Marechera's magical realism and the question of ethics

One way of looking at Scrapiron Blues is that many of the works contained within are attempts to give a semi-humorous articulation to realities that pass beneath our socially conditioned radars.

It is worth making an argument that there is a lot that we are conventionally predisposed to not see, to overlook and to disregard, especially when it comes to social justice. Reasons we do not experience parts of reality are many and varied. Our need to believe that we control our own safety and that our efforts in life will be rewarded leads us to invent a realitythat rewards or punishes people in direct relation to their efforts. Therefore many Jews in Nazi Germany took heart that genocide would not befall them, but languished in their ghettos until it was time to die. The just world fallacy explains why we may not see the world the way it actually is, particularly at the level where political machinations affect us.

There are other psychological reasons of varying importance. Jung says that we do not see our "shadow side" -- which is those aspects of ourselves that do not comply with a positive self image. What is evil about our own complicity with injustice in the world we would tend to deny, according to Jung's theorem.

On a more trivial level, Lacan's conceptualisation of the Real, suggests that we do not adequately process traumatic experiences since we cannot convey them in language. If this is so, the ethical consequence of this would be that we cannot warn others effectively about traumatic situations, so that they may avoid them. Even if we have experience and understanding of these traumatic situations, it is unlikely that we will be able to convey their significance.

So there are a lot of psychological reasons why a great deal about reality must be left unsaid. Yet there are ideological reasons, also. Our already existing psychological tendencies to overlook so much of reality has been enshrined in various right wing dogmas as being in accordance with the most proper sort of behaviour. One should not appear to "whine", for instance. Why not? According to all dogmatists, talking about a reality that others do not agree to share is simply "fake". Ideological pressure forces a great silence to descend upon so much that is real.

By the time Marechera wrote much of the material in Scrapiron Blues , he must have had a pretty shrewd idea of how much people could or couldn't hear about reality, in general. He wrote many of his works in such a way as to soften the blow of the message by imputing humour regarding the aspects of history and personal reality that are hidden from our conscious minds.

Thus he wrote a pantomime about the traumas of war, and raises the status of women as perceivers of a hidden reality. In making women out to be in tune with what it not patently observable in the world, he recognises their position in society puts them closer to the experience of trauma than most men.

His magical realist mode of writing, then, is politically and psychologically astute and serves an intellectual purpose.