Marechera and the psychology of shamanism

My particular intellectual background and experiences have made it fairly easy for me to find shamanistic elements within Marechera's work.

The other factor to my discovering these is that these elements were already in Marechera’s work, waiting to be analysed and discovered – if not be me, then by somebody else like myself, for I am sure that I cannot be alone in having the kind of background and ideas which would permit me to evolve towards a shamanic reading of Marechera.

I have already suggested that Marechera himself may not have known he was shamanic in his way of writing and manner of approaching the world. If one were a practitioner of a specific religion in the traditional sense, it would be necessary, of course, to know that this is what one was.  Such self-recognition would hardly be so necessary if shamanism were rather a phenomenon based upon the neurological structures of the mind – as I am suggesting, in line with the intensive theoretical research of Michael Winkelman, that it in fact is. Shamanism is the intuitive discovery that destruction of parts of the self (including and above all, one’s self concept) need not spell the end of the road for one’s processes of life, but is rather the beginning of new forms of life and self-identity, which can transcend in their perfection and intensity earlier ways of thinking and existing.

Shamanism is the creative and regenerating life force that recasts those accidents of fate that would have led simply to personal destruction into a sense that one has access to something better; something more. It is the neurological structures of the mind that facilitate the kind of healing that results, and it is the psychological experience of this healing that causes the one who had become inadvertently ‘shamanised’ to associate experiences of a partial ‘death’ and destruction of earlier self concepts with an intrinsic healing power within life itself.

This is by no means to imply that the shaman fully forgets the traumas of his or her past, or that he overcomes his sense of tragedy. Quite the opposite is the case.

Rather, a ‘shamanic initiation’ is an induction into an experience of psychological trauma, that results in the acknowledgement of ones’ mortality. From the point of view of one who may have been brought up within a system of monotheistic religion, it involves a radical destruction of the sensibility that there’s a God “up there” who will intervene on ones’ behalf. Rather, gods and the sense of the Good lose their positions on a pedestal above humanity, with the result that the sense of what is sacred is recast, neurologically, as being much more proximate to the human being and his or her everyday experiences.

Similarly – and this goes to the ‘bittersweet’ aspect of shamanism – death itself also draws nearer to the one who has been ‘shamanised’, and remains in proximity, as a constant reminder of human mortality. It is as if conventional ego defences, that would cause the subject to constantly deny his or her own mortality had been severely weakened by the traumatic process of ‘shamanic intitiation’. The initiate henceforth has more self knowledge, and more knowledge of the structures of human reality – but only at a cost.

In overall terms the cost is perhaps worth it. One has to, I suspect, be a bit ghoulish to say so – yet, in all honesty, one feasts upon the bones of the saints (both in literary and political terms, and in terms of spiritual self nourishment). Marechera’s writing embodies a state of human activity – the state of being thoroughly neurologically active – that one rarely sees in any written work. The normal developmental processes that produce, as their end result, the ‘good citizen’ and the ‘mature adult’, also lead to an outcome that is relatively static.

The following is the position of orthodox psychoanalysis (although it is not often recognised that this is its position, due to the tremendous power of conventional ego defences, in protecting us from developing knowledge about ourselves – in the end, a protection of knowledge concerning our mortality.) Psychoanalysis points to ‘normative’ processes of development that are also deemed to be normative in their traumatic nature, which can extract much of the lifeforce from a human being.   (See Freud's reference to the woman of 30 years.) Shamans, by contrast, are those who have made the happy discovery that there is life on the other side of the rational constructions (and rationalising limitations) of ego.

In the case of a shaman-initiate,  death has become a very well-known enemy indeed. And having become so well known, death may be bargained with, and persuaded to release more of one’s life force. A shaman is one who keeps his friends close and his enemy – death – even closer. It is through negotiating with death that one can persuade superego – who would require that one become increasingly more psychologically static – to allow one to expand. One faces down death and thus takes life force – (that which Nietzsche refers to as ‘plasticity’) – back from him. A shaman is a type who has discovered that there are benefits in engaging with the forces of destruction. Needless to say: despite his proclaimed intentions, he performs his mediation role on behalf of others, more than himself, for the shamanistic role is sacrificial.