READING MARECHERA’S THE HOUSE OF HUNGER AS ‘AT THE HEAD OF THE STREAM’.

PREAMBLE

The nine short stories and one novella contained in the collection of works published as The House of Hunger are all shamanistic in style. (4) I will speak generally (and in some cases more specifically, about the short stories), however, my main focus in this chapter will be on the shamanic narrative of the novella. The chapter on The House of Hunger comes first in my analysis, not just because it was Marechera's first book, but because the novella depicts his psychological transformation towards a form of subjectivity that I hold to be shamanistic. Shamanistic initiation can be understood as entailing a "spiritual crisis", which leads to the expansion of the mind. Whereas there are those who become mad and learn nothing from their madness, a shaman is one who has learned something from his initiatory madness. His powers increase, rather than diminish, through the experience. Instead of identifying oneself with the narrow level of consciousness that is determined by the ego and its needs, the initiate takes into account the whole self in its totality. This includes the forces operating within the unconscious, which strive for power, and facilitate creative openings in the subconscious. One who survives shamanic initiation does not always entirely escape long-term damage caused by an experience that destroys much of his previous way of thinking and being in the world. Yet, he is also for all that – in many ways – a more complete human being than those who have no been so initiated. Furthermore, he is able to heal others: Thus when faced with a disease/plague in the community which would maybe have astounded medicine people of repute, one who has been initiated by disappearing under the water would simply journey back to “the head of the stream” to commune and convene with the spirits and emerge there from with the solution and cure.

It is now evident that Marechera’s writing is vastly complicated by the double role that he chose to play both as shamanic seer, and as a man living under troubled circumstances. It is the complication of having a shamanistic psyche that makes his work complex, rather than any importation of complex theoretical ideas: for one has to relate both the esoteric and the exoteric aspects of life – and often they are at odds. The charge of elitism is certainly misplaced when one considers that it is not a shaman's task to disperse intellectual knowledge, so much as to differentiate between social and cultural forces that enhance the experience of life and those that serve to dampen or kill "inner experience". (14) This is what is meant by referring to a shaman's "ontological knowledge" – knowledge about the origins of the self in the realm of consciousness that is dominated by power relations and archetypes. An encounter with death, in the form of temporary ego death, imparts this knowledge. An intense experience of shamanic initiation takes the protagonist back to the pre-Oedipal state (rather than just putting him in touch with the adult vestiges of this earlier state, he is rejuvenated by the experience of primary process thinking). (15)

The aspect of shamanic consciousness was more patently and self-consciously alchemic. Marechera's protagonist was trying to move himself forward in consciousness, in a way that precipitated his shamanic initiation:

Friends who acted out of character affected me in the same way [as a tropic storm from which one needed to take shelter. …I was] creating for myself a labyrinthine personal world which would merely enmesh me within its crude mythology. That I could not bear a star, a stone, a flame, a river, or a cupful of air was purely because they all seemed to have a significance irrevocably not my own. (16)

The ‘crude mythology’ forms the basis for the writer’s escape from reality, via mythopoeia. Yet this is a fledgling mythopoeia that has not yet received its wings of power due to being connected to the writer’s regenerated psyche and the wings of his imagination. Rather, this “crude mythology” enables an escape from reality, a fact acknowledged very directly and precisely by the writer, yet in terms that invoke the shamanic elements, of earth, fire water and air, as well as the heavens and the earth. What he is escaping, (in the same paragraph), is that which he cannot allow himself to overlook – the anti-spiritualisation, the unavailability of a direct or easy means to transcendence of his human experiences:

On a baser level I could not forgive man, myself, for being utterly and crudely there. I felt in need of forgiveness. And those unfortunate enough to come into contact with me always afterwards consoled themselves and myself by reducing it all to a ‘chip on the shoulder’. (17)

This is a psychologically astute account of a kind of attitude and situation that could lead to a break with reality. In fact, disapproval of oneself and others is a factor that may contribute to the experience of hallucinations and paranoia – both of which the protagonist suffered from in the novella. The slumber of ego (that is its temporary state of dissociation) is represented in The House of Hunger, when the protagonist is unable to distinguish between the inside of "the house" (his psyche) and its outside. His conscious mind or ego is thus "dissociated", and yet to its advantage, is given ventilation and room to breathe. It is whilst ego is asleep, and depersonalisation and derealisation take over, that the unconscious mind – (made up of R-complex or "id") -- is permitted to burst to the fore. Thus, the pressures building up in the mind are released. To become a shaman, however, one must then set up a bridge of communication between the two parts of the mind – higher and lower – so that harmony and communication are facilitated. It's a different metaphor that the writer uses at the next point of the narrative -- the all too tight "stitches" (18) that hold together the author's head (symbolising his fraught character structure) no longer pull so tightly anymore. It's a holistic depiction of how temporary psychosis led to the expansion of his mind despite his original inner resistance to this process of expansion. This is a story of spontaneous "shamanic initiation". It is often viewed as a sickness that is brought about by "spirits" or a wounding of the mind and body. (19) The author's way of writing about it has nothing to do with feigning an elite stance against the world. Rather, he incorporates intellectual and aesthetic material from the widest range of sources (African and Western), in order to convey the nature of his transformation. (His writing should be considered to be broadly culturally inclusive, rather than by any means "elitist".)

The value of shamanic initiation, as I have said, is that the one who undergoes it receives "ontological knowledge". He knows that at the origins of identity, a person is a product of unconscious social forces, which develop him in line with presently existing power relations. A person who "faces death" through shamanic initiation is not afraid to see this. He does not hold his own self-concept to be all that precious that it must be protected from such dangerous knowledge. Rather, he understands implicitly the relationships that humans develop with the spectre of death (that is, death as symbolically constructed, death as a common means of psychological self-compromise that facilitates certain types of human social organisation, and death as existential threat or "limit".) Marechera's writing in The House of Hunger and beyond reveals a preoccupation with these concerns. Shamanic healing involves using the techniques of dissociation and projecting of one's ego elsewhere, to cope with this now known enemy -- the spectre of death. The goal is to use one's knowledge of how the human psyche is constructed (knowledge gained during initiation) to outwit danger and death. Shamanic dualism (as previously described) enables one to escape the spectre of symbolic death by taking on different forms. Symbolic death (20) is a metaphysically projected endpoint to life, but in shamanic terms, “facing death” leads to the capacity to become reborn and thus transform oneself, in terms of the non-linear logic of the imagination, as one gains access to the recourses of the unconscious mind. R-complex – the 'lizard part of our brain – is one of these primary resources. We are all influenced by this early evolutionary brain system, but one would have to become 'shamanised" to see its influences clearly. We see here a useful transformation in "The Writers' Grain" when the protagonist encounters "Barbara's father in the valley":

'I'll get you in the end, you rascal!' he screamed.
But I bit the silver button and turned myself into a crocodile and laughed my great sharp teeth at him.(21)

The crocodile, representing the lowest part of the mind – R-complex – is notably concerned with power via sensations of domination or submission. It also facilitates primitive psychological defences such as dissociation, splitting, projection and magical thinking is real. One with shamanic knowledge understands how these psychological devices are commonly used in everyday human society, and how they may advantage or disadvantage those who use them. The novella and the nine stories in The House of Hunger anthology all highlight these mechanisms of defence, which are used as aesthetic devices. Access to the kind of knowledge that comes from a profound understanding of R-complex marks the shaman as potentially a real political player. Since he is shaman and therefore "double" he can function from either his higher mind's point of view or from the point of view of his lower mind, ie. R-complex.

While I was cursing [Barbara's father], a voice I did not recognise said:

"You thought it was all politics, didn't you?'

But there was no one there.

I sneered.

'Isn't it?'

