intro black insider

Much has been said critically about the complexity and intrigue of The Black Insider. Yet few have considered the work actually beyond its literary merits, and in terms of the calculated effect it is capable of having upon its readers. I say that this effect has been “calculated” in the sense of having been intended by its author, since the structure of The Black Insider is psychologically designed to produce, in a reader who is committed in following the writing all the way to the end, an emotional and more broadly psychological sense of what it is like to have to fight a defensive war against an encroaching aggressor, when one would much rather be doing something else. The final scene – a war scene – in the final passages of The Black Insider is anything but gratuitous, but is faithfully rendered in terms of the logic of necessity built up within the extremely long and convoluted (in a literary sense) text, that leads up to this final, devastating outcome.

I have said already that the writer writes shamanically, and that means he intends to exert a direct and life-altering impression upon the readers’ minds. It is not intended that Marechera’s writing should filter into the reader’s intellectual consciousness slowly. Rather, Marechera’s writing functions in a way that is designed to give the reader no place to hide -- neither, that is to say, directly in the realm of the mind “or spirit” as this text would just as easily have it – or in the comfort of the body’s placid existence as it is. Picture the ease at which it would be possible to renounce the rights to either dimension of existence, if only one would be assured of being left alone. This is precisely what the structure of Marechera’s text assures will not happen. Instead the text compels the readers to mentally vacillate between the possibilities of resting comfortably in the life of the mind so as to transcend the most menacing aspects of reality, or the acceptance of reality as it is. These are the catches: To live the life of the mind involves living under siege by the rest of warlike humanity. Alternatively, one can struggle more directly, in terms of the principle of “survival of the fittest”, to the death, by being on the side of the aggressors.

Neither option is salutary, as both are costly in human terms. Marechera’s way of making us experience this is by building psychological tension by denying the reader the option of a way out of the conceptual and thoroughly existential maze that his text sets about building.

The Faculty itself is small when seen from the outside; but inside it is stupendously labyrinthine with its infinite ramifications or little nooks of rooms, some of which are bricked up to isolate forever the rotten corpses within. [...]

The people in the house are all refugees in one way or another; exiles from the war out there. Wanderers from some unknown trouble. All pilgrims at the shrine of the plague. The place stinks of psychological wounds, which gives it a human fragrance. (p 25)

In this text, dualisms collapse, and if one looks to find safety by preferring the side of a dichotomy that seems relatively safe for the moment, one will not find it – mind versus body, inside versus outside, warlike versus peaceable, are all eminently collapsible dichotomies, in The Black Insider. Moreover, they lead to existential dead-ends. The structure of the book does not permit a reader’s recourse to any of these conceptual dichotomies as a way to find enduring stable ground. Rather, the words delivered in the text are fluid elements of destructiveness, undermining faith in hierarchical systems of power – which are, after all, built on conceptual dichotomies that create, in turn, identities. The fluid psychological motion of this book is therefore not in terms of valuing or enhancing the culturally normative dichotomies of values we are used to – such dichotomies including those of race and moral standing, whether high or low. Rather, the psychological pattern that is reinforced by this book is in terms of the Tao – with one sort of state of being flowing into its opposite (and, as mentioned, always under pressure from each end): "Inside-out is outside-in, but there is always bleeding. And hidden persuaders." P 103.

If the work is designed to make us feel tense and even irritable, it is because of its political realism. Marechera spoke, a year before his death, of his Cassandra complex -- how could tell that certain things would happen before they took place. “Writers know more things than others do,” Marechera seemed to say. The capacity to see more, and to know more, might well pertain to one who keeps his ears open for new language and ideas to write down, for use in a novel. Yet Cassandra was a political figure, who knew more politically, about the future than others at her time did. In equating writers with “seers”, it is as if Marechera was saying that writers automatically fulfil a shamanic role for their societies. In speaking of Cassandra, and her failed attempt to save Troy from invasion, Marechera suggests that this shamanic role of the writer is actually political.

The knowledge that Marechera had, about the “Arts Faculty” at the University of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, and what was destined to be in store for the residue of guerrilla fighters there, was not, however given to him by “spirits” – at least, not entirely. Marechera’s voice on the CD in an interview session confirms that he already knew, through the political grapevine, presumably, that there were dissidents within the University, who were being assisted by certain sympathetic professors and lecturers. State military intelligence – which was still largely white dominated – knew this, too. They had developed a contingency plan to storm the Fine Arts building, with heavy artillery, should the now incumbent president, Robert Mugabe be voted in. You see, the Zimbabwe-Rhodesian regime had been declared illegal, and so a new vote was necessary in 1980, so that a new (and likely Marxist) government was in the offing. Operation Quartz was never given the secret signal to go ahead within hours of Robert Mugabe being declared the winner of the State election, and so the description of the Arts Faculty taking heavy shelling and being thoroughly destroyed, (as is depicted in the end passage of The Black Insider) did not take place in actual reality. Yet it could just as easily have happened, and President Mugabe’s more recent rorting of an election upon failing to win sufficient votes only confirms that the mode of thinking behind planning Operation Quartz is hardly removed from the Zimbabwe of today. The contents of The Black Insider are significantly prophetic, in the sense that Marechera understood very well the political psychology of this time and, as it turns out, the political psychology that remained in place more than twenty years later.