MARECHERA, THE ORIGINS OF THE SELF AND SHAMANIC BURNING.

My abiding interest in Marechera’s work does not stem from his glorious capacities as a storyteller nor am I interested particularly in his politics and the degree to which his points of view either facilitated or rejected the liberation politics and its values of his time and place. In this thesis I trace a more esoteric thread through the whole of Marechera’s works. This approach emphasises a certain underlying logic of mental and emotional processes that I have found to be remarkably consistent throughout the whole of Marechera’s writings. It is the logic of an extreme will to live, the martialling of all the energies of one’s conscious and subconscious forces towards the goal not just of bare material survival, but rather towards living robustly, with a full sense of the plenitude of life’s inner resources.

This is the characteristic that I have found to be ubiquitous within Marechera’s works – that of a defiant overcoming of the limits set by historically imposed structures that would limit the range of expression, the type of political engagement and the nature of social interaction for any person, at any time or place. Most of us accept such historically imposed limitations without much question. We settle down to busy ourselves with the roles that seem to be most “logical” for us to embrace in terms of the particular nature of our historical time and place. Defiance of such roles and limitations are for those who have the luxury of a financial buffer between themselves the harsh reality of the world and its demands upon them – the foremost being that we should earn a living to survive. And Marechera, too – shouldn’t he have been satisfied to earn a living and survive? After all, he was not one who had been born into a situation with much hope – father dead at fourteen, mother prostituting herself to survive. And lo and behold, he was given an undergraduate scholarship – to study at Oxford of all places! It should have sufficed for the boy “from the ghetto”, from the Rhodesian slums, to know that he was getting out of the worst of the situation that poverty and the abjection of what racialist politics had been for him. Now he was free, didn’t he know it? Or, at least, to be precise – for we are never, any of us, totally free – he was much freer than he might have ever dreamed of being, to pursue his own plans and direction and to do more than just aspire to a higher place within society, if that took his fancy. It seemed like Marechera’s story could have been the archetypal one of ‘poor boy made good’. Society and the ideals of ‘civilisation’ – once standing in opposition to him, in the relation of the coloniser to the colonised – had now moved over to be on his side. The money would be pouring in from the Oxford coffers, and as long as he kept studying – something for which he had the most natural of aptitudes, in any case – the student could be assured of things improving for him, at any rate.

Yet – and here I return to my point – there is something about Marechera’s writing that eschews this logic of survival and yet does not eschew survival as such. I was intrigued, in my initial exposure to the author’s work, by this paradox -- the quality in his work of something robust which resisted the discourse of “mere survival”. It seemed to me at the time, (and more recent experience has given me only slight cause to revise this initial view), that for the sake of responding to a more superficial and conventional logic of survival the critics had overlooked, a much deeper, more complex, and nonetheless remarkably logically consistent conceptualisation of what it means to survive. It was this that I kept coming across in Marechera’s work, which made me decide to write my thesis on him. I was intrigued as much by how the critics seemed to miss the underlying presence of this other sort of discourse as by the excitement of finding it in each of his works. The discourse of survival that came under scrutiny most often in books and articles that commented on Marechera is the one I have outlined above. It has the very natural and perhaps even tragic postscript to it: “How can someone who had been fortunate enough to be rescued out of the gutter be so foolhardy as to have let this opportunity of a lifetime slip through his fingers?” He was expelled from Oxford for not attending classes. Furthermore, he may, or may not, have actually tried to set its brick and stone alight. The cultural logic of the conventional discourse concerning survival renders to us its automatic conclusion: Obviously the scholar who became a writer had ultimately gone very, very mad – madder than he had been before he wrote the book that bought him Guardian book award acclaim. Since tossing away the opportunity to advance by study (when he had the aptitude for it) was the definitive condition of madness, there seemed to be little that anyone could do for him. They would have to resign him to his madness, to the illogic of his self-chosen condition.

And yet, and yet – what I read within the pages of Marechera’s oeuvre is a strong and repeated statement of a determination to survive. So clearly, I realised once again that my views and indeed, my ‘reading’ of the author’s values were clearly at odds with conventional notions and many of the values which determine what is and what isn’t rational behaviour, in our present time.

As I reflect upon my intellectual influences – Nietzsche, more recently Georges Bataille, a fair smattering of Karl Marx – I am quite able to grasp why my reading of Marechera must have to be very different from many of the critical readings that have gone before, and have constituted, as it were, the “first-wave” of criticism, published in the critical anthology of more than ten years previous, Emerging Perspectives. However it may be that I came to be influenced by rather transgressive schools of thought, taking my influences from primary rather than secondary sources, it does not yet fully explain the variant nature of my reading of Marechera. There are other factors, too, that contribute. I was born in 1968 – a year that has attracted a preponderance of Marechera scholars. I can only vaguely postulate the reasons why this is, but of the handful of existing Marechera scholars – less than 20, one may presume -- Nhamo Mhiripiri, Drew Shaw, Gerald Gaylard, and I were all born in Rhodesia in 1968. No reasons for the magical power of exacting “68” seem yet forthcoming, but it does not surprise me that those born just three years after the ideological and political axe falling that was the Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain (in November 1965), must have been in the position (framed by immaturity) to least understand what this political crisis was all about – and yet, due to a later burgeoning maturity under the completed shadow of this crisis, would also have been the group most likely to have been unconsciously touched by it. For my generation of intellectuals, the Rhodesian crisis was a conceptual and emotional mystery, which nonetheless had ramifications that had been imposed by the generations a level or two above ours.

It is the kind of mystery that, having taken place as a preparatory backdrop to one’s being born, gets you thinking endlessly in an ontological fashion, about the meaning of being and existence, and how it can lead to severe disruption, and the removal of one from one’s original place of abode, one’s country and one’s home. My generation is perhaps a survivalist generation in the sense of not taking the nature or characteristics of our being and identities for granted. Rather we may tend to consider anything bestowed upon us by previous generations – or “from above” – to be highly dubious offerings at best. We have a need to return to “the source”, somehow, which is to say, and speaking for myself, I’m driven by an extreme determination to strip bare what is thought to be known about identity and political reality, to try to determine the exact point where duplicity and shallowness made their interventions into the conditioned nature of our being. Or, to put it in a rather different light, since something has gone wrong with “Rhodesia”, we are the generation upon whom it has fallen to perform the spiritual post-mortem on it. And this spiritual post-mortem cannot be performed lightly – for our very “beings”, which is to

say, our self-understanding – is at stake in drawing accurate conclusions. We need to liberate ourselves from a historically bestowed disease – and not something so lightly put as “racism” or “prejudice”. It is a disease that has its very roots in the question of what is means to be African – albeit “white African”. If I may speak for my generation, it is the disease of being African that we are coming to terms with. It is a disease of identity (and in some potent sense also, a lack of identity) for which Marechera provides a potion and a cure.