And I sullenly turned myself back into human shape. (22)

A shamanistic approach does have political advantage in that it takes a holistic approach to human affairs. It disregards the common human need for repression as well as forms of mind-body dualism that do not allow for an equal expression of both of these sides of the human existential coin. Therefore it is capable of seeing more at once, and from a wider angle, than many rationally conceived theoretical positions are capable of taking in at once. (23)

Although Marechera’s writing, right from its first inception and presentation in The House of Hunger, has been shamanic, it is arguably The House of Hunger that most closely embraces the conception of “shamanic realism” as presented by James Alexander Guerra Overton in Shamanic Realism: Latin American Literature and the Shamanic Perspective. Whereas some of his later works, such as Black Sunlight, are more wholly shamanic, The House of Hunger approximates, rather, that which Overton refers to as “Shamanic realism”, which is “a new classification or genre of literature - which [is] based on the coordinated juxtaposition in resolved antinomy of two antithetical worldviews, one shamanic and the other Western. (24) It is perhaps for this reason that The House of Hunger contains so much Western “realism” that is has been generally better acclaimed internationally than some of Marechera’s later works. It has much in common with currently recognised genres (perhaps not so well recognised in 1978, when the writing was published), particularly related to postmodernism, magical realism, and autobiographical modernism (Joyce) . Nonetheless the overall perspective is shamanistic. A shamanic initiate has eyes newly opened to the meaning and the cost of power, which has been in inscribed upon his body, like one of Kafka’s torture victims. It is in this profound sense of shamanism that Marechera’s book, The House of Hunger, finds its meaning and its raison d'être. (26)

THE NOVELLA

In the novella section of The House of Hunger, Marechera’s hunger for spiritual and intellectual sustenance – and not just food – takes place semi-autobiographically, in the black ghettoised ‘township’ of Vengere in white-ruled Rhodesia. The young man struggles with the rights and wrongs of gaining an education in English, at the expense of his parents and their suffering. He develops a crush on a local girl, Immaculate, and expresses certain traditional misogynistic attitudes towards her, despite his pity for her situation – which is worse than his. In due course, the inward hunger for a life that offered some dignity and sophistication, along with the pressure to complete his destiny through study and leave the ghetto at last, causes the protagonist’s mental breakdown. He starts to have hallucinations – seeing and hearing the unnatural. According to Eric Rhode, who writes concerning pre-Oedipal consciousness, hallucinations signify a regressive mode of consciousness. They are the result of an inner spiritual hunger, which does not project the imagination forwards, robustly. Rather there is a slinking backwards of personal resources, in an attempt to mend the sense of inner damage that the subject has. From a psychological viewpoint on shamanism, the "spirits" one meets in this regressive condition of hallucination are still untamed. One only becomes a shaman by learning how to master the "spirits" that speak to us through from the unconscious mind. Marechera, represented by his protagonist, is not yet a shaman, then, at this part of the book. These spirits are finally banished only with a huge emotional release of tension in the community, which comes to pass with a sudden crash of a storm, which destroys much of the school and the local environment. This process indicates, on the broad scale of the community, the pattern of shamanistic destruction followed by regeneration. Yet, we are dealing with an individual's spiritual crisis. More has to be achieved, in terms of actually mastering the spirits.

The spiritual hunger for life outside of the community remains, however, and the author takes us for a trip inside and outside of his head, as he draws inwards, to the point that inside and outside of this “house of hunger” – his head – can not be differentiated, (at least by the protagonist and perhaps by the reader, who is often left wondering if what is happening is actually real or is occurring symbolically and inwardly). The final passages of the book are in an entirely different tone and of a different quality from some of these tormented passages of tormented realism. It is in these last few passages that the “shamanic” elements are introduced into this otherwise excruciating but otherwise fairly “realistic” depiction of somebody’s descent into madness. These last elements are “shamanic” because they do not follow the normal pattern of human psychology, where there are only two polarities of being – madness and sanity (and the gradations in between). An unpredictable third element appears in the figure of the “wise old man” who appears at the young Marechera’s door, and nurtures him with his story-telling. The fragility of this old man and the serendipity of his appearance and his story-telling (which is somehow intrinsically nourishing) lead one to believe that this is somehow Marechera who has affected a shamanic transformation, (after a difficult “initiation” and madness), in order to provide for himself, through his imaginative powers, that which he found to be lacking. Shamanic transformation and regeneration is the third element of the pendulum – one that doesn’t rightfully exist either logically or according to most Western psychology. Yet it is the introduction of this element of restorative freedom that gives Marechera’s work the appellation “shamanic realism”.

The rest of the short stories in the book are black humorous stories about the author’s experiences, as a writer, in exile, growing up in Lesapi, and in relation to the question of having a “black identity”. These stories are shamanic in that they involve a doubling of the persona of the author (much as we saw the beginnings of in the last section of the novella), revealing two sides of the identity. In some cases, these two sides can be read in terms of Lacan’s “mirror stage”, such as in “The Writer’s Grain”, where there appears an antipathic “brother” of the protagonist, who accommodates himself to society’s mores in a way that is both facile and urbane. He casts aspersions, condescendingly, at the author/protagonist, who thereby falls into an aphasic mode, and has to get his revenge in a way other than by speaking. In the novella, however, the two sides of Marechera’s character represented most decisively are the pre-initiatory side (with the normal, patriarchal character structure) and that which is post-initiatory. In the story concerning his childhood in Lesapi, the narrative elements are animistic and broadly Romantic in their deep and evocative sense of connection with the capricious spirit of nature governing his village. The short stories of The House of Hunger portray women as manifestly strong, in terms of how they are represented, according to the author’s own metaphysics. The writer represents his shamanic view of the world – with magic and reality supervening on one other.

RESTORING THE SHAMANIC IDENTITY OF THE WORKS

There is a conceptual key to both understanding and misunderstanding Marechera’s first published work of fiction – and it lies in the restoration of its intended name, “At the head of the stream.” (27) For is it at the head of the stream – a shamanic designation, as I shall explain – that we find the author’s restored self, in the character of the old man at the end of the novella. The necessity of this particular symbolism is relatable to the following features of Marecherean shamanism that are to be found in his writing.

The novella has to do with the protagonist’s coming of age in a time of political oppression. The protagonist in the story is a thinly disguised version of Marechera. The other sections of the book are eight more short stories, semi-autobiographical, which reveal aspects of the author’s life experiences and psychodynamic states. The works in all were published under the name of The House of Hunger, and received recognition as a Joint Winner of The Guardian Fiction Prize in 1978. (28) At the award ceremony, which he attended in order to receive his prize, Marechera notoriously expressed his disdain by throwing items from his table at various presiding officials’ heads. He no doubt felt disturbed by the way his writing was received, which was not sufficiently in terms of its urgent appeal to understand the inner nature of political violence. (29) He went on to write books that were not highly appraised either in the West or in Zimbabwe, since they were not so well understood. Nonetheless, there is something about his writing that continues to act as a magnet to the younger generations of Zimbabweans. I suggest that it is the truth telling capability of the author and echo of shamanic lore in his writing which reverberates in his readers’ unconscious.

Firstly, it is necessary to deal with the earlier critical misunderstandings of Marechera’s first book, in terms of the dropping of one name for the novel and the appropriation of another. David Pattison, a critic of the writer’s life and works points out that in the publisher’s strategic renaming of the work from “At the head of the stream” to “The House of Hunger”, the work obtained a broader and more poignant political focus than it would otherwise have had. (30) This change of name was no doubt calculated to suit the marketing interests of the publishing company, which would have been able to rely upon the negative publicity concerning the Rhodesia regime in order to generate greater public interest in a book that seemed to be critiquing it. Whilst the change in emphasis made Marechera to be a more conventionally political writer than he in fact was, Pattison points out that it also raised expectations for a certain level of conventional political service and engagement from the writer that was not to be forthcoming. That which was later viewed as the author’s failure to reach his audience was actually a failure of communication from the start, set into motion by this marketing ploy which misrepresented the author’s interests as being of a narrow, political variety, when his engagement would have been better understood in shamanistic terms, as suggested by his own title. Perhaps it was the boiling over of the author’s frustration at feeling wilfully misrepresented in his views that ended up with flying plates and bottles, for, as I have stated, the concern of the writer was, and always has been, a shamanic one: He wanted to understand the nature of trauma afflicted through political oppression. His writing was intended to give meaning to the afflictions of those who were fighting to liberate Zimbabwe from colonial interests, and who were dying by the day. He spoke on this when he accepted his award. His approach showed an intention to bring to light the suffering of his people in an intersubjective and experiential way, rather than to head a political movement in a way that objectively transcended the actual experience of suffering. In essence, the shaman wants to communicate to our repressed inner selves, which may be understood as the aspect of "infinity" in us, that isn't bounded by conventional notions of morality, or segregational factors of race and gender identity.

