Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987): 20 years later! (24-08-07)

ery time. If Dambudzo Marechera had never existed, Zimbabwe, would have invented him.

Zimbabwe needed Dambudzo Marechera to shatter it’s literary lethargy and stir the stagnant pond in it’s literary landscape. Except for a very few people who knew him personally, the rest of us know him only as a projection, as we imagine him from what we have read about him.

Marechera could have easily passed away without pubic notice. His parents were nonentities, low income earners – a truck driver and nanny – raising a big family in Vengere Township in Rusape. After his father’s death when Marechera was just 11, his mother, so he said, started prostituting herself to fend for her dozen or so children. Very early on, Marechera developed repugnance for his family’s way of life, which meant poverty, hunger, filth, noise and violence. He tried to escape from this ‘House of Hunger’ by retreating into the world of books, books and more books.

It’s trite to say a creative genius exploded, but in Marechera’s case it’s the most appropriate trope to describe him. From a hungry township boy growing up in the margins of poverty, he tore like shrapnel into the soft flesh of Zimbabwe’s smug literary culture. In 1978, his first accomplished book, The House of Hunger, was published with much critical acclaim in London and received the prestigious Guardian Fiction Prize the following year, co-jointly with the Irish writer and film director, Neil Jordan. From then on, Dambudzo Marechera’s name became the star emblem of Zimbabwean Literature and shone all over the world.

Fiction and non-fiction works written by Marechera continue to have a timeless impact. There’s an abrasiveness and urgency in his writings that is disturbing and at the same time pleasurable. He swirled the English Language around to make his language clear. Although he died young and his output was regrettably small, the difference in his voice, in his concerns, and in his attitude added something special and enduring to the body of African literature.’

The nameless character in all his books is his alter ego. The narrators were his fictional doppelgangers. As if the invention of Marechera the writer was not enough to exorcise the wretched reality of his life, it is in Christian, in The Black Sunlight, that Marechera reflects his true dark side. Throughout the text, Marechera played the Devil’s advocate, slandering and deliberately describing everything around him in obscene terms. Some sections of the Zimbabwean society judged the book as offensive and subsequently banned it under the pretext of its obscenity, anti-Establishment and anti-Christian tone. Thanks to the intervention of Musaemura Zimunya and other leading literary minded scholars, the ban was lifted.

While Mugabe and his cronies plunder the country today, what could be Marechera be saying to them? Perhaps the titles of his books provide telling clues. The House of Hunger was a candid examination of not only the spiritual but also the socio-political hunger in his motherland, it seems now more than ever, to have been a literary forecast on the physical and political hunger that have become a characteristic feature of Zimbabwean life. Shops, instead of stocking food, are filled with rows and rows of tissue paper none can buy. The Black Sunlight of political demagogy and plunder engulf the country. Zimbabwe has become a Cemetery of the Mind.

Marechera could be turning in his grave, disappointed with us, the lot who call ourselves writers, for betraying the spirit of truth that the vocation demands. “I don’t know what the writer can offer…But I think there must always be a healthy tension between a writer and his nation. Writing can always turn into cheap propaganda. As long he is serious, the writer must be free to criticise or write about anything in society which he feels is going against the grain of the nation’s aspirations.”