He considers that once they have stopped thinking in an institutionalised way, they might “look in a mirror [and] they will see how beautiful they are and see those possibilities within themselves, emotionally and intellectually.” ( p 41) The illness he wants to save them from is “slow brain death” ( p 42) due to “being fed with irrelevant facts, fed with things that have nothing to do with the individual who carries that brain”. (p 40) He questions, in the same refrain, whether an anarchistic uprising might be the answer to being fed the kinds of data that produce brain death.
As I have asserted already, it is the focus of this thesis to take an interest in Marechera’s “unconscious” determinations and their inner logic, since it is in these that one finds his total shamanistic sensibilities -- the aim to cure various social diseases, via certain practices and techniques of recovery from “brain death” that are based upon Marechera’s own experience with, to use a different term for the same thing, “soul loss” and subsequent “soul recovery”. While Marechera doesn’t use the term, “shamanism” to describe his agenda in this regard, the inner logic of his ideas above testifies to the fact that the key component to his thinking was shamanistic. One doesn’t need to have the available term at hand, in order to understand the principles involved, since a shamanic practitioner works from inner experience.
This key point concerning the exact nature of Marechera’s unconscious drives – that is, to heal and revitalise others on the basis of his shamanic self knowledge – explains the otherwise odd and in some ways chaotic formal structure of the book. The author’s investigation of anarchism as a means to solve the problem of a societal origin for inner soul death is undertaken on the basis of the author’s already accumulated shamanic knowledge, which he had acquired earlier in life (as described in terms of the madness and recovery he experienced in The House of Hunger’s novella section.)
Despite the author’s view that Black Sunlight was about exploring anarchism as a formal position, the broader emotional and intellectual context of the protagonist’s entry into the world of anarchism is shamanic – as are the methods (of being seduced into a transgressive mode of thinking and swallowing drugs); as is the middle section that follows the pattern of an initiation, as when the author looks at the sky that is cracked [footnote: joy before death, Bataille]; as is the renunciation of the solution of anarchism for shamanic healing; as is the final looking into the mirror (in a state of exhausted, and apparently suicidal bliss/renunciation— two of the extreme sides of human organic experience are united in confrontation with death. A sense of “ecstasy in loss”, in confronting death, is a keystone for a shamanic experience. [Bataille]) The broader scope of Black Sunlight, then, as guided by the author’s unconscious agenda, is that it is a shamanistic novel, designed to initiate others into a shamanistic mindset, whereby they may lose their institutionalised ways of thinking and recover from their ongoing affliction of “slow brain death”. The difficulty in writing in this way with any success is recognised by Georges Bataille, who states regarding “the practice of joy before death” that “oral initiation is […] difficult”. ( p 236 Visions of Excess).
Clearly Marechera wants to attempt to initiate us into shamanic alertness and aliveness by the sheer shock value and intensity of his writing. Admittedly, his writing is incredibly shocking and exciting, however my experience as a reader suggests that it is very difficult to take all of the dazzling complexities of language (and the sense of the ground of Being giving away beneath you more than once), without exercising the most common ego defence of repression. Thus one may come away from the text with a nauseating and bored feeling – as did one professional reader – without really having experienced the full clout of the text. To be able to experience its full impact, one has to be able to wear down the resistance of one’s own repressive devices, if need be, by repetitive reading (which finally ‘worked’ for me).
Once one is actually able to read the text from beginning to end, without pausing, and without switching off, the remarkable nature of its inner coherence will astound any reader. Yet, as stated, it is difficult to get to this point. The text is loaded with precisely the kinds of elements that are psychologically and socially disruptive, according to the philosophy of Georges Bataille. Yet, the degree to which the text is loaded with these elements of what Bataille would call “heterology” (in other words, with laughter, tears, sexual excitement, poetic emotion, the sentiment of the sacred and ecstasy [footnote: Shannon Winnubst, Reading Bataille Now—ref 2001a, 159-60.] ) in fact leads away from experiencing the impact of “electric shock treatment”. Rather, the normalizing part of the mind, that is, the part of the mind that is prone to accepting and reinforcing institutionalised thinking, blows its fuse whenever it senses an encroaching danger of electricity overload. This is as much as needs to be said about the difficulty of initiating anybody orally. So, it is extremely difficult – although not impossible – to get the kind of reaction that Marechera hoped his work would solicit.
