LITERATURE REVIEW
Dambudzo Marechera lived during a
time of great and cataclysmic change for himself and his country. He lived between 1952 and 1987. He was
born under Rhodesian, paternalistic rule, but later experienced the beginnings
of authoritarian black rule in Zimbabwe. He developed a way of coping
that not only allowed him to rise above the madness that was literally
consuming him within the Rhodesian township (reservation) he grew up in, but to
perform alchemy on his soul. How did he
do it and what were the resources that enabled him to go so far as to achieve
an Oxford scholarship and win the joint Guardian fiction prize in 1979, despite
the extremely deficient nature of his social situation – that which he depicts
in the novella within the collected works, The
House of Hunger, as spiritual and physical hunger?
Dambudzo Marechera wrote novels,
plays and poetry and literary commentary -- all strongly autobiographical and
necessarily so, since a shaman’s basis for wisdom comes from inner experience,
which also includes autobiographical and historical elements of reality. His
books, published under his own name, and those sources in which his words have
been captured include:
Marechera,
Dambudzo 1978. The House of Hunger.
———.
1980. Black Sunlight.
———. 1988. An
Articulate Anger: Dambudzo
Marechera, 1952-87. Interviewed by Kirsten Holst Petersen.
———.
1992.
———.
1994. Mindblast, or, The Definitive Buddy.
———.
1994. Scrapiron blues. Edited by F. Veit-Wild.
———.
1999. The Black Insider. Edited by F. Veit-Wild.
[Some
of his work can also to be found here]: Veit-Wild, Flora. 2004. Dambudzo
Marechera: A Source Book on his Life and Work.
His
first book, The House of Hunger, won him a Guardian prize. His
later works were less well appraised due to their perceived difficulty and
seeming inaccessibility. Marechera’s short life also produced a few magazine
articles and unpublished manuscripts. “Dambudzo” is a Shona word meaning
“strife” and his life was a written revelation of political and social strife.
He developed his own manner for relating strife by combining elements from his
experience of growing up within a segment of Shona culture, with elements of
his British Colonial
education and European
(
In terms of considering the choice
of theoretical paradigm, it is necessary to acknowledge similarities and
differences between traditional Shona religious practices. “Mediumship” has some psychologically
similar dimensions to shamanism as such, since both a shaman and a medium are
chosen “by the spirits” and not on the basis of their own free will. The sign of having been chosen is a sickness
of the soul. This can be understood in
Marechera's case as a psycho-spiritual developmental crisis. The material limits of life in the ghetto put
so much strain on one who was intellectually gifted and spiritually hungry for
a better life that it caused the psyche to rupture in such a way that it gave
the future author direct access to the contents of his unconscious mind. This is the quintessential experience that
marks the transition towards shamanism in those whose egos are strong enough to
withstand the assault by the repressed parts of the psyche, and the lower parts
of the mind – such as R-Complex. [See: Winkelman] Whether or not one becomes a
shaman depends on the capacity to recover from the experience, and to integrate
one's knowledge of the Unconscious [or, more broadly, the lower mind] with
one's knowledge of the everyday world. To
be able to do this is quite a feat, and that is why the shaman is considered to
be more mentally healthy (at least in at least some important respects), than
the average person who has less integration between conscious and unconscious
levels of the mind.
Marechera’s life was not the only
one to follow a shamanistic pattern. I have found clear and obvious signs of such
‘shamanistic” sickness and modes of recovery in the more ostensibly Western
styled works of Nietzsche and Bataille. This
is not at all surprising, giving the inspired mode in which these other writers
produced their texts. James M Glass
captures many of the aspects of Marechera’s spirit in his writing on “The
philosopher and the Shaman: The political Vision as incantation.” [Political
Theory, 1974, 182]. Some
similarities between the philosopher and the shaman are:
Both […] see their task as primarily
one of curing, performing psychotherapeutic acts for the person or the audience
in pain. Each conceives of his role as a
vocation. Each creates and performs in a
highly individualistic, personalized fashion, the shaman establishing “his
relationship to the spirit world through his quest.”
