(H/T Diana)
Interview assesses the literary and social impact of the Zimbabwean iconoclast, Dambudzo Marechera.
Q & A :
The Desire To Be An Outsider
Moses Magadza interviews MEMORY CHIRERE about the legacy of writer Dambudzo Marechera
WINDHOEK, Oct 12 (IPS) - "The old man died beneath the wheels of the twentieth century. There was nothing left but stains, bloodstains and fragments of flesh... And the same thing is happening to my generation." - Dambudzo Marechera, House of Hunger
Marechera died in 1987 at the age of just 35, but the handful of slender novels, short stories and poems he left behind continue to hold the imaginations of readers all over Africa. A controversial figure, winner of the Guardian Prize for Fiction with his first novel, House of Hunger, Marechera and the explosive, rude stream-of-consciousness of his writing stood in sharp contrast to the sober realistic novels of his contemporaries.
As he wrote, he lived. His personality disturbed the way his literature was read, says Memory Chirere, himself a writer and a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe. "I am beginning to think that people are now more comfortable with Marechera's literature in his absence."
Indeed - Marechera may be on the school syllabus today, but when he returned to liberated Zimbabwe in 1982, his book Black Sunlight was on a banned list. He spent most of the last five years of his life living in the streets, writing furiously but publishing just one more book, Mindblasts. In this interview, Chirere reflects on the domestication of one of Africa's most feral minds.
IPS: Twenty-two years on, what work of Marechera is most read and which is least read and why?
MEMORY CHIRERE: We could debate between the collection of short stories called The House of Hunger and his collection of short stories, poems and journals called Mindblast.
Students who go up to university in Zimbabwe tend to prefer the House of Hunger maybe necessarily because it is part of their syllabus.
People who don’t go very far with their education tend to prefer Mindblast, maybe because in Zimbabwe the book is locally available.
Some people read Mindblast for the sheer novelty of its title and for the wide variety that it offers the reader in the sense that you find short stories, poems, plays and journalese in it.
IPS: Is literature by Marechera difficult to comprehend? If so, how so and where?
MC: If you look at the sheer intensity of language, the use of intense imagery, the fearlessness and openness in texts like House of Hunger and Black Sunlight you might say Marechera is difficult. However, when you are patient with Marechera and read him in the context of Rhodesia in House of Hunger, open windows into what Rhodesia was.
Having said that, I want to say that Marechera’s Black Sunlight is probably the most obscure of all his literature in that, unlike House of Hunger and Mindblast, it does not pay attention to a specific setting, personality and sensibility. He was trying to write an international book that does not identify with a specific sensibility... Scrapiron Blues is less militant, if not mellow.
IPS: Would you say that Marechera is better understood now than ever before?
MC: People who like Marechera now can do so with freedom knowing that he is not around. There is Marechera the man and Marechera the literature and these tended to come together.
Musaemara Zimunya (Marechera’s contemporary at the then-University of Rhodesia and now Zimbabwe’s most anthologised poet) once said that Marechera "wrote as he lived and lived as he wrote". People seem to agree that they are more comfortable with his work without his "troublesome" presence.
IPS: Why is Marechera getting attention even beyond his grave?
MC: Simply because of the sheer intensity of his work, the beauty of his language, the complexity of his imagery and also what his personality represented: the desire to be independent from the self and society. The stubbornness in Marechera keeps coming back again and again.
Read the entire interview here.
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