PREAMBLE
Marechera's
Black Sunlight takes us on a
shamanistic psychologically-regressive journey, back to the womb, in order to
be reborn as shamanistic initiates. The
core structure of the book involves a theme of shamanistic destruction of the
presently existing self, and regeneration as those who have been inducted into
esoteric knowledge concerning how energy forces generated from our unconscious
minds work on us to make us conform to established systems of power. The
potential value of shamanism to reorganise society along lines that affirm the
individual and his potential are explored by the author via a narrower,
anarchistic trope. The psychological
structures of the dynamics used to cause us to regress (in order to be reborn)
are recognisably 'pre-Oedipal', in psychoanalytic terms.
In his 1986 interview with Alle Lansu, Marechera, speaking on Black Sunlight and Mindblast, relates concerning his “unconscious” desire to write in
a way that is “destructive or disruptive” in order to save people from the
“slow brain death” of thinking in an institutionalised way. [40-41]. “I try to write in such a way that I
short-circuit, like electricity, people’s traditions and morals. Because only then can they start having
original thoughts of their own.” (1) [p
40]. The shamanistic term for the loss and regaining of self in a way that
makes one’s will less scattered is “recapitulation”. (2) Marechera evokes this idea when he
considers that once his readers have stopped thinking in an institutionalised
way, they might “look in a mirror [and] they will see how beautiful they are
and see those possibilities within themselves, emotionally and
intellectually.” (3) [p 41] The illness
he wants to save them from is “slow brain death” (4) [
p 42] due to “being fed with irrelevant facts, fed with things that have
nothing to do with the individual who carries that brain”. (5) [p 40] He questions, in the same refrain, whether an
anarchistic uprising might be the answer to being fed the kinds of data that
produce brain death.
Marechera’s Black Sunlight is
the cornerstone of his oeuvre, for it is the most shamanistic of all of his
writing. The book invites us to undergo,
with him, a recapitulation of the past – meaning the specific historical past
of Rhodesia, and the psychological states that were common to it during the
time of the bush war. The term,
“recapitulation”, has a specific meaning in terms of shamanism [footnote: it is
from Carlos Casteneda’s books]. One very
useful way to look at it is in terms of Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence”, which
is central to his book on how to shamanise, and thus recover from the past, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. To recapitulate one’s past, one must first
have a need to do so – that is, if the past has left one with any psychological
traumas, one must revisit the past in order to recover from these. This is not to say that all traumas can be
recovered from, since some cut too deeply for the one who desires healing to be
able to benefit from a recapitulation. Black Sunlight, nonetheless, is a novel
that invites us to go along with the author as he experiences his
recapitulation of past events. The book
invokes his mental anguish, as it relates to the anti-colonial revolution in
Rhodesia. Marechera invites his readers
to go on this highly subjective inner journey, where everything that we would
hold to be true and fixed and objective about the world seems to melt into the
air, and we are left only with a feeling of complete immersion in the emotions
of the time, increasing to an ultimate sense of paranoia and terror as the reader
is positioned on the side of the anarchist revolutionaries against the
encroaching Rhodesian security forces.
Black Sunlight invites its reader to do just that,
and along the lines of shamanism established by the tradition of Friedrich
Nietzsche and Georges Bataille, which involves a doubling of the ontological
concept of the self. Marechera’s Black Sunlight is also potent along the
lines of traditional shamanism, in encouraging a guided regression into the
past in order to gain hidden psychological resources and recover energy that
had been lost through states of weakness that led to our accommodation to
various outwardly imposed laws and conditions that produce blind and callow
conformity, and which in practical terms need not have a psychological hold
over us anymore. Marechera’s writing is
designed to bring us to psychological liberation, through both his shamanistic
and anarchistic tropes. The writing,
although set mostly in war-torn Rhodesia, also references parts of Marechera’s
life experiences elsewhere, and thus marshals its anarchistic force. Anarchistic tropes are derived from notions
of female liberation based on the actions of the Baader Meinhof gang, and stem
from Marechera’s visceral hostility to the political progamme of
"austerity" that was no doubt already in the air when Margaret
Thatcher took power in 1979. The general
setting for most of the book is obviously Rhodesia.
Marechera’s writing has all the elements of shamanistic strategy, serving
to encourage a reader to undergo shamanistic transformation in order to become
stronger than before, through exploiting the ontological crack that appears to
give one the capabilities of “second vision” as a result of one’s prior
encounters with historical and developmental trauma. Yet, to be able to benefit from one’s wounds,
it is necessary to revisit the trauma, and one must do so in a shamanistic way,
which is to say, by travelling backwards, developmentally, towards one’s
primeval origins in infanthood, and into the womb, again. Like Nietzsche and Bataille, Marechera
experienced a rupture in the nature of being, a wormhole in the ontological
seam of things, which allowed him to move between two parallel universes. Working within this philosophical shamanistic
tradition I have described, he made use of his profound insights into the human
condition. Above all, he sought to
initiate us also into that shamanistic experience, which would enable us to
transform and regenerate, in order to become “not what we seem to be”, but
something new. For those readers who
wish to go along with Marechera on his journey back to our primeval and
personal origins, Black Sunlight is a
means of recapitulation. The term is
explained by Carlos Casteneda as follows:
Don Juan had given me very detailed
and explicit instructions about the recapitulation. It consisted of reliving
the totality of one's life experiences by remembering every possible minute
detail of them. He saw the recapitulation as the essential factor in a
dreamer's redefinition and redeployment of energy. "The recapitulation
sets free energy imprisoned within us, and without this liberated energy dreaming
is not possible.” 1
Marechera’s book invites us back to the events that defined the
Rhodesian civil war – black student riots, dead bodies being carried in trucks,
and the necessary grind of life continuing in the black ghettos, despite the
backdrop of war. It is only when the
main protagonist, Chris, a photographer, encounters Susan, an aficionado of extreme
types of transgression – including, but not limited to, violating the taboo
entailed in the normative development of Oedipus complex by having sex with her
father, that Chris’s world is turned upside down even further.
In traditional Shona society, people who broke the incest taboo were generally
those who dabbled in the occult and black magic who sought to have potent
portions for use in enhancing hunting or farming. Among the Shona in some of
the sub-ethnic groups the practice of incest between father and daughter or
brother and sister was done as a fertility ritual upon a new chief’s ascension
to the throne. The Shona word for it is kupinga
nyika. It was believed that this would bring fertility to the land, rid of
plagues and other associated risks and dangers. It was also believed to
strengthen or fortify the chief’s reign. Thus the sexual act had a hallowed and
sacred tinge to it in terms of what it was believed to bring forth both within
the community and in terms of personal benefit.
So, Susan is imbued with occult power.
Chris, on the other hand, finds that he has joined a gang of anarchists,
The Black Sunlight Organisation, and that he is in the process of revisiting
the primeval caves at “Devil’s End”, whereby “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”
– which is to say that his personal return to this metaphorical womb of being is also a
return to our primeval past. Thus, in
the same stroke, history and the nature of his individual being are revisited.
You don’t know the history of these
caves I suppose? Nobody really
does. But they are prehuman. All kinds of monstrous beings used to roam in
and around here, beings long since extinct […]
We are as it were the living memory of those centuries of nightmare. But then everybody must have roots. A sense of identity, continuity. (p 71)
The book invites you to re-experience that war through the mediation of
pre-Oedipal psychological perspectives.
These are perspectives that relate to the free-flow of desire as it
intermingles with psychologically external and internal manifestations of
power. This is a realm of experience
that is not governed by any a priori
principles or facts. There is nothing to
repress and no reality to conform to. It
is a violent realm – but also a nurturing realm – and the reader is invited to
experience this for what it is, without recourse to the normative (adult)
psychological mechanism of repression5. We are in the realm defined by pre-Oedipal
states, which is marked by the aesthetics of the novel, especially from Chapter
7, (and the arrival in Devil’s End), onwards.
Here, the characters lose their individuated qualities, and the way that
they are portrayed heavily relies upon the dynamics described by Melanie Klein,
which concern the paranoid-schizoid position (or early pre-Oedipal stage). From the narrator’s (and the readers’)
perspective, there are splittings of identity (primitive ego splitting),
projections of one’s self into the body of another (projective identification),
magical thinking (when one’s identity may be radically transformed by
perception), dissociation (when Chris sees himself from a perspective outside
of his body).
