SHAMANISTIC SUBJECTIVITY, POSTMODERNISM AND THE PROCESS OF THESIS WRITING.

The following is a “joke”, and it ought not to be taken too seriously, but more as a way of looking back over my processes of mind when I began to write my thesis. I am speaking from a shamanistic perspective, and from this viewpoint so much of what we take for reality is actually smoke and mirrors. A shamanistic understanding of the world is psychologically linked to the phenomenon of tricksterism – that is of "pranking people". It's based on the notion of life and dreaming as being intricately connected. As a European shaman, Nietzsche, said: It is as if one suddenly wakes from a dream [into reality], but only to the consciousness that one must go on dreaming. So it is that we construct this world out of our dreams. So, let us begin the story in its jocular vein. I will talk about shamanism and postmodernism, and how they are alike and different, at least in the way that I saw them. Do I see them differently now? I do!

To begin with, let me say something about the emotions that can undergird the process of thesis writing. I decided to take the bloody minded approach to my thesis because I am actually the walking, living embodiment of what my father used to say about my grandmother-- that is, using the parlance of the time to describe a woman who was anything but weak of heart and mind: “bloody minded”. Such bloody-mindedness has been the basis for my approach to living as well as doing research, at least for the first two years of my PhD. Yet such an approach, that aims to get to the very bottom of things by blasting them apart can, in fact, be rather superficial. The will is there, but the content isn’t necessarily best approached – that is, best stalked (and stalking a problem is quintessentially shamanistic) – by blowing things apart. It’s a temptation that must be resisted, if one is to get beyond the drama of rhetoric and enter the realm of substantial content. It was a mind blast from a certain Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera, which took me to another level of consciousness, via a regressive shamanistic journey to "Devil's End" – and this development in intellectual and social awareness was facilitated by nothing other than my bloody mindedness.

It is quite clear that there are some things that act upon my mind like a Zen koan, demanding all my energy until I break through to a different level of enlightenment. The one that took up all my time and energy during the first two years of writing my thesis was the matter, seemingly supine and innocent unto itself – “Why do Westerners refuse to be termed Westerners?” I may have been living in the West for over twenty years, but my ideas are often given an alien political interpretation that does nothing but surprise me – I am still, I would imagine, a Zimbabwean in my natural thinking processes, and hence in many ways I remain "Other".

I will not go so far as to say that I have cracked the various puzzles of identity that have for so long intrigued me, in a way that can be easily articulated, but it was one of the Zen koans rotating through the mills of my mind, throughout the first two years of study. This riddle refused to leave me alone. The way that I have ultimately been able to explain it to myself – the meaning of this paradox – is that those whom I had perceived as Westerners were really those unmarked by the kind of historical trauma, which would have given them another sort of identity than that which I had come to recognise as “Western”. Already, unbeknownst to myself, I was thinking shamanistically – those who had been marked by some historically engendered trauma were “my” sort of people. Those who hadn’t? Well, they were simply “Westerners”. These normative “Westerners” were impossible to get to the bottom of -- perhaps because they had no base to get to. Those whom I considered to be suffering from this condition proved, according to later analysis, to be in such a state simply because they lacked recognisable trauma. Unlike myself, I thought these were the “postmodernists”. Thus, I drew battle lines for the provisional basis of my thesis. Yet, my reasons for doing so were still partially submerged in my unconscious.

Initially, I reckoned it was kind of like Odysseus. I mean, when asked by that delightful representative of natural power, Polyphemus, to give his name, he uttered “Nobody”. “A very shrewd tactic! No wonder ‘Athena bright eyes’ liked him best among Greeks,” I reflected. “Of course if you have power, you don’t want other people in the world to know you have it, or they might start taking it away. So, it makes sense that somebody who has much to lose would adopt this stance as a form of political rhetoric.” If those in the Middle Eastern part of the world yearned to know who is hurting them, the best tactical reply by those who actually have power to lose is “Nobody!” By depicting themselves as such, they stand a lesser risk of losing any power that they do have. Polyphemus was not yet shrewd enough to discover the meaning of this way of speaking, but nonetheless, I willingly identified myself entirety with this one-eyed giant. This giant had heart. Even as a preposterous caricature of primordial reality: Or, especially as a pure embodiment of Nature. There is nothing that is really worth engaging with that is not, on some level, a caricature. It’s only when the mind takes on a vision of reality in a hyperbolic fashion that you know you are in for one hell of a ride.

It is vital to enjoy the ride, but caricatures only get one so far and no further. I didn’t make much progress with my thesis overall, until I had understood Marechera’s shamanistic project – not from the point of view of one who was pursuing an ideological agenda to identify with, in order to bolster my sense of pride, but from the point of view of one who had, at least in part, undergone the experience of shamanistic initiation herself. It took a while, but I became obsessed with understanding Marechera’s work, Black Sunlight, a book that seems to me to try to force one to perceive the world from the perspective of a shamanistic initiate.

It’s a little hard to explain the process of inwards transformation that Black Sunlight works you towards, but to give you some idea from a psychological perspective, it is little bit like holding on to the edge of a cliff with all your might, as gravity very slowly plies your fingers from their slipping security. Before long you are falling: Into what? -- into ether? Into the Sun? (as per Bataille). As a shamanistic initiate, you do not know, but the falling doesn’t seem too bad in a way, and soon it seems like floating, gliding gracefully. This image depicts both the terror and euphoria of ego loss.

It is, besides the fun aspect, a very painful process, for one has lost something of oneself equivalent to a belief in the unchanging nature of identity. It’s gone! One must have misplaced it somewhere, like Peter Pan’s shadow, for it is surely nowhere to be found. Moreover, one has lost one’s deeper sense of trauma. That also seems to have departed. Well, that is the point of shamanism – to regress a little by letting go of the present fixations of one’s ego – and thus to be reborn with a fresh perspective and fresh goals. And herein, one encounters the intersection between traditional shamanistic thinking and postmodernism: I quote from an article in Wikipedia, which I happen to agree with, on the subject of “limit experiences”: “A limit-experience is a type of action or experience which approaches the edge of living in terms of its intensity and its seeming impossibility. This approach has been [linked] to the seeking of limit experiences as a sort of mysticism. A limit experience breaks the subject from itself. The idea is associated with Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Michel Foucault.”

The breaking of the subject from herself is the fundamental factor of shamanism, as it facilitates the doubling of the subject, which enables one to access hidden knowledge. It now seems to me that the individual who shamanises becomes free of the past, and thus lives very much in the present, like a postmodernist. It now seems that my thinking comes full circle.

1408 words.