I have already indicated then, I see Marechera in a shamanistic light – that is, as a potential healer of the Rhodesian -- now Zimbabwean -- historical condition. I see him in this sense in three ways that are mutually reinforcing: neurological [Michael Winkelman], psychoanalytic, and in terms of certain philosophical streams in Modernism (Nietzsche and Bataille, predominantly). His writing does not follow a logical pattern of compliance with a goal to be upwardly mobile precisely because he is dealing with other issues. Another source of misunderstanding is that he seems to miss the mark in dealing with the question of the “African identity”, by which is meant the black identities of those born in Africa, vis-à-vis more globally manifest evaluations of their worth. Marechera pays fairly limited attention to this form of political discourse, it is true, although he does attempt, quite successfully in my view, to put this kind of discourse itself into context, in relation to a more psychologically founded and determining worldview. In short, he views somebody’s worth as the value that they, themselves, are inclined to place on it. And that was how he also lived his life. He wasn’t going to wait for the global discourse to get things right, because history had taught him that in general that the discourse at a global or even national level gets things wrong, and that it doesn’t pay to wait for this to change. One’s life might already be over by then – as he had seen happening to so many of his friends and colleagues. Yet it is the strong will to live that encompasses everything and anything the writer has ever written. To ‘live on another’s terms’ was clearly not the same thing as to live on his own terms. That would have reduced quality of life, and in a time that had experienced a prolonged war (the bush war of 1963-1980), when life was cheap and freedom was in short supply, the ingrained instinct to live as if it surviving the present moment was the priority, and as if the future would take care of itself, was not limited to Marechera alone. Indeed, it was the attitude of the majority of adults within white society – and black society was notably worse off in terms of the amount of danger that many of its members had to face. There is a certain precise logic in Marechera’s calculations concerning all of this. One sees it in the way he lived his life. His ‘adaptation’ to the demands of life was an adaptation to life in the time of a series of extreme crises.

He wrote not for those who already had their lives mapped out for them and nicely planned, but for those fellow travellers who were also in the midst of an experience of extreme historically engendered crisis. It is his skilled attention and focus towards mapping out the nature of that crisis, as well as giving hints, many of them inadvertent, as to how to survive any crisis that demanded – and won – my attention. The profound drive for survival – which I read in Marechera’s writing, but which many earlier critics largely miss – addresses the need for self-integrity in a time of stress and change. An awareness of one’s own integrity is the core nugget of selfhood that one dare not risk losing during a time of immense crisis. In other times and places, it is undervalued and may be readily lost – and perhaps recovered again.

And so I come closer to elucidating the nature of Marechera’s peculiar vitality of spirit that made his works into a form of nourishment for me. If I could put it into a nutshell, it is this: his deeper instincts for survival, forged during a time of crisis -- and unforgotten even when things ostensibly “improved” -- made him choose correctly, in favour of what in life has eternal and resilient properties that go towards enhancing life, whilst eschewing programmes and ideas that merely seem to promise the world but are incapable of delivering in full. The underlying logic of Marechera’s life choices and writing style all reveal to me, in different forms, the nature of this peculiarly vital spirit of his – one that would not take social and historically imposed political limits for an answer. The refusals to conform to external expectations had their corollary in the writer’s attempts to map the psychological forms of freedom and psychological imprisonment in all of his works. Thus he takes us to a deeper level of questioning and thinking about identities, about colonialism and anti-colonialism. There are too many superficial, although rational-sounding answers, that only make things worse – we might consider the tragically limited degree of freedom that Black Nationalism has permitted to be allowed in present-day Zimbabwe, now that Rhodesian colonial rule is decisively a thing of the past. “Logical” answers and rational sounding beliefs are not often the easy and transparently amenable solutions that they are imagined to be – Marechera foresaw this more than most intellectuals of the present era. Marechera knew that the deeper solution to the problems of Zimbabwe was radical – literally, to ‘get to the root’ of things. One does this with psychological knowledge – but conventional psychological knowledge can be far too narrow, prescriptive and conformist, without even questioning, the merits or otherwise of social conformity for psychological health and wellbeing. Only shamanistic knowledge touches the very foundations of experience in terms of what it means to be human.

Shamanistic knowledge is ontological, and concerns the way that our sense of self is put together, in relation to other ‘selves’, prior to acquiring any conscious knowledge about the world. To understand the world at this deepest of levels – which pertains both to the primeval basis of consciousness that informs everyday life, and to understanding one’s own very primary and infantile ways of making sense of the world, is to understand the psychologically undergirding structures of political power very well indeed. Further, Marechera’s work is psychologically informed in a deeper way than what we would understand by reference to the contemporary discipline of psychology. His elucidations of human nature, as it was to be found during the time of Rhodesian rule and later, during the early years of Robert Mugabe’s rule in Zimbabwe, and indeed, in terms of what he found in Britain, during his time at Oxford and later in exile there, are all deeply experiential in their basis. This, too, differentiates him from a contemporary psychologist, or even a psychoanalyst with a detached laboratory expression, and a white coat. There is a metaphysical dimension to Marechera’s work, too: that is, he thoroughly investigates the notion of ‘non-being’ in relation to ‘being’, conceptually (rather than merely experientially). This sets him apart from a contemporary psychologist, as someone with philosophical interests. And of course, he claimed to be a writer, but his writing has taken him down paths different from those taken by ‘normal’ writers, with their more distilled modes of generating work for entertainment value -- Marechera’s work goes further than this. Since the author writes with metaphysical concerns in mind, one might make him out to be a philosopher, even though he lacked any formal training in the discipline of philosophy! So, where to place his writing became a key question for me. Marechera is a writer of uncommon skill with language – in his ability to cause the English language to vibrate so as to exude thousands of meanings from a few words, deftly combined, he attains genius. His writing ought to be considered in terms of the philosophical-aesthetic genre of Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Bataille, which speaks to particular historical and social conditions, but also speaks in a way that goes beyond them. Marechera's writing, like that of the aforementioned, is shamanistic. Thus he speaks, esoterically, of the future, at the same time as he also sets an agenda for the future – a psychological reorientation towards the very meaning of existence.

When I come to consider what it was about Marechera’s writing that made me reflect on it in terms of the Sacred – indeed, in terms of a homecoming of a spiritual sort – it was his writing in Black Sunlight that did it for me. But, the best place to start is via a direct reference, made in his typewritten journal that was reproduced in part in Mindblast:

My father's mysterious death when I was eleven taught me - like nothing would ever have done -that everything, including people, is unreal. That, like Carlos Casteneda's Don Juan, I had to weave my own descriptions of reality into the available fantasy we call the world. I describe and live my descriptions. [Marechera, p 123, Mindblast].

It is no accident that Marechera alighted upon one of the central shamanistic figures of his time, don Juan, in order to explain his own situation to us, since his agile mind was used to appropriating tropes from wherever he could find them, that best described his inner condition. Thus he would give "flesh" to his skeleton. In the above extract, we have a very clear, and indeed overt, reference to perceiving the world in terms of shamanistic sensibilities – for the cult books of the 60s by the American, Carlos Casteneda, feature his shamanistic apprenticeship to a Yaqui (Northern Mexican) master of esoteric knowledge, Don Juan. These books are concerned with an experience of traditional shamanism. Yet it is less the traditional mode of shamanism that I am concerned with regarding Marechera. Rather, I am interested in how Marechera’s extremely creative mind organised itself in such a way as to give written and physical embodied expression to a fundamentally shamanistic mental structure, that is found both in traditional shamanisms and in Western modernist texts. In the latter sense, one can find resonances within Marechera's work of the shamanism of a Friedrich Nietzsche, or indeed, even more so, of a Georges Bataille, whose far left politics are more closely aligned to Marechera's anarchistic stance. Marechera’s sensibilities were also forged within traditional Shona culture, from his Rhodesian experience, and his realisation that it was not possible to be a “black Rhodesian” and to be a self-determining individual in his own right. In a strange way, the elements of his experience that were marked with trauma became sacred to him, so that certain aspects of his autobiography reflect an esoteric gleam of forbidden knowledge. Whether he ended up “weaving” more expansive versions of the possible into the limited political reality of his time, or exploding the reader’s sense of everyday reality with new forms of radicalism (as in Black Sunlight), his shamanistic interventions in writing were designed to change the nature of Zimbabwe’s social structure have the quality of shamanistic transcendence and facing the “death” of a limited and limiting Rhodesian identity.