Just as the intended impact of the work was shamanic, so is the actual structure and storyline of his work, as I’ve suggested. .] The first part of the book is set in real life Rhodesia, with student riots, trucks of dead bodies from the war, and University life as a backdrop. Then follows the “seduction” into the occult or “shamanic initiation”. Marechera’s work traces the events that lead to the shamanic initiation of the main protagonist – a photographer, Chris – who becomes “Christian” upon encountering the dark, transgressive underworld of the primeval caves at “Devil’s End”.
Devil’s End describes, suggestively, the buttocks of Being, which eventually swallow and then excrete the protagonist, in a way that suggests that he is born anew -- only not now from his mother or his father, but out of the horror and ecstasy of his experience. The shaman who offers the seduction (A Bataillesque term for mystical initiation) is “Susan”, who represents the horror and ecstasy available from Nature (in the raw) by having a consensual sexual relationship with her father. This positions her outside of Civilisation, in theory [See Freud], but she is in and of the realm of Nature, which lends her an occult force.) Christian eventually recovers from his ordeal, but not before he and a group of anarchists have run amok over the city, destroying cathedrals and blowing things up.
These anarchists are all, in some cryptic sense, shamanic initiates, since they are all “changelings”, having dropped out of society due to their inability to conform to its expectations (such as gender roles) or having fallen from society’s grace. [Footnote: In a material, rather than mystical sense, the anarchists of the Black Sunlight Organisation are, in Bataille’s terms, “heterogeneous” characters, which is to say, those who have some kind of antisocial irregularity about them, so that they don’t reinforce or reproduce society’s mores. Such people could end up being co-opted to work for the Nazis, but they could just as easily become anarchistic revolutionaries, since they are inherently not attached to any ideology. See: “On the Psychology of Fascism.”] Yet, to the degree that they have all been changed inwardly by their heterological experiences, they are also practitioners of ‘hidden knowledge’, which is, since it has to do with the whole body, with dissociation and with an encounter with Nature, broadly shamanic. The final parts of the book are a kind of winding down from the experience of shamanic ecstasy and horror. The protagonist of the book, now truly himself, and no longer “Christian” renounces the value of the Black Sunlight Organisation, declaiming it as “shit” [Footnote: “shit” is another feature of heterology, so this form of speech is ironically consistent with Bataille’s mysticism, at least.] The fictional nature of the earlier protagonist/s (in terms of the double/s who took the shamanic soul journeys) begins to reside, and we see the author more starkly, as he really is in everyday reality. Does the author see “the beautiful person” he is, at this moment? It seems that rather, he is imbued with the knowledge that his is a sacrificial animal, in relation to the vagaries of everyday reality, which extract a toll on him, the final one being actual mortal death – of which he confronts the image, staring back at him, wrists pouring blood, from the reflection in the mirror.
It is shamanic death -- that is a ritualised encounter with death – preoccupies the author in the last and post-climactic sections of the novel. He sees that life and words flow through him with energy of their own, and that there is nothing he can do about it to stem their flow. The mood of the final passages has everything in common with Bataille’s meditation on “the practice of joy before death”:
Everything that exists destroying itself, consuming itself and dying, each instant producing itself only in the annihilation of the preceding one, and itself existing only as mortally wounded. (p 238)
The author is reborn at the moment of his death, gazing into the mirror “as the gashes in my wrists leak faster and faster with meaning” and attending to the soft shamanic beat of the drums (to promote trance), which is actually the rain of words as expression of inspiration (seeming to come as if from the roof of his mind, or from the ‘above’). He is:
Beginning to live over again, having more provisions for the road than the road left. Like Cato the Censor, learning Greek in his old age, I am learning to speak just when I need to learn to be silent forever. (p 117)
He is psychologically restored, no longer “brain dead” but distrustful of words and their relative emptiness (in comparison to the immediacy of the knowledge conveyed via direct shamanic experience). (“Words are an empty bag. – p 117). There is also a political overtone in terms of his need to learn to keep silent forever. The book was initially banned in Zimbabwe, ostensibly for its obscenity, yet more likely because there are parts of the book where the protagonist takes on the role of “court jester” and mocks the “black chief” for his lust for power, which is depicted visually as an enormous erection.
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