THE BLACK INSIDER – A SHAMANISTIC
VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY OF ZIMBABWE-RHODESIA
PREAMBLE
Marechera's
novel/intellectual treatise, The Black
Insider, offers various shamanistic tropes to delight and tease the
reader. Soul journeying and
communication with the spirit world and diagnosis of social pathologies are some
primary ones. However, it is the
author's role as "shamanic seer", and prophet for his own time, which
I am most interested in here.
The Black
Insider is a book of
considerable intellectual merit, in terms of its examination of the plight of
those belonging to Africa’s black diaspora as well as those who remain entombed
in the womb of Africa itself – (no doubt as a result of the effect of neo-colonial
global power structures, for this book is interested in a material analysis of
the black conditions, as well as historical, psychological, scientific,
literary and other facets of meaning that serve to influence identity). It is a book written by the author in exile
in the UK, and if we consider the metaphorical structure of the “Axis Mundi”,
this book can be positioned with the concern of travelling on the upwards pole
within the psyche towards the possibility of finding higher knowledge. The author questions whether higher knowledge
(beyond mere higher education) will enable blacks, who have lost their African
identities in the diaspora, to transcend their situational poverty and regain a
degree of empowerment. (This is unlike Black Sunlight, which takes us on a
downwards or regressive trajectory in the psyche, in search of ontological
knowledge, rather than knowledge that will enable transcendence of the status
quo.) Unfortunately, Marechera’s shamanic voyage of discovery reveals a
prognosis that is grim, due to the very lack of power that keeps blacks as it
were on the inside of the womb of existence.
The black identity (or indeed, black identities) is unable to give birth
to itself in a way that equals that of
other dominant identities – those for whom militarism represents their sense of
power (one may think of the Rhodesian white minority regime in this
sense.)
If we are to
imagine that the book takes us back and forward in time (along the horizontal
axis of the Axis Mundi), we move from experiencing Marechera’s squat in Britain
during the late seventies back to discussing the politics of the newly
amalgamated state of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, back to the squat and then to a
stand-off between academics/drop outs-turned-guerrillas and the “rest of the
world”, militarised as it is. This final
showdown prophetically resonates with an event that almost happened as the
short period of time of the State of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia came to an end, and the
country prepared to vote again, for a majority rule leader, and some hardline
whites that still existed within the State military regime (from Rhodesian
days) were preparing to take matters into their own hands. [footnote.]
The book was written during another difficult time in
Marechera’s life. Having overstayed his
student visa to study at Oxford University, he was also an illegal immigrant,
and had to maintain a defensive position against society at large. The writing investigates through different
intellectual lenses, the unlikely possibility of any solution to the African
political crises which were the foundation of the black diaspora. It is a book written from a position of
extreme psychological and cultural alienation.
Those of the diaspora are as alienated from themselves as they are from
the society that contains them. Those
who are intellectuals or artists have nowhere to go and, in the allegorical
terms of this book, are walled up within an abandoned Arts Faculty. [Footnote:
in psychological terms, this is the Arts Faculty that Marechera
physically abandoned when he dropped out of Oxford. Yet he is unable to move on from it, since he
is an alien in the broader society.]
Here they eke out an existence
between life and death as a war rages on around them. As drop-outs from society at large, these
“aliens” are considered to have a debilitating disease. Marechera opens his book by spelling out the nature
of this disease: a sense of being “subtracted from oneself.” It now seems quite evident what their
condition involves: the loss of self (and more specifically, as the book goes
on to tell it, the loss of the African core self or culturally engendered sense
of self.) Such is the nature of the
diagnosis, but what will be the cure?
It is vital to understand the nature of the illness. To gain some insight we can refer to the work
of Teresa Brennan (Freud and Femininity),
for, although her work focuses on femininity in relation to the masculine
psychological structure, her work has broader application to power relations
than that which would pertain merely to gender.
[Footnote: She speaks of
masculine and feminine “positions” that may be occupied by particular males or females in each case, rather than the more
conventional idea that one must always take the psychological position that is
generalisable to one’s gender.] Although it may seem strange enough to speak of
race in terms of gender constructs, Brennan’s approach, which analyses the
nature of subjectivity and its lack in terms of cui bono – who benefits – lends enormous explanatory power to the
metaphors that Marechera uses in this book, regarding the psychological
afflictions that pertain to being black, for this book is written as a kind of
negative dialectic – depicting, implicitly, the psychological “other side” of
the advantages of being white.
In diagnosing the affliction of the illness in The Black Insider, Marechera, as shaman,
traverses psychological boundaries between being himself “an insider”, and
being a social outsider whose very social alienation gives him a measure of
transcendence of an unexamined subjectivity.
The lack of political power in one’s homeland, and the state of being
exiled from one’s culture is responsible for such a state of mind of
Marechera’s “insiders”. This explains,
then, the fragmented nature of the subjectivity represented in the book, where
one illustration of subjective alienation rolls into another, without being
connected to the force of an overall transcendental ego. It is this “feminine position” of the
psychological insiders which also explains the prevalent metaphors in the book
of being half alive (ghostly and in touch with spirits) and (in the sense of
having being and identity) close to death.
The metaphor of the abandoned Arts Faculty is a makeshift womb, for those
with an afflicted subjectivity to wait out their time until an “African identity”
can be born. In the mean time, those who
have an identity, (which happens to be a military -- hence “masculine” one --
rather than the inwardly directed and thus “sickly” one of those awaiting their
own birth), are attacking the insiders from without. State power, as always, is
threatening to make war of different sorts – a danger of which Marechera, as
anarchist, was always conscious. What is
important for him, both as shaman and as anarchist, is to ascertain the likely
trajectories of this State power. In
making his assessments, Marechera’s mind finally returns to his homeland of
Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, to bring in train an alarming, almost prophetic vision.
2
A shaman must find a cure to heal society’s
sicknesses, and the author spares no effort in traversing different realms of
consciousness – to the heights of the heavens, and to the depths of the ocean
[footnote], back towards the past, and towards the possibilities of a future
(depicted as a grisly and dramatic resolution to a siege of state). [Footnote: it is in The Black Insider that the author most makes use of the mythical
“axis mundi” – the idea of there being a centre of reality from which it is
possible to travel “in spirit” in four different directions, as
described.] The book ends, as I have
just suggested, catastrophically, and this depiction of total destruction can
be read ominously, as an omen concerning the demise of those who seek refuge
from the strains of psychological and political violence raging in the dominant
social order. [Footnote: Perhaps with
this sign, Marechera foretells his own premature death.] Yet, the book deals not only with the
condition of the author’s own exiled state of mind, but also with political
circumstances reigning in his homeland.
At the time of writing The Black
Insider, Rhodesia was Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, a State in transition from white
rule. [Footnote: on Muzorewa/Marota]. The nation was not yet liberated but also not
completely under colonial rule, and it mirrors the author’s own state of being
betwixt and between. The metaphor the
author chooses to use is that which he uses to refer to Africa and Africans in
general – they are in a state of being between coming into life and existence
and not yet being born. It is this kind
of pregnant twilight and somnambulistic mood (that can be viewed as an extended
shamanistic voyage) that invokes the author’s imagery of ghosts roaming the
corridors of the Arts Faculty. This
half alive and half dead state is determined by the broader political and
social circumstances that the author has found himself in, and it defines the
psychological state he is in as he confers with “spirits” (those of the half
dead faculty members). Marechera takes
an approach of ontological development with his choice of metaphors – often
invoking the idea of a return to the womb and of the situation of being not yet
born. This emphasis on ontology
(approached through a psychological-developmental angle) in terms of analysing
the nature of selfhood and the nature of the African identity is in a
shamanistic-diagnostic mode. The outcome
of the shaman’s research on this basis is the discovery of a great
psychological split within society, between intellectuals and common
people. The prognosis on the basis of
this outcome is defined in the last few pages of the book as being violent
death.
Much has been observed about the complexity and
intrigue of The Black Insider. Yet few have considered the work beyond its
literary merits, and fewer still, in terms of the calculated effect it is capable
of having upon its readers. I say that
this effect has been “calculated” in the sense of having been intended by its
author, since the structure of The Black
Insider is psychologically designed to produce an emotional and more
broadly psychological sense of what it is like to have to fight a defensive war
against an encroaching aggressor, when one would much rather be doing something
else. The final scene – a war scene – in
the final passages of The Black Insider
is anything but gratuitous. It is faithfully
rendered in terms of the logic of necessity built up within the extremely long
and convoluted (in a literary sense) text, that leads up to a devastating
outcome.