Conceptually, shamanism requires a notion of the Sacred and the experiential facing of death of one’s current state of being. Nietzsche, Bataille, and indeed, others such as Julia Kristeva, all offer, through their work, different conceptions of where the Sacred is located. In each case, the particular space for the Sacred is produced paradigmatically, through the drawing of a line that psychologically separates the individual from states of mind that are, according to regular social mores, forbidden. Nietzsche, for instance, felt it to be verboten-- and thus entirely necessary -- to depart from Christian moral standards (where everybody was each other’s “nursemaid”), in order to achieve a sensation of personal transcendence: “'Here is the prospect free, the spirit exalted” 18. ”. His transgression of Christian norms is precisely what gave him the feeling of self-overcoming -- a feeling of the Sacred, but also of facing death in terms of facing the unknown. Bataille, finding that “transcendence” had acquired a rather sterile and disengaged quality during his time, a half a century after Nietzsche – ( and, no doubt because it had become the normal aspiration, rather than the exception) – sought to find his sense of the Sacred in the opposite metaphysical position to that of Nietzsche, in “immanence”. As Michael Richardson says, in his outline of Bataille’s work, Bataille sought to heal a wounded sense of self by “facing death” through confronting the limits of human experience. That is, he sought to sacrifice his normative condition of middle class masculinity in the space nominated as “feminine” – which directly relates to the field of experience denoted by him and by Western metaphysics, as “immanence”. Another example of finding the Sacred in the infringement of boundaries was brought to us by Julia Kristeva, born another half century after Bataille. She saw the mysterious origins of poetry in the rhythms of the womb and nurturing. For an adult who has passed the stage of being mothered, being a poet implies engagement with this primary field of consciousness, and along with that, I want to suggest, the eclipse or temporary death of ego.

I have just defined my notion of the Sacred, as the field of psychological experience that is forbidden according to conventional social mores (and thus logically involves a confrontation with death of self in some way). I have noted that the way we conceptualise the Sacred may be related to the mores of particular historical time and place. Marechera had his own ideas of the Sacred – and these are what I am suggesting, to be evident in Black Sunlight, in particular. Yet, to return to the Mindblast text, quoted earlier, it was Marechera’s father’s death that made him into a sort of shaman. I don’t believe I am taking the text too literally when I make the connection between the author and the psychological structure of shamanism – for all that I have read on the matter indicates to me that it is via a “wound” to mind and body that one first becomes a shaman; that is, first gets access to the spirit world. The “wound” that changes Marechera forever is a wound caused by the “mysterious” death of his father. It marginalised him and sets him apart from the rest of the community, as he has said. More than this, however, the nature of the wound – experienced as psychological trauma – has created strong divisions within his mind, between what is socially acceptable and what is not. His inability to remember more precise details than his approximate youth at the time his father died (Veit-Wild places the time of the occurrence more than two years later than the author does in his own self-reflections) indicates the mythic nature of the memory, which is to say the extent to which the event had been subsumed under the Sacred as an alternative conceptualisation of reality to that of everyday experience. A large part of his personal experience, given that it is traumatic or at least traumatically separated from other parts of his experience in his mind, has to be located to the field of the Sacred. Henceforth, he may not speak of these experiences such as his reaction to his father’s death, in a direct way, or in a normative social context, since they no longer belong to this sphere. They now belong to a field of knowledge that is separated from the field of conventional knowledge. To this kind of awareness of the incommunicable Sacred, George Bataille attaches, mysteriously, the term, “non-knowledge”, whereas Dambudzo Marechera elects to use the word “mysterious” in more ways than one, to describe not only his feeling about having only sketchy details of his father’s death, but to allude to something Sacred in terms of the meaning the death had for him. The meaning, as has been said, is that it introduced him into the world of shamanism, as per Nietzsche’s shamanistic formula, “The spirits increase, vigor grows through wounding.” Whereas Nietzsche's semi-shamanistic philosophy speaks of regeneration and self-development as possible derivations from woundedness, it is the contention of this thesis that Marechera makes much deeper and wider use of his accidental stumbling upon shamanic knowledge. Both writers suffered from a nervous breakdown – however Marechera's suffering must have been deeper than that of Nietzsche, for his knowledge of what happens when the mind cracks open to reveal its otherwise unconscious contents, is indeed deeper, in that it takes us towards possibilities of a complete fluidity and then regeneration of one's inner identity: a complete ontological overhaul of the self, from the inside out. Traditional shamanisms depict this core shamanistic process with some extravagance of tone:

“[T]he central theme of an initiation ceremony [is] dismembership of the neophyte’s body and renewal of his organs; ritual death followed by resurrection.” [Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R Trask (Bollingen Series; USA: Princeton University Press, 1964), p 38, regarding the Yakut: ]

“[D]emonic beings cut his body to pieces, boil it, and exchange it for better organs.” [See also, concerning Siberian shamans, p 43: ]

The fundamental idea of shamanism, as I interpret it here, is that a partial regression of the psyche can and does lead to regeneration, if the circumstances are also congenial. Destruction leads to regeneration. Such destruction in the shamanistic sense can be understood as a kind of "burning" that gives light to humanity – so Bataille saw it. Given that shamanism is a phenomenon that has expression across cultures, one is inclined to assume that it has some neurological basis. Thus, Marechera's way of thinking springs from his encounter with a psychological paradigm that is fundamental to the human neurological structure: the capacity to regress in order to leap forward, to assimilate new knowledge about the fundamental structures of the mind, and to take voyages of ecstasy outside of the here and now, by entering the realm of spirits who seem to exist in a separate realm of 'infinity' (neurologically concomitant with the regressive state). It is the shaman's capacity to enter the realm of the unconscious at will, and not by virtue of necessity, that separates him from the madman.

How does Marechera’s shamanism work to achieve something transformative within his readers? In Black Sunlight, the shaman as writer seeks to exert upon us a downward pressure on the psyche. 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 (along the lines of Bataille’s approach to the Sacred) and also socially and psychologically regenerative. In order to demonstrate the ways in which we mistakenly attribute “essences” (in terms of ideas about enduring characteristics determined by race, but one could argue, in terms of gender, too) to particularised human identities, Marechera constantly uses, as literary devices, the universal psychological dimensions we have that draw from a lower part of the mind. He utilises conceptions that reflect the conceptual framework of Kleinian object relations psychoanalysis -- termed “splitting, projective identification, magical thinking and dissociation” -- to show us that the person whom we take as a unified and integral “self” is not what that person seems to be to a commonsensical mindset, but is merely an assumption of identity based upon primitive ego-defensive capabilities. 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 could, but for an accident of fate and other arbitrary conditions relating to human birth and identity circumscriptions, all have come out of the same womb.

Marechera’s agenda for Zimbabwean society is for a re-awakening of our sense of the Sacred through the Dionysian spirit: specifically, its political death and rebirth. Yet this must be in a way that does not permit the forgetting of its originative trauma, which gives it the quality of the Sacred. To not forget the nature of the trauma of UDI and of the war that it engendered is to partake of the human experience of participating in the knowledge of the Sacred. The shadow that remains in memory is that one knows that any experience of the Sacred is contingent upon one’s having been wounded – thus one has two faces to offer the world: the face of a tragic knowledge concerning self and history, and the face of one who has nevertheless learned to survive and who has found in one’s historical woundedness an ability to discern with practiced skill of a gifted psychological diviner, what really matters in life, and what doesn’t. This is the knowledge – and the skill – of a practitioner of wisdom; a shaman.