The central feature of the novella is the writer’s semi-fictionalised account of his life in Vengere Township in colonial Rhodesia. The writer gives vivid pictures of an “iron net thrown over the sky” (47) in the sense of hungering for fulfilment and transcendence of what was effectively “a ghetto”, and yet being unable to attain release. His character is similar to that of Stephen Hero, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with a young man's mixture of arrogance and uncertainty about women. Above all, he is a character who disdains the vulgar level of survival necessitated by life in the black slums. His disdain of this kind of lifestyle is passed on as a disdain of women, whom he feels are dangerous as well as dangerously inhuman because of their ability to survive and nurture, even under the impossible terms of poverty and violence. They seem to be able to placidly accept that which his moral sensibilities want to violently rage against. It is the raging of a narrowly focussed (pre-shamanised) consciousness against what it takes to be a blind and docile acceptance of political and social relations which are guided by principles of white supremacy that the protagonist considers unconscionable. The very conventional, patriarchal nature of his mind is depicted in the author’s attitudes towards women, as creatures inviting the most extreme emotions of love and hatred. The displacement of male rage, at having little control over one’s life’s destination, is redirected against those who are situated in a still weaker position in the societal hierarchy than black men. (48) The author’s attitude at this stage is one of nurturing a little seed of hatred until it grew. Nurturing this seed of hatred could be seen as a way of inviting the lower dynamics of the mind, which are concerned with very rudimentary approaches towards love, hate and knowledge [See:Bion], to manifest themselves in the present:

I found a seed, a little seed, the smallest in the world. And its name was Hate. I buried it in my mind and watered it with tears. No seed ever had a better gardener. As it swelled and cracked into green life I felt my nation tremble, tremble in the throes of birth – and burst out bloom and branch. (49)

This hatred, planted within the “house” of his mind – a hatred which is also represented as longing for “the black heroes” -- was the likely force behind his “shamanic initiation”. The inertia of everyday life in the “ghetto”, the reckless determination to hate the degradation of life in this environment, along with an intellectual and artistic drive that could not find nourishment within this limited environment was what pushed the writer and his protagonist to the point of crisis that undermined his sanity. It seems reasonable that such an upsurgeance of destructive effect from within was necessary to clear the space from which the author could construct a different platform for identity. According to Roger Walsh:

When the forces of growth overwhelm the forces of inertia, then a developmental crisis occurs. The symptoms of this crisis may vary depending upon the individual's personality and maturity. They may range from primitive pathology to existential, transpersonal, or spiritual concerns […]. In the latter case the crisis has come to be known as a transpersonal crisis, spiritual emergency, or spiritual emergence […], and it is these that seem closest to and most helpful in understanding the shamanic initiation crisis.(50)

Walsh goes on to speak of the shamanic initiation (in Marechera’s case, understood as a loss of sanity and control over language) as a maturation crisis – thus accounting for the change in the author as he no longer sees himself positioned as a social victim of his circumstances so much as one who has learned to tell tales and master reality from a position of self-knowledge, having harnessed his own vivid imagination as a tool of self-nourishment.(51) The novella depicts what is really an involuntary shamanic initiation, in the sense that the writer didn’t set out with the goal in mind to become a type of shaman. Yet his hatred of reality nurtured and watered the psychosis that was to overtake him in the form of four hallucinated figures following him everywhere, when he was at the point of studying for his "A" levels (school leaving exam).

They could not have been the black heroes whom I sought – or perhaps they were. I don’t’ know. There had been four of them; three men in threadbare clothes and the woman of the faded shawl. This had happened a few weeks before my sixth form examinations – which I then had to write with the assistance of a massive dose of white tranquillisers and pink triangular pills. (52)

Clearly, the spiritual hunger he has is for powerful mentors that will enable him to affirm his black identity in a racialist society. The reckless watering of the seed of hatred no doubt had a voluntary aspect – at least in the form of the will of wanting to depart from reality. The writer also confesses, in autobiographical tone, to having enjoyed dagga (marijuana) (53), which, as a drug, would have increased his chance of “shamanic initiation”, for various drugs or herbs are indeed used for traditional forms of shamanic initiation. That which tips our young protagonist over the edge to the point of having to “look inwards” [footnote] and resolve the pressures within his psyche, can also cause paranoia – which is represented also in the novella. It is the feeding of the “seeds of hatred”, however, that causes the “tightening” of the stitches that hold together the young protagonist’s sense of being. Is autodestruction already at work in an unspoken will to trade off what one has and is in exchange for an unknown “something more”? Autodestruction is at work in the subject as he relates story through the novella, and shall bring about shamanic initiation. I shall go through and reveal how each of these has a clear place in the sections of work I am analysing in this chapter. The adoption of alchemic imagery is also an important aspect of Marechera’s writing, although I am primarily interested in the universal psychological dynamics of shamanism, as they pertain to the subject’s development as an individual and a writer.

The author’s acute observations of his psychological state are excruciating in their exactitude in terms of depicting a society’s psychological dynamics, and a young man’s psychic disintegration. As mentioned, Roger Walsh has stated that shamanic initiation might be understood as the result of culturally imposed internal pressure towards personal growth rather than being seriously pathological. (54) The tearing apart of the fabric of one’s being is a motif the writer has used more than once in the pages of the novella. “I looked up. As I did so the old cloth of my former self seemed to stretch and tear once more.” (55) Yet, the writer is also clearly driven to grow and develop despite his own limitations, thus the internal opposition that developed within his higher and his lower systems of mind:

“My fear of heights had not restrained me from climbing the cliffs of my nerves. And the demons, finding the House unattended, had calmly strutted in through the open door. Had I been a good atheist perhaps….” (56)

The writer is then beset by voices and rain that seems to knock upon his head, the metaphoric house of spiritual hunger. It is these that beckon him towards shamanistic initiation:

“For it was a strange thirst. An unknown hunger. Which had driven him from himself, from his friends, from his family, from the things of his first world.” (57)

As the narrative proceeds, there is one violent event after another, adding pressure to the underlying feeling of psychological hunger. Whilst, in the opening scenes the author’s cat is killed by a children’s gang, by the end of the book the violence hasn’t quite relented. The author resists his brother’s girlfriend’s affection, because he cannot quite understand how she could be so, within the context in which she lives. The lack of personal transcendence becomes a limitation of subjectivity – a trap wrapped around his wounded and stitched up head: “Those stitches like a net cast up into the sky tightened around my mind, and with the needle bit sharply into the more tender parts of the brain.” (The life in the land of gangsters has already taken its toll on the sensitive young man by depriving him of speech, earlier in the book.) It is the author’s need for transcendence of his circumstances, however – his Icarian complex – that causes his undoing (58). The salvation of the writer, however, in terms of the enhancements supplied by his “shamanic initiation” is to be found in that which he was earlier deprived of – his capacity to speak. In an early part of the book, we learn: “I began to ramble, incoherently, in a disconnected manner. I was being severed from my own voice.” (59) Only in the final passages of the novella, the restoration of the self knowledge that restores speech is not via the normal pathways of renunciation of the pre-Oedipal mode of experience (as per Lacan’s ideas concerning the entry into language via “castration” of one’s capacity to connect with one’s pre-Oedipal self and the primary processes that govern it.) Rather, as the evidence of text reveals, the shaman’s capacity for speech is restored via a baptism into this level of experience of “Nature” (rather than moving in a linear, developmental way, towards “Civilisation” and its repressive mores) as an adult – an experience that restores his capacity to nurture himself inwardly – in Jung’s terms, to “water one’s own garden”. (60)

