EXORCISING RACIAL DEMONS AT DEVIL'S END: A SHAMANIC JOURNEY OF REDEMPTION

Marechera's approach to writing largely consists in exorcising the demons that had developed in post-war Zimbabwean culture, due to the tribulations of the war. Marechera's writing in Black Sunlight uses this religious logic of Shona culture, but also takes us deeper into hidden realms of desire and power, to a primeval/primal stage of development – a regressive psychological state of consciousness, where ideas about identities are only just beginning to be formulated¹. The writer's approach is quintessentially shamanistic². The main protagonist, Chris, has the sort of adventures in Black Sunlight that should be understood as meaningful in terms of a shamanic journey. As readers we are taken via the narrative into the level of neurological consciousness that is dominated by the experience of relationships of desire, but also relationships of power. Chris experiences an immersion into a different level of consciousness, one which is not influenced by the functioning of adult ego as a rational, phenomena-mediating device. ³ We, too, as readers, experience Chris's transformations vicariously. We make our journey to the underworld, as "Christian", and acquire thereby tap previously hidden knowledge, located deeply within the primeval mechanisms of the unconscious mind. From such psychological depths originate our primal energetic systems (drives) to have power and to experience desire.

Once we experience this journey to the underworld of consciousness at 'Devil's End', we are likely to become "changelings". We can say that we have become “shamanised”, for we experience desire and power in totally different ways than before, when we were operating from the standpoint of conventionally understood 'reason'. In Black Sunlight, the shamanic journey of healing is facilitated through the mind of the protagonist, Chris, who is also Marechera. It is through the author as mediator of his own psychotropic experiences that we experience an altered, shamanic vision, a vision which takes us back to the primeval womb at Devil's End. It is here that we encounter the origins of political power as a force that is buried deeply within our DNA⁴.

Desire and power are the fundamental factors that make up our identities. We are a product of both forces yet, they may be at odds. This is the tragic insight of our protagonist, Chris, as he encounters various versions of himself in the primeval caves of Devil's End. He also encounters the original psychological rupture in his primeval being, which is caused by a contradiction appearing between a desire (to embrace reality as it seems to be) and power (that prevents such a simple and straightforward navigation of life. (The origin of this trauma that splits the identity can be traced to Rhodesia's racial laws that created poor, black "ghettos"):

‘What does it mean to be poor?’

‘Going to bed under a bush without your dinner.’

The next night he neither came for his dinner nor for his bed.

They searched for him all night. He walked in calmly at breakfast. Stephen watched as she whipped me. I wanted to tell her I had done nothing but be poor that last night of expectations⁵.

Desire, which is expressed by trying to be one with the world as it seems to be, only turns out to lead to punishment, as power gets the upper hand. This wound at the centre of the author's existence is expounded in Black Sunlight, as a kind of revisiting of the scene of primal trauma. We undertake the journey with Marechera in the same manner as Carlos Casteneda, (the apprentice of the traditional Yaqui shaman, don Juan⁶.) Along with the protagonist, we inadvertently imbibe a psychoactive substance (but we do not find this out until later in the text). Christian and Chris are each shamanistic doubles of the other. The former is the mere devolution of the latter, as the photographer (the latter) undergoes shamanic degeneration, back to the source of his primeval psychological, social and mental origins. As readers, we all return with Chris to "the caves", as the origins of primeval consciousness⁷. It is useful to understand this regressive process as being one whereby "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny".⁸ Unlike his more conventional counterpart Chris, Christian is our quintessential shamanic disembodied spirit, one who encounters death in order to learn from it and to capture power from his experience in the underworld. So much for the issue of power, and one's desire to have more of it. This much is at least possible from a shamanic experience, since shamanic journeying is about learning new information about the way reality works.

Desire and power – understand how they work at the level of primal thinking, and one will have the world at one's fingertips. Such is the shaman's traditional ambition! He can try to multiply himself, and so enhance his power by sending various versions of himself on exploratory journeys, as we have seen. That is one way to increase both knowledge and power. Another way, and it is common to all shamans everywhere, is to employ the joking manipulation of perceptions. We can see this as a feature of early childhood consciousness expressed in Black Sunlight. Features of the primeval, desiring consciousness, (which is not mitigated by a reality-based orientation) are psychological tropes of dissociation, splitting, projective identification and magical thinking⁹. There are numerous instances in which this occurs in the book, and an interesting example follows:

‘Christian,” I want you to meet someone you know.’

