Leslie Fiedler

Hattie sent me this.

It has some resonances with Marechera's Black Sunlight, which was, however published much later. The musical rather than verbal/linguistic turn (blind Marie on her ukulele as the metaphor for the text itself), plus the embrace of madness as refusal of social norms. Yet Marechera's writing, whilst having this "postmodernist" flavour outlined by Fiedler, also has its quintessentially Zimbabwean references, mood and message -- so is actually much more full-bodied emotionally and intellectually than Fiedler's depiction of the Western cultural trend would imply.

I do see the beginnings of the postmodernistic attitude detailed in her writing -- which frankly, I have never understood. This postmodernistic attitude of passive defiance as a form of rebellion does seem to correspond with a notion of what femininity is or might assumed to be. Yet actually, this notion of postmodernism's does seem all too rigid to me in its masculinist assumption that there are only two gender roles to begin with and also with its idea that it is more fragrant to embrace "femininity" than its ostensible masculine opposite. To me that is naive, since it ought to be recognised -- far more radically -- that there are as many possible genders as there are humans.