Marechera: No direction home
Marechera comes back to Zimbabwe “with no direction home, like a complete unknown”. In his own words, he is rootless; home means nothing to him.
“House of Hunger”, the BBC Channel Four documentary on Zimbabwe’s foremost literary genius, opens with Dambudzo Marechera pacing the streets of London like a bogeyman adrift waterless plains. When he finally stops to look about, his alienated impression suggests he is looking for something beyond right of way at the intersection. Possibly looking for the home he lost when the overbearing relations, narratives and institutions of late modernity were decided in his absence.
This visual metaphor, appearing at the beginning and end of the Chris Austin-directed 1982 documentary, captures the essence of Marechera’s work. Rootlessness. He is subverting labels, overturning seats chosen for him before his arrival, breathing anger at having no place in the world.
Though never one to be neatly boxed, the troubled writer-tramp compares identically to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” persona. He comes back to Zimbabwe “with no direction home, like a complete unknown”. In his own words, he is rootless; home means nothing to him.
On Saturday, it will be 30 years into the death of Zimbabwe’s most important writer who succumbed to an Aids-related illness on August 18, 1987. Crucially, as the nation commemorates its heroes this month it would be no mix-up to challenge the uni-dimensional, hegemonic definition of a hero by celebrating this disruptive black man.
I repeat the charges levelled here last week that Zimbabwe has betrayed Marechera. While the academy is feverishly parsing his contributions to (or is it his subtractions from?) mankind’s intellectual record, at least half his titles are not available in his own country.
Experts would say it is common to have this book or that book out of circulation. Are we not normalising our intellectual famine?
I have been around Harare bookshops (and pirates too, since that elaborates the case) for “Cemetery of Mind”, “Scrapiron Blues” and “Black Sunlight” without luck. It does not help that the locally available titles are not in visible orbit, except for “House of Hunger” which made the shelves fairly recently.
The dilapidation is not particular with Marechera’s estate. Whether you talk of music or literature, the industries have not done enough to sustain the shelf life of some of Zimbabwe’s most important works of art.
Like I pointed out, it should, therefore, be no surprise that the more readily circulated impression of Marechera is the mythic one.
Barbershop apocrypha such as the supposed letter from Dambudzo to his white girlfriend, Samantha, and his reading of the dictionary in the dark, burning elapsed pages for torchlight, are informing our knowledge of the writer like red-lettered scripture in the absence of his actual works.
We stoke the halo around him without having read him like the false prophets of Alain Mabanckou’s “As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth” poem, who summon Mr Fanon, Mr Diop and Mr Césaire in grandiose sermons while spiders replenish their kind in these African geniuses’ unread books.
For Marechera, the books are not just unread; they also unavailable but do we care that much?
We talk about “bloody whites” setting us up for single narratives at their awards, politically appropriating our books in their monochrome reviews, and cashing in (faming in too, one could say) on our homies, but what are we doing for them? How much are we invested into Zimbabwe’s intellectual record, into Africa’s?
Bushra al-Fadil, the 2017 Caine Prize for African Writing winner, laments in the “Quartz” article featured here last week: “I saw original copies of Achebe’s work in Yoruba and English (at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London). I even saw Nubian languages in all their diversity preserved beautifully and I thought to myself what a shame that these masterpieces could not be in the libraries of our countries. We should have institutes that honour them.”
Zimbabwe, it is time to face the charges. As far as sustaining the cultural record is concerned, this column takes the pesky role of “varoora” demanding “nzveura” (any translation hints, Mr Muchuri?), till the industries, the audiences and the Government make down payments for the promotion of artistic merit.
As it is, I have eaten into enough minutes just clearing the ground but something can be said of “The House of Hunger” documentary this 30th anniversary of the novelist’s death.
I hope Literature Today readers look it up as a visual primer to the intellectual universe of this left-leaning maverick.
One has to empathetically smile at the contradictions Marechera embodies but what else can you do when the world presupposes the right to tell you where to turn, when to run and when to sit down? It is crazy.
Beyond the dismissive response to him as a madman, Marechera is the self-aware voice of a lost generation begrudged of the resources of mental health, so many narratives tugging for its soul.
Although he was certified “salad”, firmly in the “nose brigade” where cultural consumption is concerned, he might have seen something of his own confusion in that polysemic Zexie Manatsa song, “Vaparidzi Vawanda”.
It is exciting watching three of Zimbabwe’s literary notables - Marechera, Musaemura Zimunya and Wilson Katiyo - in the same room, brawling and bromancing in the documentary.
They seem to be agreed in flinching away from the Censorship Board (reconstituted this year) as a Rhodesian fossil that should not have crossed into Independence.
The context of the discussion is the banning of Marechera’s first full-length novel “Black Sunlight.”
Always one to rise to the occasion and shore up populist capital, Marechera plays the bleating ram and emphasises that he cannot conscientiously settle in Zimbabwe.
The conversation takes an uneasy turn when Marechera implies that Mr Katiyo (then an official in the Ministry of Information) and Mr Zimunya (then a UZ lecturer) had sent writers’ integrity to the devil and sold out to bureaucracy.
While it is easy to understand the pragmatism of Mr Katiyo, who argues that there is nowhere in the world a person can just afford to read and write without a 9-5 (I have personally tried it only to find myself one foot immersed in a debtor’s quicksand), it is important not to dismiss outright Marechera’s idealism or extremism.
He would indeed pursue that “principle” at no mean expense to himself and to others but the content he sheaved up in the process far outweighs the need to fit into capitalism’s banal routines and presupposed narratives.
In any case, who says writing novels, plays and poems is not work enough unless it is tied to a bureaucratic chain?
The documentary hits the viewer with a blast of star power, featuring Chief Rekayi Tangwena, who acts as Dambudzo’s father in a reconstructed segment, before switching to his offscreen chieftaincy. Susan Chenjerai, immortalised as Mai Rwizi in “Mhuri yaMukadota,” acts as the novelist’s mother. Stephen Chigorimbo plays a police informer while Claudius Maredza narrates.
Chief Tangwena is an articulate nationalist who refuses to be tamed or tanned, even by speaking English.
It is comical to hear him recreate a passage of the famous novella in Shona.
But I cherish most his recollection of how he was offered £60 to sign his people into an extractive labour agreement. He told the system: “I am the father of 3 000 children. Whom do I give the £60?” How badly Zimbabwe needs such realness!
The film was finished without Marechera, who refused to work with Mr Austin, alleging that the latter was being exploitative. Mr Katiyo suggests that the filmmaker might have gainfully waited for Marechera to settle well in Zimbabwe first before enlisting his cooperation. He never settled.
Maybe some writers have to die rootless pilgrims, complete unknowns with no direction home, because how else can can you tell that you have not been instutionalised (whichever direction you follow the pun)?
I do not envy that but I pay homage to the courageous few who do.
And so this Heroes’ holiday, Literature Today salutes Dambudzo, the unpimped butterfly.