Glass also adds: that both “claim a special insight and
manifest that insight through the curative capacities of a public “statement”
[and both] seem to thrive in times of intense stress and transformation” [ibid]
The nature of his environment surely had a lot to do with Marechera’s
outlook. Whereas a great deal has to
been written in critique, to acknowledge Marechera’s bizarre attitudes to life,
and indeed, what has been viewed as his quintessential rebelliousness against
authority – codified in critical terms as his “Oedipus complex” – none of the
current criticism to date has gone so far as to consider how, why and in what
sense, his strange attitudes towards the common aspects of existence and
towards authorities, was a perfectly valid adaptation to the particular
configurations of life – historical, social and psychological – that he
encountered whilst growing up. Indeed the psychological adaptation that was
achieved is nothing short of breath-taking – for it enabled the author to
undergo all sorts of hardships whilst still writing, and whilst attacking the
social injustices that surrounded him. His
holistic self-adaptation to a generally hostile and critical society cannot be
reduced to, or understood in terms of, an oedipal rebellion against society at
large. Even the patterns to be found
within his writing [footnote: see the sublation of the oedipal rebellion in The House of Hunger with regard to the
imaginative restoration of “The Old Man” to a position of nurturer and advisor
at the end of the novella] speaks of a transformation of the mind and spirit
that thoroughly transcends the “Oedipus complex”. Before
the transformation of his being that is brought about by madness, the author’s
mind is a stark and destitute “house of hunger”. Afterwards, he is nurtured by wisdom and
creativity that seem to come to his very doorstep, unbidden, yet to his
pleasure. The term “shamanism” has value in describing
the kind of radically renewing experience that Marechera underwent (albeit
without conscious intent, which is often the way with shamanism). The term for an experience of madness
transformed into astonishing powers that enable one to adapt and understand
one’s situation, is “shamanic initiation”. One can look to Michael Taussig to discover
a link between “shamanism, colonialism, and the wild man” *– (for shamanism
really is, in the psychological sense, a return to “wildness” and hence a way
to escape some of the hostilities of civilisation – especially when such
“civilisation” is imposed on one from the outside, as it under colonial
systems.) Jim Perkinson also has much to
contribute in terms of analysing shamanism as a product of oppression. His article is called: “The Gift/Curse of
“Second Sight”: Is “Blackness” a Shamanic Category in the Myth of
America?” So it is clear that living
through a time of crisis and enduring harsh and oppressive circumstances, can
suffice to produce shamans. An
additional factor for developing a shamanistic outlook is the imbibement of
“entheogens” like marijuana, which can lead to a subjective experience of the
divine. Marechera makes reference to
smoking this drug in his writing. [footnote
–the house of hunger]
It is the psychological wildness of
the “shamanised” psyche, which is lauded by a Nietzsche and a Bataille as
having redemptive qualities for “civilisation”. (Both see shamanic processes as producing mental
and philosophical states that can revitalise a society that has spiritually
lost its way.) It is precisely this quality of being “wild”
and hence extremely indeterminable (by choice, and often specifically so as to
evade the control of the dominant social powers), that separates this shamanic
approach intrinsically from various more cultural – and thus more regulated –
approaches to spirituality, such as spirit mediumship.
Above and beyond this factor of
being initiated as a shaman, Marechera was an unusual person for these times: a
black intellectual, a creative writer and (at least on the surface) as well as
being an apparent rebel. Simple empirical observation of the author would
take into account the qualities of character that I shall outline in the next
few paragraphs. He embraced
anarcho-socialist possibilities in his writings, which were always deeply
political, even aggressively so. At a psychological level, he sought a
reorganization of society along patterns that would allow for greater human
freedom. Identity was important to Marechera – not in the sense of having
a fixed point from which to pursue his politics, but in terms of his life
having an enduring impact. Above all, he wrote because he was afraid of
not existing. 1] Yet, his writing brought into existence a unique
subject, one that defied authoritarian political definitions. As such, he
should have found a unique place as a distinctively African and yet at the same
time a broadly cosmopolitan writer. He did not, however, achieve this
status during his lifetime. Yet Marechera
never gave up his fundamentally antagonistic position towards systems and ideas
that oppose the exposure of necessarily traumatic, repressed truths about the
human condition – specifically his own condition.
Various critical approaches – historical, psychoanalytic and more
narrowly literary – have been used in relation to Marechera’s texts. Many
portray the author in very colourful lights, worthy of his emotional extremity
and characterological incorrigibility. In plain terms, he displayed a
tendency towards nonconformity, disruptiveness and was at times plagued by what
looked like, and probably was, an extreme form of mental instability. A
substantial amount of very well written and theoretically sophisticated
criticism abounds concerning both his personality and his work. Many critical approaches have utilised
psychoanalysis in order to investigate the psyche of the author, yet conventionally
Freudian approaches, as have been tried by many critics, do not take into
account the possibility that psychological development may be non-linear, and
that aspects of the behaviour of the psyche that may look pathological (and may
indeed be so, in some respects) can have a developmental logic of their
own. “Theodore Flournoy” she says, was
the one who “first suspected that within the phenomenon of dissociation the
psyche is re-combining old material into something new.” (76) [footnote: Linking European spirit mediumship
of 1900 with discovery of the “unconscious”], Sherry Salman says, “Sonu Shamdasani
makes a compelling case that this formulation of unconscious multiple selves
was the true discovery of the unconscious.”