The author’s loss of language itself, an its restoration, in The House of Hunger is instructive psychologically – and in terms of our study of shamanic transformation and regeneration – for it details how a typical patriarchal mindset can become neurotically fraught in terms of its desire for compartmentalisation of values, gender segregation, and transcendence of the despised symbolically “feminine” aspects of personality. Shamanic healing involves the restoration of the whole self – the desegregated self – after a period in the spiritual wilderness. he fundamental issue with regard to Marechera’s angst in relation to language was whether he should speak English or Shona, for Marechera, as a young man, suffered from an Oedipus complex dictating that he should be a pleasing and dutiful son to his parents. (61) The tension produced, in the author/protagonist’s awareness of the cultural and political ramifications of one’s choice of language shouldn’t be underestimated: The novella details how, by unwittingly speaking English to his mother, he received a resounding hiding. Yet the writer could not identify wholly with the colonial English speaking culture, which seemed to impress upon him the culture of the oppressors. If the “symbolic register” of language (the entrance into which marks adult maturity within Lacanian psychoanalysis) is understood to encompass language as the expression of the social and cultural values of each of these social milieus, both languages put strain on the young artist to adapt to his role as an adult in contradictory ways. (62) Aspects of the values of both systems also seemed debasing to this high-minded artist. (He could not accommodate himself to life in the slums any more than he could ethically adopt the oppressor’s language.)

Both alternatives would have been felt as extremely threatening in terms of undermining his previously happy connection with the world, that he experienced (63) as a child. His culturally conditioned role as a man, who cannot tolerate the possibility of womanly love or romance under the cultural conditions of the ghetto, blocked his only avenue for comfort and must have only exacerbated his condition. It seems then that it was specifically his unhappiness, determined by his strongly uncompromising attitude of masculine transcendence, which broke the protagonist apart. The quintessentially shamanic knowledge that a unity is needed between “masculine” and “feminine” components of the psyche is, however, evidenced, in “Burning in the Rain”, which puts the unity of the male and female deities at the head of the source of life, and therefore, at the source of shamanic inspiration. This mythopoeic way of writing, encompasses the expression of “shamanic realism”, makes reference to the hidden, “spiritual” dimensions of the psyche that sustain it. (This is despite the violence that takes place in the story because of the protagonist’s inability to deduce a desirable self in the mirror that he could publically present as his coherent and whole identity) (64):

At the head of the stream, that’s where they had, with great violence, fused into one and it was among the petunias so unbearably sweet that they had become afraid and listened to the staring motionless thing which made the rivers flow. (65)

The description of the forceful uniting of two components of the mind appears like symbolism for shamanic initiation itself. Shamanic initiation, as I have suggested, involves a portion of the mind undergoing creative regression towards a state of greater malleability and receptivity to change, however there also has to be a countervailing will and determination to gather up benefits from such a regression, and to move forward. (Failing this, one remains only in madness.) It is likely then, that there was already pre-existing in the earlier (pre-shamanic) version of the protagonist, the desire to bring his own mental state to a crisis, so as to undergo shamanic initiation, and that this was the meaning of the nurturing of inner hatred to the point where the poison bubble in the psyche finally burst the seams that held it in.

Along with the effect of being in a pressure cooker on a social and political level, which is effectively what the ghetto situation was, the author’s own attitude to life was to push the envelope, to climb up to the height of his nerves in order to satisfy his curiosity about life. This openness to knowledge is what ultimately secured a path for him outside of the dominant cultural mores and its status quo. This approach is fully compatible with various shamanistic projects, which according to Perkinson, “entails internal flights of creative daring, labouring inarticulable depths of anguish into forms of self-knowledge that continually elude dominant culture categories and understanding. In this vein, we would also perhaps have to recognize a certain novelty of the enterprise in coming to enjoy shamanistic flight for its own sake.” (66)

The writer’s reckless pursuit of self-destruction by upping the ante in terms of his own inner tension (that is, nurturing, rather than putting an end to the “seeds of hate”) created the underlying conditions for his shamanistic initiation. It is also what saved him. (67). The vigour reinstalled and supplied through the experience of being wounded expanded the range of his imagination to take in unconventional insights. The same recklessness that caused his brain to suffer from hallucinations now enables him to master his own psyche and its insights as adventure; rather than locate his subjectivity within a particular brand of cultural identity, he invites his brain to explode. Towards the end of the book the protagonist smokes marijuana and welcomes the subtle exploding of his mind as part of a shamanistic journey away from the political categories of identity:

‘White people are shit,’ Doug added with closed eyes.

I agreed.

‘And black people are shit,” Doug blew cinders and ash from his shirtfront.

Before I could agree again Philip interrupted:

‘Everybody human shits, that’s the trouble.’

I nodded, watching my mind explode deliciously.’ (68)

In traditional shona society, mbanje (marijuana) was considered as a sacred drug, and in modern day Shona society, it is still even referred to as vodya yavakuru – literally, 'the tobacco of the ancestors'. So, once more the protagonist is seen to be self-consciously dabbling in the spirit world, trying to bring about a change. The use of marijuana in rituals was common, and spirit mediums used to be smoked whilst that they were possessed. On a deep psychological level, this desire to explode one’s own mind (the autodestruction of ego, through dissociation, that allows one to “journey”), and the epistemological destruction of difference is indeed shamanic, for it is a way of giving in to the conventional fear of losing one’s identity and the stability of self, only to find what one had been looking for all the time – the unity of one’s self as a preposterously humorous undermining of conventional tropes of identity. (68) [Footnote: Bataille refers to such “transgression” leading to the explosion of one’s mind as “sublation” – a movement towards a more advanced state of being. In Nietzsche’s terms, its termed “creating beyond oneself”, the task of the Overman. ] According to Joan Halifax (quoted by Perkinson) (69) “The shaman is a figure "balanced between worlds," teaching that trauma can be "a passageway to a greater life where there is access to great power at great risk." Indeed, the shaman often becomes androgynous, "balancing" or equalizing problematic social roles and creating healing through paradox. The initiatory quest here is one that opens the mystery by "becoming it," transcends death "by dying in life," pierces duality "by embracing opposites," reunites fractured forms by fashioning oneself as "a double being.” (70) In the case of Marechera, the shaman journeys beyond the psychic damage imposed upon him by the political antagonisms between tribes of black and white and by his conventional patriarchal contempt for women.

If the story of the author’s life detailed in the novella is indeed at least partly fact and not fiction, the author’s “shamanic initiation” must have achieved the effect that turned him into a writer. It must have led to a greater strengthening of mind, insight and creative energy. The elaborate richness, acuteness of observation and humour of the writing in this group of works lends certainty to the idea that there is a salient difference between the person depicted as Marechera in the stories and the writer who completed the semi-autobiographical texts. A lot of the richness of the text is ironical. Marechera’s conscious or subconscious concession to an ironic view of himself as a kind of shaman is indicated through a viewing of his bones after having undergone an X-ray. Traditionally, shamans count the number of their own bones. “But he let me see the X-rays on the illuminated screen. The sight of my own bones chilled me.” (71) There are shamanic insinuations in the earlier parts of the text, wherein the writer conceives of himself as prematurely grey, and has his wise old man status affirmed by a bird’s dropping on his head. Perhaps the shaman is necessarily one who is prematurely aged? – As Perkinson says about Frida Kahlo, it was as if life, after her accident, suddenly had no secrets from her. The ‘old man’ speaks of a hunger that couldn’t simply be nurtured by hate. “He fed on hatred of all things; but that did not quench his thirst.” (72) In the terminology of Carlos Casteneda’s Don Juan, (whom Marechera read) he longed for “infinity”. However, the price he paid to enjoy this sensation was autodestruction and shamanic initiation.

