TONDERAI'S FATHER REFLECTS

FROM “THE CONCENTRATION CAMP” – “TONDERAI’S FATHER REFLECTS”

To suffer martyrdom is a fate that falls upon some, taking them outside the arena of rationality, to a place where death casts its irrational shadow. It is the destiny of Tonderai’s father to endure martyrdom for the sake of freedom, in Zimbabwe’s Second Chimurenga or war of liberation. Mr Murehwa is the father of Tonderai, a boy who had been taking food to support the guerilla combatants. In the three page soliloquy by Tonderai’s father, he commits to denying the torturers of the Rhodesian forces any information. Rather, he seals up his fate, along with the refusal of his words, in the metaphoric form of a burial ship that will take him to his death:

Well it’s done
Across this stuttering tongue of sea
My ship, The Wordhorde, sails
My burial ship, wrought from tough hardwood word
Sails … (p 195)

The writing is intra-psychological, dealing as it does with Tonderai’s father’s encounter and reconciliation with his superego, which he recruits to the side of his fight for liberation, using his memories that evoke hatred of the Rhodesian forces to enable him to face death in a manner that is “hard” in the sense of being unwavering and resolute.

From afar, listing into view,
The Towerman cometh; cloud and spray,
Rent apart, reveal
The Towerman’s glisped visage! (p 195)

This encounter with superego is destructive – not least because it involves reconciliation with what is right to do, rather than with what is merely comfortable and acting in compliance with the status quo. It would be easier to deny that deny that the Rhodesian forces really meant to do harm. It would be easier to defer to those who were already in power. So the reconciliation with his superego produces a tearing apart of mind and body – the body must submit to what the mind has commanded.

Like ‘lectric feather drop’t
From thunderbird’s tearing flight
(Darkness visible!) memory’s very light
Baptises the Towerman’s exilebroken
Return …

The “light” of memory (and the capacity of resolution that the recollection of hatred brings) enables Mr Murehwa to recruit his own superego for an appropriately warlike response to the war waged against him, despite his humble needs and desires.

The rest of the soliloquy reads like a “soul journey” of shamanistic dissociation. It is clear that the formlessness of the “ocean” forms the basis for the partial release of Mr Murehwa’s body from his mind, as he undergoes torture. The sea “stutters” (p 198), but does not speak. It is formless and “oceanic”, for it carries the victim away from the shores of reality and the victimisers who reside there.

This shamanic soul journey of dissociation enables the subject to transcend himself, so as to embrace his mysterious destiny to become a freedom fighter, although in a material sense he is merely a slave to circumstance:

Whose on the trader’s forearm these teethmarks?
A sudden mist
Casts mystery upon the cradle. ( p 196)


It also unites him in life and death with a transcendent image of eternity as the embracer of both good and bad fate – “This deep black-blue sky”, from which “no breath in hope’s breeze will blow her image.” ( p 197) The dissociation that enables the “soul journey” – the “sailing away” is facilitated in traditional shamanistic fashion, facilitating dissociation by the sense of a beating of a drum:

Only this drum
Of gloom and din
And gross dream
Wrought from tough hardwood word
Sails. ( p 197)

Pain takes on a rhythm of its own that enables the subject to endure his torment. Tonderai’s father reflects upon his wife writing an obituary in the newspaper after he has gone. ( p 197). He forecasts her endurance in an alienating cityscape after his death, and her meeting him there after they have both become ghosts. It is a place that uses up the poor as manual labour, and gives them only coldness (and nothing for the soul) in return.

Only this drum
Skyscapers of steel and sinew
Cement, plateglass, and workers’ blood
The Towerman’s sneer as wide as Fourth Street
Down which I walk hand in hand with the ghost
Of her who sailed the stuttering sea …
My burial ship, The Wordhorde. ( p 198)