Marechera intends to exert a direct and life-altering
impression upon the readers’ minds. It
is not intended that Marechera’s writing should filter into the reader’s
intellectual consciousness slowly.
Rather, Marechera’s writing functions in a way that is designed to give
the reader no place to hide -- neither, that is to say, directly in the realm
of the mind “or spirit” as this text would just as easily have it – or in the
comfort of the body’s placid existence as it is. Picture the ease at which it would be
possible to renounce the rights to either dimension of existence, if only one
would be assured of being left alone.
This is precisely what the structure of Marechera’s shamanic approach
assures will not happen. Instead the
text compels the readers to mentally vacillate between the possibilities of
resting comfortably in the life of the mind so as to transcend the most
menacing aspects of reality, or the acceptance of reality as it is. These are the catches: To live the life of
the mind involves living under siege by the rest of warlike humanity. Alternatively, one can struggle more
directly, in terms of the principle of “survival of the fittest”, to the death,
by being on the side of the aggressors.
Neither option is salutary, as both are costly in
human terms. Marechera’s way of making
us experience this is by building psychological tension by denying the reader
the option of a way out of the conceptual and thoroughly existential maze that
his text sets about building.
The Faculty
itself is small when seen from the outside; but inside it is stupendously
labyrinthine with its infinite ramifications or little nooks of rooms, some of
which are bricked up to isolate forever the rotten corpses within. [...]
The people
in the house are all refugees in one way or another; exiles from the war out
there. Wanderers from some unknown trouble. All pilgrims at the shrine of the
plague. The place stinks of
psychological wounds, which gives it a human fragrance. (p 25)
In this text, dualisms collapse, and if one looks to
find safety by preferring the side of a dichotomy that seems relatively safe
for the moment, one will not find it – mind versus body, inside versus outside,
warlike versus peaceable, are all eminently collapsible dichotomies, in The Black Insider. Moreover, they lead to existential
dead-ends. The structure of the book does
not permit a reader’s recourse to any of these conceptual dichotomies as a way
to find enduring stable ground. Rather,
the words delivered in the text are fluid elements of destructiveness,
undermining faith in hierarchical systems of power – which are, after all,
built on conceptual dichotomies that create, in turn, identities. The fluid psychological motion of this book
is therefore not in terms of valuing or enhancing the culturally normative
dichotomies we are used to – such dichotomies including those of race and moral
standing, whether high or low. Rather,
the psychological pattern that is reinforced by this book is in terms of the
Tao – with one sort of state of being flowing into its opposite (and, as mentioned,
always under pressure from each end):
"Inside-out is outside-in, but there is always bleeding. And hidden
persuaders." P 103.
If the work is designed to make us feel tense and even
irritable it is because it interrupts our natural train of thought as those who
are not positioned psychologically as “feminine”, but as transcendental
egos. It is also because of its
political realism. Marechera spoke, a
year before his death, of his Cassandra complex, of how he could tell that
certain things would happen before they took place. “Writers know more things than others do,”
Marechera said. The capacity to see
more, and to know more, might well pertain to one who keeps his ears open for
new language and ideas to write down, for use in a novel. Yet Cassandra was a magical figure, who knew
more politically, about the future than others at her time did. In equating writers with “seers”, it is as if
Marechera was saying that writers automatically fulfil a shamanic role for
their societies. In speaking of
Cassandra, and her failed attempt to save Troy from invasion, Marechera
suggests that this shamanic role of the writer is actually political.
The knowledge that Marechera had, about the “Arts
Faculty” at the University of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, and what was destined to be in
store for the residue of guerrilla fighters there, was not, however given to
him by “spirits” – at least, not entirely.
Marechera’s voice on the CD in an interview session confirms that he
already knew, through the political grapevine, presumably, that there were
dissidents within the University, who were being assisted by certain
sympathetic professors and lecturers. [reference the CD here] State military intelligence – which was
still largely white dominated – knew this, too.
They had developed a contingency plan to storm the Fine Arts building,
with heavy artillery, should the now incumbent president, Robert Mugabe be
voted in. You see, the
Zimbabwe-Rhodesian regime had been declared illegal, and so a new vote was
necessary in 1980, so that a new (and likely Marxist) government was in the
offing. Operation Quartz was never given
the secret signal to go ahead within hours of Robert Mugabe being declared the
winner of the State election, and so the description of the Arts Faculty taking
heavy shelling and being thoroughly destroyed, (as is depicted in the end
passage of The Black Insider) did not
take place in actual reality. Yet it
could just as easily have happened, and President Mugabe’s more recent rorting
of an election upon failing to win sufficient votes only confirms that the mode
of thinking behind planning Operation Quartz is hardly removed from the
Zimbabwe of today. The contents of The Black Insider are significantly
prophetic, in the sense that Marechera understood very well the political
psychology of this time and, as it turns out, the political psychology that
remained in place more than twenty years later.
3.
As I have indicated in previous chapters, Marechera’s
relationship to the texts that he produces is shamanistic. He endeavours to both interrogate and reveal
the underlying psychic structures of society, in order to bring about a
reorientation, in his readers, that would enable them to transcend the social
ills that he is diagnosing. According to
the Mircea Eliade, an expert on the topic of shamanism:
The shamans have played
an essential role in the defense of the psychic integrity of the community.
They are pre-eminently the antidemonic champions; They combat not only demons
and disease, but also black magicians. (p 508 Eliade)
It is the shamanistic process and
motifs, not the origins of shamanistic behaviour that might seem to determine
the content of the writer’s books that I am interested in. It is evident that Marechera brought to table
of world literary thought a very sophisticated – indeed in many respects
literary and social modernistic consciousness –however, he used a process of
psychological self-cure that had the same pattern as that of the shaman. Of
course, in the case of Marechera, who had a very advanced modern sensibility,
all of the above should be taken figuratively – the “demons” he combats are
psychosocial forces which also have a political dimension – such as in terms of
racism, and ideological systems that promote acceptance of political
inequality. The book, set in an age of
war, within a quarantine zone of an abandoned Arts Faculty, with a bomb on the
roof, depicts the author’s anguish at having come from a war zone (his country
of origin, Rhodesia, or at the time of writing, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.) Whilst writing the book, he was in Britain
illegally, having ceased to be a student at Oxford University. The book details his encounters with British
society and racism, his meeting and falling in love with “Helen” who moves in
with him ( p 49) and who influences his life as “a demon” ( p 49) despite
having resonances of being “of Troy” (p 25, 81). Towards the last few pages of the book we
encounter the fateful determination of those excluded from society because of
either their intellectuality, or strangeness, (thus making them social
misfits), to amass arms and then in turn to fight. The unsatisfactory situation
of the puppet state of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia is also strenuously critiqued in this
writing. The shamanistic aspects of this
writing are represented in the author’s experiential basis for a political
reading of his time and place and in the idea that much of life has a non-bodily
quality. The book is not exactly a novel
but, follows a form determined by oral historical narratives (and echoes them
in theme):
When Chaucer adapted
[the Decameron’s structure of a plague outside and the storytellers inside] to
his own specific needs […] he was really taking over a genre that unlike the
novel is most suited to the oral tradition here in Africa. ( p 89)
In The Black
Insider, the writer’s aim is to explore his own situation and the situation
of the world around him, in order to see more than others do. He is
emotionally driven to question and conquer forces of social and political
alienation. He sees and participates in
the parts of existence that are not part of the “spectrum” of ordinary
reality. He sees with the sensitivity of
one who has been wounded by life and thus feels it more intensely. He diagnoses a pathological condition of intellectual
exile and social alienation within himself, which is paralleled his sense of
something being wrong in the state of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. In the final pages of the book, he concludes
that recourse to violence is the only possible solution available to those who
can no longer feel “the temperature of the blood”. Thus, with shamanistic eye, he predicts the
violence that would take over in his homeland and by extension, himself. Just as the protagonist and his group take up
arms in the end of the book, so Marechera’s return to Zimbabwe in the early
eighties was a manner of succumbing to a guilty conscience about Zimbabwe’s
situation (and his lack of direct participation in the war of liberation)
rather than remaining an intellectual in exile.
The "outsiders" in The Black Insider are the flipside
or countervailing human attitude to the insiders' pacifism. The flipsides of being an outsider looking
into society or an insider looking out both represent psychological/spiritual
aspects of identity that have been excluded from the accepted reality of the
paradigm at hand, or of the culture of the day.
This position taken by the author implicitly accepts that psychological
woundedness (being subtracted from oneself) is the norm for most people
according to the writer.
