Black Sunlight is a distinctly Zimbabwean book. Since a large part of it appears to have been set in war-torn Rhodesia, it is also a distinctly Rhodesian book. Ideologically, which is to say genealogically, the residents of Black Sunlight, and indeed the seditious members of the anarchistic Black Sunlight Organisation represented in this book, are neither specifically black nor white. Marechera has on a number of occasions, made it clear that it was a deliberate choice on his part not to define his handful of outlaw characters in terms of a racial identity. Like The Black Insider, which can be considered in some senses as a warm-up manuscript, or more objectively, a step in the process of writing Black Sunlight (although is has value in its own right), Black Sunlight is designed to break down the structures of the mind and ways of thinking that have developed under the pressures and constraints of growing up in a class (and racially-segregated) society.
When I first read Black Sunlight, the information in it and multiple shifts in direction were too much for me to take in. As stories of dogged persistence often go, something about the text, something uncanny in it, kept bringing me back to the story. What was it I was searching for, and what did I expect or hope to find? In essence, I was looking for a trace of my self, perhaps to be found cowering in the labyrinths of the past. My sudden – and effectively forced – emigration from Zimbabwe in 1984, at the age of fifteen, when my parents decided to pull up roots, and head for Australia, had effectively uprooted a core part of my mind. In the parlance of certain stream of neo-shamanism – and I use this term advisedly, for lack of any term that more accurately captures my predicament – I was suffering from “soul loss”. I was in a state of being that -- had it been caused by actual mental trauma, rather than by the violent shifting of the tectonic plates of existing reality – would have made more sense. I had been born into a culture that had inherited many of the old Victorian ideas about children, and particularly those of the female sort-- to wit, that they should be kept in the dark as much as possible, concerning politics and all the other aspects of reality that were considered too much for our sort to bear. Consequently, I had been psychologically shaped by a very decisive and important period of history, which I knew nearly nothing about, concretely.
Marechera’s Black Sunlight gradually suffused into my consciousness, as I read it through, four, five and six times. It’s a very visceral kind of work, as Gerald Gaylard, pointed out. Each time I read it, my mind would reach a certain point where it would announce to me, through a feeling of satiation, of my having had sufficient to digest for now. It took several returns until I could read the book from start to finish, as a whole, in order to develop my aesthetic impression of it, which was my goal at that time. The extremely visceral nature and intensity of the writing had made it too hard for me to proceed to this point, before.
Upon reaching this point, I discovered that I was in the midst of the Rhodesian bush war or Chimurenga, seeing everything from the perspective of those who were being persecuted as “reds”. As I had worn down my initial resistance to experiencing the scenes within the novel, I was able to experience everything in the novel in a powerful and profound way, as I followed the protagonist through his experiences and troubles. The structure of the text (which I will explain, shortly, is patterned after the early developmental structures of an infant’s mind) enabled me to experience the events in the text through a diffused ego – as if whatever was happening to anybody in the writing was also happening to me. So, it was that I was able to effectively journey with Marechera to a time in the past, and to re-experience it in a way that was not hindered or distorted by the censoring adult mind and its emotionally conditioned suppositions.
By means of this psychological regression, I was able to experience something of the bush war first-hand, seeing it through Marechera’s reconstruction of events. I recovered a sense of visceral and experiential knowledge that enabled me to make sense of who I am. By undergoing partial psychological regression with Marechera, I’d rediscovered part of the lost history of “my soul”.
It was this experience with the text that confirmed my already existing hypothesis – that Marechera’s texts are, in general, shamanic. Further research affirms that a temporary and partial regression to an infantile state is the key to shamanic interventions that restore lost psychological or physical health. It is the shamanic juxtaposition of the state of an infant’s mental flexibility with the state of an adult’s store of wisdom and knowledge, which enables the damaged psyche to repair itself – and, Marechera wrote for a generation of damaged psyches; for those who were suffering from what had happened during the prolonged bush war (1966-1980). This book – which reacquaints people with the damage and desperation that relates to Zimbabwe’s still recent history -- is intended to bring healing, and a sense of a transcendence of categories of “race”, to this society.
No comments:
Post a Comment