(ibid) Whilst this mediumistic
model provides an inroad into understanding the way in which Marechera wrote by
utilising his unconscious mind and simultaneously “conferring with spirits, it
is to be noted that he worked autonomously, and not in association with others
so as to consciously practice mediumship.
The independent nature of his spiritual practice, and his exploitation
of, rather than complete submission to, the forces of unconscious mind, in
order to develop his writing, suggests the model of shamanism rather than
mediumship.
David Pattison has suggested a view
that the drive behind Marechera’s work is in some sense to return to the womb
and start over again [footnote]. Whereas
Pattison points out the existence of such a drive, my thesis points out the
shamanistic (healing) logic of such a drive, and suggests also, that Marechera
was largely very successful in employing shamanistic modes of self healing in
order to escape some of the very negative psychological effects that would have
accrued to him as one who was brought up within highly oppressive colonial
social conditions. The well-recognised
theoretical notion of shamanistic death and rebirth is described by the writer
of Shamanism: The neural ecology of consciousness and healing, Michael
Winkelman, as reflecting “perinatal experiences” 35 and the restructuring of
the ego:
The death-rebirth experiences frequently
result in dramatic alleviation of psychosomatic, emotional, and interpersonal
problems resistant to previous psychotherapy 36.
Other critical approaches that do not take into sufficient account
Marechera’s spiritualism include that of Annie Gagiano, in her article,
“Marecheran Postmodernism: Mocking the Bad Joke of ‘African Modernity’” is one
who recognises Marechera’s “profound existential concerns”. [2] Her
recognition of Marechera’s existential concerns partly reflects Marechera’s
view that: “[The] truth inflicts first-degree burns on the body of both
the individual and the State. It affronts our complacency and all we take for
granted.” [3] Unfortunately, she mistakes his refusal to adapt
to the political and social status quo as a sign of his literary
“postmodernity” as opposed to his desire to come to terms with his experience
of trauma and oppose the existing orders. She goes on to quote his
self-representing protagonist as saying, “the development of social and
national and international man is one long denial of [what he calls] ‘the very
life within us…The spark that sets creation on fire.’ ” [4]
Gagiano then goes on to say this: “Not only is the ‘spark’ to which Marechera’s
narrator refers our ‘primitive’ or non-modern, elemental energies and impulses,
but it also contains what Marechera terms our ‘humane considerations’.” [5]
She therefore acknowledges Marechera’s apprehension about this ‘spark of life’
within him but does not consider that Marechera’s rejection of
“social and national and
[1] Flora Veit-Wild and Ernst
Schade, Dambudzo Marechera 1952-1987 (Harare: Baobab Books, 1988), p 34.
[2] 'Marecheran
Postmodernism: Mocking the Bad Joke of "African Modernity"',
Journal of Literary Studies, 18/1-2 (2006), 73.
[3] Flora
Veit-Wild.
Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on his Life and Work. (Trenton,
Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2004), p 370.
[4] Annie Gagiano,
“Marecheran Postmodernism: Mocking the Bad Joke of ‘African Modernity’.” Journal
of Literary Studies (2002) 18 (1-2), 73.
[5] Gagiano, Op.Cit.
international man” indicates that it is the nature of this spark of life
to ontologically precede and partly to resist all forces of social
organisation. She fails to go so far as to situate Marechera’s ‘humane
considerations’ as pertaining to the abundance accessible in Nature itself,
which can be known through shamanic journeying.
She misunderstands as "postmodernism" that which pertains to
shamanism's wise embrace of contingency, as the force of life that supplies its
nourishment and meaning. This capacity
to embrace contingency is a feature of a strong mind and has only peripheral relationship
to postmodernist playfulness, and postmodernist ideals of living on the surface
of meaning.
