Notes on contemporary shamanism

CONTEMPORARY SHAMANISM

I want to talk about contemporary shamanism. My subject for my thesis is Dambudzo Marechera, a Zimbabwean writer. He wasn’t a shaman in the traditional sense that we might think about shamanism. Yet the arc of his writings, the way they developed, indicates that he had the kind of intelligence which combined bodily self-awareness with sensitivity to the psychological nature of the political dynamics operating within his sphere. Along with this, he was inclined to take the temperature of his society, in order to gauge its health. His mode of writing could be considered high European or Shakespearean in its complexity.

Like Shakespeare’s plays, and indeed like the mythical voyages depicted in Homer’s writings, Marechera’s work also has its share of characters that may not be precisely living. Thus, his writing is a form of engagement with the spirits of his time and era, and indeed with spirits that can be recognised as manifestations of his previous or present outlooks – for he had a few different perspectives that have been culturally and historically engendered. Marechera’s writing is a kind of giving life to a materialist historicism.

One could not understand Marechera without recognising his acute awareness of how history gives us our identities, and how there can be simultaneous influences on us that are not necessarily in logical accord, but may be in some ways contradictory. These aspects of his thinking make it sound like he had taken up a postmodernist reading of the way things are. Whilst there are some superficial similarities between Marechera’s writing and the ideas of Lyotard (in his opposition to metanarratives) and while Bakhtin’s theory certainly got some play, and while there is more than ample material for the employment of deconstruction as a key approach in Marechera’s literary arsenal, his writing is not postmodern, but I would argue shamanistic. Whereas the techniques the writer uses do rupture our sense of a normative, fixed, universalising sense of reality and morality, they do not do so in order to throw us into disarray, but to bring us to our senses. His writing would contain no political message if it entailed an injunction only to disperse and scatter. There is another strain of meaning in the works: a deeper pulse, if you will. It lies underneath the writer’s flourishes and anarchistic, destructive gestures concerning culture and civilisation.

It echoes through Marechera’s regular and faithful return to elements of his own autobiography, through his references to his bodily states, by which he attempts to gauge the condition of health of his community. In a healthy community, evil does not happen, or if it does, it happens with a sense of meaning. Marechera uses the trope of meaningless evil – the unnecessary death of his father, his mother’s turn to prostitution – to stand as a bad omen regarding the fate of whole societies. This deeper strain of emotional awareness and the tendency to read one’s own condition as a register for the society’s condition at large, lends Marechera’s approach an emphasis based upon a very refined feeling for the intersubjective qualities of human experience.

He writes as if to critique – but only in order to heal -- his society. Thus the surface appearance of postmodernist fragmentation of the identity in his works is not intended as the end in itself of his writing. Rather, it is a return to one’s physical body as a register for political right or wrong that is his ultimate end.

Marechera and the shaman of old both rely upon the information they receive from their bodies in order to heal their communities. In a state of ecstasy, one is able to decode the meanings of the material reality that rest above and around one. The very, very measured quality of returning fire for fire, in Marechera’s political critiques of the Zimbabwe of the eighties and the Britain of the seventies (even, if not particularly, in his states of outrage and tone of prophetic condemnation) give his writing a weighty quality of truth, that transcends his particular time and situation but continues to speak to forms of abuse and injustice occurring in Zimbabwe and other parts of the West today.

The writing has a purging and healing potency, to those who are attuned to hearing it that way. Most of his work has a destructive tone too – rather than being merely deconstructive as his portrayal of gender and the black and white of race are. The destruction of the rational (or to speak more plainly) socially conditioned parts of your mind are necessary if you are to undergo the shamanic initiation that would enable you to understand Marechera’s perspectives on politics and on human behaviour.

The writing of Marechera, then, like a perfume or a good wine, is made up of several “notes”. There is the high note, which reads a lot like postmodernism. There is the middle note, which reads like conventional social and political criticism. There is, underneath all of this the lowest and most lingering note of all. It is the strangely swelling aftertaste, the lingering quality of what has already departed: Its note is shamanism. This is the aspect of Marechera’s work which challenges the human psyche to dissolve in order to regenerate itself again, along better and more graceful lines. This is the part of his work that I am most interested in.

Note on restoring the feminine.