As stated in the beginning of this chapter, the clue resides in the very name of the book in its original intention: At the head of the stream. The shamanic resolution of the binary aspects of the author’s mind (particularly “spirit” versus “vulgarly there”) has its meaning in this term. In both Lacanian and in interpersonal terms, the shamanic initiation experience would appear to involve a temporary going backwards, or regression. This is in fact more than appearance; however the regression solves a particular purpose of taking one to a place where the contradictions of life can be seen in a different light. What makes the difference is that Marechera discovers a nurturing aspect within himself, in the reformulation of his father – the “old man” who “died beneath the wheels of the twentieth century”. “There was nothing left but stains, bloodstains and fragments of flesh, when the whole length of it was through with eating him.” (73)– to an older and nurturing version of himself, who is a story teller. This revitalised old man takes the young man under his wing. It is an instance of shamanic doubling of the self, whereby one acquires a spirit guide to give comfort and wisdom. The old man fulfils this role by telling parables and snatches of stories and amusing him with his absurd, magical ideas:

But the old man was my friend. He simply wandered into the House [which the writer tells us is the protagonist’s mind] one day out of the rain, dragging himself on his knobbly walking stick. And he stayed. His face was like a mesh of copper wire; his wrists, strings of muscle [….] What he loved best was for me to listen attentively while he told stories that were oblique, rambling, fragmentary. His transparent, cunning look, his eager chuckle, his wheezing cough, and something of the earth, gravel-like, in his voice – these gave body to the fragments of things which he casually threw in my direction.” (74)

This old man is, in fact, on one level, an image for Marechera the writer who has become shamanised and attained spiritual wisdom, whose imagination has been regenerated so that he is a shaman, capable of “watering his own garden” (a Jungian term) in a spiritually satisfying sense. It is also a manifestation of his father, whose death is mentioned in the book, come back to life. It terms of the author’s shamanic regeneration, the image is loaded with significance, as it reveals a resolution of the Oedipus complex in a way that favours the imagination and creativity – rather than leading to psychological repression of the pre-Oedipal self, and the adoption of the patriarchal character structure of the father.(75) On the other hand, shamans are cunning and even socially dubious characters by all accounts – and what defines them is that they have mastered “the spirits” that had previously tormented them. This also has meaning in the psycho-social sense. The production of a palatable and amenable image of his distant and patriarchal father is a way of controlling the “spirits”. The writer as shaman shows that he has mastered the necessary fragmentation of life, and the need for creative stitches to bind reality together, so as to give it some digestible semblance of form.

What is unique about shamans is not that they complain of persecution by spirits; it is that they eventually learn how to master and use them. (76)

If language and its symbols were indeed the young Marechera’s tormentors as he claims in relation to his protagonist, then by the end of the book the master has definitively established his mastery over them. This “old man” has also, quite obviously, overcome the younger writer’s hostility towards all that nurtures, which had been fuelled by his sense of a gender dichotomy (wherein women “foolishly” sought nurturing and to be nurtured, whereas men were tough gangsters.) What has significantly happened is that the young man has overcome his disturbed psychological state by pushing on through the various stages of shamanic initiation. Shamanic initiation involves gaining knowledge of how one’s own mind works intrapsychologically. It also bestows knowledge as to how the forces of society (that is, the broader dimensions of human engagement) operate beneath the surface of the consciousness of individuals, in order to give them an “identity”. That which shamanic knowledge and experience does not cure, however, is the pain of the shamanic wounding -- which lasts. Under traditional circumstances of shamanic initiation, the “loss of self” is guided by an already wise shamanic practitioner. This safeguards the initiate and prevents the injury he receives during his state of regression from being overwhelming. In Marechera’s case, he did not have this help or guidance, and his initiatory experience was consequently extremely violent. His later temporary breakdowns into paranoiac states can be traced to this.

Yet, in understanding more about the positive side of his experience – his successful shamanic self-initiation -- one need go no further than Nietzsche to see how shamanic initiation follows a certain trajectory of taking things seriously, of throwing off the shackles of confining thought, and finally rebuilding the character structure in a way that is on one’s own terms. For the three metamorphoses described in Thus Spake Zarathustra, the weight bearing spirit changes into a destructive spirit which changes in turn into a playful spirit. This represents a logical transformation of one’s character from being part of a particular cultural group, to being one who has undergone the experience of being shamanised. We can see how this works through the mediating mode of subjectivity – the capacity for language. To have learned a language, only then to unlearn it or to be unable to speak it, is different from never having learned a language at all. One has developed a certain intellectual discipline, a certain social awareness as the result of language’s cognitive and social demands. To be able to speak a language is also to become aware of the political nuances of one’s culture, to learn its ins and outs, perhaps even to learn of its potential to hand you over into life or death (under the circumstances of a civil war, such as the Rhodesian bush war / Second Chimurenga):

“Many heavy things are there for the spirit, the strong load-bearing spirit in which reverence dwelleth: for the heavy and the heaviest longeth its strength.” (77).

If language gives the character a social basis for identity and structure, (as would be the case according to Lacan), then a loss of ability to communicate one’s self is a form of destruction of that character, yet what is regenerated after the shamanic initiation is not the conventional adult character structure understood and outlined by Lacan, but a state of being that incorporates knowledge of the Unconscious mind (collective and personal) with the capacity to have a public and sociable identity on the other side of the mirror (78). The story of the novella is a story of auto-destruction that leads the way for a new character structure: “To create new values—that, even the lion cannot yet accomplish: but to create itself freedom for new creating—that can the might of the lion do.” To have the capacity to speak a language and to lose it is to lose one’s capacity for conformity. The rigidity of the character structure that was developed through the “castration” of the pre-Oedipal self, is broken down, and thus can be reformed anew, in a way that incorporates the innocent (but not pathological aspects) of the pre-Oedipal self: “But tell me, my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why hath the preying lion still to become a child?” (79)

In terms of his “three metamorphoses”, Nietzsche delineates that path of the shaman, from an experience of building one’s character, to one of demolishing the binds of social conformity (and thus, implicitly, losing one’s social identity and social character structure) to the point of embracing life on one’s own terms. “Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.” (80) The final outcome, in this prescription for shamanisation, is the individual who is radically self-determining as well as being imaginative and playful. This is the outcome that we do in fact see in the last few pages of Marechera’s novella. The following prose from the end of the novella, (after shamanic transformation), is a radiant example of such shamanistic playfulness and the psychological clarity that comes from transformation and spiritual recovery [whether full psychological recovery from trauma is ever possible is another question entirely.] It involves a sense of struggle followed by a (paradoxical, certainly--) joyous embrace of life as an artist-exile (one who has developed the capacity to face life as a new kind of person, free of the constraints of social conformity.) The outcome of persistence through the stages of shamanic initiation is detailed in the following playful fashion, towards the end of the novella, where the book takes on a much more concentrated shamanic-realist tone:

[A hunter of women] fed on exhaustion of mind and body, but the brain only dies at its own behest and the body is a precious thing which, fading and knotting within itself, generates a new being who shimmers around the old body and does not die unless the great star comes down. And so exhaustion did not slake his thirst and weariness, did not stop the gnawing of the hunger in his belly. He came to a great city, but when he tried to enter the guard at the gates laughed a great laugh and the whole thing faded into nothing but sand-dunes. It may not even have been there. There were great beautiful birds in his vision, but when he called out to them they turned into vultures and awkwardly out of his sight. It was like a sudden irritation. In fact he actually scratched himself tenderly between his legs. That’s when he said: “I will live in the heart of a grain of sand.” And he also said: “I will light a match: When it flares I will jump straight into the dark heart of its flame-seed.” But as he listened to himself, to the thirst and to the hunger, he suddenly said in words of gold: “I will live at the head of the stream where all of man’s questions began. (81)

The “head of the stream” is the place of recovery, the explosively creative place in which the shaman dwells in the spirit world (along with the “manfish” – another symbol of a drowned soul) – yet it is also, most certainly paradoxically, a place of creative renewal of one’s lost identity. In the sacred watering places, spirits sometimes manifested themselves as a manfish/mermaid (njuzu). These spirits sometimes abducted human beings whom they lived with under the waters and initiated into medicinemen / women of repute. (Marechera, elsewhere in this collection of stories refers to himself via his protagonist as a manfish.) He is the one 'undead' whom people are not even permitted to cry for. Yet, a shamanic initiate faces death, and lives for a while in the realm of the dead, during the initiation. After one had been abducted or disappeared the family of the person or child was supposed to observe a strict no weeping or mourning or any outward show of bereavement if they were to see their relative or child alive again. If they did exhibit any outward sign of bereavement the abducted would be thrown above the waters and float after a few hours or days as a victim of drowning. If the family and relatives observed the rules, the abducted would emerge after a period of time sometimes spanning years and henceforth that person would be a person set apart from the generality of his community and set on a path to be revered n’anga/healer.