In Black Sunlight, the shaman
as writer seeks to exert upon us, a downward pressure upon the psyche of his
readers. He wants us to experience the
part of our psyche that thinks about identity in a deeply visceral, not just
emotional way. He wants to guide us
through a way of thinking that encounters the Sacred in a way that is both
transgressive 23 (along the lines of Bataille’s approach to the
Sacred) and also socially and psychologically re-integrative in terms of
providing a foundation for a new kind of society based on more refined notions
of how the identity of the other is created at a primary (in terms of early childhood development) and
primeval (in terms of sequence of human evolutionary development) psychological
level24. Black Sunlight is a novel that continuously evokes a transgressive
hence, sacred knowledge about identity.
By taking into account that aspect of experiences that are so painful
that we repress them – the Oedipus complex is included here – we come face to
face with the parts of ourselves that were not chosen, and which we would not
tend to consider as necessary parts of our identities. Paradoxically indeed, we
find that it is by recognising the contingent aspects of life – including that
special "contingency" of having an animal self – that we gain access to
the sacred. More especially, as when we
move from being animal selves to being part of civilisation, by passing through
the process of the Oedipus complex, the trauma of adjustment produces an
initiatory wound (Lacan refers to it as "castration"), which
paradoxically, through the receiving thereof, also allows us potential access
to the Sacred. For, we automatically are
driven to repress and suppress knowledge of the nature of the wound, and
thereupon we view the state of our being that preceded the wounding as
mysterious. A mystery, however, is what
seduces us towards shamanic journeying, in order to regain what has been
lost. Marechera's Black Sunlight is an incitement of the reader to pass backwards
through the traumatic gateway, into the realm of the contingent, the animal,
and the state of being one with Nature.
It is only through encountering that traumatic nature of the wounds we
have received from life that we can redeem the metaphysical category of
contingency, to the point that we make the factor of contingency a recognisable
part of the very make-up of our beings.
This is the goal of shamanic journeying: It is for the reconstruction of
our originative psychological unity as both animals (contingent) and civilised
human beings, without the typical outcome described in the views promulgated by
Freud, whereby the animal instincts are denied and repressed. Through shamanism, experience of contingency
is redeemed to become intricately part of us, and even what makes life sacredly
human.
In order to become "sacred", various manifestations of
contingency must first be encountered in their original traumatic forms. One of
the powerful messages of Black Sunlight
is that personal identity is not in fact chosen, but is actually contingent
upon such things as historical accidents and features of life that are beyond
one’s own control. This notion of
contingency, Marechera counterposes, throughout the book, to the notions (psychological
and political) of innate identities (viewed in terms of my reading of Black Sunlight as relating to conventional categories of race and gender
as already "givens" that put one into a predefined position within a
structure of power).
‘What does it mean to be poor?’
‘Going to bed under a bush without
your dinner.’
The next night he neither came for
his dinner nor for his bed. They
searched for him all night. He walked in
calmly at breakfast. Stephen watched as
she whipped me. ( p 77)
When adopting the formal behaviour of "poverty", by which
one's practical life is already defined, leads to punishment, a psychological
wound in the fabric of the self is created.
To heal this sort of wound, a would-be shaman recapitulates the past.
To face one's wounds successfully then leads to the creation of a
shamanistic sensibility, which functions to enhance self-perception and
perception of the world around one. It
seems that one may pay a heavy price for it, and even though healing may be
attained – to a level of psychological health greater than one had previously
enjoyed, due to the levels of awareness being enhanced, the “corrosion of the
brain” that is due to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder may continue to lurk in
certain cavernous passages of the mind, assuring a marginal social status, no
matter how gifted, perspicacious, or giving one might be. Nietzsche’s shamanistic formula, “The spirits
increase, vigour grows through a wound,”22
does not therefore tell us the whole truth of the matter, but it does
tell us a large part of it: Perhaps not
all trauma can be cured by shamanic means, however, the wound to one’s pride,
or to one’s identity, is already the basis for a cure, as it causes one to look
inwards, towards the hidden source of the Sacred.
To enhance the shamanic potency of his message, Marechera constantly
uses, as literary devices, the universal psychological capacities we have that
draw from a lower part of the mind to practice primitive (pre-Oedipal)
ego-defence. There are numerous
instances in which this occurs in the book, and some interesting examples are
as follows:
‘Christian,” I want you to meet
someone you know.’
The typing stopped. Irritably, the man said,
‘Who is it? Can’t you see I am busy. You can’t just come
here…(p 60)
The person turns out to be Chris, himself, represented from the point of
view of (what had been) the original Chris, who has now turned into
“Christian”. This is an example of
simultaneous dissociation, splitting and projective identification into the
body of another.
Another particularly amusing example is found later in the book:
And there was Nick and
Susan, shacking up here, there, everywhere.
And there was Patricia,
fucking anything in sight.
Sometimes I think we were
the wrong people in the right minds.
In the wrong place at the right
time.
We
were Franz, and his brother. Probably called Fred.
There
was Nicola campaigning against minds, against all thinking. That lethal
intellect.
There
was …
And
I get the eerie feeling.
Chris.
Christian.
The
right people arrived in the wrong bodies.
That ought to be me. No—that
one. Fucking Christ! Will you shut up! ( p 92).
Projective identification and splitting occur in that section to the
point that all the anarchists share the same or interchangeable identities with
each other. Finally, there is a clear case of “magical thinking” with regard to
the protagonist’s socially unreachable love, Blanche Goodfather, for she is
represented throughout the book as a rather socially conventional academic, but
by the final pages she has transformed, and is now an “Amazon” ( p117) – a mythical creature with whom the
author’s shamanistic imagination might more readily unite, as she is free from
the force of circumstances that govern us according to our formal identities.
As a reader, one experiences all these things, viscerally, as if one had
not yet learned the more mature mode of ego defence, that is employed by
well-balanced adults – that is, repression of data that frightens us and causes
us to question ourselves, including the rationality of the status quo. The book seeks to disrupt our current views
and state of mind, to cause us to regress at least in part, into the past, and
into our own psyches, that we may be born anew.
The recapitulation that Marechera invites us to undergo in his book is
highly effective for psychological rejuvenation – for his psychological
approach and aesthetics force us to confront ourselves in “immanence” – meaning
in terms of the dynamics of an infant’s early consciousness, before a
reality-based ego had been developed [footnote: in terms of Kleinian theory,
the paranoid-schizoid position]. This
means that there is no escape for us in using the transcendent power of logic
and safe conceptual references to the idea that we have permanent (and hence
unassailable) identity, in order to escape the psychological immediacy of the
historical trauma that is revisited upon us.
In facing the trauma of the past, we are in fact facing a temporary and
relative state of death of our transcendent ego. And yet – paradoxically – through recapitulation, one reclaims the
elements of one’s psyche that had been lost to the whole sense of the self at
the time when one was overwhelmed with frightening events that caused part of
one’s vitality to flee away from the present, leaving a consciousness that was
left to face the world in a mode of dull resignation. Marechera’s style of writing, however,
compels us to recapitulate those moments when we lost parts of our “soul” to
trauma. If we are strong enough to do
so, we can affirm our present lives with the fullest measure of wakefulness and
vitality: by facing death we will be
better equipped to face life. His book
also hints that we will become revolutionaries, if we are able to face
ourselves without repressing our traumas.
The revolutionary aspect of Black
Sunlight – for the book is not just narrowly shamanistic, but has another
message to impart -- is represented by a number of social dropouts, many for
whom, for good reason, are female.
[Footnote: Marechera’s psychological insights/sympathy with women]. In the novel, there are social-outsider
women – later to become anarchist revolutionaries along the lines of
Bade-Meinhof – who, from the get-go, cannot find it within their natures to
adapt to the strict kind of femininity that a strongly patriarchal society
makes necessary for societal acceptance.
Rejecting their allotted feminine identities, (in the same way as the
author is rejecting his politically allotted black identity), they undergo an
identity transformation, becoming “changelings” 34. They fulfil their principles as militant
anarchists by living/creating a new sort of society that will be fit for them. The well-recognised theoretical notion of
shamanistic death and rebirth is described by the writer of Shamanism: The
neural ecology of consciousness and healing, Michael Winkelman, as reflecting
“perinatal experiences” 35 and the restructuring of the ego:
The death-rebirth experiences frequently
result in dramatic alleviation of psychosomatic, emotional, and interpersonal
problems resistant to previous psychotherapy 36.
