Zimbabwe's cultural landscape

MY BODY THE B52s DEAD RECKONING

A means of dealing with the trauma of the past, nationally and personally, in order to create the ground for a healthier future.   Marechera's is a radically subjective view, which somehow transcends the common assumptions about the “merely subjective”. Why? Because of the objective reference of geographic images shared by the public, and a subjective or experiential basis for political “dead reckonings”. Furthermore, if we see those who are outcast in society as having something to tell us about its workings, we can truly understand ourselves in a deeper way, by understanding which parts of ourselves we want to disown. This understanding is in terms of the mechanisms of “projective identification” – which suggests that we disown and distance ourselves from that in others which we fear most about ourselves.

Does this style of writing have anything to offer? Yes—it offers political wisdom (knowledge for survival), which is highly contextually based in terms of the cultural and political landscape that is intended to house it.   Wisdom  comes from lived experience, as well as the imagination taking creative intuitive leaps, and reinterpreting in a way that adds new vitality to the existing culture, often through a complete rearrangement of the cultural gestalt – how we see ourselves and others.

Marechera worked for a radical revaluation of such identities -- Marechera was nothing if not a political, cultural and spiritual radical. As well as this, he embodied in his vision and approach to life much of what Michael Taussig would call shamanistic “wild man” propensities – abilities that Taussig identifies with the Columbian Indians who transformed their identities, under colonial oppression, into autonomous identities, designed to be both mysterious and dangerous in the eyes of their colonial rulers who preferred that their subjects adopted a riggedly regulated demeanour. The creative and mental mode of Marechera’s work is paralleled by the psychological and social character of these Indians. His character was in a liminal or “limit position’ close to conjuring up of a metaphysical spectre of death. Figuratively and metaphorically – if not quite literally (although some of his insights give us pause for thought) – Marechera had intercourse with “spirits”.

As one who had experienced the imminence of violence under Rhodesian colonialism, he had developed mental and emotional strategies for defending against attempts to control his existence from above,  either at a State level, or at an administrative level in other respects.

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Marechera's children's writing invites children to see the discrepancies between reality and purported reality. It is profoundly culturally Zimbabwean.

In Fuzzy Goo's Guide (to the Earth), Marechera goes even further in his endeavours to safeguard children from the devices of "civilisation" employed by adults.   Tongue in cheek,  he encourages them react with suspicion to a range of adult authorities -- including the police, ambulance men who "rape you (girl or boy) if you are unconscious", and the powerful members of the political inner circle known locally as the "chefs".

One must put a wedge between the adult world and the children's world, in order to preserve the children by making them adopt a mode which is constructively "paranoid". (see Isabel Menzies Lyth on “Constructive Paranoia”.) This mode of seeing is also related to the facility of the strong mind which – aware of its anxiety -- overcomes a human tendency to revert to primitive psychological defences [as described by Menzies Lyth] in the face of overwhelming anxiety. “Paranoid means seeing all the things which big humans have been taught not to see." ( p 241)

Marechera draws very much from his own experiences in his education of the children. His teachings, being experiential, invoke shamanistic wisdom -- they are not abstract teachings, or those based upon transcendental principles. Rather, the teachings furnish the emotional and cognitive basis for living in an objectively dangerous world.
You know what I said about big people! They have a torture machine called drought which they bang on the heads of the little people: they say there is no food. Drought means no food for the little citizens. All the big chefs will be eating silly -- but not for you. Especially if you are sick. ( p 243)

Marechera's advice to children is to be as independent as possible, and to seek to experience the world on their own terms, on pain of death:
So when you know you are growing up you must kill yourself before you become just another very boring blah. If you are a coward, then you must smoke ganga [marijuana] or get mean and drunk every day and night. It is usually better to run away from home. All you need is a rucksack and a small tent. If you stay in society and the big ones want to beat up the other society next door they will put you into the army and you will get your small finger and private parts blown up with bombs. It is very painful. If you stay in society, the big ones will make you stand in line in the streets and wave stupid flags and sing horrible national songs, and be kissed by the thick drunken lips of the biggest of the big human beings. They won't let you pee when you want to but when they want you to. ( p 241)

Back to Zimbabwe again in the early 80s, our poet is locked in once more. Not in a Welsh jail, for illegally overstaying his student visa and for petty theft, but for political insubordination. Practising English and embracing a globalised notion of freedom were the way forward he insisted, not sticking with black nationalism and its languages of shit-Shona and shit-Ndebele. (Marechera was righteously wary of the way that black nationalist regimes treated their intellectuals. He’d had historical precedent to warn him on this.)

The lockdown came swiftly. His bodily register, trained by many blows and kicks taught him when to anticipate another onslaught – and upon making his pronouncement, he picked up the small case containing all his worldly belongings – including the tool of his trade, his typewriter – and hailed a taxi, heading for Harare International Airport. There he was blocked by customs officials, acting under orders from above.