So, the shaman, although a regenerated 'wise-man" is also one who can never re-enter human society again, on the terms he had originally been granted, as an everyday human being. He is transformed – and knows too much. He is necessarily a liminal character, then, who occupies the boundaries of the mind as well as being on the community's' boundaries. The shaman who is forbidden to enter “the city” lives at a point of experience that precedes and oversees the nature and development of the dichotomies of social meaning. His situation is rather amoral, and he associates with the like in kind.

In fact, he is psychologically at the source of our coming into being. (He can regress to this degree, but being shaman, he can also advance.) In Shona mythology the head of a stream (mavambo) was held sacred in all respects. Water bodies were the abode of water spirits and pools, springs were particularly seen in this light. Natural springs and stream sources were sacred places and people had certain ritualistic observations which they followed when fetching water. when faced with a disease/plague in the community which would maybe have astounded medicine people of repute, one who has been initiated by disappearing under the water would simply journey back to “the head of the stream” to commune and convene with the spirits and emerge there from with the solution and cure.

The writer's skill is to unify Shona mythology with his own shamanistic experience, in order to convey the idea of redemption through the shamanistic initiation that had unified different parts of his mind. Speaking of a lover (who had been accused of being a whore), he writes, “At the head of the stream, that’s where they had, with great violence, fused into one and it was among the petunias so unbearably sweet that they had become afraid and listened to the staring motionless thing which made rivers flow. (84) This union that takes place as a form of creativity overcomes the male-female dichotomy that had been limiting his scope within the normative symbolic register of divisive cultural evaluations. It is precisely this refusal of the normal symbolic order and the recovery of a self that exceeds the epistemological scope of the common verities within a particular culture, that enables the shaman to develop into a wise man: Shamans "show proof of a more than normal nervous constitution.[…] shamans not only recover but may function exceptionally well as leaders and healers of their people (85)

“At the head of the stream”, one encounters, in the spirit world, a wholeness of identity, that is not concerned with the morality of higher versus lower actions, but wherein all things are made equal. This is the primal position of selfhood, developmentally prior to the acquisition of personality and social place, which, however, lies beyond the comfort zone of normal, adult humanity. It is the position of the creator, who uses his or her creative insights in order to direct reality, without succumbing to the ideological force of language that would command cultural conformity (and in fact, which had previously been the basis for the protagonist’s disturbances). The shaman’s position is that of a cultural outsider, who nonetheless has the inside track on a particular culture and maintains a sense of freedom through psychological distancing from the norm. What I am calling a “pre-ontological position” towards life enables a shaman to see the present manifestations of cultural reality, in its realised and concrete senses, represents just one possibility for life out of many imaginable alternatives. This fuels the creative insight, found throughout the book: that ontology is actually indeterminate; that more than one person can occupy the subject-position of any one story (such as in “The Writer’s Grain”, wherein Marechera encounters his double).

The final stamp of shamanic authenticity in the anthology, however, does not rest so much with the figure of the “old man” -- Jungian trope signifying wisdom -- whose generation out of Marechera’s own mind makes him something other than “the old man” who was Marechera’s father, found dead under the railway tracks of history, earlier in the novel. Rather, it is the “trickster” element that we first catch sight of, in the newly shamanised character of the narrator. (86) In the following text, which forms the last paragraph of the novella, the author, in the shamanic-inspired mode of representing the nurturing aspect that he no doubt had longed for from his father, adopts as strategy of revenge against a character from earlier in the book. From pages that preceded the author’s earlier descent into madness, we learn of Harry, a rather unsavoury character (much like the rest of the male characters in the novella) who wears a “blood red coat” and has a predilection for white women rather than for those of his own colour, which he views as “just meat” (87). In this ghetto of Vengere that is populated by black gangsters, Harry is the smooth operator who has acquired his outstanding coat from a white girlfriend. It marks him as having something that the rest of the ghetto wants, and no doubt raises competitive ire and jealousy. In the last paragraph of the novella, the father persona uses his shamanic magical thinking (having changed form – a very shamanic act) to even a score with Harry, who has scored social precedence by going out with a white women. Knowing his predilection for the white female form, the protagonist sends him to a trap: to be beaten up by white soldiers. Thus we see for the first time that which will become easily recognisable as a common feature of Marechera’s writings – shamanic tricksterism (for the one who best knows the range and scope of the human mind is the shaman, and he cannot resist using his knowledge to tease and provoke ordinary mortals):

One day I too chose my spot and sat upon it, waiting for travellers to pass me by. It was Sunday and early. Soon a solid youth in a crimson jacket strolled up to me and asked if I knew where he could buy white chicken. Do you know where I sent him? To the white soldiers’ whorehouse: they beat him to a pulp. Or into a past, I’m not sure. (88)

As we can see from this segment, shamanic magic is not particularly moral, nor does it necessarily involve itself with making the sort of political critique that will serve all, and be of benefit to all parties (no matter what side of the political fence they sit) for all time. Yet the shamanic perspective does open up a new dimension of imagination in those cases where the predictable nature of social norms has undermined the vitality of a community. The writer’s hard-earned shamanic perspective is this mode that is imaginatively antecedent to-- and yet practically surpasses -- the more conventionalising mode of language (and its narrow dichotomies both within ourselves and against others). It is from his detached position in relation to normal, everyday life, that Marechera is able to accurately measure and diagnose societies' ills. From his position that transcends death, the manfish (Njuzu) – submerged, radically transformed by his experiences and yet somehow still alive on the boundaries of existence – speaks to us. Shamanic regeneration can be considered to have been achieved when one is no longer troubled by "spirits". Instead the higher mind (represented by the author in his terrestrial existence) and lower mind (represented by Njuzu) are fused into a unity that the subject hadn't previously been experienced. It is this facility of 'shamanic doubling' that enables Marechera to produce works wherein the visceral faculties of the unconscious mind and the higher intellect work in liaison with each other, to give each other comfort and meaningful wisdom.

This chapter has concerned itself with the way that the two levels of the brain's functional hierarchy become integrated after shamanistic initiation. Should one part or the other part become too strong in relation to the other, a dangerous psychical imbalance occurs, in ordinary people. However, this imbalance can provide the basis for shamanic initiation (leading to expansion of consciousness) if there is already a will present in the subject to know more about reality, and to improve one's standing in the world. Shamanic initiation is dangerous – even under the instruction of a traditional shaman master. What Marechera (represented as his protagonist) experienced was spontaneous shamanistic initiation. The violence of this experience may have done him some harm, but in general it led to greater knowledge concerning the psychological mechanisms that undergird our experience of power, in societies. His shamanic initiation also gave him access to the force of the unconscious that produces dreams and active elements of the imagination. In the next chapter, we will look at how the expanded consciousness of the shaman is able to take in more information than most, concerning subtle shifts in political and social attitudes, in order to anticipate the future.

FOOTNOTES

1 Dambudzo Marechera, The House of hunger : Short stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978) pp 78-82, depicts the transformation of the angry, ghetto-dwelling youth into one whose spiritual wisdom and story-telling ability is represented in the arrival of the character of the “old man”.