The ability to walk away
from your own shadow, to walk away from the evidence of one’s own existence, is
at the source of dreams, ghosts, myths, spirits. In this room, each one has his own way of
doing it. ( p 76)
Helen, for instance, is “subtracted from the world” because of her sporadic
bouts of illness, which cause her pain.
( p 50). The author is
“subtracted” because of his sense of being in exile. The "shadow", in this sense,
signifies trauma and grievance. To walk
away from one's pains and agonies in the material world is to psychologically
disassociate one's mind from one's body.
Such disassociation leads to an encounter with the "spirit
world" – and this kind of encounter is common with shamanistic practice, as
well as in the case of reactions to severe trauma. The shamanistic sense of walking away from
one's shadow is brought out by the author's reference to the achievement of
disassociation in terms of "ability" (implying that it is not
involuntary – hence merely pathological – but a survival technique). In addition, there is a subtle echo of
meaning that comes from Shona culture, and its conception of shadows in a
sometimes metaphorical sense. When a person dies, if that person had any form
of grievance, it is understood that the person’s mumvuri (shadow) would shows itself before burial, rising against
the wall, where the mourners have gathered. The shadow will continue to grow in size if a
person with whom the dead person had some grievance with enters the room or
stays in there. This occurrence is
called kuita mumvuri, literally
showing up through the shadow. So, taking this background meaning of shadows
from Shona culture into account, "walk[ing] away from your own shadow" suggests that shamanistic journeying
is a means to dispel one's grievances with the world.
4
SOUL
FLIGHT IN SEARCH OF MEANING IN A WORLD OF EXILE
There is reason for the shamanistic flight or
soul ecstasy of the writer, who must, by conferring with the spirits (in his
mind) past and present, come up with a solution to the political and social dilemma
of finding social justice. The reason
described for the author’s shamanistic “soul flight” in this book is the state
of limbo he feels during his sojourn in Britain.
So many feeling
subtracted out of my world. This was the
tearing of the cloth of exile, and of the sense of being in the world in which
one yearned to leap out of one’s mind. (
p 61)
That is one side of the coin – the
being subtracted from one’s true self due to circumstances of exile: the other
aspect is that one may be interpellated by the new culture into having many
more selves, some of which may be perceived as hypocritical or somehow
false. The illusion of “walking away
from one’s shadow” becomes an attraction under these circumstances. ( p
76).
“Inside out is outside in” is the philosophical point that the book
rests upon. It is also the fulcrum upon
which the dramatic episodes of the book’s fictional narrative finally find a
basis for movement. The
inside-out/outside-in teeter totter feeds into the final inversion, whereby the
insiders who had been intellectuals and cultural outsiders, particularly
pacifists, take up arms to oppose (but at the same time become) the militarised
world that they were previously opposing.
This is a passive state of revolt, but a state of revolt all the same. The structure of the paradigm that opens up the key issues
of this book is in the refrain, “Inside-out is outside-in”. ( p 75) Paradigmatically, the dilemma being
described here has something in common with the claustrophobic situation described
in Jean-Paul Sartre’s NO EXIT. The problem Marechera analyses is that no matter
whether he turns himself inside out, to face the social world in terms of “the
temperature of the blood”, or faces the world “outside in” through logic and
the presentation of historical and scientific facts and ideas, neither
furnishes him with the substantial sense of identity and belonging which he
craves. Since the philosophical
parameters of the author’s thinking are cold and limiting, they seem to require
a shamanistic approach to supplementing the impoverishment of existence on
either side of the coin. Thus, The Black Insider is replete with
“shadows”. Yet the shadows of identity
are both necessary and elusive. In
Platonic terms, the “shadows” that Marechera wants to walk away from are the
aspects of the material world that have no thoughts or ideas to hold them in
place, except for the human body, which in biblical terms is “putrid clay”:
It’s not so much that
every man is not an island as what intercourse can two heaps of putrid clay and
crumbling bones hold together? ( p 76)
Thus the “putrid clay” of material existence is
the shadow. On the other hand, upon
walking away from “the evidence of one’s own existence” – the shadows on the
cave walls -- one then enters a world of pure abstraction, within the terms of
Platonism. Platonism is not the only
flavour of this book. In all it comes
across as a demonstration of intellectual mastery across a range of
disciplines: history, geography, astronomy, art, literature, physics and
chemistry. It is not just that the continuum of history seems to be condensed
into one spot in time: the old, abandoned arts faculty now appropriated by
various homeless bohemians and social misfits, trying to survive against the
war that rages "outside".
The imagery and context of the book (emotionally and imagistically) is
relatively flattened and intellectual in approach and style, rather than being
emotionally loaded. Yet within cold geometric terms, the book has both breadth
and depth. By going away and thinking,
we can assimilate the layers of symbolism and cosmological depiction of the
world contained therein to enhance our own awareness of the psychosocial
dynamics that create reality from the inside (subjectively and psychologically)
out (to the material realities that we perceive and limit us.) As a shaman, Marechera is not interested in
investigating the relative merits of various ideologies, but what their effects
happen to be on human life and consciousness.
One has to understand that these are the estimations he is keen to make
when he causes us to think downwards to the bottom of the ocean (as with the
sinking submarine image he invokes) or up to the stars in the far beyond of the
universe. Such is represented by the
character Otolith whose approach to life seems to insist (ironically quite
blindly as he collides into the protagonist) on instinct or a feeling for “the
temperature of the blood” as a basis for action. However, an accommodation to ‘the temperature
of the blood’, as the basis for orienting oneself in reality, is registered as
sinking. The shaman may go down to the underworld:
To throw the levers wide
open and let the damnation sink with one to the grim bottom of the sea would
leave pearls where our eyes once were. (
p 61)
Otolith speaks from the
“equipoise of the deep”. ( p 86)
[O]toliths enable the
miniature shark to appreciate its position, even when stationary, while the
flow of endolymph in canals gives a sense of balance during movement. And I almost collided into him. ( p 54)
The middle realm of the spirit is that created
by memories – (and indeed, by Marechera’s own autobiographical memories in
which fragments of ourselves seem to persist, within past contexts) -- it is
represented as follows:
The Middle World is
recognizable as our own biosphere but transposed into a nonordinary key. In the Middle World the shaman can travel
back and forth through human histories.
Sometimes the soul of a patient has remained in a past moment of his or
her life while the outer world has continued to move onward. To rescue such a soul, the shaman must travel
through the Middle World to this encapsulated moment and then find a way to get
the soul out of it. (p 36 Soul
Retrieval.)
The upper realm of the nonordinary reality, represented
in this shaman’s cosmology, is the heavens. I have also suggested that this is
a realm of abstract knowledge, facilitated by the functioning of the higher
mind. This realm is represented in this book as the stars and universe beyond, by
logic, science, Newtonian physics, Greco-Roman thinking (p 63) and the capacity
for a perspective that transcends human concerns by dissolving their appearance
into a kind of scientific vision of the nature of life. The non-ordinary aspect
of the celestial reality is given by the fact that stars and light travel in
ways which are not in accordance with common-sense expectations. ( p 46)
The purpose of the shaman is to create a new cosmological vision by
uniting all three levels in a form of unity.
The unity that Marechera creates, through his imagination and intellect,
is an intellectual whole, rather than emotionally harmonious form of unity. In
classical and shamanistic senses, the book is infused with a sense of the sacred.
The occupants of the house are in Dante's outer circle of hell. They meet ghosts from the past and present all
the time. Some of the ghosts are suggestibly the characters themselves (are
they alive or dead?), for the author warns us that death is just a drop of
blood away, just a single breath away. Ghosts of dead intellectuals might well
populate the corridors. Thus the writer loses and regains himself through
various mutations of identity. Varying situations and perspectives -- social
and literary -- might well also leave the characters feeling "subtracted
from" their selves. Helen, a 14 year old epileptic, who cannot read or
write, gives ultimate physical expression to this state. But being subtracted
from oneself is "not as bad as it sounds", she says as the book tells
us that "we all find ways to do it". Presumably others might do so
through dreaming or through creative work.
5.
What separates Marechera and his writing from everyday
social and political criticism is that he first seeks to find the effects of
these social evils within himself – by using methods of introspection, by
imbibing psychoactive substances and by pushing his own experiential limits to
the extremes. In aiming to experience the extremes – in terms of poverty,
exposure to the elements, social and political antagonism and confrontation
with authority – he expects to encounter the “spirits” that permeate and
instruct society. This enables him to diagnose the political diseases of
society which he can learn about by looking into his own experiences – that is,
into himself. As I have revealed in previous chapters, Marechera’s oeuvre can
be seen as chronologically following three stages typical of shamanism. These stages, which to the eyes of Western
anthropologists of the past (but not necessarily so much of the present)
appeared pathological, are, according to Roger Walsh, “the initiation crisis,
mediumship, and shamanic journey.” There is a continuity of the shamanistic
theme in Marechera’s oeuvre, which take the author through different stages of
shamanistic self development.
