Zimbabwe is ours

Marechera’s skill is to be able to express, using a number of quite diverse literary techniques, including irony and humour, the hidden aspects of social injustice, which are experienced as this existential discontinuity and disruption of selfhood. The measure by which social justice can be estimated is, of course, by the ability to assert in a convincing way, that one’s environment is genuinely one’s own. Since this is the metaphysical measurement that Marechera brings to bear, within his writings in the book, it is clear that the approach he uses has radical social and political implications – one might say that they were anarchistic in design.

The metaphysics governing Marechera’s writing is thus a notion of selfhood that is affirmed at the greater social level: an existential sense of being that would give the affirmation to the concept that “Zimbabwe is ours”. In fact, his writing in Scrapiron Blues is highly ironic, for there is an inevitable discordance between how the characters see themselves and whether the author’s sense of organic truth -- as an underlying ontological foundation with its own way of catching and holding the vibrations of human life -- actually agrees or disagrees with the characters’ self assessments. The membrane that we hear echoing with a true or false note as pronouncement of a moral judgment says much about the characters relation to authenticity. There are characters in Scrapiron Blues who have been effectively pushed out of normal, everyday existence, to inhabit a spirit-realm. Here their ghost selves serve the truth through the authenticity of their personal testimonies. Compared to those who remain in a conventional relationship with life – that is, without the alienation that makes them into ghosts – Marechera’s spirit characters are on higher moral ground. Their voices echo with the sense that Zimbabwe is not yet theirs. Their cries, thwarted in their lifetime, but resonant in the spirit world, concern their right to participate fully in life as human beings who are not alienated from society at large. Their legacy to those still living is to catch them in their false notes in relation to authenticity. It is to put them back on course towards an authentic kind of living, in accordance with which they will be able to honestly pronounce that Zimbabwe is theirs. In Shona spiritualist terms, there is an unbroken chain of connection between the future and its well-being and the moral integrity of the past.


The aesthetics of moral discordance in Scrapiron Blues is a sign to his readers that there is more work in transforming everyday reality to be done. Marechera’s short stories for children were criticised for having a similar quality of discordance about them: “Publishers found the stories ‘unsuitable’ because of the disparity between the child-like narrator and the sarcastic, older voice which permeates the writing.” (p xiii). In terms of typical Marecherian sense of humour, those who embrace reality as it is without questioning it, in particular those who haven’t been pushed out of life, to live a shadowy liminal existence, are the least intelligent and most comical of characters. (The rest of his characters are involved in some tragic circumstances or other.) Thus it is the author’s cat, and not the author himself who can affirm reality as it currently is. For the author’s cat, it is the structure of archeological ruins of previous Zimbabwean civilisation that is to be applauded. What of Zimbabwe itself? The question is studiously avoided, for the cat can be pleased with that which the author, in his higher knowledge, cannot be:


My Cat looked at Great Zimbabwe.
“It’s huge! It’s very old.
“It’s made of great big stones!” my Cat
exclaimed.
“It’s ours. I am proud of Zimbabwe!”
said my Cat on the way home. ( p 224)


Marechera as the author of this piece is herein playing his part as mediator of the knowledge held by those already dead (the freedom fighters who fought for a better Zimbabwe) and those half-pushed out of life (those living in a mode of political and social alienation in his contemporary Zimbabwe). He knows the truth, but it is difficult to say it within a context of political censorship. (His last book published when he was alive, Mindblast, goes into more details about his censorship. Its contents caused a political furore.) The discrepancy between the “two voices” adds, in any case, an aspect of aesthetic complexity to the writing. Children may not understand sarcasm of this sort, but in due course they are able to understand that adults address them with different tones of voice, which have different meanings and repurcussions for them. A child can therefore grow towards understanding the meaning of Marechera’s text in light of his political critique and complexity.