2 Marechera faces and acknowledges the pertinence of the accusation of nonparticipation and elitism directed at the artist-writer (in contrast with the political activist) when he puts in the following parenthesis close to the conclusion of Black Sunlight: "Steve Biko died while I was blind drunk in London. Soweto burned while I was sunk in deep thought about an editor's rejection slip" (Marechera 1980: 114 Journal of Literary Studies. Marecheran postmodernism: mocking the bad joke of "African Modernity", 73)

3 Ideas are taken from the Western and African contexts and used by Marechera in the form of literary pastiche to form a skin or exo-skeleton that will define the outline of his "inner experience". “Inner experience” is a term of Georges Bataille for experiences (like shamanistic initiation) which elude positivistic definition and thus also attract his definition of “non-knowledge”.

4 The generation of mythopoeic images is based upon the shamanic goal to develop equilibrium between inner and outerworlds: This is partly the theme of “Burning in the Rain”, where the two parallel worlds – the shamanic and the real – appear to be aesthetically (but not psychologically) quite integrated. Psychologically, there is still tumult, as there was in the novella, and there are still signs of pathology, which indicate that the story relates to the shamanic “difficult crossing” (initiation) part of Marechera’s life, rather than to the subsequent period when he has effectively “tamed the spirits” in his life.

5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoeia_(genre)

6 It is no secret that much of the content of Marechera’s writing can be traced to aspects of his own personal experiences.

7 See: Sherry Salman, 'Dissociation and the Self in the magical pre-Oedipal field ', Journal of Analytical Psychology, 44 (1999), 69.

“Such a conception of the Self [as implied in the “dream of totality] is distinguished from a reified structure or a deified imago, and is considered to be that aspect of psychological functioning consonant with emerging meanings, and the birth of new psychological ground.”

8 The loss of subjective differentiation between the inside of the mind and the outside, in the novella, describes the point of shamanic initiation. The inside of the "house of hunger" is Marechera's psyche and the outside of it is the real world outside of his head.

9 “Black Skin, What Mask?”, The House of hunger : Short stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978)

10 [footnote: in large part this is defined by temporary dissociation that facilitates psychological development, the mechanism of which is described by Salman – although she describes it in a context of therapeutic counselling, which makes for a moderated and less overwhelming or shattering experience]

11 Perkinson speaks of the shamanic gift of “second sight” as also being a curse, brought about by social oppression: Jim Perkinson, 'The Gift/Curse of "Second Sight": Is "Blackness" a Shamanic Category in the Myth of America? ' History of Religions, 42.1(2002.), 47. He says: “In Eliadian terms, we could perhaps describe this structure of [American] blackness as "second sight," as a complex form of "ecstatic enstasy" or "enstatic

ecstasy." […I]t entails internal flights of creative daring, laboring inarticulable depths of anguish into forms of self-knowledge that continually elude dominant culture categories and understanding.

12 “The Writer’s Grain”, The House of hunger : Short stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978),p 111.

13 : 1999. The Black Insider. Edited by F. Veit-Wild. Trenton, Asmara: Africa World Press. “Christopher Heywood […] had to buy [his] own books back from the second-hand bookshop ‘Rare and Racy’ after they had been ‘borrowed’ by the writer who fed on books in more than one way.” P 10 –Veit-Wild introduction.

14. One ought to understand the whole thrust of writers like Nietzsche and Bataille in this light.

15 These primary processes relate back to a child’s first experiences the sensation of “coming into being” – an ontological arrival as in independent entity. “Through his exploration of the psyche’s archetypal matrix, and the dynamics of magical thinking, dissociation, splitting and projective identification, it is becoming clear that Jung, and others such as Whitmont (1957) anticipated many aspects of what in psychoanalytic circles generally is known as the theory of pre-Oedipal development.” See: Sherry Salman, 'Dissociation and the Self in the magical pre-Oedipal field ', Journal of Analytical Psychology, 44 (1999), 69.

16 The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 7.

17 Ibid.

18 See: The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 16, 73, 75.

19 See Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R Trask (Bollingen Series; USA: Princeton University Press, 1964), p 43, for an example of shamanic wounding.

20 It can be actually experienced as loss of ego in states of depersonalisation and derealisation, but it such symbolic death can also be faced in the exertion of the will not to give in due to fear of death, during an existential crisis. Such different ways of facing death can take one beyond the normal range of human psychological experience into the shamanic realm of an encounter inner experience.

21 The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 33.

22 The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 133.

23 James M. Glass, 'The Philosopher and the Shaman: The Political Vision as Incantation', Political Theory, 2. 2 (1974), 188.

“The shaman tries to "restore the 'communicability' that existed in illo tempore between this world and heaven"; that act of restoration appears in the "myth of ascent," symbolizing the "recovery of the human condition before the 'fall' "; the myth "reproduces a primordial 'situation' accessible to the rest of mankind only through death."”

24 James Alexander Guerra Overton, Shamanic Realism: Latin American Literature and the Shamanic Perspective. (accessed from the Internet – source UWA Library staff), p 63. Overton speaks in this regard of texts relating to Latin America, however he also states that, “the roots of this [Latin American tradition of] esoteria were already well established in the weltanschauung of the three principal cultures which constitute the social and racial make-up of the Latin American continent: the Native American, the African, and the Iberian (p. 3).

25 The Making of a Shaman: Calling, Training, and Culmination, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 34, No. 3, 7-30 (1994) abstract – p? The initial shamanic crisis is seen to be a culture-specific form of developmental crisis rather than being evidence of severe psychopathology, p 7.

26 This is not to underestimate the effect that the international youth subculture had on the author, or indeed the degree to which his use of cannabis –an entheogen—had the result of producing his “shamanic initiation”. However, it was the oppression of hunger and the poverty of opportunity that ultimately produced Marechera’s induction into the world of shamanic sensibilities.

27 David Pattison, No Room For Cowardice (Trenton, NJ; Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2001), p 93-95.

28 Veit-Wild, Flora. 2004. Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on his Life and Work. Trenton, Asmara: Africa World Press, p 37.

29 See: Jim Perkinson, 'The Gift/Curse of "Second Sight": Is "Blackness" a Shamanic Category in the Myth of America? ' History of Religions, 42.1(2002.), 47. He says: “In Eliadian terms, we could perhaps describe this structure of [American] blackness as "second sight," as a complex form of "ecstatic enstasy" or "enstatic ecstasy." […I]t entails internal flights of creative daring, laboring inarticulable depths of anguish into forms of self-knowledge that continually elude dominant culture categories and understanding.” It is not surprising that the depth of Marechera’s insights, and their import, were hard for him to communicate.

30. It is actually questionable whether it obtained a much narrower ontological focus than it should have had, which excluded the writer’s insights into the Unconscious, which he represented as the realm in which mythopoeic entities engage with each other, beneath the level of normative society’s knowledge.

31 Jim Perkinson, 'The Gift/Curse of "Second Sight": Is "Blackness" a Shamanic Category in the Myth of America? ' History of Religions, 42.1(2002), 48-49.

32 Michael Taussing, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. p 374

33 Lacan and the unformulated self prior to the mirror stage. Marechera’s text introduces a political dimension to this thesis concerning developmental processes. According to his writing, one’s developmental options are limited by the choice of politically devised subject-positions that one has to choose from, in a particular society and culture.

34 Jim Perkinson, 'The Gift/Curse of "Second Sight": Is "Blackness" a Shamanic Category in the Myth of America? ' History of Religions, 42.1(2002.), p 19.

35 A mythopoeic creature, neither man nor fish, but the soul of a drowned man who has been transformed into a fish, according to Shona culture. It represents, in Marechera’s texts, a shamanic encounter with death, and transformation.

36 Veit-Wild, Flora. 2004. Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on his Life and Work. Trenton, Asmara: Africa World Press, 41, 42 – the writer is viewed as a “kind of Cassandra figure”.

37 This directly correlates with greater access to the Unconscious.

38 According to Fanon’s description, one becomes split into various directions, which encompass concerns about identity in an historical-organic and not necessarily categorical way.