Whereas critics recognise certain
postmodernist elements in his form – such as multiple levels of narrative,
intertextuality, and resistance to colonial discourses -- I contend that his
work is founded on a very different emotional basis to that which is properly
understood as “postmodernist”. According to Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism is
what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for
good”. [6] This means that there is no longer any cultural or
experiential category of Nature, understood as different from the category of
‘Civilisation’ which can be referenced and creatively exploited by the artist
who writes from the perspective of late Capitalism. Since much of Marechera’s
experience is founded in a society that is at an earlier stage than late
capitalist development, this compelling definition has little to say about his
work, but seems to put it into a different category than that of
postmodernism. A different way of conceptualising his work is needed, one
other than the Euro-normative.
On the other
hand, Drew Shaw observes this
writer’s fallibility in terms of his failure to trumpet liberatory causes in a
more decisive and less ambivalent manner than the writer was inclined to
do. This seems like an accurate moral
criticism on the surface, and it is logical that one who has lived through
substantial history ought to feel morally obliged to do what one can to strive
for social justice in accordance with the terms of living that history has
dealt one. Yet such a point of view
fails to take into account shamanic doubling.
In these terms, one is both the individual who emerges from a particular
historical context in everyday time and space, but one is also much more than
that. One is also infinite spirit,
capable of changing into something else, and of being anything. Marechera’s “other” self – his ‘spiritual
self’ or doppelganger – had in mind broader and more ambitious
conceptualisations of how to enact political change, and this 'doubling' aspect
of the author's self is what Shaw overlooks.
For it is by virtue of shamanic knowledge, attained metaphorically and
conceptually by "leaving the body" (in practical terms, by journeying
into the unconscious and subconscious minds) that one is able to find the
correct poultice to heal politically and socially engendered traumas.
***
It is fundamental to understanding his style to recognise that Marechera maintains the veracity of “nature” as those aspects of being which the civilising process would tend to eliminate. In this way, he ironically asserts a positive epistemological value in the particularly rural and premodernist nature of some of his experience – (for this contains aspects of “nature”) – as a basis for his self-understanding. Furthermore, the rural aspect of his experiences may give him a stronger basis for a self that can both acknowledge whilst it resists the traumatic realities of macro-level political and social power. James Overton’s pivotal, and much overlooked article, “Shamanic Realism: Latin American Literature and the Shamanic Perspective”. He writes that shamanic realism involves:
The use of
"resolved antinomy" in the presentation of two often antithetical
worldviews, one shamanistic and the other Western, is employed in order to
formulate a credible worldview in the perspective of the implied reader. When
properly analyzed, many of these narrations exhibit several discernable levels
of reality such as death, dreams, time and space warps, which coalesce in resolved
antinomy in the text, frequently with the use of reality displacements of the narrative
voice itself.
This much of his analysis of what “shamanic realism” is could be applied to most of Marechera’s writing, without much of a stretch. However, Overton goes on to describe the “shamanic” element of “shamanic realism” as being “the realistic presentation of an esoteric worldview which is not the result of the imagination of the author, but principally of a system of beliefs of ethnographic origins.” This part of his definition does not match my understanding of Marechera, who often used ideas from the imagination, although his practices, I argue, were shamanic.
***
A significant strand of Marechera's
writing is related to his individual autobiography. Once again, the meaning of these elements
need to be understood within an overall shamanistic project of accepting
destruction of the absolute identity and undergoing spiritual regeneration in
order to embrace reality as contingency.
the In the anthology of early Marechera criticism, Emerging
Perspectives, [7] most of the critical approaches imply
that Marechera’s redemption and proper identity is be found in a posited
generic human need to conform to social normalisation (This is most
strongly reflected in David Pattison’s approach in the Emerging Perspectives
anthology and in his essay in his own book, No Room For Cowardice). [8]
. In fact, the opposite is what he felt to be
true.
Marechera’s position, politically,
socially and psychologically is one of intellectual and emotional radicalism,
expressed mostly as a rejection of conventional social forms. It is a central
feature of shamanistic wisdom to deny the value of ideological absolutes –
which are in fact wrapped up in a mode of thinking that perpetuates
psychological trauma:
"The common accusatory stance
towards perpetrators and victims reinforces such a constricted state of mind
and narrows the range of opportunities for traumatized individuals to reenter
the libinized social matrix." ---49.
Emery, Paul F. & Emery, Olga B. "Psychoanalytic
Considerations on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder." Journal of Contemporary
Psychotherapy 19.1 (1989): 39-53.