2

As I have suggested above shamanism involves an initiatory experience into the Sacred, through death of the conventional self and spiritual rebirth into the realm of the Sacred. Subsequent shamanistic practice (that may take place sometime after the initiatory event) is different from the initial initiation into the spirit world. Subsequent “soul journeys” involve auto-destruction of the existing social self and regeneration into different and more potent forms of life and being. Take, for example the way that gender is treated as a form of shamanistic experience and discourse. It is fluid – but not in such a way that it denies boundaries. Rather, and paradoxically, the differences between the genders are affirmed through a crossing of the boundaries to experience the world through a perspective attributed to a particular gender (there is no need to limit them to two). The autodestruction of one’s fixed and crystalised self – fixed into the form of one particular gendered mindset or another, thus opens the way to a broadening of experiential reality. Additionally, this experience is not nihilistic, in the sense of simply destroying the divisions that make up conventional social mores. Rather, the cultural divisions are affirmed culturally, as well as at the level of imaginative experience, whilst being transversed. This leads to a broadening of one’s imaginative self, although this is arguably at the expense of one’s conventionally socialised mind (which might not be so easy to return to, given that it is narrower and less charged with the imagination than one’s subsequent state is). Regular destruction of the conventionally socialised self and regeneration on the basis of self-hypnotism and the imagination, give shamans their insights into human experience and into the broadness or limits of its possibilities. A shaman is thus not a person who merely inherits the characteristics of one or both parents, via social conditioning and training, but is self-made.

Of course, as might be anticipated or expected, there is a downside to all of this shamanism, all of this propensity to “shape-shift” and to enjoy “soul journeys” into other psychological realms. The difficulty is the wound, that originative wound, by which one was initiated. Does it produce anything more than the sensations and reactions that are now medically defined as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? That which requires that shamanistic solution of constant self regeneration might be precisely this, which also prevents one’s untroubled re-entry into conventional modes of society and more ‘normal’ patterns of integration? A marginal and not untroubled character, the shaman might be considered to be one that makes the best of his or her less than fortuitous circumstances, and often delivers way beyond what would be considered normal in terms of creative productivity, and not least in terms of the productive nature of the shaman’s self-awareness. It is in this sense, rather than in the sense defined by anthropology as traditional religious practice, that I see Dambudzo Marechera as being a shaman.

For a person to lack insight into themselves and their situation is the quintessential definition of madness. On the basis of this principle, Marechera was surely not mad, but was rather a shaman – one who had a superlative amount of disturbing insights into himself, his own situation, and the political structures of the world at large. Yet, in a way, he took on the madness of his time, and interpreted it through a shamanistic lens, in order to point-point the nature of the social and political pathologies and facilitates their healing. When a shaman “reads” his own symptoms in order to come to terms with them, he or she is actually reading that which society disavows about itself. The shaman is thus positioned by accidents of fate as society’s unconscious. Marechera’s particular skill was to be able to interpret the particular unconscious structures of colonial Rhodesia by interpreting his own symptomatology. The role of “shaman” was clearly not one he had consciously or even willingly chosen. Yet, he was stuck with it. No doubt, the term for his condition and above all for his response to it would seem entirely alien were I to have somehow, by chance of luck, encountered the author and suggested it to him. He might protest, resoundingly, that he was a Modernist author, and by no means something so archaic sounding as what I have been suggesting – a traditional medicinal practitioner. The universalism of shamanism, as a result, as I’m suggesting, of our shared human neurological structures, would help to explain how someone as advanced in intellectual study, as the contemporary Zimbabwean author actually was, could still have been a shaman. Not least, one may be considered a shaman if others can obtain healing from one’s perspectives. As Marechera was a gatekeeper to the other world of the colonial unconscious, those suffering from colonial afflictions will be best positioned to obtain healing from his cultural mediations.

I take the typical shamanistic notion of “the taming of the spirits” in both metaphorical and metonymic senses – since an encounter with psychological forces is in fact an encounter with the “spirits” of others, only made manifest at a deeper level of self-knowledge. One encounters the good will and the bad will of others in an analysis of one’s own unconscious and its relationship to salient ideological forces. The natural evolution of a shaman is to first become acquainted with the nature of the disturbing psychological forces or “spirits” (in other words, the effect of others’ ‘ideological high spirits’) within him. Only later are these originally unruly forces tamed by self-knowledge, to the point where mastering the spirits of one’s time becomes, finally, a necessary and associated feature of developing one’s own self-mastery. Evidence of the former – for instance in the skill of social observation made manifest in Marechera’s art – is evidence also of the latter. Despite this, the shaman’s self-mastery is always tenuous, for he does battle with forces often much greater and more socially powerful than he is; and for all the skill of management of alien forces, he nonetheless remains, at bottom, a very small unit of social power: a mere individual.)

The above paragraph goes towards an understanding of the linear aspect of one’s development as a shaman – as well as to how it might be one’s undoing, which I believe, in Marechera’s case, it was. It is always possible to go under when doing battle with the spirits of one’s time. The more one takes on, the greater the likelihood of an unfortunate end. To dwell solely on this conclusion, however, is to become melancholy about human nature and the realities of human experience in general – life is always a risk, since little is assured in it, and taking risks with their life is one of the most interesting things a human being can ever hope to do. What is rather more interesting than the inevitability of a state of loss – death, in its final and irrevocable form – is the other aspect of shamanism that I have mentioned already. That is the circular nature of selfhood that one finds within Marechera’s work – the continual cycle of death and rebirth within a sphere of creative inspiration. When the higher mind submits to the vital elements of life present in the lower mind's perception of the world creative self-renewal is possible. A return to the womb and death of the old persona creates a new self – which is never the same as the old self, as the totally different approaches in Marechera’s work will testify to.

The Modernist (rather than traditional schools) of shamanism of Bataille and Nietzsche provide common threads in relation to Marechera’s work – indicating that there is something substantially psychologically similar in the means and purpose of the Modernist type of shamanism – which is a regeneration of the Self within an industrialised context. All of the following aspects of Marechera’s psychological logic and trajectories, the psychological structure of which is also similar in traditional forms of shamanism, are present in the Modernist and Late Modernist forms of shamanism of Nietzsche and Bataille, respectively. These features are linked together by a certain internal logic – the logic of shamanism – which my conclusions derived from Kleinian theory go very far towards elucidating in contemporary scientific terms, although it should be mentioned that Kleinian and post-Kleinian theory do not take into account the much broader internal logic of shamanism. Shamanism allows that one may transverse the normal developmental processes backwards to some degree, in order to gain vitality and insight into the nature of Being. Kleinian thinking and psychoanalysis in general does not countenance – except in terms of the “talking cure” as an exploration of one’s hidden, unconscious proclivities (in fact, a very toned down and narrowed version of the typical shamanistic approach to healing) – that one can obtain a more complete sense of self and insight into the ontological structure of the self and world through a self-willed (and temporary) regression. In Jungian analytical psychology (see Winnicot and Bollas) regression under therapy is seen as useful, however rather, is the facilitator of his or her own healing. At the risk of being rather brief and schematic, I want to suggest that the means by which a shaman is initiated, and indeed the advantages that accrue to such initiation, can all be understood with reference to a paradigm that has resonances with Lacan, in particular, which has everything to do with Kleinian and post-Kleinian insights into the psychological states of very early childhood development (that is, Kleinian psychology gives insight into primal ways of thinking, in the sense that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny). Fundamental to shamanistic ways of thinking is to open up a channel of communication between at least two very different functional levels of the mind (I lump together R-complex and the limbic system, for sake of simplifying my explanation). It is the assumption of this thesis that the practice of shamanism involves knowledgeably exploiting the universal neurological structures of the human mind, in order to make them accessible for more direct (rather than repressive) processing by the higher mind or neo-cortex. For shamanic initiation to take place, ego strength must be developed to the point that it can withstand a hammering from the impact of direct contact with parts of the mind that are normally lower in the executive hierarchy of brain structure. These lower structures becomes more on a par with the neo-cortex after shamanistic initiation, so that the shaman gains access to knowledge about the underlying principles of emotion and thought that govern our societies, beneath the surface of consciousness. It is, in some respects, the Freudian unconscious that is made accessible by shamanic initiation, however, shamanistic knowledge, in terms of this thesis, is a great deal broader than that conceived of in Freudian terms. Rather, it is the neurological structure of the mind that is significant in terms of shamanistic practice and not theoretical postulates as such. My reason, therefore for making broad use of psychoanalytic postulates is that are often very helpful in pointing to the structure of the psyche, and enabling us to speak of it in a more coherent way than if one were to rely purely on concepts that pertain to the hard science that informs us about neurological structures. One of the key problems in talking about shamanistic knowledge is that one is referring to information that comes from the nonverbal parts of the brain. So, one can speak about the effects of this knowledge, but with difficulty only about the nature of the knowledge itself. Yet, one can make a rough alignment between certain postulates of psychoanalysis, and those of traditional shamanism, which I shall attempt to demonstrate with an extract from a text by Roger Walsh and Deane Shapiro. The inserts in square brackets are my own:

To attempt to define the nagual is virtually impossible. It is presented as "that part of us for which there is no description, no words, no names, no feelings, and no knowledge." [That is: It is the pre-Oedipal that enables us to unconsciously adapt to adult communities as a political "whole"]. The teacher indicates that to say anything about the nagual forces one to borrow from the tonal, thus it is easier to simply detail its effects. This is so because our talking makes sense only when we stay within certain boundaries, and those boundaries "are not applicable to the nagual." [Because the nagual is actually a feature of one's unconscious that precedes and also continued to extend beyond the type of awareness that is quintessential to the adult's "reality-based" ego]. The nagual can only be witnessed; [ie "experienced"] it can be neither understood nor explained.

It is evident that the ego, which roughly pertains to the phenomenon of the tonal, in the above passage, is that which is capable of speaking in ways that we recognise as common, everyday speech. The nagual is preverbal, however, in both an evolutionary and individualistic sense relating to human psychological maturity. It is not able to speak directly on its own behalf, but its experiences must be both interpreted and given a rough approximation of meaning by the reality-based ego. All the same, the nagual is not reality based itself, but desire-based, and power-based. So, in effect, the nagual can never fully be communicated – which is what Lacan meant when he said that the process of maturation involved "castration"; a harsh word, which defines the normal state of human nature as being lacking in a fundamental attribute. Shamanism redresses that wrong, and corrects an inherent psychical imbalance in its practitioners. These, then, in turn, try to correct the way we look at the world, to bring us more in tune with natural forces.

The above text is useful in that it provides a basis for understanding a common Marecherian trope, that of the doubling of the self-identity. The two selves that one may detect in his work are the time-limited and bodily self (relating to the ego) and the submerged "self" that pertains to the functioning of lower parts of the mind. This is a functional trope from the point of view of all shamanisms. Apart from this, Marechera's shamanism – like all shamanisms -- is highly individualistic. While the individual nature of experience is a key aspect of shamanism, Marechera's concerns are to be viewed within the context of a life that is already marginalised. So his concerns about "soul loss" (the loss of vitality) and how to remedy that are to be viewed in the psychodynamic context of defence of one's self concept against the authorities and their claims. This is related to shamanism in that quintessentially, a shaman seeks to make the psyche of the subject, who has lost part of his “soul”, “whole” again. The idea that seeking wholeness is a fundamental trait of the psyche (although in a true shamanistic sense, one would use a temporary regression or shattering of identity to do this), is part of Sherry Salmon’s conception of the therapeutic nature of Jungian psychology. Nietzsche, too, when in his shamanistic mode (which is not always the case), makes much of the value of the subject who is “whole” as apart from the one who is broken or has lost limbs as on a “battlefield”. [Zarathustra]. Marechera’s view was to maintain his internal sense of self-wholeness in the face of what he felt to be various societies’ efforts to rob him of his rights to self-ownership.

Secondly, in terms of existing character, shamanism requires the opposite of timidity in order to participate in it -- that is, a pre-existing inclination to put one's inner self at stake. This is absolutely crucial because one does not strike a fire in one's own spirit unless one first puts something at stake. And if one has no fire to begin with, one does not strike a fire in that case, either. (This relates to Bataille's celebration of "excess" or the "limit experience" and Nietzsche's injunction to "live dangerously", both of which produce a heightened awareness of the intrapersonal -- that is, the inner self.) One lives close to the concept of death. It is also imperative to consider that shamanism involves strategic regression to trance states in order to enhance the quality of one's life. (This relates to Bataille more than it does to Nietzsche -- although both preferred feelings of "intoxication".) "Transgression" -- as per Bataille -- can destroy the currently existing social self and cause part of it to regress. Nietzsche adopted, by contrast, a regressive view of human nature, in order to enhance his feeling of power in reacting with it and ultimately transcending it.

Furthermore, shamanism involves a certain amount of destruction of the existing self, in order to release pent up heat (causing pathologies) and to increase the capacity for inwards development and playful self transformations. This is its link to psychoanalysis, the talking cure. Along with this is a key point that is of great overall significance in terms of this thesis. It is that there is an inherent shamanistic link between pre-Oedipal states (and the pre-Oedipal field in adult life) and the shamanistic -- since both recall a sense of Nature and one's primeval origins. Tricksterism, and self-creation are, combined as an overall attitude, part of shamanism as they express the release of pent up heat enables social playfulness and social masks. (Marechera dressed up as a photographer from Fleet Street.) One can see this in Nietzsche's Zarathustra, for instance, in his use of high Biblical language in a book whose overall theme is to debunk Christian attitudes as being artificial and damaging.

In terms of analysing Marechera’s shamanism, it also pays to note, that shamanism is a feature of the ontological imagination, but also involves the concretisation of abstract ideas, so that a shaman may call upon powerful figures of the imagination, as “spirits” in order to gain personal strength to obtain knowledge from them. Another way of looking at this is that an archetypal form or idea may be used to help one to advance developmentally, using the pre-Oedipal field. This is the psychological purpose of the shaman's animal spirit guides.

Finally, it is relevant to consider that a shaman’s mode of development does not follow a “normal” pattern, but rather moves between different energetic fields that pertain to different psychological developmental levels , in order to obtain advantages by this movement. In “Beyond Postmodernism”, Louis Herman quotes anthropologist Peter Deurr, with regard to his maintaining that “shamanic traditions all have in common the struggle to ‘dissolve,’ ‘remove,’ ‘shatter,’ ‘move across,’ or ‘sit astride,’ the barriers between culture and wilderness.” (p 83) In general, it would seem logical to conclude, especially in Marechera’s case, that the shaman deals with the inevitable sense of loss of wholeness (that is part and parcel of normal development in the "depressive position") by engaging his or her creativity rather than more common/normal means of dealing with one's situation -- repression and resignation. This involves a definite risk -- that one has the energy and consistency to power one's own engine through life, rather than relying upon social organisations to assist one. The shaman is more aware than others that the nature of life is to be inherently "incomplete", and that deliberate and self-conscious efforts are required to heal this lack of wholeness, temporarily -- for the shaman's efforts can never signify more than a temporary festival of wholeness and completion. It is the shaman's hypersensitivity to the problem of the "depressive position" (that of alienation, aloneness and a lost sense of wholeness), that drives his creativity. It is his (or her) knowledge of how to provide temporary solutions against falling into typical resignation towards life (in the depressive position), that becomes the shaman's secret fountain of youthfulness and exuberance.

The following poem by Marechera exemplifies my argument with the division between the two developmental levels of the psyche – the one from his childhood, which evokes a sense of wholeness, followed by the alienated viewpoint that stems from the necessary developmental sense of apartness that is key to one’s experience of the depressive position (and of course the mood is exacerbated by Marechera’s sense of exile from community and the innocent experience of his early childhood):

MY TIME TO KNOW

There is a river called Lesapi
From whose bedrock, like ghost of weeds,
Passion's flames vainly yearn to surface,
To rise
To bolt-burst
And retire, confirmed by the sparkling-clear Air.