The logic to this is that shamanism, since it revitalises the soul, also
puts one at odds with the political status quo, which is based upon resignation
and acquiescence to conventional roles in life (which one acquiesces to because
of sometimes subtle developmental and historical traumas, which have damaged
the vitality of the inner self.) The
kinds of identities that cannot easily be politically controlled are those that
are shamanised – for the nature of their rebellion, which harnesses irrational
forces of sexuality and other forms of nonverbal communication (such as tears
and laughter), also opens an intellectual space for rethinking some of the
conventions of morality as well as normative structures of identity (which,
according to Louis Althusser, are intrinsically political).
It is logical not to expect too much success in reader response, after
having written a shamanic novel. One would have to be speaking with shamanic
initiates who were not afraid of the powerful effects of the unconscious mind,
if one was to speak sufficiently clearly and directly. Even if Black
Sunlight is seen, as I have suggested, as a means to initiate us into the
shamanic realm of consciousness, success in achieving that outcome is not
assured. As Georges Bataille states
regarding “the practice of joy before death” : “oral initiation is […]
difficult”. ( p 236 Visions of Excess).(20)
The initiation of his readers into a shamanic sensibility is made all
the more difficult, perhaps, by the manner in which the author wishes to “short
circuit” our current ways of thinking.
He wants to employ the vehicle of our imaginations relating to the early
pre-Oedipal or paranoid-schizoid level of developmental consciousness. This direct encounter with regressive modes
of relating to power – for coping with overwhelming forces is what pre-Oedipal
dynamics are designed to do, as a safety valve in adult society, as well as
predominantly in the infantile consciousness – is likely to make us feel
overwhelmed and in fear of annihilation.
Therefore, we tend to revert to more adult modes of repression of the
stimulation, or revert to pre-Oedipal defences of our own and project our own
fears pejoratively onto the author.
Despite these interesting historical reference points the book contains,
on Rhodesia’s war and history of rebellion, it is difficult to get a reader to
experience the book fully, as a “shamanic journey” of their own. This may be because of our normative
faculties of repression, which do not allow us to cross easily from
"language" to immediate experience without putting up a fight.
[Footnote: Lacan] The text is loaded
with precisely the kinds of elements that are psychologically and socially
disruptive and intended to speak to us on the level of communication which
recalls for us the states of being that pre-existed our entrance into language
as the dominant and logocentric mode of interacting. According to the
philosophy of Georges Bataille, these elements can be referred to as pertaining
to a system of “heterology” (in other
words, with laughter, tears, sexual excitement, poetic emotion, the sentiment
of the sacred and ecstasy [footnote: Shannon Winnubst, Reading Bataille Now—ref 2001a, 159-60.] ) An encounter with these
leads us to opening up otherwise repressed capabilities of the mind. Yet, too much of this material can make us
repress all the more, which will lead to the opposite effect the author wants
from his audience. The reader's mileage
may therefore vary, and constant exposure to the text can open up the readers'
minds to tolerating more – thus leading, ultimately to shamanisation.
Rather, the normalizing part of the mind, that is, the part of the mind
that is prone to accepting and reinforcing institutionalised thinking, blows
its fuse whenever it senses an encroaching danger of electricity overload. This is as much as needs to be said about the
difficulty of initiating anybody orally. So, it is extremely difficult –
although not impossible – to get the kind of reaction that Marechera hoped his
work would solicit.
Just as the intended impact of the work was shamanic, so is the actual
structure and storyline of his work.
The first part of the book is set in real life Rhodesia, with student
riots, trucks of dead bodies from the war, and university life as a
backdrop. Then follows the “seduction”
into the occult or “shamanic initiation”.
Marechera’s work traces the events that lead to the shamanic initiation
of the main protagonist – a photographer, Chris – who becomes “Christian” upon
encountering the dark, transgressive underworld of the primeval caves at
“Devil’s End”. In Shona mythology caves
are considered as the domain of spirits. Although not all caves were viewed as
the same but some were considered highly sacred and communities would conduct
rituals there such as rainmaking ceremonies and seeking intercession of the
spirits during crises periods such as war, droughts, disease, and other
calamities. Caves are therefore places of sanctity to which mortals retreat
during their moments of hopelessness to regain resolve and fortitude. Devil’s End describes, suggestively, the
buttocks of Being Itself, which eventually swallows and then excretes the
protagonist, in a way that suggests that he is born anew -- only not now from
his mother or his father, but out of the horror and ecstasy of his
experience. The shaman who offers the
seduction (A Bataillesque term for mystical initiation) is “Susan”, who
represents the horror and ecstasy available from Nature (in the raw) by having
a consensual sexual relationship with her father. This positions her outside of
Civilisation, in theory [See Freud], but she is in and of the realm of Nature,
which lends her an occult force.)
Christian eventually recovers from his ordeal, but not before he and a
group of anarchists have run amok over the city, destroying cathedrals and
blowing things up.
This all occurs with a backdrop of pre-Oedipal dynamics of magical
thinking, dissociation, splitting of identity, projective identification in
Marechera’s writing, which remind us of our passing through this pre-Oedipal
stage on the way towards gaining a solidified and certain adult identity within
society’s system of social hierarchies (the main ones in the novel being man
versus woman and white versus black). His
book thus addresses power dynamics in society at large, and what it means to
move from a state of unity with everything that exists, but whilst experiencing
effective “non-being” to a status of tangible civil and political being. (One is well advised to pay attention also to
type of imagery in this work that unifies post-Oedipal sexuality with
pre-Oedipal psychological structures or “primary processes” (such as trance
induced fantasy and the array of Kleinian psychodynamics. These increase the intensity of the pressure
on the psyche, to process such potentially traumatic material.) (21)
The shamanic initiatory journey that Marechera wants to take us on is
thus designed to be psychologically overwhelming and painful, but with definite
redeeming qualities (such as awareness of one’s political position in society,
and transcendence of identity-defined neuroses). ( 22) This is because, despite the fact that
this early stage of childhood development can be considered as “psychotic” when
compared to adult rationality and the equilibrium of the normal adult’s ego
state, this early stage of consciousness, and their psychological dynamics of
thanatos and eros remain with us as adults, as part of the unconscious mind,
influencing political processes and governing the processes of creative and
innovative thought. Whereas the artist,
in expressing his or her creativity, experiences “unconscious” ego
dedifferentiation, the shaman’s approach to knowledge and creativity is more
extreme. The author of Black Sunlight, is rightly represented
as an artist of sorts (a photographer), who captures images with his eyes (and
stores them in his memory) as well as with his camera. Chris experiences the paranoid-schizoid
dimensions of existence (as said, via conscious acts of transgression) that set
into motion the psychological processes linking self-destruction to
self-regeneration, for there is a way of short-circuiting conventional adult
consciousness in a way that allows the ego to return to its previous state,
only more powerfully imbued with self-knowledge. (23)
In Black Sunlight, we can
revisit our own psychologically fluid states prior to the acquisition of an “I”
(Lacan’s mirror stage) and prior to our sense of having wholeness. We vicariously partake of the adventure of
the protagonist into the most primeval caverns of his mind, which represent the
way in which “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (23) ( p 29 Slipp) in terms of the psychological motif of the
primeval caves at “Devil’s End”. We thus disintegrate as a whole, until the end
of the book when we are restored. It is as if we had been “torn apart by
spirits”, if only to be rebuilt by them in a more psychologically robust
form. Our necessary psychological sense
of wholeness is restored by gazing into the mirror, which draws all the
otherwise disorganised sensations of the mind together to become part and
parcel of a coherent subject. (23)
[Footnote: It is Lacan who sees this developmental “mirror stage” as taking
place in a way that parallels or replicates the sense of a child starting to
recognise himself in a mirror).
According to Lacan, this liquid state of pre-Oedipal consciousness is
lost forever to self-awareness when a child finally gains a formal identity in
society proper (patriarchal, male dominated society) and learns language as
‘the law of the father” – the social values of patriarchal society.]