The typing stopped. Irritably, the man said,

‘Who is it? Can’t you see I am busy. You can’t just come in here…¹⁰

The person turns out to be Chris, himself, represented from the point of view of (what had been) the original Chris, who has now turned into “Christian”. As a consequence of shamanic regression towards the early childhood state, there is no longer any higher level ego to organise the many variations of personality into one person, at least in terms of the aesthetics. (In actual practice, the shaman uses the higher mind, the reality-based ego, to be able to write.) Each character in Black Sunlight forms various strands of identity in the primeval soup of the whole. They are shown to be enmeshed in a web of relationships dominated by psychological power dynamics. In this sense, they are reduced to DNA strands that have yet to evolve into fully self-determining, independent people. The characters become physical features of shamanic vision – always in the process of seeming to lose the singularity of their individual beings:

And there was Nick and Susan, shacking up here, there, everywhere.

And there was Patricia, fucking anything in sight.

Sometimes I think we were the wrong people in the right minds.

In the wrong place at the right time.

We were Franz, and his brother. Probably called Fred.

There was Nicola campaigning against minds, against all thinking. That lethal intellect.

There was …

And I get the eerie feeling.

Chris.

Christian.

The right people arrived in the wrong bodies. That ought to be me. No—that one. Fucking Christ! Will you shut up! ¹¹

This dissolution of ego in the other characters in Black Sunlight is necessary for shamanistic vision. Marechera allows us to see not the individuals and their "free will" in operation, but instead the operations of desire and power, as primeval forces on their own. The desire to be part of, or separate from, the body of another is shown to cause changes in networks of social relations.

At this primary level of consciousness, the desire for power organises how reality is experienced. Therefore, magical events take place, and individuals are transformed into other objects by virtue of someone thinking about them. “Magical thinking” organises the destiny of the protagonist’s socially unreachable love, Blanche Goodfather. Although she is represented throughout the book as a rather conventional academic – and this is how she is in the logical terms of everyday reality -- by the final pages she is transformed into an “Amazon”¹². Primary thinking turns her into a mythical creature, free from force of circumstance, and therefore accessible to the author via imagination, powered by desire. Much of the rest of the theme of Black Sunlight is about desire, and this is also understandable within a shamanic vein of reasoning. It is about sexual desire for the white anthropologist, Blanche Goodfather, and the protagonist's loss of connection with her. This narrative of lost love runs alongside the narrative of anarchistic uprising, and is folded within the broader shamanistic context and meaning of the novel as a whole. They are compelled to move in differing spheres because of their different social class. Only shamanic self destruction and regeneration can heal the broken self that was the inevitable consequence of a broken romance. This view is summarised in the dying embers of the book – its final passage:

And we grew to know less and less of each other. Yet the memory would not set into the setting sun, that green and frozen glance to the wide blue sea where broken hearts are wrecked out of their wounds¹³.

The "wrecking out of [one's] wounds," could, of course, be interpreted as a shamanistic motif, for paradoxically, it is by receiving primal wounding that the shaman is able to access otherwise inaccessible resources of his unconscious mind, and is thus able to heal himself and others

Then, there is the slightly different theme in the book, of desire for power – which can be seen primarily via the capacity to become "changelings" (or to change another to suit one's needs). However, the solution to having no power is to obtain power. So there is a parallel formulation in the novel, whereby those who have been politically disempowered strive to use occult means to gain actual power. Rejecting their allotted feminine identities as subordinates, (in the same way as the author is rejecting his politically allotted black identity), the female characters of the book undergo complete transformations. They experiment with occult knowledge as power and thus become “changelings” ¹⁴. The shaman's remedy for a lack of power is to obtain power. A parallel – and not particularly shamanistic -- viewpoint of the novel deals with anarchistic politics. This need for this perspective springs from the adult's reality-based ego, although the means of facilitating its expression is by psychological regression. The journey of regression that the anarchy-prone characters take is ultimately transforming, but only on a shamanistic (not political) level. Black Sunlight's overarching shamanistic theme does say much about Marechera's overriding concern: healing wounded identities can only be achieved by re-encountering primal forces on an intra-subjective level; hence, shamanic journeying.