39 Jim Perkinson, 'The Gift/Curse of "Second Sight": Is "Blackness" a Shamanic Category in the Myth of America? ' History of Religions, 42.1(2002.),41.

40 Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, p 33.

41 Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, p 33.

42 Michael Taussing, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, p 219. “Wildness is the death space of signification.” One might also see this in terms of the definitive shamanistic manoeuvre of a “return to Nature.”

43 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R Trask (Bollingen Series; USA: Princeton University Press, 1964. See, for instance, page 121.

44 He makes use of such imagery in “Throne of Bayonets”, for instance, where he gives us the idea that he is calling himself from the grave. In Shona culture, a person has two shadows – a dark one for his body, and a light one for his spirit. This doubling of identity seems to be replicated in that extended poem. See: 1992. Cemetery of Mind. Edited by Flora Veit-Wild.  Trenton, Asmara: Africa World Press, p 35- 56.

45 [p 101 Roger Walsh, “The Psychological Health of Shamans: A Reevaluation”]

46 See Michael Winkelman, who differentiates between mediumship and shamanism: Shamanism: The neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing. pp 66-69.

47 Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 74, 75.

48 [footnote: The black women become the targets of this displaced rage at the white, colonial authorities. The emotion that is directed against women is then dressed up as male justice and authority. See pp 12-13 -Wild, Flora. 2004. Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on his Life and Work. Trenton, Asmara: Africa World Press.

49 Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 17.

50 Roger Walsh, “The Psychological Health of Shamans: A Reevaluation, 116.

51. In Jungian terms, the Collective Unconscious is both a tool for learning more about oneself and others and a pool that can be tapped for creative engagement with a broader than merely rational sphere of reality.

52 Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 28.

53 Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 3.

54 Roger Walsh, “The Making of a Shaman: Calling, Training, and Culmination,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 34, No. 3, 7-30 (1994) abstract –

55 Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 17.

56 Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 29.

57 Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 79..

58 Georges Bataille. Visions of Excess. P 58.

59 Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 30.

60 “If thou knowest how to moisten this dry earth with its own water, thou wilt loosen the pores of the earth, and this thief from outside will be cast”... Sherry Salman, quoting Jung, in 'Dissociation and the Self in the magical pre-Oedipal field ', Journal of Analytical Psychology, 44 (1999) 81.

61. Michael Mack, Freud's Other Enlightenment: Turning the Tables on Kant, © 2002 New German Critique. “The superego will preserve the character of the father” ) 19. –said by Freud In the Ego and the Id (1923).

62 The author goes on to describe the fight, autonomously taking place as if apart from his own will or preferences, between the English and Shona parts of his psyche. Yet he himself has become incoherent. The refusal of the symbolic order is a refusal “reality” in terms of the reality of the ghetto and its lack of scope for transcendence of the violence it harbours.

63 Dambudzo Marechera, “Burning in the Rain”, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 85.

64. Once again, the Lacanian idea of the child’s identification of himself as “I” (a coherent whole) in the mirror for the first time, is given a political context and conceptual framework, that it doesn’t have in Lacan’s own formulation. For Lacan’s own view see the elucidation in Lacan and the Matter of Origins – 183-184. Shuli Barzilai. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999.

65 Dambudzo Marechera, “Burning in the Rain,” The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978),p 84.

66. Jim Perkinson, 'The Gift/Curse of "Second Sight": Is "Blackness" a Shamanic Category in the Myth of America? ' History of Religions, 42.1(2002.), 47. The suggestion I am making is that many of the subsidiary stories to the main novella, in anthology, The House of Hunger, seem like isolated shamanic journeys for the pleasure of self-discovery.

67 Friedrich Nietzsche, [ footnote: Increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus. "The spirits increase, vigor grows through a wound," quoth Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols.

68 Dambudzo Marechera, “Burning in the Rain,” The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978),p 67.

69 Jim Perkinson, 'The Gift/Curse of "Second Sight": Is "Blackness" a Shamanic Category in the Myth of America? ' History of Religions, 42.1(2002.), page 23.

70 Jim Perkinson, 'The Gift/Curse of "Second Sight": Is "Blackness" a Shamanic Category in the Myth of America? ' History of Religions, 42.1(2002.), page 23.

71 Dambudzo Marechera, “The House of Hunger”, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 77.

72 Dambudzo Marechera, “The House of Hunger”, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 79. . The writer’s haunting encounter with his own bones earlier precedes his later transformation into the “old man” and thus it seems to follow the patterns of shamanistic initiation as per Mircea Eliade (speaking of the Tungus shaman). “The pierced him with arrows until he lost consciousness and fell to the ground; they cut off his flesh, tore out his bones and counted them; if one had been missing, he could not have become a shaman.”

See Eliade’s: Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R Trask (Bollingen Series; USA: Princeton University Press, 1964), R Trask (Bollingen Series; USA: Princeton University Press, 1964), p 43.

73 Dambudzo Marechera, “The House of Hunger”, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 45.

74 Dambudzo Marechera, “The House of Hunger”, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 79.

75 See footnote 69.

76 Roger Walsh, “The Psychological Health of Shamans: A Reevaluation, 112.

77 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

78. See Shuli Barzilai. Lacan and the Matter of Origins, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999), p 107.

79 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

80 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

81. Dambudzo Marechera, “The House of Hunger”, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 80. This passage highlights the ontological nature of the shamanistic quest, by referring to the “head of the stream where all of man’s questions began.”

82 Dambudzo Marechera, “Burning in the Rain,” The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978),p 85.

83 See: Marechera, “Burning in the Rain,” The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978),. p 84. Marechera is variously “the ape in the mirror”, a demonic father Christmas (also no doubt, descendent from the mirror, and a whitewashed aristocratic gent. Thus his attempts to cross the developmental threshold, so as to become a fully whole and recognisable person, are sabotaged in three different ways. Nonetheless, he has a dramatic, symbolically sexual union with his female other whilst all this is happening. This indicates his vital connectivity to his Unconscious (and thereby pinpoints the problem he is facing as being externally political and not a result of his own pathology.)

84 Dambudzo Marechera, “Burning in the Rain,” The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978),p84.

85 Roger Walsh, “The Psychological Health of Shamans: A Reevaluation, 115 Walsh is quoting Eliade.

86 See: Jurgen W. Kremer, 'Ironies of True Selves in Trans/Personal Knowing: Decolonising Trickster Presences in the Creation of Indigenous Participatory Presence', ReVision 29, 4 (2007). Jurgen W. Kremer, 'Ironies of True Selves in Trans/Personal Knowing: Decolonising Trickster Presences in The Creation of Indigenous Participatory Presence', ReVision 29, 4 (2007), p 23, suggests an historical dissolving of the Cartesian self many enable us all to see more than we would otherwise have seen or understand. However, he says, it is “tricksters [who] move between heaven and earth […] They are the spirits of the threshold and the liminal.” Marechera’s “old man” character who appears in the final pages of The House of Hunger, is a kind of trickster (See page 24:) “Tricksters may manifest as a creative idiot, wise fool, gray-haired baby, crossdresser, or speaker of sacred profanities.”

87 Dambudzo Marechera, “The House of Hunger”, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 13.

88 Dambudzo Marechera, “The House of Hunger”, The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), 82. (“White chicken” is a Freudian associative slip relating to idea of “white chick”.)

89. Shamanism tends to suggest a notion of returning to a state of psychological fluidity or malleability in order to be “reborn”.

90. Dambudzo Marechera, “Burning in the Rain,” The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), pp 83-87.

91 See Shuli Barzilai. Lacan and the Matter of Origins, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999), 87.

92 Dambudzo Marechera, “Burning in the Rain,” The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 85.

93 Ibid. Marechera is, in a psychological sense, a “man to whom everything under the sun had really happened”. Dambudzo Marechera, Black Sunlight (London: Heinemann, 1980), p 82.

94 Dambudzo Marechera, “Burning in the Rain,” The House of Hunger : Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978), p 84.