Encountering audacity in the works of Marechera

MINDBLAST

One of the most significant ways in which Marechera’s work has been misunderstood – and certainly underestimated – is in the sense that his “confessions” about his life have been interpreted within a primarily moral register (as, for instance, in David Pattison’s approach), rather than in terms of an epistemological register, exemplifying rigourous self-knowledge.

In Marechera’s life and the manner in which he reflected upon it, I do not see a Romantic Steppenwolf type of character, as Veit-Wild does. I can see how Marechera’s confessions concerning himself and his view of the world as “unreal” in the manner of the shamanistic experiences of “Don Juan” [ref] could lead to this impression, that he lived life recklessly and without concern for its reality. However, to assume that this was all there was to Marechera is to overlook the fact that a writer who uses himself as the subject of his writing does not remain the subject of his self-portrayal. That is, in the ‘act’ of portraying himself, he has transcended himself and his subjectivity, and is portraying that subjectivity in a light that is necessarily apart from the subjectivity that is being represented. This automatic doubling of the self is the methodological key to effective memoir writing. One never writes a memoir as “one’s self”, but always from a point of epistemological distance from that self, at a point from which one has already become “other”. To put this necessity concerning writing into a different perspective – Marechera writes Black Sunlight from a pre-oedipal perspective, whereby he apparently wallows in the immanence of his self-concepts. Nonetheless, the self that pertains to a very egoistic and very adult understanding of one’s own political self-interest frames and guides the structural development of this work. The self that experiences the world and the self that takes note of the experience and determines its value in an overall conceptual view of one’s relationship to reality are two very different selves. It is the latter self of Marechera that is wise. However, it has been the former definition of self – the merely experiential (but not necessarily reflective) self – that many critics have chosen to focus on, as if this were all there were to Marechera and his writing. Thus many critics have judged him superficially according to his “behaviour”, rather than in terms of the audacity of his self-knowledge, which was what actually led him to the destitution of the park benches of Harare.