Scrapiron Blues

SCRAPIRON BLUES OR “ZIMBABWE IS OURS”

Mugabe insists 'Zimbabwe is mine'
Friday, 19 December 2008 BBC NEWS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7791574.stm

Mugabe: "I will never surrender"
President Robert Mugabe has said that "Zimbabwe is mine" and rejected calls from some African leaders to step down.

This chapter will look mainly at four pieces from the book of Marechera’s posthumously published works, compiled and edited by Flora Veit-Wild and published in 1992, five years after the author’s death. […plus more here about the general content of the book] In these works I will be examining, the author examines question of evil as the repressed Real in the Lacanian sense (via Zizek). Evil is imposed as political and social repression and expressed via narrative disruption and dismemberment of the narrative continuity. Its presence separates those marked by its effect, cordoning them off into their own worlds where they see and experience things differently from others, as those marked out for a special, esoteric kind of knowledge. We are in the company of  the wounded healers of society, who perceive the world magically.

The lens through which the question of social evil can be examined is in terms of a phrase that claims possession of its own social reality. “Zimbabwe is ours,” is just such a phrase, for it expresses a sense of seemless continuity between ‘what is me’ and what is mine.  The statement is patently untrue.

The Marxist complaint about the alienation of the worker from the product of her or his labour is grounded in a structural discontinuity between ‘what is me’ and what is mine, which robs life of its deeper meaning.

Migrants undergo a similar experience of alienation, as a baptism of evil, experienced as being separated from social and political environment of the nation by an inability to possess the new environment in any deeply felt and meaningful sense. The disruption of self that is experienced as a result of not being able to interpret the local or national order as “mine” can often lead to a sense of being set apart by fate, for a particular purpose. It is a subtle form of shamanistic initiation; as it produces the effect of “double vision”, spoken of by DuBois, for how others see you is never quite how you see yourself. This disruption of ones’ selfhood at the level of communication and a sense of efficacy is experienced in isolation, rather than publically, for it is the relative strength and certainty of the public discourse as hegemony that creates the recoil and alienation on the private level.