Feminist theorists will recognise the theoretical turn towards the body as a necessary part of materialist critique taken in order to be in a position to positively re-evaluate that which we have historically been taught to think of as “the feminine”. The “feminine” in this sense is that mode of awareness which has been repressed by modes of thinking that are determined by the patriarchal mores of industrial culture as definitively “rational” -- thus it has become "rational" to coerce one's body into conformity with industrial mores by the use of pharmaceutical drugs. The primary division of self into ‘bodily’ and ‘mental’ components is culturally and historically specific, just as our notion of rationality is narrowly defined on the basis of this conceptual distinction. The use of the body for divining intellectual truths may seem far removed from our ways of experiencing the world. Nonetheless, contemporary shamanism reads the world through the body as a finely honed instrument of knowledge.

Facing death as a means to wholeness

Perhaps this is the meaning of the shaman's facing death or "death". To give up on the just world hypothesis is a kind of way of facing one's own vulnerability, contingency and mortality. Yet, it is also a way to opening up to genuine wisdom about oneself and others. One sees the flaws in society and attempts to heal them, instead of railing maniacally against them. Awareness of injustice -- the thorn in the side that caused the "shamanic" illness -- is still present, but one's expectations are now more in tune with the truth of the human condition.

Soul retrieval? Or healing by affirming the emerging self?

The key role of the shaman is healing the members of the community. Marechera attempts to heal whole communities. (See Pamela Reynolds’ article, ‘Children of Tribulation: The need to heal and the means to heal war trauma.’). Here are two other examples of contemporary shamanism:

1. The new-age neo-shamanistic book, Soul Retrieval, gives an outline of retrieving fragmented parts of the self, which dissociate from the present due to a refusal to participate in situations unconsciously felt to be subjectively intolerable. This is most interesting. Whereas there are serious psychological books geared towards examining how dissociation and the splitting of identity (ending up in multiple personality disorder, for instance) can happen under situations of extreme stress, more subtle modes of splitting (along the same principles of avoidance of stress) can apparently happen within situations that we would consider objectively quite conventional. The fact that the subject in question considers the externally benign event (such as moving home) to be subjectively so intolerable is key to understanding the complexities and subtleties of individual personality development. Loss of aspects of self through dissociation during significant historical moments in one’s life leads to a devitalised form of existence, marked by resignation, in the present. The shaman retrieves these missing, split off bits of self in order to retrieve vital presence of mind for the subject’s life in the present.

2. The article on the Magical pre-Oedipal field also describes soul retrieval, but from a Jungian rather than New Age perspective. To facilitate healing, the psychotherapist may permit the client (receiving the Jungian analysis) to project onto the therapist the character of someone who has caused the subject damage in the past. The damage caused in the past, creating loss, is psychodynamically transported into the present, to be dealt with skilfully by the analytical psychologist. . By feeling free to recreate the original psychodynamic within the healing circumstances of therapy, the client is able to experience healing. The self in the process of healing is thus viewed dynamically as an “emerging self”. This follows the pattern of shamanism: retrieving aspects of the vitalised self concept lost to the past, in order to bring healing and a revitalisation to the subjectively experienced present.

Bataille

Bataille finds in destruction, in mutilation – the shaman’s confrontation with death and contingency juxtaposed against the notion of transcendence and permanency – a mode of the sacred.

Oral history


If you wanted to write a history of your life that derived from an inner understanding of your own experiences, rather than taking cues from historical “landmarks” that had been objectively determined by history books, you would be able to formulate a great deal of information and interpretation on the basis of a reading of one’s own emotional traces. What do these tell you about where you came from? About the historical time and place you’ve lived in? And about where you’re going?If we are inclined to contribute to the writing of history, then a shamanistic reading of one’s own emotional vicissitudes as determinants of the meaning of one’s own history (and perhaps the meanings of broader historical contexts too), could be a great starting point. However, one would have to become a skilled interpreter of oneself then – a really astute dialectitian, taking both subjective (direct) readings and intrepretive (detached) readings of the self. The shaman is always at least two people, then (a subjective experiencer and an objective intrepreter of experiences) -- never just one.

Interestingly, shamanism and oral history go together in their enshrinement of subjectivity as ‘presence’. Remember that Derrida sees the written language as a potential mode of liberation from the traditional metaphysics of presence? However, this decentering of the subject specific to late industrial societies is not part and parcel of traditional societies, which still have modes of oral history, and a view that subjectivity at the ground level is a primary source of meaningfulness. Actually, it seems to me that Derrida is merely trying to find a way to accept reification (the reversal of the subject-object relationship in terms understanding the source of meaning) as inevitable – and to find a way to make it fun and endurable. The means by which shamans have fun is, however, counterposed to this: by the enshrinement of deep subjectivity as a mode of experiencing that one is real.