Marechera’s writing is thus shamanic in that one is torn apart by the
forces that were once attributed as “spiritual forces” and then rejuvenated and
restored. In terms of the Western
tradition of shamanism, his writing reverberates with the ecstatic nature of
the irrational aspects of life. In more
narrowly psychological terms, he seeks to restore to us “paradise lost” – an
almost forgotten state of awareness, when one was (so far as one’s awareness
went) ontologically at one with one’s mother and with every other thing. The
recollection of one’s earlier unity of self with everything else seems mystical
in the sense that a profound recollection of this primeval state is actually barred
by later milestone developmental processes that produce repression (in Lacan’s
system, at the point of learning language, and in Freud’s system at the oedipal
stage.) (24) So it is that to be able to re-experience in a direct – rather
than indirect sense -- this earlier mode of psychological liquidity (the primal
state of pre-identity) whilst as a fully developed adult (as indicated by
Marechera’s powerful motifs of adult sexuality throughout the novel) is to
undergo shamanistic initiation itself (rather than just a movement between two
developmental fields, as earlier discussed).
Theoretically, one crosses the barrier of repression that introduces us
into adult identity, and back to the early pre-Oedipal self, by means of transgression
of the commands of the oedipal superego.
Marechera’s anarchists are all, in relation to this mode of
transgression, shamanic initiates, since they are all “changelings”, having
dropped out of society due to their inability to conform to its expectations
(such as gender roles) or having fallen from society’s grace. Yet, to the degree that they have all been
changed inwardly by their
heterological experiences, they are also practitioners of ‘hidden knowledge’,
which is, since it has to do with the whole body, with dissociation and with an
encounter with Nature, broadly shamanic.
The final parts of the book are a kind of winding down from the
experience of shamanic ecstasy and horror.
The protagonist of the book, now truly himself, and no longer
“Christian” renounces the value of the Black Sunlight Organisation, declaiming
it as “shit” [Footnote: “shit” is
another feature of heterology, so this form of speech is ironically consistent
with Bataille’s mysticism, at least.]
The fictional nature of the earlier protagonist/s (in terms of the
double/s who took the shamanic soul journeys) begins to reside, and we see the
author more starkly, as he really is in everyday reality. Does the author see “the beautiful person” he
is, at this moment? It seems that
rather, he is imbued with the knowledge that he is a sacrificial animal, in
relation to the vagaries of everyday reality, which extract a toll on him, the
final one being actual mortal death – of which he confronts the image, staring
back at him, wrists pouring blood, from the reflection in the mirror. Marechera, represented by his main
protagonist, Chris, having entered a state of mind in which his rationality is
suppressed – a realm of drives, necessities, and a sense of oneness with everything
else that exists, has been guided to the end of his journey by a vestige of his
adult ego that has not been obviated by the suppression of rationality. Thus the protagonist’s apparent “psychosis” (we
later learn, from taking “psychiatric drugs”) is really an adventure of
self-exploration into his pre-Oedipal unconscious.
In
terms of its style, Black Sunlight is
written in a surrealist, stream of consciousness style (almost “automatic
writing”) wherein what is described
are the inner workings of the author's
own ostensibly (that is, in terms of aesthetic form) ‘paranoid’, ‘schizoid’ and
deeply introspective vision of the world. This
makes an objective interpretation difficult.
The writing actually takes us back to a pre-Oedipal state of
consciousness, which is the stage at which the ontological question: “Do I
exist (and if so how?) is resolved by the child towards the process of maturity. The overall effect of the book is to use a
partial sense of psychological regression to allow us to see what it looks like
underneath the social skin of society, as if it were that the moral and
historical justifications for the existing order were ripped away, and we saw
the blood, veins, and bare bones beneath.
These appear to us as startling, shocking, (and in the same visceral
sense one has, in response to viewing human mutilations in a thriller) quite
horrific.
Yet,
what Marechera shows us is not the literal physiology of the human body,
stripped of its covering of skin, but rather the equivalent in terms of an
anatomy of social power. The body that
is dissected on the conceptual table of Black
Sunlight is the body politic.
Marechera shows us its underlying psychological streams of power; (in
physiological terms) its sympathetic and parasympathetic psychological forces
(all required to be internally balanced in the soul of the protagonist in order
not to “go mad”). These can be
understood in terms of Eros and Thanatos, for the shaman utilises both in order
to facilitate his own ego death and regeneration: Thanatos facilitates the ego’s shattering,
and the countervailing force or Eros follows on to reconstruct a new and
different sense of self. By utilising,
in his psychological style of writing, a format of ego scattering and
disintegration (a utilisation of the force of Thanatos), along with a quality
of identities merging into each other (utilising the force of Eros, which binds
us together to become part of a giant wholeness), Marechera shows what is
hidden beneath the apparent calm and “order” that appears to us on the surface
of society, which is actually its skin. This style of writing suggests that the economies
of Eros and Thanatos that are in us all could be redirected to construct a very
different kind of society. Yet it is
more than just a “style”, for we are invited to experience undercurrents of the
tugs of war between Eros and Thanatos in our own bodies, as we read through
Marechera’s writing.
So
it is that the forces of revolution in this book, which disrupt and distress
the body’s equilibrium, with the instinctual message of ‘fight or flight’, can
be likened to the sympathetic nervous system, according to my rough
analogy. As disruptive forces, they are
force of Thanatos, however, the sexualised and wordless mode via which the
revolutionaries communicate with each other is representative of Eros, and of
the possibility for a new kind of community that is genuine and authentic.
The way the readers experience, and respond, to
much of the otherwise hidden communication of the book is via a subconscious
tuning into the vicissitudes of Eros and Thanatos, which underpin the changing
circumstances of the characters of the book.
To read the book in this way, as
a book that communicates primarily a “visceral” message, is to read it in a
shamanistic fashion. Some of the “parasympathetic
forces” (or: forces of Thanatos) within this book are those which represent
withdrawal from social relations, represented as a calming down or the
recognition of a state of fatigue. A
structural parallel in the book may also be noted in terms of this same
analogy, between revolutionary upsurges against repressive social forces
(including, for instance, Margaret Thatcher’s policy of austerity) and a return
to a state of resignation. This book is
not only a psychological study of a specific human psyche (Marechera’s
autobiographical self) put under political pressure (where the question is to
revolt or not to revolt). It is also a
political analysis of power structures with regard to their social
psychological effect. Because the work
is knit together with complex strands of autobiographical ventricles and fibre,
the body of the work is exceedingly complex, and at various times, different
situations or motifs will radiate like nerve cells do, to reach out for more
than one cross-textual or historical meaning.
The overall aesthetic effect of the book is a deep sense of intimacy
with the human condition as it has been represented here, and a spiritual sense
of gratefulness for the writer’s truth-telling.
Paradoxically, it is as if through understanding the ubiquity of
violence that permeates the author’s life – and indeed our own lives, insofar
as we are promoters as well as victims of power – we can come to terms with the
reality that human life is fragile and therefore precious. This book is revolutionary in that its
overall analysis of social power leads us to consider how social identities are
like the skin that clothe underlying power dynamics and that they are not as
deeply rooted or immutable as they may seem to be on the surface.
Due to the confrontational nature of the writing, which seeks to destroy
the boundaries of identity put up in order to maintain the present social
organisation of power, the reader is not excluded (of course) from exposure to
this unmitigating level of violence, as Marechera seeks to take us beneath
society’s skin. He has undergone a self-investigation
into all the states of non-being that are the outcomes of refusing a fixed and
stable social identity.
Black
Sunlight’s key theme 2 is the loss of ego (thus an encounter with
death, not just symbolically – which is to say, aesthetically, but also
experientially) which occurs as a result of taking hallucinogenic drugs, as the
main protagonist’s initiation into shamanism at the caves of Devil’s End. One apprehends the Sacred through these
unconventional means. Just as don Juan’s
apprentice routinely imbibes hallucinogenic drugs in his quest for
self-knowledge, “Christian” – one of the main protagonists in Black Sunlight –
has inadvertently swallowed “Chris’s psychiatric drugs”, which, I have argued,
facilitates his entry into the realm of shamanic experience and into a realm of
experiential otherness 31The drugs in the story symbolically point to the idea
of entry into the spirit world by psychological self-regression. Yet, the taking of the drugs is a metaphysical
act of transgression via overt compliance and conformity, at least on an
autobiographical level. Marechera
refused to take psychiatric drugs in his life-time, although he must have felt
that he was in imminent danger of being made to do so, due to his refusal to
conform to social expectations, and his ongoing tendency to make political
points about the inherent value of running one’s own life. To accept the psychiatric drugs is to
ostensibly accept the hemlock – a means perhaps of assuring that one’s
martyrdom, as an anarchist. This is a feature of Marechera’s shamanistic
tricksterism, which manipulates the perceptions of those who are less
intellectually and emotionally dextrous than the writer, as a way of paying
them back for their hostilities in his actual life. Joking, through manipulating the reader’s
perceptions, is a huge part of what Black Sunlight is about – and it makes up
the core narrative of the book, whereby the whole aspect of the anarchists
uprising is viewed as a retrospective error, caused by having mistakenly imbibed
psychiatric drugs 32. The semi-submerged criticism is that a healthy person
does not take psychiatric drugs as they will drive him crazy. But if he does go crazy, he also wins,
ideologically, by putting into action his own anarchistic tendencies. So, there is a symbolic as well as black
humorous autobiographical reference to the aspect of drug taking, as well as to
the “suicide” depicted at the end of the book 33. They are two more transgressive aspects that
invoke the resilience of anarchistic thinking, and the quality of the
Sacred.