And this London-returned ghoul
Withdraw his live-coal tears
Into his stone-hewn eyes.

Here, childhood drowned never to rise
No bloated floating corpse ever was seen:
Only these flameweeds on the bedrock of a river
Known as Lesapi.

To make the earlier point about the shaman’s unusual approach to his own psychological development clearer, the shaman's unusual perceptive abilities stem not only from his or her great sensitivity to the way that energy flows between different parts of his (or her) mind, but also derive from the fact that the shaman is inclined to repress less of reality (for instance, out of fear of it), and is rather more inclined to work more or less directly with the positive and negative aspects of reality as they are felt to impact on the psyche. There is an attempt to manipulate, control and redirect psychological forces, within the broader society at large.

The parallel between traditional shamanism and the psychology of shamanism that I have elucidated should be obvious. The following text depicts the quintessentially shamanistic orientation toward uniting the world that is veiled from consciousness with the world that is available to consciousness, in order to create a unity of the sense of being that is felt to have been lost:

According to the "World Myth" found in many cultures, the earliest stage of human life was one of total harmony and wisdom. The planet was connected to the sky, which was always a place of light and the focus of human devotion, by the bridge, tree, mountain etc., thought to be the "axis mundi", the center of the world. "Humans could effortlessly communicate with the gods above."[Eliade] They could pass between heaven and earth without obstacle because there was no death yet. This easy communication was cut off by a "fall" from grace similar to that in the Christian bible. Since this "fall", the only way to cross the bridge is in "spirit", ie. as [one who is] dead or in ecstasy. This bridge is full of obstacles, demons and monsters, and the way is as narrow as a razors edge. The crossing is dangerous and only privileged persons succeed in passing over it in their lifetime. " In the myths, the passage emphatically testifies that he who succeeds in accomplishing it, has transcended the human condition; he is a shaman, a hero, or a spirit and indeed this passage can be accomplished by only one who is spirit. "[Eliade] The shaman in crossing by way of his ecstatic journey proves he is spirit, and attempts to restore the "communicability" that originally existed between this world and heaven. What the shaman succeeds in doing today through ecstasy, could be done at the dawn of all beings "in concreto" ie. without trance, in the physical body. 'The shaman reestablishes the primordial condition of all mankind."[Eliade]

[ see: http://easternhealingarts.com/Articles/shamanism.html ]

And Marechera really did embody the Nietzschean principle of living his ideas – thus becoming “the spirit” (that is, the creative drive) that ran “alongside him” [Zarathustra]:

I love him who keeps back no drop of spirit for himself, but wants to be the spirit of his virtue entirely: thus he steps as spirit over the bridge.

Bataille’s shamanistic orientation goes further to elucidate a dualism between two fundamentally different “worlds”, which the shamanistic consciousness must cross between:

Insofar as it is spirit, the human reality is holy, but it is profane insofar as it is real. Animals, plants, tools, and other controllable things form a real world with the bodies that control them, a world subject to and traversed by divine forces, but fallen. [Bataille, George, Theory of Religion, Robert Hurley Translation., p.38.]

Taking this quote along with the text above, from Eliade, it is apparent that anyone who was capable of crossing between these two worlds would effectively restore an integral unity that had been lost. This can be understood allegorically, in terms of the restoration of the primal unity with the mother, as a source of wholeness. Yet, such a description risks being cast as “pathological” or in an overly simplistic light of contemporary psychology. It is absolutely crucial to add a further proviso, concerning shamanistic dynamics and how they operate on our minds: wherever reality – as held in place by dominant ideologies and political power and its rhetorical devices are unable to hold our consciousness into one place, doubt arises concerning the nature of the socially constructed reality and whether it is as real as it may have at first seemed to be. This soul-threatening process of existential opens up a wormhole in the nature of real and access to the realm of “spirit”. The achievement of shamanic doubt is shamanic scepticism, which transcends social norms and conventions and sees them as eternally pliable. The logic of shamanic scepticism can also be quite recursive -- thus Marechera’s very shamanic suggestion concerning his own attribution of value to anarchist resistance to social domination and control – “The Black Sunlight organisation was shit.” Such shamanic doubt values the fluidity and flexibility of forms of life over dogma. [ footnote: The realm of the spirit is both the existential counterpart and yet also the negation of the real (it is the negation in terms of the fact that the self-evident quality of reality becomes open to doubt and questioning: Ultimately the bridge to the other realm is crossed in terms of answering the question: is the real that pertains to communicable experience really the ultimate form of reality – ie. all that there is?. Shamanistic doubting of this sort is extremely politically subversive.]

3

The Shona culture that Marechera was born into has much to offer that is akin to shamanism. There is the idea that there are humans who are set apart from the living(by the ancestors) and whose purpose in life is healing and solving both personal and community problems who are in contact with spirits for advice and instruction is also deeply rooted. These can go into very high state of consciousness during which they can gain deeper insights and understanding of diseases and societal problems. It is also understood that these people can traverse the human and spiritual world. In Shona understanding, it is during such journeying that communion with the spirits is done and solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems found. Masquerades, various kinds of entertainment such as story telling or plays, all have an aspect of social service to them, in Zimbabwean society, and thus a cultural link between Zimbabwean mediumship and Marechera as a Zimbabwean shaman may be found – albeit that this is an indirect one, and does not involve the psychology of shamanism that I wish to elucidate within this thesis.

Traditional Shona religious practices surely provided a very suitable seedbed for the nurturing of shamanistic sensibilities. All the same, I am keen to keep a certain dividing line between Zimbabwean traditional culture and shamanism, by suggesting the key to shamanistic experience remains neurological. I want to suggest, is the intuitive discovery that destruction of parts of the self (including and above all, one’s self concept) need not spell the end of the road for one’s processes of life, but is rather the beginning of new forms of life and self-identity, which can transcend in their perfection and intensity earlier ways of thinking and existing. Thus, shamanism is the creative and regenerating life force that recasts those accidents of fate that would have led simply to personal destruction into a sense that one has access to something better; something more. It is the neurological structures of the mind that facilitate the kind of healing that results, and it is the psychological experience of this healing that causes the one who had become inadvertently ‘shamanised’ to associate experiences of a partial ‘death’ and destruction of earlier self concepts with an intrinsic healing power within life itself.

This is by no means to imply that the shaman fully forgets the traumas of his or her past, or that he overcomes his sense of tragedy. Quite the opposite is the case. Rather, a ‘shamanic initiation’ is an induction into an experience of psychological trauma, which results in the acknowledgement of one’s mortality. It exposes the arbitrary nature of much of one's social and cultural conditioning, and thus creates a space for novelty, experimentation and shamanic tricksterism. At the same time, it can exacerbate certain kinds of trauma, through exposing the reality of our mortality, knowledge of which is normatively repressed. From the point of view of one who may have been brought up within a system of monotheistic religion, it involves a radical destruction of the sensibility that there’s a God “up there” who will intervene on ones’ behalf. Rather, gods and the sense of the Good lose their positions on a pedestal above humanity, with the result that the sense of what is Sacred is recast, neurologically, as being much more proximate to the human being and his or her everyday experiences. Similarly – and this goes to the ‘bittersweet’ aspect of shamanism – death itself also draws nearer to the one who has been ‘shamanised’, and remains in proximity, as a constant reminder of human mortality. It is as if conventional ego defences, that would cause the subject to constantly deny his or her own mortality had been severely weakened by the traumatic process of ‘shamanic initiation’. The initiate henceforth has more self knowledge, and more knowledge of the structures of human reality – but only at a cost. The cost is at Bataille has termed it, an endless and final “falling into the sun”, which is to say, the sense that one is unavoidably a part of the destructive forces of life, which, however, renew one also.