Marechera's shamanistic position
allows him to find his holistic self-redemption in departing from the
conventional tendency of those who have been traumatised to perpetuate
essentialising notions – ie. that there are "types" of perpetrators
and victims. He implicitly recognises
that this viewpoint is unhealthy and merely causes a repetition of history as
we re-traumatise each other on the basis of assuming fixed historical roles as
perpetrators or victims. The sign of his
insight into the cause of deep psychological wounding is that he rejects any
need to find a place within the dominant social order as a specific type of
postcolonial subject, preferring to invoke the rejected apostles of the
gospels:
Nothing but blows and kicks
Greet the friendly eye of thought
Which bloodied muddied shakes the
dust
To all humanity
And discovers terror the totem of
truth. [9]
The rejection of the status quo is
absolute for Marechera. Although it is based on revelatory insight as to what
most causes harm, it marginalised him, socially. This rejection provides the underlying
impetus for his work. It is the renunciation of one who wants
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[6] Fredric Jameson.,
Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. (London, NY:
Verso 1991), ix.
[7] Flora Veit-Wild &Anthony
Chennells, Emerging
Perspectives on Dambudzo Marechera (Trenton, Asmara: Africa World
Press, 1999).
[8] David Pattison. No
Room for Cowardice. (
[9] From Dambudo Marechera’s poem,
“Throne of Bayonets”. In Cemetery of Mind, [Ed Flora Veit-Wild] (Trenton,
Asmara: African World Press, 1992), p 35.
to make society over into a more
exciting form, where people, being shamanised by the short-circuiting of their
institutionalised thinking, would “start having original ideas of their
own.” ( p 262 Gagiano, source book
40-41)
The result of his nonconformity to
power structures is an adaptive response borne out of a context of war and
familiar crisis. It is also the source of Marechera’s insight into the
human condition, and it is not immaturity in any deep psychologically
(or, above all, epistemologically) obstructive sense. Rather, the author is inclined to step beyond
the call of duty in not only trying to save himself from succumbing to the
pressures of authoritarian and paternalistic cultures, but is trying to advise
others on how to do the best for themselves within these contexts, that he has
been successful in navigating, for the most part. His advice is based upon a deep understanding
of ontology that is produced by guided forms of partial regression of the
psyche or “shamanic journeys” that enable him to see the way that any existing
reality is politically structured and manufactured.
Current and previous criticism of
his work has incorrectly situated him within various theoretical paradigms that
originate from a Western economic and social context. Marechera, however,
employs a number of Western ideas and paradigms, which he uses in a way to
reject rather than to accept social conformity. A sensitive reading of
his writing will seek to understand where these paradigms are used, and what
kind of aspect of his own peculiar experiences the writer is trying to convey,
rather than impose a paradigm upon the writing, wholesale. In order to simplify this task for the sake
of focussing this thesis, I have decided to look at Marechera’s writing in the
light of the universal neurological structures that facilitate shamanistic
experiences. The fact that Marechera’s approach is based very powerfully on
insights that came to him when his mind was shattered, and thus revealed to him
its ontological structure, puts him in the camp of other revelatory prophets
who share less a similar culture than the capacity to exploit aesthetically and
spiritually, the unconscious components of the human mind.
Cultural elements, however, can be
taken into account in the way that Marechera employs aesthetic elements of
spiritualism from Shona culture, and often uses these ideas conceptually, too,
as in terms of his shamanic mediation between the spirits of the dead freedom
fighters (in “Throne of Bayonets”) and the present existing society of
Zimbabwe, which seems to have betrayed their ideals for a much better society
for all. The shattering of his mind,
however, that produced the shamanic initiatory experience was not based upon something specific to do
with Shona culture, but rather had to do with the oppressive conditions of his
environment during the time that he was coming of age. These
oppressive conditions were of a “colonial” nature, although it is worth bearing
in mind that any conditions powerful enough to cause the mind to stand outside
of itself, so as observe itself with acute ontological astuteness, can produce
the effect of “shamanic initiation”.
Insofar as they have not often
acknowledged the traumatic and coercive mechanisms of society, his
“non-Western” critics have not often acknowledged some of the common mechanisms
of social control. These critics tend not to come to terms with the
radical epistemological and political nature of Marechera’s project; that is
the critique of the nature of many of the existing social structures (which, in
Marechera terms, are “The emperor’s new clothes”) . It is of course an
ontologically-based critique, which Marechera makes. He sees that many things endeavour to appear
to be that which they actually are not. He
also understands implicitly that most forms of adaptation are made at the
expense of one’s vitality.