The broader conceptual context of this story is
anarchist revolution in tune with a metaphysical unleashing of the repressed
forces of Nature, set free to defy social norms. The primordial power
associated with “Nature” is thus released as anarchistic energy, in defiance of
its metaphysical opposite, “Civilisation”.
The regression of the mind to a state of nature is explored quite
astutely in the novel. It is similar to
the regression of mind that a more traditional shaman aims for – the altered
states of consciousness that are attained in order to see visions.
In an ironic reversal of the protagonist’s attitude in
the previous section of the book where he rejects Christianity, the author’s
persona takes on a pathos that makes him emblematic of a sacrificial
subject: I watch the gashes in my wrists
leak faster and faster with meaning ( p 117).
This loss has resonances with Bataille’s revolutionary and surrealistic
pathos which he attaches to religious sacrifice. Throughout the book, the fiery spontaneity of
the misfits, directed by libidinous or violent impulses, find expression in
various nonverbal forms such as laughter, orgy, nightmare and occult experience
or sensation.
The concept which I have found to consistently
reside within the text of Black Sunlight
is made visible to an strongly analytic eye through the concept of
“heterogeneity”, this term having been coined by Bataille to indicate that
which does not pertain to the socially coordinated production system (that
which we do not consider as a rational, productive part of workaday life). Bataille’s concept is designed to refer to aspects
of existence that escape the conceptual nets of ideological and philosophical
positivism. Aspects of human life that cannot be assimilated into rational and
productive modes of the state and economy are set apart from these modes,
excluded from the predominant social whole, and rendered abject or invisible by
rational processes of productivity. Individuals
who cannot be assimilated to society’s rational ends are “heterogeneous”. Actions and behaviours that cannot be
harnessed for the goals of economic efficiency are similarly referred to as
pertaining to “heterology”. Heterogeneous
types are inherently disruptive of the systemic order of society. Meanwhile, the elements of heterology, (which
include laughter, poetic feeling, tears and sexual sensations), invoke in us a
sense of the Sacred. Both aspects
together are used in Marechera’s Black
Sunlight. Heterogeneity is the key
characteristic feature of the anarchists (who are all social rejects in one
form or another). The use of tears,
laughter, sexual sensations and poetic feelings invoke a sense of the sacred,
and mark this work as shamanic.
In a
sense, one can view the homogeneous part of society functions as a kind of stomach
which deals with those aspects that are considered to be vulgar, lowly,
criminally dangerous or shocking by excreting them – in other words, normative
society protects itself from those aspects of humanity which form its “excess”.
These include the social outcasts and vagrants that Marechera so preferred to
socialise with. Thinking that operates
on the basis of conformity thus functions to exclude the elements considered not
to have a place within normative society and hence to be “abnormal”. These have to be cast out (excreted), and in
Bataille’s terms, are “heterogeneous”. Thus,
“heterogeneous” occupies the logical position of being a social “unconscious”
in relation to “ego” – although this model of society does not give an exact analogy
with the function of the ego and the id in the Freudian sense.
Bataille
points out that, “man has established [homogeneity] throughout the external
world by everywhere replacing a priori inconceivable objects with classified
series of conceptions or ideas.” 10 This is
to say that our very categories of thinking put us into boxes which deprive us
of human spontaneity. Marechera’s
sophisticated interest is in that which might exist despite cultural
classifications – that is, in what the hidden violence of imposed cultural
classifications have excluded for appearing to be irrelevant (which is to say,
beyond the pale of cultural interest) or excluded because they are cognitively
elusive (especially in relation to what is excluded by legitimisation processes within
hierarchical systems of power by processes of education.) Despite his protests
and the depths of his analyses, he was enough of a realist to realise that
cultural violence was an inescapable aspect of being human, since, “our
feelings and thoughts are themselves a kind of self-violation,” but there is
also “violence in the very attempt to write in such a way that writing is
beyond thinking and feeling.” (p 65) 11
The role of Blanche Goodfather is pivotal in defining the difference
between Marechera’s own ideas of heterogeneity and homogeneity in this novel.
However, it is first necessary to observe how the
complimentary mode to the heterogeneous is founded on psychological conformity
to the principle of the "good father".
A REPRESENTATION OF A HOMOGENEOUS
CHARACTER STRUCTURE
Within shamanism, there is the
normative mode of accepting reality just as it seems to be, in a more or less
positivistic fashion, and there is the shamanic mode of seeing and experiencing
other non-normative possibilities.
Blanche Goodfather’s role as a character is to embody the opposite of
heterogeneity – that is that state of fitting in to the productive mode of
society, in a way that supports the existing system as a whole. It's a way of being that is definitively not anarchistic,
nor does she seem to be shamanised, for her character structure is shaped by
her normatively resolved Oedipus complex.
(She has not resolved it in a shamanic way, as Susan has.) Her character structure is therefore
pro-patriarchal and relatively conservative.
Her academic role as anthropologist (working
within legitimate system of production) enables her to consume the lives of the
heterogeneous ones – society’s ‘primitives’ and lumpen proletarians. Since she is well positioned within her dominant,
white culture, she represents the strata of “normative”, patriarchal society --
(as well as acquiescence to that society). “Blanche Goodfather” is a name based
upon pairing two symbolically positive social referents (at least in terms of
the views of the dominant social order).
She is on the white side of the symbolic dichotomy which determines
power, and the term “good father” indicates that her social order does not
consider authority (as represented by ‘the father’) ambivalently, but rather as
an unequivocal “good”. By implication,
she has successfully resolved her Electra complex in favour of her father’s
continued authority. Nonetheless, as an anthropologist, the allure of the
heterogeneous compels Blanche to spend a year with the protagonist, a year that
the protagonist himself can ultimately not remember. She thus reduces the spontaneous forms of heterogeneous
life, which she would study, into something more calculable, abstract, dead,
and more obviously homogeneous, as per the following:
Blanche Goodfather, that was her name. I had avidly
read her books. On life among headhunters. Life among skinheads, screwballs,
dossers, down and outs, tarts, the shitheads of skidrow. Life among cannibals.
She was a moth fiercely attracted to the lights of the savage, the earthy, the
primitive. And how she roamed the earth -- how she too searched -- ferreted out
the few bits and pieces of authentic people reducing them to meticulous
combinations of the English alphabet.
One can see by the jaded manner in which the author/protagonist notices Blanche
Goodfather’s self-accommodation to the system that he is politically distant
from her. She is obedient to her role
within the social system, whilst he is one of those whom she is studying and is
heterogeneous in his nonconformity.
Because of such sharp distinctions in the novel, I want to suggest that,
in line with Bataille’s philosophy, elements of “heterogeneity” are the
dynamite that Marechera wishes to place beneath the system of identities
created by State power. Existing for
oneself is “sovereignty” in Bataille’s terms.
It is certainly a principle, perhaps even a credo that Marechera
embraced during his lifetime. He refused
to be controlled by any social organisation, embracing fellow outcasts, and
following his impulses. Furthermore he
thought to use his heterogeneous literary characters as a means of self
education. The extreme experiences of
vagrancy and of emotional abandonment helped him to see into the human
situation that much more clearly. “It is
not victory unless the vanquished admits your mastery,” (p 115) he announced,
within a written context that spoke of his own personal anguish and abandonment,
but not to the forces that demand conformity.
Psychologically, Marechera reached way beyond the logic that determines
reality according to common measures, but that was because he had experienced
his early life in such traumatic ways. Trauma tends to remove one from the
homogeneous realm of social equivalences, since individual traumas resist being
public and quantifiable.