For the shaman, death is not an unknown enemy (as it is for those of a more professedly ‘normal’ psychology). Rather, death has become a very well-known enemy indeed. And having become so well known, death may be bargained with, and persuaded to release more of one’s life force. A shaman is one who keeps his friends close and his enemy – death – even closer. It is through negotiating with death that one can persuade Superego – who would require that one become increasingly more psychologically static – to relinquish his grasp. One faces down Death and thus takes life force – (that which Nietzsche refers to as ‘plasticity’) – back from him. The shaman is one who has discovered that there are benefits in engaging with the forces of destruction – in other terms, that one frees one’s rather limited and conventional life by giving form to one’s spirit (as per the quote by Nietzsche, above, that I understand not metaphorically, but entirely neurologically).

The shaman crosses between two worlds -- between psychological fluidity (a healthy plasticity of self-identity) and rigidity (the inevitability of psychological structures that conform to social expectations in society at large). As spirit (one who has resources of huge psychological plasticity), the shaman encounters energy as force -- indeed, as other forms of spirit -- and thus moves very easily and on light feet "as spirit", observing the visible forms of solidified energy (rigidified psychological forces expressed as sociological forms) that have become fixed into position. The energy forces of those (and of the parts of self) that have become fixed into social roles register in physics terms, as "matter". [e=mc2]

4.

A modern day shaman is different from a traditional shaman-initiate, in that his or her initiation has often been quite accidental. His or her life has been ‘shipwrecked’ at some point, and the hapless victim cast to sea, only to sink to the depths and find hidden treasure. Yet who would believe in this treasure, or that the meaning of the shipwreck could have turned out to be something positive? It is this kind of a paradox that we are dealing with, in terms of Marechera’s life. Thinking of shamanism in these terms, one encounters the necessary nature of its ‘doubling’ of self-image, for one is never quite not a victim or not somebody who has been “lost at sea”, but one is hardly trapped and restricted by ‘common-sensical’ notions either – such as the notion might be that nobody finds treasure whilst lost out at sea. Thus the anarchistic and self-conscious “black identity” of Marechera is sometimes, if not generally, transcended by his shamanistic perspective, which allows that anybody can, in the Nietzschean shamanic fashion, be “All and None”. There can be found a self that is somewhat of a tragederian, which laments the original sense of self and its feelings of security aboard a boat with definite direction and an already furnished life-purpose. Alongside that self, however, is the self that has somehow triumphed, not despite of – but because of – the ensuing chaos. This is the doubling of the self that we constantly encounter within Marechera’s work. The fact that the ‘tragedy’ of one’s life produced unexpected benefits is harder to speak of in direct, everyday language, since it goes against the grain of rational expectations. This knowledge pertains to the ‘shamanic” aspect of the self, which gives the subject access to a level of reality that is generally denied by those who are uncomfortable with the notion of being shipwrecked.

It should be taken, therefore, that I am dealing with some very esoteric processes that occur within Marechera’s work and within the scope of his life. The fact that there is a neurological basis for these processes does not suffice for effective communication of the archetypical shamanic experience, since most people will not have had strong enough experiences that would link for them, psychologically, an experience of destruction with a serendipitous experience of redemption (all neurologically founded, in the ultimate sense.) To consider the literary, philosophical and social value of Marechera’s work is therefore rendered situationally difficult by the very esoteric nature of the scope of shamanism. The underlying psychology of shamanism resonates with us, because we share the same neurological makeup as the author.. Nonetheless, if we have not taken the logic of shamanism to the practical levels that Marechera has, we ultimately will not be able to find his approaches to be logical (they are logical in terms of shamanism, but not necessarily in our eyes.)

There are a number of quintessentially shamanistic tropes that pertain to Marechera’s actual life. These reflect a psychological organisation that is geared towards a shamanistic mode of perceiving and questioning the status quo. In all cases, shamanistic thinking involves the possibility – and indeed the necessity – of “boundary crossing”. This boundary crossing is always ontological, at least in the way in which the one who engages in such boundary crossing experiences it. The typical shamanic experience involves crossing boundaries of identity, which may be considered in terms of gender, race, and indeed species. Later, upon returning to a state of rest after shamanic journeying, the shaman may conceptualise and articulate his findings concerning the hidden structures of desire and power that he has discovered during his journeying. From a shamanistic perspective these power and desire are potentially fluid, and have not entirely stabilised into firm psychological and social structures. In actual fact, this is how reality appears to a state of mind that has subverted its reality-based, logical system of thinking that is founded on the psychological structure of ego. Whereas ego represses, all too commonly, too much of reality, to give us the illusion that things around us are more stable than they are, the desire-based ego (of the pre-Oedipal mind) sees everything as being in nothing but flux. Somewhere in-between these two perspectives lies the truth – and it is the shaman's task to interpret it.

Another quintessentially shamanistic trope that appears in Marechera’s life is his experience of initiatory madness (in the form of depersonalisation and derealisation). This experience relates to a more mature stage of the authors life, which was marked by the intervention of trauma (at the age of 14) with the death of his father in a road accident; the oppression of the “ghetto” of Vengere Township, the madness and hallucinations that inducted him into the “sink or swim” test that is shamanistic initiation. [The House of Hunger]

It is clear from the trajectory of psychological development depicted in the novella -- The House of Hunger -- that Marechera’s recovery from his mental illness took him towards a shamanistic -- or “magical” -- way of seeing the world and of attempting to deal with its political problems. The books he was reading around the time that he consolidated himself as a writer were on the occult and psychoanalysis. The consolidation of a shamanistic way of seeing the world as a form of turning the tables on his madness and on the “spirits” (psychological and political) that had dominated him is expressed in The Black Insider, and in a more urbane form – playfully depicting the nature of a shamanistic journey as initiatory experience in Black Sunlight. The writing of these books roughly coincide with a time after he was expelled from Oxford, and spent time in Britain, overstaying his student visa.

There is one more shamanistic trope that is related to the psychology of shamanism as I have described it and is an essential part of Marechera’s overall style and his mode of political criticism. This is the feature of the shaman who engages with us as a trickster. A master of ontological disguises which set surface appearances against what lies underneath, the shaman as trickster will attempt to “deceive the spirits” — (that is in this case of Marechera, the psycho-political forces in society at large) — in order to control them, whereas the “medium” purports to merely channel them, so as to deliver their messages to the world of the living earnestly and sincerely. There is also the aspect of the shaman’s capacity to bring back to his physically embodied life, new vitality, from the world he enters in a trance. This also indicates a shrewd survival mechanism, drawing deeply upon one’s own resources

[footnote: Marechera’s forgetting of the date of his father’s death, or how old he was at that time and how it happened, can be read as an attempt to “deceive the spirits” as to the impact of this experience on him, by recreating the time and place out of his own mind. ]

We can now consider a few more points as they relate to the way that a shaman, as one who is psychologically structured differently from others, engages with the world in a way that promotes his own survival and creative functions. They are the autodestruction and regeneration of the self: Destruction is linked to regeneration as its natural prelude: “Ready must thou be to burn thyself in thine own flame; how couldst thou become new if thou have not first become ashes!” [XVII. THE WAY OF THE CREATING ONE] Both Bataille and Nietzsche use the concept of awakefulness to point to the desired human state. Mythically, the recovered state can also be viewed in terms of restoration of “soul parts” that had become traumatically separated from overall consciousness, leading to an inability to be fully present to the present. What is freed up, in becoming new, is creative energy, and capacity to live in the moment. However destruction of conventional modes of thinking and feeling are necessary first, if one is to become “shamanised”. Another common trope in Marechera's writing is the use of imagination to supplement reality (this relates to tragic sense that life is in need of repair) – this is related to an acute awareness of the implications of the “depressive position” (when one individuates from the mother, and experiences a diminishing sense of importance, according to Kleinian theory). The tragic sense of life is indeed shamanistic, as seen in Nietzsche's ideas concerning tragedy, for instance. Then, there is the idea of rebirth through shamanistic initiation to become no longer the child of one’s parent/s (anti-oedipal/self generating/not socially prescriptive creativity), which is also a key part of Marechera's way of seeing things. The doubling of the self – the penultimate shamanistic trope to appear in Marechera's writing -- has already been dealt with, above. It's not just a feature of the way a shaman functions , but pertains to the way that traditional shamans self-consciously enact their shamanistic rituals.