In The Black
Insider as well as Black Sunlight
Marechera’s artistic and intellectual development involves an encounter with
his own Unconscious in the form of various versions of himself, some directly
historical in a Zimbabwean sense, and some representing literary figures that stand
in the place of archetypes, all relevant to the matter at hand since, from a
Jungian perspective, the experience of archetypes within one’s own unconscious
is part of the process of gathering insight that enables the shaman to heal. Marechera’s
writing is original in that it draws its creative and intellectual inspiration
from reference to classical literary and intellectual figures – such as Cicero
and Helen of Troy, standing in as archetypes for certain cultural attitudes – rather
than from the Jungian archetypes, which Jung controversially claimed were
universal. His ideas and choice of
literary tropes are not conventional or formulaic in any terms, but reveal
something specific about his own historical and psychological junctures at the
point in time in which he wrote. In a
more direct political sense, The Black
Insider is also interested in
exploring the farcical puppet state of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. (1979-1980 was the
year in which the colonial regime tried unsuccessfully to install a pro-white
regime with Bishop Abel Muzorewa as its figurehead.) The imagery that Marechera
uses to portray his sense of reality (concerning his own situation as a
homeless individual in cultural exile in Britain and in terms of the political
nature of the regime at home) was the idea of “limbo”. Thus, just like the State of Zimbabwe, and
the state of world racial relations, all in limbo, since imperfectly manifested
– the black identity, too, was “not yet born”.
Here [in the Africa
Centre] was a womb into which one could retreat to nibble at the warm fluids of
an Africa that would never be anything other than artificial. ( p 66)
What Marechera deals with in this book are
issues that have been prematurely solved in terms of a resigned attitude and
pragmatic acceptance within many spheres of otherwise advanced society. What is
the real value of social Darwinism, and doesn't it undermine the very basis for
humanity's enjoyment of itself? Isn't it better to stay, "shut up in one's
head" than to compete in this fashion? What is the role of the
intellectual within a society that is either metaphorically or literally at
war? Indeed what is and isn't "civilised" about fighting? Marechera seems
to be identifying with political liberalism in TBI -- but also explicitly
accepts a conservative valuation that intellectuality and higher culture are an
expression of social sickness or a "plague". Thus, damaged
subjectivity can be creatively and intellectually fruitful (a shamanic insight,
since it is his very wound that makes the shaman spiritually fruitful):
The enigmatic smile of
the Mona Lisa is probably the best outward expression of the rank and terminal
cancer deep inside her and her age. It's as though some secret fungi, some
impossible bacillus infects us through an incision in our mind and imagination
with a fatal yearning for beauty, terror, horror, creativity. Certainly the
common imagination portrays artists as consumptive, tubercular and generally
sickly. Thomas Mann's works seem exclusively to consider this worth exploring,
not just in artists but also in musicians and other upper-caste progenitors of
the sublime. (p 94)
In this,
he is a person of his time and place. No doubt this cultural feeling was contributed
to by Marechera’s’ own guilty non-participation in the war of liberation,
something he was tackled on by one of the characters in The Black Insider. This
outlook also appears to reproduce in part a colonial perspective which sees
“sickly” liberals as opposed to the forceful warriors of society by virtue of
their own weak natures. Whilst Marechera
accepts this dichotomy as a useful general delineation for the parties –
insiders versus outsiders – in the book, he in fact perceives things from the
point of view of the sickly “insider” and thus reverses to some degree the
force of this right wing value judgment.
His questions are culturally conditioned but deeply humanistic, for they
seek to discover what the meaning of society ought to be for those who are
intellectual and accepting of dissent.
Is the book to be considered a product of madness? No. It comes across as a near
toning down of the author's emotions -- the less he is capable of roaming, the
more intellectual he must necessarily become. (He does have a sexual fantasy or
two, however, the details are skipped over -- the tone of the book is
repressed, urbane.) But the context of the writing of the book, the context of the
book is the corridors of the mind -- the inward world that one has -- after one
has been locked up for one's drapetomania: I refer to his absconding from the
social control of the university, to take up an independent life as a vagrant
in Britain. This is an ironic term that
seems to apply to Marechera’s condition in the world – and which those who are
inclined to condemn the author’s writings as “mad” should feel free to resort
to, in order to bring to the surface their true ideological predilections.
Culturally, Marechera was at least primarily African, and even when locked up
to think alone, his images and ideas are grass-roots democratic and
collectivist. He does not quite feel that we are the victims or products of a
cultural apparatus to the degree that Foucault does. Nor does he accept the
mind-body dualism that would lead to the conclusion that mental processes could
lead us to a realm of pure play (Derrida). There is always something more
deeply and materially political at play than this in Marechera's writings. Yet
he jokes about identity, and feels ambivalent about the freedom that has come
to him through the removal of colonial control from Zimbabwe's people.
"The winds of change have cooled our porridge," he says, nonchalantly.
It is now possible for those who have been liberated to eat it. This
non-serious tone of the approach to national politics was part of a grass-roots
participatory tradition in that part of Africa. On the part of the whites --
who also had their oral history, news and reactions to it, travelled through
the grapevine. Nicknames for certain things also implied a degree of contention
as to their value. But always with an ironic air.
Marechera's overall perspective in The Black
Insider iscosmological.
It is in a literary and philosophical sense naturalistic. That is to say that
this is not a moral universe, but rather one in which human affairs are dwarfed
by much more dangerous and spectacular things going on, on larger physical
scales than those which pertain to human life.
The narrative reveals that brains and a whole continent (Africa), too, can be
eroded by natural physical forces – another shamanic insight, since our eyes
are not accustomed, without training, to actually seeing this occur. The more
energised human elements simply die sooner than the rest. There is no natural
justice, nor even necessarily any human recognition of one another. Against
this indifferent backdrop, timeless dramatic characters move their way from
situation to situation. The past and the present, high culture and the lowest
forms of culture mingle freely in this timeless zone, which is just a breath
away from death. Life is spread taut and
thin within this writing – both in tone and in terms of content. Dante's
inferno beckons -- or it might have already swallowed up the building’s occupants?
To be able to read and
write is therefore only the first downward step towards the first circle where
black fires rage inconsumably. (p 33)
Stars explode in the outer universe and so do
the wretched, tragic lives of human beings – particularly those of politically
aware writers.
When the war came out of
the blue sky like something out of Ixtlan, only more deadly than the lessons
Castaneda learnt, it destroyed most of the buildings and what was left of the
intellectual atmosphere was this plague-ridden building with its diseased ghosts
of arts’ graduates still wandering about in the corridors waiting for tutorials
and seminars that were never to come.
Waiting until today. (p 47)
The lessons
that Castaneda learned are “deadly” just because shamanistic insights always
reveal the human soul as it is – violent, clawing for power, often famished and
destined to die. (Nietzsche thus warns
of the psychological danger in knowing the Truth.) The destruction of his homeland through the
war is in the background. His invisible state of internal exile as a Zimbabwean
intellectual provides the ghosts. Ultimately, this shamanistic seer is faced
with this realisation that intellectual attitudes – although mere surface
attributes of consciousness and identity – tend to be the guiding principle by
which we all sink or swim. The book is a
tragedy, because the writer’s astute observation of his own psychological state
and the psychological states of those around him, lead him to conclude that
having become emotionally and psychologically “subtracted from” their own
selves through a state of being in cultural exile, the exiles must necessarily
become victims all to the insidious effect of adopting and succumbing to
cultural “attitudes”. This leads to
their deaths and undoing. The Black Insider is thus a book wherein the
shamanistic aspect of the writer diagnoses the source of evil in the
world. Since a shaman deals with the
questions of life and death in relation to the spirit world, the author
encounters his answers in placing himself in physical proximity to the spirit
world. For, every shaman must face his or her own death. For shades and ghosts abound within the
labyrinths of the abandoned arts faculty in which the cultural exiles dwell and
death is “only a drop of blood away”.
Indeed, the exiles, like ‘the black identity” wait in Dante’s limbo, in
legal purgatory (as vagrants) and in a state “not yet born”.