JOURNEYING WITHIN THE PRE-OEDIPAL
Shamanic journeying is fundamentally a
psychological journey that one takes in order to recover the essential force of
one’s true self. One embarks on such a
recapitulation of the past in order to retrieve that which has been lost in the
past because of trauma, or because of pressures to adjust to the expectations
of others, one must relearn how to tolerate ambiguity, for it is such mental
conditioning that will enable one to hold back from jumping to conclusions
about “essential identities”, enough to see more of reality as the interweaving
web of complexity that it actually is. Black Sunlight draws its readers into the
constraints of pre-Oedipal psyche, which hardly thinks at all, but experiences
the world only in terms of immediate effects, from which it is powerless to
relieve itself by conventional adult means of relieving tension – that is, by
means of repression. Black Sunlight, however, is a narrative
that seeks to prevent us from repressing the impact of the traumas that are
within the narrative, since we are not following a storyline that is written
from the point of view of a transcendent ego, but rather one that is written,
for the most part, from the point of view of the ego that has sunk into its
prior state of a pre-oedipal consciousness.
We are therefore shackled to a perspective that is almost entirely
unmediated by the ego’s reality filtering devices. This, in itself, is traumatic, and is
designed to break down conventional ways of seeing. To
put it in another way, it is a key point, that differentiates shamanic
strategies from mere dissociation and psychosis, that one does in fact discover
one’s key self if the journey is to be defined at all as “shamanic”. Marechera took an abnormal – which is to say
shamanic -- psychological route to restoring his character structure and
overcoming his Oedipus complex, the processes of which are outlined by Nietzsche
in Thus Spake Zarathustra, but are
not on the map of Lacanian psychoanalysis. He destroyed his crystalised,
existing personality by crossing back into the pre-Oedipal field of
consciousness (as we see in Black
Sunlight.)
Here he encountered what Gertrud B Ujheley describes
as follows:
The magical, pre-oedipal
structure of consciousness corresponds to a state of emergence into unity of
being out of a state of identity with nature and nonbeing. […]
The person residing on that plane of consciousness is still very much in
touch with the souls of animals and plants, and even of things. He can
communicate with them in their language and experiences their joys and
sufferings as if they were his own. He
is also in touch with the still nature-close archetypal dimension of human
souls, but not with the human, conscious aspect of their personalities. [..] Although
there is awareness of the objective difference between self and other,
there is lack of differentiation concerning the subjectivity of each. The person on the magical level of
consciousness literally lives in a world of subjectivity, of being subject to
and subjected to powers. There is no connection from one human being to
another, but everyone and everything is seen as existing in relation to
oneself: either as benevolent or malicious.
.http://www.cejournal.org/GRD/PreOedipal.htm
Thus, in the middle of the book, he encounters
“Susan” (a character earlier introduced to us as an everyday acquaintance of the
author) in her most terrible manifestation as the negative dimension of the
‘phallic mother’ (See Kristeva.) This is
a kind of Medusa – a manifestation of Nature itself in all of its horror and
nurturing potential. And it is as
phallic mother that “Susan” anally rapes the protagonist. This regression to the level of the
pre-Oedipal must have given the author a certain wary consciousness about what
was at the base of human nature, as he had experienced it through a regressive
mode that took him back to the pre-Oedipal.
Nonetheless such baptism in self-knowledge remained with him as a type
of shamanic initiation. He knew that he
could always return to this dense spirit world he had discovered, to grapple
with “Nature”.
In theory, successful resolution of the Oedipus
complex would produce the changes in
each individual which make them into a cog within homogeneous part of society –
interpellated as social units -- thus calculable,
interchangeable with other parts of the same category (for example, sharing an
identity on the basis of the essentialist qualities thought to pertain to “blackness”
or “femaleness” in accordance with established moral and cognitive divisions
already present in society’s definitions of successful social maturation.). Significantly, in Black Sunlight, Marechera’s female characters are very strong
indeed (unlike how they would arguably have been interpellated under
patriarchy). The strongest character of
all – Susan – has monstrous metaphysical powers, no doubt due to having become
one with the forces of nature through violating the incest taboo with her
father. To embrace nature rather than
transcend it into civilisation has made her identifiable (in the author’s mind)
with the most violent and potentially subversive powers that consist in Nature
itself.
One can only speculate on
how a neurological imperative to remember violent events, rather than repress
and forget them, changed the otherwise “natural” course of the Oedipus complex,
towards traumatic “seeing” rather than accepting self-negation out of horror at
discovering one’s own propensities for Oedipal attraction. The evidence of Marechera’s writings, in
total, give one the impression that he remained strongly aware of the violence
entailed in submitting to social control and still not being relieved of a
sense of guilt. Why? Because of his being implicated in society and
in relation to his parents, as having been a “disobedient child”. What is significant and deep in Marechera as
well as in his writing is that he experienced the terror of this very human
tension without repressing what he
knew about the nature of social violence coming from forces above and around
him. When the protagonist of Black
Sunlight acknowledges, “Do you know I’ve always thought that I killed my
parents,” ( p 46) the mythical blindness of Oedipus, which should ensue upon noticing
that one has allowed one’s carnal instincts to become rage, is missing. Rather, what remains is an even more powerful will
to see -- uncloaked by subsequent violent reactions, such as destroying oneself
with blindness as per Oedipus. The writer’s daring, entailed in his refusing blindness, is what defines all
of his work, to varying degrees. In
terms of his relationship to the Oedipus complex, it is also that which situates
him “in immanence”, in direct connection with the material and immediate reality
of raw experience, rather than in a position of social transcendence. On a moral level, being “in immanence” is to
be understood as embracing humanity as it is, rather than how it might be in
the future.
To read the content of Marechera’s Black Sunlight without switching off and
filtering the negative and scatological references from one’s mind is an
exercise in consciously reversing one’s social conditioning processes. If the
heterogeneous is that which is ‘excreted’ as heterogeneous matter from our
economically logical and productive minds as “nauseating” and “boring” (as Ann
Godfrey found it Marechera’s Black
Sunlight.) 34 then to approach Marechera on his own terms, one
needs to overcome the condemnation activated by our excessively well- adjusted minds
so as to understand the meaning of the writing. For, it is easy to be well-adjusted to the
power structures of the day, on the internal basis of our Superego’s
condemnation of any overt rebellion against the social order.
MORAL DOUBLE-TAKES
Black
Sunlight
abounds in an orgiastic festival of heterologous elements (elements which have
no equivalency or generalisable and common meaning), vying for acknowledgement through
a tone of ambivalence. Black Sunlight
revels in elements of revolutionary rage, loss of self through exclusion from
the homogeneous mass, laughter, orgy and sacrifice (see: the sacrifice of the
poet at the end, in the slashing of the wrists).
[T]he sacred as posited
of those things which are, in common practice, hidden, obscured, subject to
prohibition or censorship- objects of revulsion, excluded from quotidian
contact or touch, abstracted from use. […Also,] those States of loss of self we
know in rage, laughter, orgy, and sacrifice
The substances cast off and excluded are indeed,
not quite the bodily fluids, but in larger sense, the discordant human elements
of society who do not manage to find their part in the homogeneous whole – due
to having poorly adjusted characters in terms of their allotted role in
life. For example, a particular female
character is too temperamental to be a make-up artist, and a doctor drinks too
much to perform his job. The misfortune of being born poor is another feature
that defines human heterogeneity. Yet, laughter
and rage are textually and existentially unavoidable features of life as the
photographer of Precision magazine
makes his imprecise journey to his final end, but not before publishing an
unwitting misrepresentation of an inquiry into the medical misdemeanours of his
fellow outcast, Sordid Joe. 37
Christian’s progress through the labyrinth of his own psyche (as well as
the narrative of the novel), ultimately yields him the conclusion that violence
may be unavoidable. (p 65). The
consolation for the resulting ambivalent state is that “fear cleanses”. Marechera invites his readers to laugh with him at his
rejection of all claims to power (see the excerpt from Black Sunlight below). It is
an invitation for them also for them to laugh at an oppressive authority whilst
both approving of his claims to power and disapproving. This is a state of
ambivalence. This represents Marechera’s situation in relation to his own
native culture and indeed his “race”. The writing about the chief refers
to African nativism and its ideological power, in service of which, Marechera's
parents had punished him for speaking in English. That was surely not a
weak or forgettable experience. Also, Marechera had some prescience about
how he would be treated as an intellectual in an independent black State. The
power he feared was real, and the criticisms he made of Afro-essentialism in Black Sunlight were also prescient:
Was there a difference between the
chief on his skull-carpentered throne and the general who even now had grappled
all power to himself in our new and twentieth-century image? In either I can only perform as chronicler,
subversive jester and teller of tales.