The shaman's body always projects a double shadow on the ground. A subtle tragic vein seems constantly to underlie every shamanic ritual performance. Just so. Without leaving any way of distinguishing between the faces and the masks. [From "shamanistic solitudes" p 87] This “doubling” explains how, for example, Marechera could both represent AS WELL AS transcend his culturally-based, sexist viewpoints. His shamanic/spirit self and his fleshly self are far from being entirely one. . [From "shamanic solitudes" p 87]

The shaman, both traditional and modern, is one who develops visionary perspectives on the basis of the central shamanistic trope that one's being, in the here and now is a tenuous bridge that is linked to the ‘the spirit world.’ [similar to mediumship, yet neurologically rather than overtly culturally facilitated]

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In chapter one of this thesis, I will look at Marechera’s novella and 11 [check this] short stories] entitled The House of Hunger. Here, we encounter, for the first time, what I shall take to be his “shamanic initiation”. The stories within The House of Hunger ought to be read in the light of using shamanic resources of doubling the self in order to enhance the sense of vitality and intensity that the author experiences in his everyday existence. There are also elements of tragedy in the novella and the shorts stories, but as I have mentioned this is part of shamanic doubling – that one does not divorce oneself completely from the mortal coils of everyday existence and its pitfalls.

In chapter two, I will look at The Black Insider, from the point of view of shamanic insight into the structural turmoil of a divided nation – that is Zimbabwe-Rhodesia of 1979-1980. In this chapter I am looking especially at the role of prophetic insight into the political crisis of the time, as well as the ones to come. It seems Marechera had acute prescience in terms of his ability to read the signs of the times in a way that is oriented towards a quintessentially shamanistic approach of reckoning with the deeper meanings of reality – that is, he perceives the psychological dynamics influencing reality in a very imagistic [quintessentially shamanic] way.

Chapter three will focus on one of Marechera’s books that seem to best exhibit the structure of his shamanism. I have already given much indication of how Black Sunlight makes us plunge into a state (or states) of ontological shatteredness, in order to require us to be reconstituted again. Although the apparently chaotic nature of this book may belie what I am about to suggest, this is one of Marechera’s most philosophical books, for it exhibits an understanding that society will always reproduce itself in a conservative way (that is, preserving all the authoritarian and prejudicial elements of racial and sexual inequality) so long as we are all readily formed and developed through the universal psychological dynamic of the Oedipus complex. Black Sunlight furnishes a very complete answer as to how we can avoid what otherwise seems to be inevitable – the reproduction of society as it already is. The psychological structure of the book is patterned on the author-persona’s regression to the stage or field of the pre-Oedipal – albeit that this is not a complete regression as it incorporates the author’s adult point of view. Does such a deliberate and structured regression – in shamanic terms a ‘soul-journey’ – produce redemption from biologically determined and socially prescriptive norms? The author’s encounter with the infantile dynamics of the mind – projective identification, splitting, dissociation, and magical thinking – does in fact spell out a partial “ego death” for the adult self. Ego death is one of the key motifs of “shamanic journeying”, and the emblem of the author’s suicide at the end of the book spells out ego death in a painful, and initiatory sense, rather than in the more positive sense of exploring the “ecstasy” that Eliade associates with shamanism. The author/persona’s perception of his whole, embodied self in the mirror, which is right at the end of the book, includes a motif of ego restoration – thus the author/shaman’s auto-destruction is countered with regeneration. The author’s project in writing Black Sunlight has been to explore sources of origin for the anarchistic psyche. Marechera’s solution regarding this type of psyche is to produce examples that are suggestibly shamanistic, in my view. For shamans, just exactly like his anarchistic characters in the book, do undergo destruction of their currently existing and conventional personas, and end up experiencing self regeneration in a way that gives them much stronger personas, more socially active and aware of how society actually works in general (rather than how it seems to function from a psychologically superficial perspective). There is also present the shamanic motif that I have taken care to mention --the link between destruction (of society, for instance), and the idea of the result being a better form of society. Marechera seems to be enquiring about this dynamic, rather than simply prescribing a recipe for society’s destruction. The statement that the Black Sunlight organisation was “shit” (about three quarters of the way through the book) seems to be a caution against any too crude political response in terms of engagement with actual anarchism. Rather one’s anarchism must be deeply psychological – that is, based on shamanistic scepticism concerning what is true.

In the fourth chapter, I will look at two of Marechera’s shorter and poetic texts. They are “A portrait of a Black Artist in London” and “Throne of Bayonets”. Each has a rather different structure, with the former acting as a prophetic warning against the political abuse of the black migrant and vagrant population in Britain. The latter concerns the superficial nature of the socialism in what was the recently born Zimbabwe of the early 80s. Marechera’s insights might also, in the latter case, be considered prophetic. In both cases, it is being close to “death” that enables the author to see into the political machinations of the two societies as much as he does. It is a shamanic notion that one must “face death” in order to become a shaman. Does “facing death” also activate our long repressed survival instincts (repressed by processes of “civilisation”) that would enable the human mind to ‘read between the lines’ and come up with insights that would pass others by? I’m suggesting that this is so. Add to this kind of sensitivity that Marechera had, and the “Cassandra complex” claimed by the author becomes clearly recognisable in a shamanistic light. It is this that enables a poet and seer to attempt to change the course of fate by his writing which critiques the rather negative state of two political realities in each of the different societies.

Chapter five brings us to Scrapiron Blues, and here I am looking at several ways in which Marechera as a writer acts as a bridge of consciousness between two worlds of being. They can be conceptualised as “the spirit world of the dead” and “the world of the living”. I will look at several extracts from different works throughout the book [name them] that show how Marechera used his shamanic knowledge to enhance his writing skills, and to reveal to us the psychological dimension that is difficult to speak about in other ways – the silent cries of the oppressed. Did Marechera perhaps go too far in giving life to his “spirit” – his ideals – that he was unable to perform the appropriate shamanistic task of bringing life’s vitality back from the spirit world into the world of the flesh and of material existence? A shamanistic crossing is always dangerous, and one must assure one has one’s wits about one to make a full recovery from the regressive state of “soul journeying” or “trance states”. Alternatively, the pressures brought to bear on Marechera by society in general proved to be too much for even a skilled shamanic practitioner to continue to endure.

So, the thesis comes full circle, to Mindblast, where Marechera is battling out the last days of his life on a park bench in Harare. Although the collected works in this book were written at different times, prior to 1986, when they were published, the shamanic elements in them are still very strong. The everlasting concern with a way of living that takes into account the unseen dimensions of that pertaining to the human psyche is present. Marechera tackles ontological questions concerning ways to retain one’s vitalised sense of selfhood, when the whole of social organisation seems to conspire against our retention of ourselves as our most prized possession. He cracks jokes amidst destitution. He bemoans his sense of having lost his “self” and fallen into a state of hollowness – although the vitality of much of his writing testifies against this as being the whole truth of the matter. “Soul loss” is a shamanic term which implies a lost presence of mind along with emotional depletion and splitting off of parts of oneself into contexts that pertain to the past, so that one is not free to deal with the present and its pressures – and Marechera self-consciously tackles the problem here with regard both to his sense of being inspired as a writer as well as in terms of a diminished sense of selfhood.