new thesis statement

Marechera’s universe is one where the idea of direct use of force -- ie.expressed as deference to the primal father--is more common than the sublimated law of the band of brothers. This is a historical situation outside of the ideology of a modernist universalization of morality (which reached its ideological height in the West in the 50s). His writing encompasses and also generally critiques historically pre-modernist (but also postmodernist) situation whereby tribal fiefdoms – for example of black and white Africa -- predominate. Not just in colonial society, but even in “postmodernist” social contexts, we might consider ourselves to be in a post-Freudian era of neotribalistic social organisation, based upon identity politics and other more pernicious sorts of local fiefdoms, which, within their a limited social context, strike us as "natural" due to our emotional indebtedness to them in giving us feelings of belonging and protecting us from a feeling of danger coming from those who do not "belong". Marechera’s shamanistic propensities for emotional detachment enable him to take a more detached moral and political position in relation to fiefdoms of social and political identity. His hard-won psychological distance (gained through “facing death” -- in particular, the sense of not fitting into any particular group) gives him a profound understanding of the intricate workings of power relations and how they affect the human psyche, whilst avoiding playing into the impassioned tribalistic subjectivities of identity politics, which would only make him a victim of their highly emotive tropes of belonging or exclusion.   By contrast to these features of identity politics, Marechera's  shamanistic detachment enables him to make deeper critiques than can be given within the scope of contemporary identity politics of power relations and to see the damage they do to the excluded "other".

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NB. ‘Facing death’ doesn’t mean self-annihilation, so much as it is an experience that enables one to “double” the self and thus transcend certain aspects of the everyday, concrete self and its historical limitations. The facet of shamanism that differentiates it from madness is the capacity for self-observation and the wisdom this imparts in terms of dealing with others on equitable terms. It may seem that some of Marechera’s shamanistic “wisdom” is emotive and as such subjective, however, even in his most polemic and invective modes there is an element of self-reflexivity that makes for a psychological counterbalance within the political critiques he is making.