7
In another sense, Marechera’s “Faculty of Arts” is
cast as something between a kind of “Tardis” and Michel Foucault’s Archaeology
of Knowledge:
The Faculty itself is
small when seen from the outside; but inside it is stupendously labyrinthine
with its infinite ramifications of little nooks of rooms, some of which are
bricked up to isolate forever the rotting corpses within. The plague has taken its toll of those like
myself who have sought refuge under its dark wing. ( p 25)
The people in the house
are all refugees in one way or another, exiles from the war out there. Wanderers from some unknown trouble. All pilgrims at the shrine of the
plague. The place stinks of
psychological wounds, which gives it a human fragrance. (25)
We do not know if the characters are really alive or dead (hence,
spirits), but once again, this situation seems shamanistic – the “wounded
healers” are also inheritors of intellectual knowledge (Liz, indeed, is one of
the old faculty members. The others –Cicero, Helen and Otolith, to name a few – are all like
spirit-helpers. Liz is a female professorial type who has a body like an onion
and such thin white skin you can almost see the tea she's drinking pass down
her neck to form a brown stain under her pink dress. Helen is implicitly “of
Troy” and her beauty raises questions of what is the depth and which is the
surface? Again and again, these questions
echo through the book in a melancholic refrain. If this was a postmodern book,
in theory, the writer would be happy with 'all surface'. Yet it is by coming to
accept the idea that the "insiders" (shut away in an arts faculty as
individuals suffering from an intellectual disease) are just the
"surface" which causes the author to take up arms against a
descending military force from the outside. It is what forces him into an
absolutist position, which ends in his own death and in the death of Helen, who
was all that the protagonist claims, he had ever wanted. “Otolith” is – in
biological terms – the part of the fish that determines its place in the
water. In the case of the character of
this book, this part of the fish does so very ineffectively, for the protagonist
collides with the disoriented Otolith.
(p 54). He represents “the underwater of time” –that which is viscous
and connected. This is the underworld of
nonordinary reality. Cicero is one who
opposes war on an intellectual basis.
All of the characters suffer from the plague, which keeps the military
away from them, and affords them some protection from the war being perpetuated
“outside”. They are all therefore
“insiders.” There is a positive flipside to this reasoning: The “plague” is stigmata but, at the same time, power – specifically
the power of the shaman who is necessarily a “wounded healer”:
Thought is more fatal
than bilharzia. And if you want to write a book you cannot think unless your
thoughts are contagious.( p 34)
Where the conceptual similarities between
Foucault’s paradigm finishes or doesn’t work is in the highly idiosyncratic map
of knowledge that Marechera draws out, in terms of the ‘Arts Faculty’. It is
based as much upon his own experiences perceptions, as upon the assumption of a
shared history of knowledge. This
authorial approach accurately reproduces the psycho-social conditions governing
the Rhodesian educational system’s laxitude in enforcing social conformity –
and out of failure to generate this shared conformity, failure to generate shared
assumptions about the world that constitute what is viewed by those in more
regulated parts of the world “knowledge”.
Yet, lacking sufficient regulatory mechanisms for efficient control of
citizens’ inner lives, it seems logical that the colonial system also lacked
the consequential effect of a shared system of knowledge, more or less agreed
upon across the colonial society. As
Jock McCulloch argues convincingly in his Colonial
Psychiatry and the African Mind, the kind of social control that has been
in Europe through the historical psychiatric disciplining of its societies (as
related by Michel Foucault) was not to be found in this same sense within the
auspices of colonial African control.
So, we must come back to an experiential basis for the urgent
development of practical knowledge. We
come down to a shamanistic basis for knowing. We must also come down to the
question that is the eternal and underlying refrain of this book, the one that
I have framed here in the following terms: “What would be the difference
between acting according to ‘the temperature of the blood’ versus according to
the ‘shadow’ of one’s being, that leaves behind objectifying evidence of one's
own existence?”
You don’t come on like you used to do back home. I mean everyone looks phoney and suspicious
and cynical and there’s no black feeling among us any more. ( p 62)
This is the crux of the problem that the Platonic dialogue of this book –
“a sort of tutorial” ( p 47) raises. Shouldn't
one "walk away" from the latter, and into one's own subjective idea
of Africanisation, rather than become the victim of the cultural parasite of
"attitudes"? But perhaps by virtue of the very nature of the question
(logically, one does not walk away from one's shadow except through trickery)
the answer is that one becomes, necessarily the victim of "attitudes"
, which is, according to Marechera, the fate of every thinking being. Yet all is not lost, since there is at least
practically at times, if not always, a level of existence (the temperature of
the blood) that lies beneath the interpellating forces of society. This is what Marechera longs for and what
surely drove him to the community of Tolmer’s squat. Yet, as the novel proceeds, we see that what
originally began as community has become corrupted by the inevitability of
“attitudes”. The assuming of attitudes
is – as we saw earlier, (and as the shaman’s sensitive eye clearly detects) –
the basic cause that leads one to become subtracted from oneself; out of one’s
mind, like “Caligula or Ephemeral Macbeth”.
When this happens, the shaman’s spirit, abstracted from his body and
from social and concrete circumstances, may go wandering away in search of his
authentic self.
As we can see from the complexity of the analysis above, Marechera's
work contains various psychological and social analyses of power relations that
are deeply philosophical, although he is at least as much, if not more so a
poet than he is a philosopher. The philosophy of Platonism is invoked in
walking away from one’s shadow -- which means becoming separated from one’s
concrete being within a realm of pure abstraction. In the writer’s own terms, this means to walk
away from the physical evidence of one’s own existence, leaving it behind,
going into the shamanistic spirit realms. Quite evidently, he vigorously
pursues various complex systems of aesthetics to give form to his insights and
to make them seem to emanate from a sixth sense. In taking this approach, the
author works under stress – since cultural change and the pressure to adapt to
new and foreign circumstances is always a great stressor. Seen in this light,
Marechera’s ability to face life in a way that embraced the possibilities of
self-transformation and living, as opposed to giving in to psychological and
social stasis and dying (the lure of thanatos, when things get too hard), is
really remarkable. It is not that suicide was not entertained by him – it was
in both Black Sunlight and it is
mentioned as a seduction to be rejected in his journal entry in Mindblast. Overall, he approached what
was negative about life with a view to transform it, in terms of what James M
Glass (in his 1974 discussion of the similarities between philosophers and
shamans) calls “eros”. This is the positive or socially unifying aspect of the
human psychological potential. Marechera critiques in order to destroy the
rhetorical force and political reality of what he sees as being negative social
forces – eg. racism, austerity, degradation and poverty. He wants to create a new
cosmological relationship between the literary and mythological forces of the
past as well as the present and humanity itself. Thus, there is an element of
eros (the desire to rebuild and start anew) even in his criticism, which must
first clear the way for such a transformation of the human potential, inside
and out.
8.
In a later version of Black Sunlight, the author has already drawn a conclusion that he
faces the world unambiguously from the outside, whereby he identifies with
anarchists and social outcasts. In The Black Insider, he is still working
through the meaning of his social status in his newly adopted British
context. On the one hand, he finds it a
miracle that the social container of British society seems to expand to include
him, on the other hand, he is and remains an outsider, both in terms of his
legal status in Britain (no longer a student, he was not permitted to stay),
and in terms of his own inner feelings of exile. There was also the aspect of British racism
that sealed his outsider status.
In terms of African traditional religion and
mythology becoming “subtracted from oneself” in the sense of not being present
to oneself would be equivalent to becoming a disembodied spirit or ghost. In either case, one becomes ghostly and insubstantial.
So, whether looking at the world from “the inside-out” or from the “outside-in”
in either case “there’s always bleeding.”
( p 75). Marechera’s book investigates, philosophical and
experientially, both sides of the coin, in order to determine which of these
options make the most sense. Ultimately,
there is a deadlock, since neither option satisfies or lends security. Reality
is ghostlike and incomplete whether the thinker dwells, “solidly in my own mind
or in the real Africa of give and take.”
( p 75) The pragmatic option of fighting and engaging in defensive
warfare becomes the default eventuality at the conclusion of this book.
What interests us here is the writer’s exploration
of nonordinary reality – his approach towards a shamanistic notion of identity that
supplements the felt inadequate aspects of ordinary existence. One of the main metaphors in this book is the
prismatic and time-delayed nature of light which creates the visual effects and
illusions that enable us to define our identities. “[S]uch of what we know of as real life is
limited within the thin thread of colour in which we have positioned ourselves
in the spectra of the universe.”(46) The metaphor implies that ordinary reality
is indeed too narrow an affair, and that it is natural to supplement it with a
sense of nonordinary reality. This
argument, running through the book, furnishes a philosophical basis for the
acceptance of shamanistic visions which take place in the world of nonordinary
reality.