(p13).
Here we have shades of Robert
Mugabe, of whom it could reasonably be said that Marechera did finally become
the victim. Indeed, it was the ruling
party of Zimbabwe which prevented him from leaving the country and returning to
Europe in the 80s. 50 He had to try to make a living within the
ideologically narrowed confines of Zimbabwe.
He’d failed. This is almost certainly one of the main reasons for
his early demise. And yet for the
protagonist to react in a purely negative way to his absurd situation of
hanging upside down in the chicken yard would have been to embrace
despair. To
laugh is to embrace personal sovereignty.
52 The moderate alterity that the
writer adopts for the sake of humour is, nonetheless, the product of one whose
private identity has not been totally subsumed in a public one and who is using
laughter to subvert. He does not write
from the point of view of public utility but to criticise the vulgar immorality
of the chief’s implicit agenda of domination. He writes, in a sense, from
outside of society, from a position that is ambivalent to all forms of
domination. His humour—sometimes
slapstick, sometimes dark or preposterously ironic – hits the mark. In the broad social and political sense, Marechera’s
literature of ambivalence takes us away from a too predictable approach to life
and from an overestimation of any presumptuous knowledge about what is or isn’t
real. Of course, the ironic humour of
the text is politically loaded.
EXPLORING AND REWORKING THE INFANT (AND INFANT
NATION’S) PSYCHE
The repressed, dark side of humanity sometimes permeates
the text, choking almost any kind of laughter but the most subversive. The dark vision of the trauma of one’s
castration into societal mores (seen both from the angle of Civilisation and
the angle of being within undifferentiated Nature) resonates throughout the
text. From a poetic stream of
consciousness which evokes the heterogeneous through an apocalyptic vision:
Out of the black sunlight, a mother
gorges herself on the foetus screaming out of her. It silenced the light, froze
it hard and black until its sharp bright edges cut deep into his heart. Human
eyes had the same hard and dark glittering, the same refrigerated look. Which
never quite looks anyone in the eye.
Susan’s single hypnotic eye. Excavating into me.
Excavating.
The excretion.
“What has not been done in the name of some straitjacket?’
My soul a neat shirtfront; these star-studded galaxies. Ashtrays on the desk
overflow with stubbed inventions. Night and sky are refuges on a quay; the
world debris piled at the edge of neat memoranda. White pebbles on a white
beach dazzle the eye towards the lighthouse; a spurt of flame is the whiteman
shooting grouse. Orion smiles at cracked tiles on Brixton roofs. The mirror
flinches. Torn commandments of clouds shroud the sky from me. Time and space
enclose me in their fetid rooms.
Here we see the “profoundly cracked” nature of
existence through the eyes of a shamanic initiate, and shamanic rebirth through
the anus of Nature (Bataille suggests
that one should meditate on the cracked nature of being in order to undergo a
“mystical” initiation.)
At the extreme limits of heterogeneity, as it is
shown, one becomes the excreted object of one’s own fantasies, trapped within
the bowels of a heavy, draining solipsism.
It is at this point that ambivalence is again most useful in enabling
one to escape the horns of one’s dilemma.
Ambivalence can be useful to disengage one (thus preserving one as
non-egotistic individual) when the revolution appears to have failed, to have
fossilised into the lifeless abstraction of dogmatic practice. The logic of
using heterogeneity as a means for dissent implies that to reject the idée fixe of the revolution at a
strategic point is to keep alive the spirit, the movement of the revolution
(based upon keeping open the psychological wells of one’s spontaneous freedom).
The meaning of the deconstruction of the ‘Black Sunlight Organisation’ as just a fantasy is psychologically astute, for it
implies one ought not to be fixated on any ideological creed. To Marechera, the
revolution can only be a product of spontaneous freedom, a notion of radical subjectivity
in profound conflict with the Marxist-Leninism of Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF. 57
The structure of the book, Black Sunlight, certainly gives us a strong indication of what the
author as shaman sought to instigate in his readers – he intended his writing
to be the basis for radical social change.
In the primeval 6 cave at “Devil’s End’, the author
experiences his most extreme dissociative experiences, in comparison to the
rest of the book. Certainly he
encounters death (both symbolically because the caves represent regression to a
more infantile version of the self, and quite viscerally in terms of a sense of
internal fragmentation). Chris “sees”
versions of himself that have been fragmented and dissociated from the identity
of the observing self 7.
Clearly, too, he encounters his own death and resurrection: “I came among my guests like a man who has
returned from the grave to complain about his death certificate.” 8.
The author has been transformed by his confrontation with death, which
has fragmented his sense of self, and stripped him psychologically bare. The
chapters that follow from this section of the book, which details the author’s
experiences at Devils End, are, as is only to be anticipated, concerning
outright revolution. Yet the conceptual
dualism of the ordinary level of reality versus that of non-ordinary reality is
maintained, as it is only correct, for a representation of a “shamanic
journey”. For a shamanic journey is
primarily an investigative journey into the “spirit world” facilitated by an
altered state of consciousness. The
value of the anarchistic revolution is framed, therefore, in the author’s final
analysis by the shaman/protagonist’s self-questioning in the final passages of
the book. The protagonist’s withdrawal from
espousing his unity of identity with the Black Sunlight Organisation implies
that the meaning of the shamanic journey must be assimilated to the shaman’s
higher level of consciousness. What did
Marechera hope for from his shamanistic ordeal? The author has been transformed
by his confrontation with death, which has fragmented his sense of self, and
stripped him psychologically bare.
The more
horrific and painful the ordeal, the greater the prestige and power that accrue
to the initiate. ‘Death’, suffering
excarnation (removal of the flesh from the skeleton), dismemberment,
transformation and rebirth are indeed common elements of shamanistic
initiation. 9
The narrative of
Black Sunlight has taken us on a soul journey into this magical realm. The
character of Chris has photographic memory and knowledge of the occult that
come in use here to facilitate the journey.
Christian, the spiritual pilgrim to the Underworld is another inner
guide generated by the author’s psyche in order to take his exploratory “soul
journey”. Marechera has gone back to the
roots of life itself (the caves of the
prehuman), not just to the roots of his own life, in order to find out what it
means to be human – indeed, what the
essential elements are that make up life as humans know it. He has encountered the creative positive sides of the pre-oedipal mode of
thinking, whereby he is able to split himself and through projective
identification become other personalities (for instance, he has become both a
photographer and a writer; his
brother and himself; himself and Blanche Goodfather, whom he effectively has “turned into” after coming
“out of the sun”.) 19 On the other hand, he has encountered the
negative aspects of his mind’s projection:
He was swallowed up by Susan as the phallic mother 20 whose
domination of his mind and body is overwhelming and devastating, reflected from
the viewpoint of the post-oedipal, mature writer. The experience of the return
to pre-oedipal consciousness as claustrophobic accords with the insights of
psychoanalyst Donald Meltzer, who sees that the unwitting regression of parts
of the psyche to the pre-oedipal state can enhance dependency upon intuition at
the cost of genuine testing of reality. 21
The recognition that there are psychological dangers
confronting the one who undertakes a journey of shamanic initiation is also a
key part of traditional shamanism.
Similarly, regression to the pre-oedipal stage of consciousness involves
real dangers as well as being potential restorative of psychological
wholeness. To fail on one’s journey,
however, means to become effectively “bewitched” by the appeal of this
regressive mode, trapped in a
consciousness dominated by necessity, rather than personal freedom. Thus, the author’s depiction of his
experience of the downside of the pre-oedipal consciousness has been accurately
rendered. The protagonist has
experienced the pathological compulsion to submit to the abject aspects of the
life force expressed through his unconscious – that is, control and domination
by Nature, dubbed “The Great Cunt”.
“It’s the DNA in us”, the book tells, us. 22 (Access to this regressive mode is, indeed
part of our biological constitution, and as such, parts, if not the whole of
our consciousness, can regress to this state at any time.) Marechera was able
to utilise his experiential knowledge of the pre-oedipal psychodynamics of
self, by integrating them with the knowledge of society provided from the
perspective of his mature ego, in his later works.
