Marechera for Beginners

Tolu Ogunlesi

I don’t hate being black. I’m just tired of saying it’s beautiful.

Such are the kinds of statements one would expect from Dambudzo Marechera – fresh, startling, utterly subversive. I do not recall when I first came across his name, but what I do know is this: that his life has fascinated me so much that I could probably reel off a quite comprehensive biography of him from memory.

So when I heard that there would be a Dambudzo Marechera celebration at Oxford University in the middle of May 2009, it didn’t take me long to make up my mind I was going to attend. 

 Apart from it being an opportunity to meet up with a couple of writers scheduled to appear (Helon Habila, Brian Chikwava); it would also be an opportunity to venture even further into Marechera Territory. I missed the first day of the workshop, because I was due to be at the Coventry International Festival of Literature that day, but I was determined to attend the events of Day 2. So, a delayed train later, and a confusing train change later, I found myself in the intimidating city of Oxford, on Saturday May 16, 2009. 

Trust Marechera to bring together an assortment of very interesting people: Flora Veit-Weld, with whose family Dambudzo lived in the eighties in Harare, David Pattison, who wrote a book on Marechera, and who decided, at the young age of 47, that it was time to take a University degree, James Currey, one of the “ancestors” of the African Writers’ Series, Alastair Niven, former Director General of The Africa Center; and many others.

Pattison described Marechera as “gifted”, one who “believed his destiny was to be a writer”. Marechera pursued this destiny with unflinching commitment. “A genuine writer must always be prepared to fight for his work... there is no room for cowardice in writing” he was quoted as saying. 
“Dambudzo had a lot of white girlfriends. A lot!” was Caute’s understated summary of the Romantic Life and Times of Dambudzo Marechera. And then an explanation: “Marechera was an extremely aphrodisiac, attractive person.” And contrary to a lot of the opinions that people hold about him, opinions derivable from his many acts of social disorderliness, Marechera according to Caute was “very polite”— things fell apart for him only under the influence of alcohol. And when not drunk, Caute says that Marechera “had a genius for choreographing the person that he became [while drunk].”

In concluding his remarks, Caute asked the question: “Was his life following his stories, or were his stories following his life? In his work you’re never quite sure what to believe or not to believe.” Which was a question that kept cropping up and seizing center-stage all through the discussions at Oxford that Saturday: the man versus the art, the life versus the work.

Dambudzo lived a tempestuous life. He was born into poverty, lost his father to a violent death as a young boy, lost his mother to prostitution, stammered as a youngster, made a career from being expelled from University (first the University of Rhodesia and then Oxford), was arrested in Wales and almost deported, lived homeless in London and then in Harare, and eventually died of AIDS at thirty-five.

Is it not inevitable that all of this would obscure the work?

It apparently doesn’t help that much of the work is not the easily accessible, social realist style in which most of his African Writers Series contemporaries were writing at that time, work that dealt with the ‘accident scene’ resulting from the postcolonial collision of African and Colonialist cultures and structures. “I am against War and against those against War”, one of his poems begins. Translated into English, all he was saying was “fuck off!” It was not in his character to take the sides that others were rushing to take.

If Marechera had to take any sides, they had to be ones he invented, Marechera’s side(s), which was, well, no one’s side. There were strong elements of narcissism in a lot of his writing. But it was far from an unsophisticated self-indulgence. He was too much of an intelligent writer to be confined to that sphere. He was adept at reinventing himself, and casting this reinvented self in the revolutionary melodrama of his writings.

“I think that I am the doppelganger whom, until I appeared, African literature had not yet met,” he famously said.

In moments that he appeared to take sides that were not invented by him, he appeared to be teasing, delighting in his abilities to be Wildean in  pulling out memorable quotes. “They had the Bible, we had the land. Now they have the land, and we have the Bible,” he once wrote. You almost desperately wish he was seriously on the side of that “we”, but can’t shake off the feeling that in saying that he was merely an observer, free from emotional involvement, a man who couldn’t care less what the eventual fate of that “we” would be.

In my opinion Marechera is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Achebe, the ‘communal’ spokesperson, advocate of the artist as a teacher/town-crier cum Ambassador of sorts.

"I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them," Achebe wrote in 1975. One can almost sense Achebe and Marechera moving in opposite directions as an unseen voice declares loudly the words of Achebe’s famous manifesto, both men eventually crossing an imaginary “me versus we” line of artistic commitment, Achebe firmly on the side of “we/us/our”, Marechera unwrapping his typewriter on the “me” side. 

Marechera even rebelled against the term “African Writer”. David Pattison aptly captures Dambudzo’s writing as “Marechera talking to Marechera about Marechera”. Reading Marechera is akin to eavesdropping on this loud, irreverent conversation. While his colleagues were caught up in talking about the grand psychological and political challenges facing Africa, the evils of colonialism and the failures of the postcolonial state, Dambudzo was regaling us with lines like: ““My whole life has been an attempt to make myself the skeleton in my own cupboard. I have been an outsider in my own biography…”. Whether Europe and the Colonial Experience were the skeletons in Africa’s many cupboards mattered less to him than his own personal experience, for him the things that counted the most were the things permitted on the altar of Self-Reference.

Eventually I came to realize this: that we all are largely complicit in what I’d call Marecherean Fiction. We have picked up the baton of re-invention from him, and, how he must be smiling at us from wherever he is now.

I came away from Oxford quite certain that it is far more exciting talking about Marechera’s life than about his work. This I think is what we all return to. When the fiction gets dense and hard to follow, the life shows up, a brazen mistress, with all the right curves, offering us a way out, an opportunity to take a vacation from brain-puzzling work and to relax instead in the gardens of turmoil that made up Marechera’s personal lives. And in those lives there are always extra trapdoors, hidden exits, and fresh catacombs just waiting to be uncovered.

“All things to all men” would be apt in capturing the essence of Marechera’s life and legacy. University of Zimbabwe teacher Memory Chirere spoke of a phenomenon he termed “Marecheramania”; explaining that after reading Marechera for the first time it is not unusual for University students in Zimbabwe to grow dreadlocks and take up smoking and drinking and missing lectures, and – very importantly – writing angry and melodramatic poetry, the sort they imagine a clone of Marechera would be expected to write.

“In Zimbabwe, Marechera has destroyed a good number of young people,” he said. On the other hand, Tinashe Mushavakanhu, a young Zimbabwean writer and PhD student at the University of Kent, England (his ongoing PhD thesis is titled “A comparative analysis of Dambudzo Marechera and Percy Bysshe Shelley”) spoke of Marechera giving him “the gift of asking questions, of using [the] imagination.” And the filmmaker Heeten Bhagat told of how his film adaptation of Marechera’s poem “I am the rape” arose out of being told that Marechera’s work was not filmable.

He went ahead to do what Marechera would have done had he been told something was impossible – He did it.

Were Marechera alive, perhaps he would have quipped: “You did it, because it couldn’t be done!”

It would be just like him to say that.

Comments

[sokari]

I note in your analysis of Marechera you completely avoid any gender analysis which would highlight the misogyny embedded in much of his writing. "All things to all men" is an apt description. Yes he was an exceptional writer but at what point do we begin to separate that from his obvious disdain and utter disrespect for women.

[denja abdullahi]

i must confess i have not read this fellow called Marechera though i have heard a lot of irreverent thing said about him.I think now is my time to catch the marecheramania.Come to think of it,i see a bit of our own Okigbo in him.