At the time of writing this book (submitted to
Heinemann in 1978 and again with revisions in 1979), one gets the impression
that Marechera is still trying to find a way to work within the establishment
of a First World culture, in order to get ahead in his career. He writes
without sociology -- which is a lack that is quite obvious. He tries to explain
the deteriorated condition of the black subject within British society as being
the result of alienation caused by a plague of language and cultures not one's
own. Marechera's idea of language and culture is very akin to Richard Dawkins meme theory. One catches language
and culture as a disease and also in particular ways -- modes of cultural
consumption as a determination of one's social class. The right wing values as
well as the force of political and economic necessity that underlie the drive that
black Zimbabweans have to succeed in Britain during 1979-80 (and still, no
doubt, that drives them currently even more so in that direction of proving
they can "make it" abroad)also gives the writing a flair of social Darwinism.
That is, language and culture are seen to act as an affliction that compels one
towards narrow individualism and success whilst undermining the basis for
social solidarity and therefore for real communication. The social Darwinism
depicted is of those at the bottom of the pile losing their cool with each
other as they try to make it higher up within the system.
Conforming to the literary demands of the times was what Marechera failed to do
-- and hence was called upon to write and rewrite the book four more times,
with unsuccessful efforts. Two of the subsequent manuscripts appear to have
been lost by Heinemann for all time. Black Sunlight -- the fourth manuscript
to be produced by Marechera as the requisite African novel -- was reluctantly
printed at last by Heinemann as a kind of market-experiment. Read less as a
novel, but more as being a thrilling kind of detailing of the phenomenological
experience of being young, brilliant, and alienated in Britain, The Black Insider is
a remarkable work, which shows the writer's early sense of the alien kind of
world he found in Britain. It is an inside-out look at the subjectivity of
cultural alienation, and the feeling of it as a kind of organic disease which
afflicts everybody in exile, in different and unpredictable ways.
9
THE PLAY (within the play)
The
play (within the general “play” of the narrative) is in the style of George
Bernard Shaw and relates to the interim government of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia (1979).
The protagonists in the play are recognisable (now historical)
characters, some of whom occupied the cabinet of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia’s interim
government. Bishop Muzorewa (from the
UANC), prime minister of the government that had power for just the year of
1979, has been given the character of “Bishop”.
According to Flora Veit-Wild’s introduction to the book, Nyanza is
Professor Stanlake Samkange, who was a well-known writer and historian. Chief Chirau represents traditional,
“native”, interests. Marota, according
to Veit-Wild, is Byron Hove, “who shared the Ministry of Justice and Law with a
white minister in the cabinet. He was
sacked after two weeks of office because
he took an uncompromising stand and would not allow himself to be used as a
puppet.” ( p 16 TBI)
Marechera, in his play, tackles the issue of a
cloying political passivity: Nature is a woman who gives birth naturally, and so we cannot understand
it. One can at best facilitate the birth
to whatsoever requires it by remaining passive and allowing Nature to take its
course. God’s will is thus done. Harold MacMillan and the benefits of the “winds
of change sweeping through Africa” are sardonically invoked in the lead up to
the play. The blacksmith (according to
Throne of Bayonets, the cousin of the shaman, the magician, Ian Smith) said that
there would never be black majority rule in a thousand years. So, from the
point of view of some diehards of the Smith regime, the winds of change were
blowing in the wrong direction. They hold that they were proven right by the
kinds of abuses that Mugabe is inflicting on his people. The game of the
colonials was to play Britain as some kind of naïf concerning the “real” nature
of black Africans. You can see how Marechera mocks this perspective in the play
when he has Smith pontificate about the blank faces, and one of the more alert
representatives in government remarks sarcastically about the fact that the
black masses would now develop and “acquire characteristics”.
10.
SPIRITS AS MEDIATORS BETWEEN ‘WORLDS’
Ghostly feelings and paradoxes are the writer’s way of
suggesting that within any paradigm that depicts ‘reality’, there always seems
to be something essential that is excluded from the picture. Thus, he goes in search of “shadows” but, at
other times, seemingly in search of them as conceptual constructs left out of
the sense of reality. Thus he moves from
one kind of reality to its dialectical opposite, invoking the spirits or
“shadows” to show themselves for what they are, in either case. In so doing, he involves himself in the role
of shaman. He invokes the parallel
reality of spirits, understood in terms of what has been logically or
conceptually excluded from the realms of normal reality. He crosses the mythic shamanistic “bridge” to
“the other side”. The shaman detects
that we all do it, (some to a more frightening degree than others), for nobody
is completely happy or content with everyday, physical existence:
‘Subtract a man from himself and all you’ve
got is just a shadow,’ he said looking pointedly at me.’ ‘Chip away at the
marble, down to the substance that holds the core together. There, we are mere abstractions. Ephemeral Macbeth travelled in that
region. Caligula too. It is the inwardness of a candle which mere
breath can put out. When a man crossing
a bridge meets himself going the other way, the void beckons him to
follow. (p 76)
The necessity
of having ghosts to mediate between various realms of reality is that they
enhance our sense of meaning about the world.
The central paradigm of this book is the one that involves inclusion and
exclusion, both an intellectual one and one experientially related to the
environment of the exile, which also works as a model of his own mind: “Inside
out is outside in.” The
book is critical but from the inside, and also from what in dependency theory
would be called a "margin" (a colony/ex-colony) ... so, marginal and
central at once. Yet being on the
cultural margins can be a useful exercise from the point of view of standpoint
epistemology. Furthermore, accepting ones’
weak or weakened position in relation to the society as a whole can give one a
sense of heightened objectivity about the nature of the social and political
phenomena that one encounters.
In this book, the author seems to suggest that autobiography was an
approach he has put behind him. He
explains his autobiographical orientation of the past as relating to his need
to assure himself that he existed, as a way of compensating for his weak social
status in rural, colonial Africa. Now, it seems, he has met with the
psychological surprise in terms of finding British liberal society’s
accommodation to his needs. It’s not
that everything is perfect – there are still the racist aspects of British society
to contend with, and a grinding poverty that he seems to have made his lot,
with only intermittent reprieves (in forms such as small payments of writer’s
royalties from Heinemann or a job as writer in residence at a local
college.) However, the subjective
force of autobiographical genre appears to not to be
what is needed by the author at this time.
Rather the perspective is one of the black intellectual, who reads the
society he is in from the point of view of an outsider – a foreigner – but from
the perspective of one who is down and out, looking at the British culture from
the inside out. By means of the insights
granted to one on the margins (as per standpoint epistemology) and by means of
a focussed display of intellect and knowledge, breadth and depth, Marechera
claims the role of an objective social critic.
11
SHAMAN’S DIAGNOSIS OF THE EVIL SPIRITS
The most damaging effect on humans is that of
social control as a form of oppression. It
leaves the writer devoid of a feeling for “the temperature of the blood”, and
leaves him an empty shell – the victim of his own attitudes wrought through his
colonial education:
When I was a child I
played childishly; when I became a man I put away the ghost of literary thought
that stuffed me with attitudes in my student days. What is it, this vast room
we call the sky; these endless miles of reality thickly knit with grit? The
waiter must stretch his lips if he wants to get tips. We stand each to each
like sides of rock once quarried mercilessly by blind Victorian adventurers who
only sought the few gold veins in us. They have extracted the best part of our
being and left us like this. I woke up long ago this morning with aches and
pains in all the things I took for granted. This desperate tinder becomes
youth. Even the death certificate is not quite like me, said Lazarus when he
came out of the tomb. Things always happen in the worst possible way, however
hard one tries to unbend them. I can never look a rational thought straight in
the eyes. Hate me if you wish, but not too offensively. And there I was
yesterday hammering the typewriter keys with a worldliness not of this world. Thoughts like claws must be sheathed.
Something always happens to show us how blind we really are. This is not only
stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine. We cannot all afford
the luxury of self-disgust but someone has to do the dirty work. That means --
me. My hunger has stamina enough. My actions are always my fault though my
thought would plead otherwise. Attitudes--attitudes.”( p 38)
The anguish of Africa taken as a whole, and the
fierceness of the subterranean struggle for survival -- the writer’s use of
naturalistic facts evoke the Sacred. The northern lights seem to be the
metaphor Marechera uses to represent the illusion and reality of African
identity. The form of this identity is both illusion and reality -- both
objective and subjective. The phenomenological impact of it is however, full of
the anguish of alienation and African grit of sheer determination to survive
that aesthetically reflects the naturalistic life and death of the stars.