The writer, as shaman, wants to make
all things new. Marechera’s insight into
how to create a new form of society is by transcending the human condition as
it is conditioned to conformity by the Oedipus complex. He is one who has experienced in metaphorical
terms a “difficult crossing” of “the [shamanic] bridge” between the world of
fixed conventions and political norms and the fluid world of the psyche that
has faced its own dissolution and has survived that experience. By having confronted death, he now has forged
links between the world of everyday human reality (which seems all too rigid
and fixed) and the fluid world of “spirits” which is replete with as yet
unrealised possibilities. One could see
this kind of spirituality as based upon an individualistic reworking of Shona
spiritualism.
***
In terms of his critical reception
to date, Dambudzo Marechera can be viewed superficially as a postcolonial
writer who is driven to expose the contingencies of human existence – in
particular, as they are associated with political trauma and the universal
trauma underlying conformity to the status quo in politics and social life. Yet
this is a limited point of view in that it locks him a subject-position that makes
identity into a conceptual absolute (for instance, it implies that there is a
categorical meaning to having a black identity). This point of view was one that he explicitly
renounced. He was not
"postcolonial" in the sense of seeing history as the ultimate force
defining identity. Rather, inner experience
(and the capacity to work intelligently with it, in order to enhance one's
inner life) was his key concern. That he
wrote about those who had experienced the traumas of war in Zimbabwe, however,
does give him particular relevancy for those who have experience of Rhodesia and
Zimbabwe, during the bush war (1963-1980).
Therefore a limited “postcolonial” position
as a writer can be ascribed to him. As
one who interprets the effects of colonial power structures on the human mind,
as well as upon human society (for in a sense one is a mere reflection of the
other) – is not at all typical. Rather
than taking a position within existing systems of power relationships in
Shamanistic self healing involves a
constant battle against opposing forces, that can traumatise one again. If the length of his life seems to indicate a
certain amount of failure in healing himself of earlier traumas, the intensity
with which his light burned indicates precisely the opposite of this; and maybe
the sacrifice of the former was necessary to perpetuate the latter – his
intensity of honesty and commitment to personal freedom (something few of us could
attempt without coming to grief). In
this thesis, I also suggest that Marechera’s shamanistic propensities – first
seen in his ability to heal himself, as explicated by him in The House of Hunger – were also fundamental
to his writing style, which, although unconventional, was quite deliberately styled
in order to produce political and social changes in a direction that would heal
damaged psyches – especially those of the very poor and socially mistreated.
***
In terms of style, the core
aesthetic, political and psychological features of Marechera’s approach are of
the same origin –a product of living in an historical state of crisis. He
writes for those who have had similar experiences, or who are ‘spiritually
hungry’ for material that feeds the soul rather than the more intellectually
narrow desire for experience represented in an established form. The truism is that a shaman often appears in
a time of crisis is pertinent. Viewed in
this shamanistic light, his work is remarkably logically consistent to a
remarkable degree with the goal of personal survival and philosophical
surveillance of the human condition, especially under stress. He employs a very profound understanding of
the human psyche – especially as it conventionally relates to dynamics of hierarchical
power – in order to make many substantial critiques of the societies within
which he lived.
My intention in this thesis is to demonstrate an underlying
psychological link between Marachera’s aesthetic methodologies, and the
powerful shamanistic qualities in his writing. (His anarchism, as
political tendency, meshes logically with intrinsic shamanistic methods that
help to develop an individual's capacity for psychological
self-determination.) His whole oeuvre
can be seen in the light of the development of shamanistic sensibilities, and
an attempt to apply this mode of consciousness to facilitate his life and work.
This interpretational framework differs substantially from that which
critics have applied to Marechera’s work to date, although it employs some of
the psychoanalytical framework that David Pattison uses, whilst taking the
logic of this framework beyond conventional therapeutical means and into the
realm of the outright shamanistic. (The “regression” that Marechera
undergoes in some of his work is seen to be deliberate, self-conscious and
necessary for his healing and recovery.) My thesis contributes theoretically to
postcolonial studies by framing the life and times of this Zimbabwean writer in
a way that extends beyond culturally relativistic postulates. Rather, we
enter the neurologically universalisable field of shamanistic sensibilities,
that have pertained to early human cultures, and which can be theorised as
providing the source and basis for all religious experience. The question that necessarily follows is
simply, in which cultural and social contexts is it easier to be a shaman? Marechera’s life and early death testify that
modern nation states may be quite resistant to shamanism.