It is also important to note that Marechera finds
within his mode of partial or artistic/figurative regression, (entailed in the
“soul journey” that is his narrative of Black
Sunlight), the capacity for renewal as well as insight. This is reflected in the “changelings”
motif. 23 For just as
Katherine was initially a failure in conventional life, (attempting but failing
in her conventional feminine role as a make-up artist) 24 before she
altered herself from the inside out (concomitant with her becoming an anarchist
revolutionary), so Marechera’s soul journey to the unconscious – to the caves
of the “prehuman” 25 – must necessarily result in his becoming, “a
changeling”. As a shamanistic initiate,
he is, then, no longer what he “seems to be”, but something that has been
radically altered and presumably improved, by his journey to the realm of the
prehuman.
The well-recognised theoretical notion of shamanistic death and rebirth
is described by the writer of Shamanism:
The neural ecology of consciousness and healing, Michael Winkelman, as
reflecting “perinatal experiences” ( p 81, 82)
and the restructuring of the ego:
The death-rebirth experiences
frequently result in dramatic alleviation of psychosomatic, emotional, and
interpersonal problems resistant to previous psychotherapy. ( p 83),
It is Shamanic death -- that is a ritualised encounter with death – that
preoccupies the author in the last and post-climactic sections of the
novel. He sees that life and words flow
through him with energy of their own, and that there is nothing he can do about
it to stem their flow. The mood of the
final passages has everything in common with Bataille’s meditation on “the
practice of joy before death”:
Everything that exists destroying
itself, consuming itself and dying, each instant producing itself only in the
annihilation of the preceding one, and itself existing only as mortally
wounded. (p 238)
The author is reborn at the moment of his death, gazing into the mirror
“as the gashes in my wrists leak faster and faster with meaning” and attending
to the soft shamanic beat of the drums (to promote trance), which is actually
the rain of words as expression of inspiration (seeming to come as if from the
roof of his mind, or from the ‘above’). He
is:
Beginning to live over again, having
more provisions for the road than the road left. Like Cato the Censor, learning Greek in his
old age, I am learning to speak just when I need to learn to be silent forever. (p 117)
This is the nature of rebirth at an adult age. The protagonist has returned to be at one
with the author, in full, physical embodiment (as represented by his whole self
being recognised in the mirror, along with a sense of the writer as shaman's
overwhelming fatigue from doing battle in the spiritual underworld. He is life satiated, death satiated and
thoroughly shamanised --no longer “brain dead” but distrustful of words and
their relative emptiness (in comparison to the immediacy of the knowledge
conveyed via direct shamanic experience). Since “Words are an empty bag” ( p 117), the
ability to speak here means not in terms of normal, everyday language, but in
terms of the shamanistic understandings: it is the ability to speak out of the hidden
essence of things; the political reality that is hidden, repressed. [Footnote: There is also
a political overtone in terms of his need to learn to keep silent forever.]
Far from splitting his authorial self in the
writing of Black Sunlight, he reveals
the underlying, socially systemic unity between one’s self and the selves of
others – who, but for an accident of fate and philosophically arbitrary
conditions relating to human birth and identity circumscriptions, could have
come out of the same womb with you.
Marechera’s Black Sunlight,
with its splitting and its multiple authorial identities, does not reveal a la
postmodernism, the shattering of the authorial self, but rather the fact that
there is an underlying unity of meaning in terms of what it is to be human and
to experience the necessity of relating to the other, in an historical time and
setting that one has not chosen. The
aesthetic emphasis of Black Sunlight
leads to a sharpening of our experience of contingency in the book, as opposed
to relying upon unchanging a priori categories of identity, by which to follow
the development of the characters. What
this approach leads to is a psychological sense that we all share the same
primeval source of identity in being itself.
(This is the way that that infant experiences his or her unity with the
mother at the early pre-Oedipal stage.)
This primeval sense of ontological unity with the mother is the basis
both for loving and for being terrorised by her: “Out of the black sunlight, a
mother gorges herself on the foetus screaming out of her.” ( p 88). So, an encounter with the primeval mother is
a way of facing one’s fears and also of re-establishing one’s sense of being
part of Nature. It is the core of the
shamanistic regressive journey and its capacity to produce healing of the
damaged sense of self, for such an encounter, if successful, leads to an
effective rebirth.
As I have suggested, this psychological
regression is a tacit nod to the notion that ontology recapitulates phylogeny,
for there is to be gained ontological insight concerning human nature from
shamanic regression: This would not be so
if the regression were merely personal.
As I have described, as shaman, one returns to one’s primeval origins in
the caves – the caves as “Devil’s End” 27, but also the womb – in
order to recover a personal power that had been lost due to others’ malice,
along with the accidents of life.
This regression involves many features of adult
consciousness and ego-awareness (hence, there is a “doubling” of the self in
two consciousnesses); however, the dynamics governing relationships belong to
an earlier developmental stage than that of the normal adult. Here, one is able to recall that one’s
experience of life is not premised upon such things as one’s natural goodness
or inherent characteristics that seem to derive from the self alone, but from the
nurturing facility and good will of the Mother as a force of Nature. Thus, one “remembers” that life and the
qualities pertaining to it are not “deserved’ so much as given as a gift 28. A shamanistically facilitated mental
recollection of the Sacred – aided by the master who knows the nature of the
mind in general, better than the reader probably does – furnishes the basis for
a different kind of social and political life.
The marginal status of the shaman is shown to be relative – for only by
virtue of maintaining his awareness of the Sacred through his woundedness (a
wound which can keep him on the social margins), can the shaman impart his
wisdom about the human mind, and thus change Zimbabwean society.
That it was Marechera’s desire to change
Zimbabwean society is perfectly clear from his own mouth, as he spoke of the
short lifespan of Zimbabweans, and how important it was to live authentically. The rejection of one’s allotted identity thus
allows for the choosing of one’s own identity, and the acceptance of a sacred
role in furthering society’s development.
Thus the death of the author’s persona, at the end of Black Sunlight, also prefigures his own
spiritual rebirth, as he looks into the mirror and sees his physical self as
subject to the vagaries of his historical time and place, as a whole self,
subject to life’s contingencies.
How does a previously negative relationship
towards the metaphysical concept of contingency now become a positive one? One must be able to embrace it with one’s
full shamanic consciousness, by facing death. Only then will one experience it
as life itself. And, if it is life (and
not something out of reach of human interest and control) then, one may
participate in it as a fully conscious human, who lives within a reality that
he may not always agree with implicitly, but which he may attempt to
influence. So it is that the
protagonist’s life-satiated, anguished but transcendent gaze into the mirror 37
indicates a return to the reality ego, depicted by Lacan in terms of the
“mirror stage”. Such an image indicates
that the shamanic journey is complete, and that the author as protagonist
(returned to himself in one unified form) is ready to accept that it is the
very contingent nature of reality that -- now transformed from seeming
arbitrariness to be seen as the flow of life itself, due to a shamanistic
reorientation towards the world -- forever makes it sacred. Marechera’s agenda is for a re-awakening of
the Sacred through psychological ego death and rebirth along more resilient
lines, whereby one does not repress any more one’s authentic impulses out of
fear of authority. For Rhodesia, or as
it became, Zimbabwe – for the book is as much about it, as about the author’s
personal experiences -- the vision proceeds inexorably along the
lines of shamanic logic: The author envisages, for the post-Rhodesian State
(which had just become "Zimbabwe" at that time), its political death
and rebirth into greater psychological
and political vitality.
Marechera's Black
Sunlight is his most shamanistic of books, for the reality-based ego of the
protagonist (and of the readers) is almost entirely subverted throughout the
majority of the book. The book's
strategic disempowerment of the normal adult ego, though its aesthetics, is to
allow elements of the mind in the unconscious to come to the foreground. By
means of temporary psychological regression, we as readers get to encounter our
worst fears – fears born out of the experience of war and out of self-doubt – and
by facing them again as mere words in a book, we can transcend our previous limitations
that got us to put up segregating walls in our consciousness. The next chapter, on Scrapiron Blues, will enable us to take a more detailed view on the
ramifications of having walls set up in one's consciousness. Within the context of post-war Zimbabwe, the
situation of individual men and women will be examined. I believe that it was Marechera's shamanistic
goal to reveal how much of human potential goes unactualised and is squandered
in the spirit world, due to the parts of our minds that represent
"otherness". By engaging in
shamanistic boundary crossing, Marechera reveals the sides of our psyches to us
that we do not normally permit ourselves to see.