According to Mircia Eliade quoting Rudolf Otto's Das Heilige of 1917, Otto finds,
“ the feeling of terror before the sacred, before the awe-inspiring mystery
[...], the majesty [...] that emanates an overwhelming superiority of
power" ( p 9, The Sacred and the Profane) . It is to this end that
Marechera employs his naturalistic, astronomical descriptions.
Marechera’s shamanistic visions are anything but
the feel-good visions of recently popularised New Age shamanism. Rather, he writes from a condition of being psychologically trapped by his
inability to feel authentically himself whilst in exile in Britain, along with a
deep lack of psychological predilection to return home to fight a guerrilla war
to overturn the colonial puppet government of the Muzorewa regime ( 1979). This
subjective state was reflected in the political conditions of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia
at the time. Since the government in
power was a puppet regime to mask colonial interests, there was no chance of
experiencing authentic liberation. To be
an intellectual in exile at this time was to face a charge (whether brought
against oneself by oneself or by others) of implicit cowardice. Yet to engage in fighting, physically, was
not the task of the intellectual –
especially one who saw, as Marechera did, with sensitive perception of his own
life’s experiences, that violence begets violence. The book is, in large part, a Bakhtinian
(carnivalesque) attempt to come to terms with the realities of exile in Britain
and the deleteriously unsatisfying nature of the Zimbabwean-Rhodesian state. A plurality of different positions and voices
are used to investigate the conditions of the time, in order to determine what
ethical position should be taken. The Black Insider is a book in which
Marechera’s sixth sense, his perceptive skills are just being tried and tested,
as with his book written shortly after, Black
Sunlight. The psychological and
moral pressure that rests on the shaman – Marechera – is wrought through the
realisation that “Things always happen in the worst possible way, however hard
one tries to unbend them.” (p 38).
The main components of this dialectic of power
are the ideologies that determine the use of war to assert one’s interests or
defend oneself versus the use of the intellect as an individualistic or socially
beneficial force. Through asking the question in relation to himself and his
readers concerning the relative merits of these opposed social forces (actual,
physical war versus the powers of the intellect) Marechera is seeking to come
to terms with a question that is both universally profound as well as
particularly salient within the context of African politics – Does the
intellectual have much value within a society in despair and in consolidation
after the throes of a national revolution, if he has not chosen to physically fight? No doubt the question weighed heavily upon
Marechera’s consciousness, plaguing him with the feeling that he had been
personally effete in resisting the call to engage physically in the national
liberation struggle of 1966-1980. His
sister after all – a mere female even within the contexts of nationalist
political ideology (for many were treated as such in doing their parts in the
anti-colonial struggle – which is to say, were treated secondarily, and
sexually exploited) -- had done her part
in active engagement in the war. Was it
better to fight oppression with military weapons or with the intellect? This is the question that Marechera poses to
his subconscious, in Shamanistic fashion.
It is a question to which his culturally tormented mind – culturally
conditioned by white colonial, African tribal and indeed, the process of the
Zimbabwean State’s pro-war, ideological consolidation – had brought to a
head. Since his psychological self-investigations
– take place within the literary context of his experiences in Britain, there
is a curious conceptual overlay between his more present context and the origin
of some of his questions. It is
important to understand the nature of the autobiographical palimpsest of social
memory that gives Marechera’s question about the relative merits of actual war,
versus intellectual challenge of social injustice, its urgency. Needless to say, his approach which sought to
find the answer to this pressing question (both personally and socially
relevant) has resonances with the approach of shamans seeking to radically get
to the bottom of the matter, through their own internal journeys:
First, in every
community there are actual conflicts and roots of conflict; to disregard this
social fact can have very serious consequences. Shamanism, it seems to me, is a
very realistic coming-to-terms with the phenomenon within the social body. Nor
is it only an unabashed acknowledgement of conflict. It is also a serious
down-to-earth endeavour to solve the conflict to its roots, not by means which
are obvious and within reach of every member of the tribe, but primarily by
means which are often esoteric and beyond the cotidian capacity of all. [Francisco
R. Demetrio, p 60 ]
The ultimate conclusion of this book – that war
was both necessary and inevitable (along with the sacrifice of “all [he]’d ever
wanted” in the shape and form of his young lover viewed allegorically as Helen
of Troy) – can be seen as foreshadowing his return to Zimbabwe, to live out
some of the kinds of hardships that the war veterans must have experienced, in
his life as a vagrant on Harare’s streets.
Thus, the force of the political and rhetorical ideology of war trumps
that of the independent intellectual and artistic approach to life, at least in terms of Marechera’s own
specific and historically constructed psyche. Shamanism is a highly
individualistic mystical engagement for those rare spirits amongst us who have
the drive to engage in such a way.
12
A DANGEROUS SHAMANIC CROSSING—SHAMANIC IMAGERY
IN THE BLACK INSIDER
According to Mircea Eliade, "Shamans, like
the dead, must cross a bridge in the course of their journey to the
underworld."
By crossing, in ecstasy,
the “dangerous” bridge that connects the two worlds [earth with heaven – p 483]
and that only the dead can attempt, the shaman proves that he is spirit, is no
longer a human being, and at the same time attempts to restore the
“communicability” that existed in illo
tempore between this world and heaven.
( p 486)
When Marechera’s wife presents him with divorce (an
aspect that is fictionally represented within the narrative of the book), he is
beside himself and is thus “excreted dead” by the taxi that drops him at a
disco at the West End of London. In fact,
it is as if he has crossed over into the world of the dead and become millions
of shattered selves reflected in a broken crystal’s prisms. The beginnings of
this shamanistic journey to say goodbye to the spirit of his wife within him is
marked by “lingering pulses of distant drums” (p 110). In classical shamanism, drums are used to
usher the shaman along his way into an encounter with the spirit world. (p 28
Soul retrieval) The tone of the writing
is both morbid and ecstatic: The author
recaptures within himself the impious mood of Puck, which he equates with “the
childish openness of my youth.” ( p
110).
[E]cstasy implies a
"mutation," to which myth gives plastic expression by a
"perilous passage." ( p 482 Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy)
The author/protagonist herein mutates into both
an earlier version of himself and then later into multiple versions of himself,
as if the crystal of his being had been shattered. In relation to terms that Ingerman uses, he is
obviously travelling in the middle world of nonordinary reality for he travels
back to his own past and there he finds “all the million versions of me [….] so
light and inexplicably subtracted I felt.”
( p 110)
The bridge, according to Eliade, can be a symbol of ascent in shamanistic
initiation. The "rope (bridge) ...connects the birches and is hung with
ribbons of different colours (the strata of the rainbow, the different
celestial regions. p 121). The Black
Insider seems to invoke the colours of the rainbow, now and then -- for
instance in the ribbon-like visual effect of the streets and their lights
passing by as they are transformed into running colours by the speed of the car
making its way through London. In Marechera's book, this seems to imply the
movement and sensations of the shaman crossing the bridge, which ends when he
himself becomes a rainbow ribbon:
I flagged down a
taxi. The yellow, red, blues, and green
of the streets streaming past the wet and magnifying windows were, as they
flicked past, faster and faster, rigidly withholding any secret memories they
had ever had. I was a mere ribbon of
trivial human information being passed through their machine intestines. ( p 111).
This expresses an especially difficult, ironic crossing
of the bridge in his “subtracted” spirit state.
It also comes across a shamanic re-birthing
of oneself (as in Black Sunlight and
the emergence of the protagonist from Nature’s anus, at Devil’s End.
As
Marechera constantly reminds us, acknowledged nakedness is actually preferable
to many of the masks of culture, which are "the emperor's new
clothes". To be attired in cultural "clothes", it would seem, is
also the fate of every thinking being to become a hypocrite. As a shaman, doing his dangerous crossing, he
prefers the Puckish nakedness of youth. Identity,
being ego, being artifice, can be changed up to a point -- just as one changes
one's attire. This is why the identity of the narrator need not be consistent.
Collectivist ways of thinking can appreciate the artifice of ego, but the
consistency of ego isn't always necessary for the story to proceed. It can be
enjoyed as much, if not more so, if one changes one's character. (This is a
link to oral story telling -- and Marechera himself makes a link to oral
history and the tales of Chaucer.) The
putting on of ego is often preposterously funny. Yet the comedy is soon taken over by tragedy
of the worst sort, which is depicted as a loss of the pre-Oedipal safety of the
psyche, with its associations with womb.