But what did he see in Zimbabwe? He stayed there for his remaining days, sleeping on Harare streets, and occasionally in slightly more preferable accommodation. From his proximity to death, he sensed, not too surprisingly, death. It was the time of the Gukurahundi – the suppression of the Matabele faction of the freedom fighting forces, by Mugabe’s shona 5th Brigade (trained in Korea). Incidentally more than 20 000 of the Matabele region died – many of them women and children. Overall, Marechera sensed a failed revolution – a superficial façade of socialism with capitalist desires. As one who realised the differences between changing his public image and his actual consciousness and inner feelings, he diagnosed that the changes had not been thoroughly revolutionary. There had been no shamanistic alteration as of yet. No healing from within.

Privation made of him an alien in his own land. The prophetic, rhapsodic and even the peculiar pan-African black tone that he adopted all testified to the condition of death being everywhere, with only cosmetic political improvements. The natural and political scenery once again lent itself to the poet’s interpretation of events, his reading of the psycho-social entrails of the country, in 'nganga mode. The national flowers – flamelilly and more intimately and hence betokenly, the jacaranda (which graces Harare and Bulawayo streets) gave specteral form to the liberation heroes. The Victoria Falls became spectacularly devoid of water (connoting a drought and unnatural signs that indicate the wrongness of “something” within the state of Denmark).

Death beckons again like a shiver on the poet’s skin – I look to Harare my hair stands on end began the shamanistic and prophetic refrain. Dante’s Inferno beckons as the “tumultuously waterless Victoria Falls” invites like a deadly chasm, the minds and bodies of Zimbabwe’s intellectual élite cast into a hell of state censorship.   The sluggish nature of the Zambezi River indicates the lack of actual political progress, as societal attitudes remain that of the old white colonial regime – only it is now a new black élite who is left wondering whether the gardener has turned on the right tap.

This mode ought not to be understood in a mystical or delusional sense, for the writer knew full well the difficulties he was in. His writings give an indication of a measured anger which is for all that remarkably controlled and what we would be accustomed to calling “philosophical”. He knows, for instance, that he has almost certainly made a wrong choice in ending up in his Zimbabwean predicament. “Did I mistake the corridor?” In adopting this tone of the black Hamlet (with its Oedipal overtone), he also freely admits that he does not see any influence of providence in what is happening to him. The underlying attitude he adopts is rational and skeptical, wondering whether he really sees or fails to see the realities as they are, or something else besides. He is not sure, for instance, why he cannot see the underlying trauma registering on the bland faces of waiters or passers-by. Receptivity – the ability to read from one’s environment – is thereby heightened by susceptibility to pain (a point that Nietzsche makes when he refers to himself in Ecce Homo as a “decadent”).

Synchronicity is a mode of high artistic and intellectual inspiration.  When Marechera’s mind alights on The Herald newspaper, he sees Hagar the Horrible as a cartoon depicting current Zimbabwe –“Viking socialism awash in the bathtub…” In walking through the city and seeing statues of colonial soldiers, he registers the disappointment of the disenfranchised whites in the sign of the statues reddened by the rains and thereby seeming to suffer from “too many drizzly investments”. They have played their political hands wrongly. The tone is consistently that of a transcendent prophet/see-er, who nonetheless has found himself inextricably entrapped in the grisly march of history (the inextricable motion of time) that he remarks upon. He reads the immanence of his declining bodily state, through living on the streets and drinking too much, into the transcendent mode of the grand march of history, and back again from the mode of the statues, the cartoons and other “signs” to his own debilitated state. The self-consciousness of this move, the mingling of high and low, produces a self-deprecatory black humour – a mode of humour to which Zimbabweans are culturally and, of course, circumstantially well accustomed.

The tone is prophetic voice – old testament cajoling and indicting for the faults that seem to be present. He proclaims the victory of the liberation struggle in a tone that is high Victorian and majestic. [ ]. He appeals to his readers at the level of native spiritualism by evoking images that are frightening and revelatory [Malcolm x etc]. His use of imagery unites black militarism and liberation with the classical wisdom represented by Athena. The overall message is in terms of an oral review of the past and rewriting of the present through a new unity of existing cultural insignia. The living nature of oral history is present in the reception by us of his poem. This is the cultural gift of the black artist in his traditional role of tribal artist and see-er. The overall effect is shamanistic. But is it prophetic?

Marechera’s mode of writing, despite appealing to the reader on a number of levels – pan-African, native spiritualistic, classical, Biblical, and colonial (through its high Victorian tone at times) was ineffectual in reaching those he sought to reach. The author died in poverty, never having been able to leave Zimbabwe again. The prophetic mode failed.