ENDNOTES

¹ See: Wilfred R. Bion, Learning from Experience. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield: 1994).His psychoanalytical writing concerns early childhood development on the basis of three factors: love, hate and knowledge, and how these primal factors serve to facilitate and organise connections with the world at large.

² See: Robert E. Ryan, The Strong Eye of Shamanism: A Journey into the Caves of Consciousness. (Vermont: Inner Traditions: 1999), p. 114. The return to a childhood state is part of shamanic initiation. After initiation, the metaphorical 'baby' is restored to an adult size. (This imagery of regression is followed by a return to the normal adulthood state of consciousness, as the child is stretched back, metaphorically, to adult size.)

³ The early childhood state of consciousness, to which the shamanic initiate regresses, involves an experiencing desire and power as part of an experiential oneness with the primeval mother.

⁴ See: Dambudzo Marechera, Black Sunlight. (London: Heinemann,1980), p 70. 'It's in your DNA,' suggests that the origins of desire and power are inculcated in the basic building blocks of evolution -- hence we cannot escape their thrall.

⁵ See: Marechera, Black Sunlight, p. 77.

⁶ See: Dambudzo Marechera, Mindblast, or, The Definitive Buddy (Harare: College Press, 1994), p. 123.

⁷ Concerning the strong historical link between shamanism and caves, See: David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (London: Thames & Hudson: 2002).

⁸ 'Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' at Devil's End, because the primeval caves (where shamanistic practices might have taken place in prehistory) are also symbolically linked to the "Great Cunt" – that is, to the biological source of our individual lives.

⁹ For a discussion of these pre-Oedipal (early childhood) psychological dynamics and their capacity to heal a wounded psyche, see: Sherry Salman, "Dissociation and the Self in the Magical Pre-Oedipal Field," Journal of Analytical Psychology, 44 (1999), 69. She also states: "Updating this mystery tradition, clinical material illustrates how narratives of the Self are present in such pre-Oedipal dynamics as dissociation and projective identification. These dynamics are understood not only as primitive defences but as reconstitutive symbolic metaphors and mythopoetic expressions of an emergent rather than a superordinate Self."

¹⁰ See: Marechera, Black Sunlight, p. 60.

¹¹ Marechera, Black Sunlight, p. 92.

¹² Marechera, Black Sunlight, p. 117.

¹³ Marechera, Black Sunlight, p. 117.

¹⁴ See: Marechera, Black Sunlight, p. 91, concerning how Katherine 'changed' away from having a conservative, feminine identity to being a female revolutionary: a strengthening alteration. Also see: Black Sunlight, p. 107:

'You know about changelings? I feel them all the time. As though we were all changelings and not exactly what we appear to be.'

The sense Susan expresses is of having lost an indefinable inward 'something'. This loss is quintessentially shamanistic, since shamanic journeying produces a temporary state of depersonalisation (a loss of the existing identity). "[W]hen you look for a long time into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." See: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, R. J. Hollingdale. Trans. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Future Philosophy (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p 102. Although the old identity is typically lost during shamanic journeying, shamanic change is also always associated with gaining power through inner knowledge. Indeed, the narrative of Black Sunlight suggests that the anarchistic group -- all shamanic changelings – have already learned how to use their primal energies (ie. power and desire) to effectively destroy their conditioning that had them embrace a philosophy of 'austerity'. See: Black Sunlight, p. 97.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bion, Wilfred R. Learning from Experience. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994.

Lewis-Williams, David. The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.

Marechera, Dambudzo. Black Sunlight. London: Heinemann,1980.

----------. Mindblast, or, The Definitive Buddy. Harare: College Press, 1994.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Future Philosophy, London: Penguin Books, 2003.

Ryan, Robert E. The Strong Eye of Shamanism: A Journey into the Caves of Consciousness. Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1999.

Salman, Sherry "Dissociation and the Self in the Magical Pre-Oedipal Field," Journal of Analytical Psychology, 44 (1999), 69–85.

Winkelman, Michael. "Shamanism as the Original Neurotheology," Zygon, 39.1 (2004),193-217.

-----------. Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing. Connecticut, London: Bergin & Garvey, 2000.