Scrapiron Blues

According to psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who examined psychological states as aesthetic modes of experience, the paranoid-schizoid position is the one that imparts visions – one is never truly an artist unless one can retain the element of hope and “immaturity” that would enable one to access to it; whereas, a “mature” psychological position is the attitudinal position of ordinariness. To move between both states of awareness is the artist’s lot.

One can imagine how the evolution of this more “mature” philosophical perspective would have affected the author’s sense of his role as a writer and his capabilities as someone who might influence the political situation of his time. The maturation of his perceptions towards seeing the ontology of the social world as psychologically and materially founded, but not influenced by metaphysical postulates would have led to an exceeding disappointment. This attitudinal posture is akin to the “depressive position” described by Bion. As an artist one communicates one’s “paranoid-schizoid” visions – (meant figuratively so, for an artist is creatively at odds with social norms, that is if he or she has any worth) – to the world at large but with the realisation that there are limits to one’s communicative reach, since one’s visions are not postulates of a general human intersubjectivity. This realisation involves embracing reality in the “depressive position”. One sees that others will automatically see things in a different light from how one experiences one’s visions. The “maturation” of the artist to the point of seeing reality in this light could logically lead to his movement out of an artistic perspective altogether. Marechera’s maturation as an author, seen in Scrapiron Blues, sees the beginnings of a permanent movement away from an extremely visionary approach to one that is more ordinary.

The greater degree of skepticism concerning the possibility of political change on the basis of visionary motifs was a useful turn for Marechera, since it enabled him to speak in a more ordinary (less esoteric or “elitist”) fashion about Zimbabwean social reality.