This depicts an ultimate loss of the self and of subjectivity, even in
the retreat:
No longer could we
register the temperature of the blood in us, the reading of the instincts and
archetypal triggers; we had so given ourselves up for lost that there was no
meaning in such things, only a meaninglessness which cybernetics could trace on
a graph. At the same time the thoughts that controlled out feelings were not
those of where straight lines come from nor where they go. There is no centre
either, nor circumference, but as it were spiralling nebulae, galaxies beyond
galaxies, exploding wildly outwards, hurtling away towards the incredible
infinite that lay beyond the boundaries in which we had lingered.- p 103
Tragedy ensues at the end of the
book, as the occupants under siege have become, in effect, spirits – that is,
“subtracted” not just their egos, but even from the pre-Oedipal selves (the
instincts and archetypal triggers).
They are therefore, in every sense,
trapped in the realm of nonordinary reality by their inability to feel
themselves in the present (in terms of the temperature of the blood).
SHAMANISTIC PRESCIENCE CONCERNING THE MILITARY ASSAULT
ON THE ARTS FACULTY: the ending of the book
In his interview with Alle Lansu, a year before he died, Marechera
speaks of being at the University of Rhodesia during the 1970s: “Some of the
lecturers had […] been hiding arms and ammunition for the guerrillas on the
university campus; one of them had been put in jail for eleven years. Some students had also been arrested. I wanted to be part of the national
struggle.” ( p 19 Handbook)
It is this experiential knowledge that is behind the ideas that lie at
the end of the book, which are quite prophetic.
At the end of the book the Arts Faculty is bombed from point blank
range, and paratroops land on it to finish off the raid. This reflects the programme designed around
the time this book was written for a very similar operation against various
buildings at the University of Rhodesia.
The point was to attack dissident forces that were holding out against
the puppet Zimbabwe-Rhodesia regime, and depose the prime ministerial incumbent
Robert Mugabe, should he come to power. Operation Quartz would have occurred – had it been allowed to – in early in 1980.
Life imitates Art? The question leaps up to the top of
one’s mind upon reading the book, alongside historical knowledge about the
time. There turns out to be a chilling similarity to the end of the book,
which sees the building of the squatters coming down under withering military
fire, and a situation that could have happened in Zimbabwe after the dismissal
of the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia regime and Robert Mugabe was set up as the most likely
candidate to obtain power.
I was standing at the
window, transfixed by what I was seeing.
The walls shook, cracking in many places, and plaster dust fell. Then Helen twisted my leg from under me and I
fell flat on my face. As I did so, half the room was torn out like wrapping
paper; the spine-chilling room thundered dinningly at the core of all my senses,
tearing out in a split-second chunk after chunk of deafening silence. I had too
late jammed raw palms into my ears. As
the bricks and burst water pipers showered down, I was, like a puppet, jerked
backwards by the leg, scraping my face and elbow and chest on the bare
floor. The bricks and pipers and ceiling
beams smashed down where an instant before my body had lain; shattered and
plunged through the sudden hole there.
Screams rose from the workshop below; earth-cursing screams. I rolled with Helen on the floor till we lay
directly underneath Owen’s mural which still was untouched. But before we could take a first breath,
another salvo scraped the roof from overhead, hurling it away like a paper-thin
thing. It seemed the mind-wrenching bang had sucked the heat out of the sun, so
cold was the horror. I clenched my lips
against the rising hysteria. The rubble
falling crashed down upon us but it was like feathers compared to the terrible
explosion. I felt the sharp and
human-hot breath escape from Helen’s lips and when I looked down at her
clinging convulsively tight to me where her face had been there was a red
spurting wound.
[…] When finally I
looked up, I saw coming towards the city centre, towards us, coming over the
rabble flattened landscape, the thousands and thousands of face-blackened
paratroopers.
There was dead silence,
no shots fired at the advancing deadly insect-multitude. The very sky behind them was lit up with
transcendent flame.
As I looked at them,
they seemed to cut a swathe through all that barred their way, and to glory in
the ruin that marked their path.
I picked up the machine
pistol that had fallen from Helen’s arms and, even as the flies fought fiercely
to glut their appetite on Helen’s blood, I cradled the gun into position and
waited for them to get in range. [ends]
( p 114- 115)
Compare the assault on the “Faculty of Arts” to the covert operation called Operation
Quartz, of 1980 -- standby plan of colonial interests to assassinate Mugabe and
remove his comrades from power. Could
Marechera have known, along with the ZIPRA supporters who were forewarned,
about the possibility of such an event taking place around the time he wrote
his book? Or, are we dealing, on some
level with shamanistic prescience? Quartz,
an initiative by Rhodesian military forces, would have occurred after the end
of the interim government’s rule during 1979, and would have been directed
against the pockets of resistance to the puppet government that had remained
all along. It is interesting that Marechera
was intellectually trying to foment a pocket of resistance to the situation in
Zimbabwe-Rhodesia at that time by his writing The Black Insider. Although
the supporters of Mugabe and the squatters in Marechera’s fictional, abandoned
“Arts Faculty” had very different ideas about what it was they were resisting, the
pattern of guerrilla dissidence and artistic/intellectual dissidence are
implicitly paralleled through the narrative’s strange sense of historical
timing. Owen’s mural (see pg 23, 34, 114)
also symbolically signifies a visual arts aspect to the building.
The covert part of the plan - Operation Hectic - was to be carried out by the
elite troops of the Rhodesian Special
Air Service (SAS). ‘A’ Squadron of the SAS would assassinate Mugabe, while
‘B’ Squadron would take care of Vice-President Simon Muzenda and the 100-man
contingent of ZANLA based in the Medical Arts Centre. ‘C’
Squadron was designated to take out the 200 ZIPRA and ZANLA men with their
commanders (Rex Nhongo, Dumiso Dabengwa and Lookout Musika*--[sic. It is actually Lookout Masuku, who was the
ZIPRA commander. Musika (Joseph) was not
a guerilla but Nkomo’s deputy in ZAPU. ]) based at the Audio Visual Arts
building of the University
of Rhodesia. As far as possible, the ZIPRA men would be given an
opportunity to escape, and had possibly been informed of the plan beforehand.
[…]Eland armoured cars would support ‘A’ and ‘B’ Squadrons, while the Rhodesian
T-55 tanks would support ‘C’
Squadron by pounding the Audio Visual
Arts building into rubble prior to the attack by the troops. At first it
was intended that all eight of the T-55 tanks would be used against the
university buildings, but later four of them were sent to Bulawayo to assist
the RLI Support Commando in the attack planned for a large Assembly Point in
the area.
[….]The SAS teams would use this breach to storm the building and clear it
of terrorists, marking each cleared room with a sheet draped out of the
window. The SAS men were well-prepared for their task, equipped with AK-47s,
body armour and stun grenades, similar to those used by their British
counterparts. The operation would be over before the terrorists were aware of
what was happening. [my bolds]
The
paratroops falling on the bomb demolished “Arts Faculty” — the face blackened
insects — are the protagonist’s “worst nightmare” -- for they are in effect demolishing
civilisation through demolishing the house of the intellect. The political destruction
of the possibilities of civilisation by State power is the apocalyptic vision
that the shaman forecasts for Zimbabwe-Rhodesia (and for the future Zimbabwe)
if the psychological dynamics, in place during Marechera’s time of writing,
remained unchanged.
As
I have indicated, The Black
Insider's broad perspective is shamanistic, as it takes an insider's view
on the ways in which members of the global black diaspora are spiritually
stunted and forced to psychologically regress into various safe ghettos or
"a womb", in order to survive.
Through examining the inner dimensions of his experience in exile from
Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, during his time in Britain, Marechera was able to draw a
shamanistic reading of the military stand-off between progressive and
oppressive forces in the political situation that was developing back
home. His shamanistic reading of the inner
psychological meanings one set of circumstances (away from home), thus became his
means for interpreting an entirely different set of circumstances – the ones
back home. The conclusions he drew, using this method, were
surprisingly accurate (politically and militaristically) as well as being psychologically
very telling.
In
the next chapter, we will look at Black Sunlight,
which is a book that takes us for a journey towards shamanistic initiation. Here Marechera tries to solve a problem of social
schisming on the basis of ethic identities that was "solved" in The Black Insider with an apocalyptic shoot-out
and losses to both warring sides. So much
for practical political solutions to racial politics, Marechera seems to be saying.
In Black
Sunlight, he attempts a shamanistic solution to the problem of identity politics:
– We
are to regress to the womb, in order to be shamanistically "reborn".