such portrayals are consistent with Marechera’s refusal to identify with his nation.

Against normalization: writing radical democracy in South Africa

Contents: Introduction: Normalzation or Radical Democracy Radical Democracy and the Electoral Sublime Njabulo Ndebele and Radical-Democratic Culture Against Normalization: Cultural Identity from Below Staging Whiteness: Beckett, Havel, Maponya Locations of Feminism: Ingrid de Kok's Familiar Ground No Turning Back: Nise Malange and the Onset of Workers' Culture Lines of Flight: Bessie Head, Arthur Nortje, Dambudzo Marechera Epilogue: Postapartheid Narratives: The House Gun and Fools

The instabilities of national allegory: The case of Dambudzo Marechera's the house of hunger and black sunlight

The instabilities of national allegory: The case of Dambudzo Marechera's the house of hunger and black sunlight

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

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.

Harare : je te hais, moi non plus ... Hommage à Dambudzo Marechera

This paper is an analysis of the relations between a man, a writer and a city, Harare, and a reflection on an urban form, the township. The revolt of Dambudzo Marechera against his home city influences all his writing. From Rusape township to the streets of Harare, his novels contain the story of a life in conlict with its urban environment.

Carnival and hybridity in texts by Dambudzo Marechera and Lesego Rampolokeng

In the post‐independence era, a multi‐layered perception has replaced the dichotomies of the anti‐colonial struggle. But white Africanists still have a bias towards a nation‐based outlook and favour writings which reflect some kind of African identity. African writers have rejected such patronising classification. They have moved away from unilateral ways of thinking and developed modes of writing which surpass the realism of the literature of resistance. This paper focuses on the elements of hybridity and of carnival as major characteristics of postcolonial literature. Examples from the works of Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera and South African poet Lesego Rampolokeng illustrate the subversive quality of syncretic, carnivalesque art which aims at decentring dominant discourses. Such writings undermine and challenge discourses of African identity which have not only become outdated and obsolete but extremely dangerous as they are used by black elites to justify their autocratic rule.

Call no man happy: insidethe black insider,Marechera's journey to become a writer?

Over the last two decades or so an industry has burgeoned in universities and other educational institutions extolling the virtues of black African writers and their struggle to create a black historicity and to expose the evils of colonialism and neo‐colonialism. Authors such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka figure high on the curricula. If the name of Dambudzo Marechera features at all, it is as the critics’ stereotype of the ‘tortured artist’ or the ‘flawed genius’. The activities of the Dambudzo Marechera Trust led to the posthumous publication of possibly his best work, The Black Insider (1990), a collection of poetry, The Cemetery of Mind (1992), with a further volume of prose due out in 1994. These indications of a sustained and growing interest in the work of a writer who died in 1987 at the age of 35, may well encourage a reassessment of Marechera's body of work. In turn, this may lead to a recognition that the high and enduring quality of his writing, together with his refusal to be labelled a ...

Cemetery of mind: collected poems of Dambudzo Marechera

Cemetery of mind: collected poems of Dambudzo Marechera

Dambudzo Marechera: a source book on his life and work

Dambudzo Marechera: a source book on his life and work

Soul-Food for the Starving: Dambudzo Marechera's House of Hunger

Soul-Food for the Starving: Dambudzo Marechera's House of Hunger

From the Journal: An extract from the latest work by the enfant terrible of Harare who was detained during the recent Zimbabwe Book Fair

Mindblast, a new book by Dambudzo Marechera — regarded by some as Zimbabwe's most gifted and challenging young writer — was due to be launched in August at the Second Zimbabwe Book Fair, a major event attended by writers and publishers from all parts of the African continent. In the event, last-minute delays at the printers prevented copies from being ready for the opening of the Fair on 27 August. Two days later, at a party for the presentation of the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, Marechera displayed the book's cover. Copies of the book itself reached the Fair the following day. But Marechera was not there to see them or to sign them, as advertised in the Book Fair programme. He was held in Harare Central Police station from the night of 29 August for four days until the Fair was over. Marechera's arrest and imprisonment was prompted by an interview with two Dutch radio journalists after the Noma Award party, in the main lobby of Meikles Hotel, Cecil Square, in the centre of Harare. Marechera replied to the journalists' questions at the top of his voice, apparently repeating his customary criticism of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe's government: its lack of commitment to socialism, to the rural peasants, and to the black guerillas who fought to end white Rhodesian rule. Both he and the two journalists were led away by police, on orders from the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO). After being questioned for a couple of hours, the journalists were released, but Marechera remained at the Police Station. He was detained under emergency powers regulations (the state of emergency was renewed in late July for a further six months — the ninth such renewal since independence), which permits indefinite detention without trial of people believed to pose a threat to state security or public safety. He was not released as soon as the Book Fair closed at midday on 1 September, but on the following day. No charges were confirmed against him. Marechera's arrest was not reported in the Zimbabwe press until 2 September, the day he was released. Visiting authors were struck by the apparent lack of concern shown by his publishers and the Book Fair organisers. Mindblast or the Definitive Buddy is Dambudzo Marechera's first book since he returned to Zimbabwe in 1981; born in rural Rhodesia (as it then was) in 1955, he spent most of the 1970s in Europe. The book contains four short plays; a narrative, ‘Grimknife Jr's Story’; a selection of poems, and an Appendix, ‘From the Journal’. He wrote it when he was jobless and homeless, on a typewriter in Cecil Square. It gives his impressions of independent Zimbabwe, and poses the paradoxes for a writer such as himself in such a society. There are references to various forms of harassment and victimisation, and to spells in prison: Marechera had been detained for short periods before as a result of his heavy drinking and quick temper, outspoken views and bohemian life-style. Marechera's first book, The House of Hunger ( Heinemann Educational Books, London) was published in 1978, awarded the Guardian fiction prize in 1979 and republished in 1982 (Zimbabwe Publishing House, Harare); it is a set book at the University of Zimbabwe, but banned in South Africa (see p 18). His second book, the novel Black Sunlight ( HEB, London) published in 1980, was first banned in Zimbabwe, and then unbanned as a result of an appeal by members of the University of Zimbabwe Literature Department. His third book, Mindblast, is published by College Press, Harare; we print below an extract from the final section, ‘From the Journal’.