Marechera has notably stated that his purpose in his writing is to ‘short-circuit” the ways in which people think, to get them to see themselves in their full human potentiality when they look at themselves in the mirror. “Mindblast” as a concept captures the full essence of this strategy. The nature of the destination sought is immensely positive. To be able to see the potential that one has as a human being, simply by being alive, is not something that always comes easily. The 2008 movie, Revolutionary Road, illustrates how it is possible to lose one’s way by playing the game of life too safely.
Something is destroyed inwardly in the process of submitting to social expectations and economic necessity. The results are more far-reaching than the modest choices made by the protagonists in Revolutionary Road would have led anyone to anticipate. A last minute, desperate grab for freedom leads to a disastrous attempt to contract a miscarriage, leading to the female character’s tragic death. The superficiality of the suburban life that Frank and April had embraced, against the counsel of their more lively instincts, is shown in stark relief, in the face of how much potential was sacrificed in order to conform to the social expectations of the 1950s
Mindblast takes up effectively where Revolutionary Road leaves off.
The Zimbabwe of the early to mid-1980s is the American suburbia of the 1950s. The African writer has already taken into account the question of freedom versus conformity that April and Frank spent the most part of the movie trying to come to intuitive terms with, like a couple of trapped birds feeling their way to a cage exit. Marechera’s life has already taught him that a cage is often waiting for him, and that he must be as wily as a cat to escape it. In the opening section of the book, he depicts his character, as one who would try to escape the cage of authoritarian social control, as a “juvenile delinquent”. The sophistical authoritarian that wants to re-educate the boy to bring him in line with conformity to society’s expectations is Rix the Cat. His method of entrapment is something patently obvious – the use of logic. The identity of these characters will need only a small amount of decoding.
A “juvenile delinquent”, after all, is the stereotype bestowed by conservative regimes on those who will not follow in the paths allotted for them – that is, by taking up a 9- 5 job, and opting for a home in the suburbs, [this, and the characteristic of attempting to be upwardly mobile by appeasing a powerful father figure (this last point was the final nail in the coffin for April and Frank and their dream of a more satisfying life in Paris) is dealt with more thoroughly in Scrapiron Blues. The cat represents authoritarianism and the game of “cat and mouse” that various authorities (including the authority of the state and its secretive keepers of ideological order, the CIO) were playing with the writer during his time in Zimbabwe. (The writer had earlier attempted to leave the country by plane, but had been prevented from doing so by government advised airport authorities.)
Marechera, in Mindblast, is on the real revolutionary road – the one that his fictional predecessors had missed.
He is living in post-independence Zimbabwe, where nothing is guaranteed, not even a bed to sleep on at night. This kind of revolution, the one that the writer opted for, guarantees absolutely nothing -- except the reality of being true to oneself. With such a hardline attitude, one doesn’t submit to authority, but takes a position of independence, ‘come what may’, and no matter what hardships may intervene to make life difficult. Living on the streets was the least of Marechera’s worries. He managed, despite his economic hardships (which were obviously substantial) to set up an advisory centre for Zimbabwean writers. However, this establishment was closed after five days by nameless goons. He shared park benches with people who may or may not have been armed, and he often coughed up blood. Despite this, he managed to have a sporadic affair with a scholarly woman from Europe, who often put him up in a hotel for a couple of nights at a time.
Marechera’s writing in Mindblast expresses the quintessential outsider’s perspective. It is the perspective advanced by Georges Bataille, particularly when he said that “human striving is no longer directed at powerful and majestic limits; it now aspires, on the contrary, to anything that can deliver it from established tranquillity.” [ p 217, Visions of Excess]. There is wilfulness in exploring the possibilities of living life on the streets, especially in terms of the possibilities of producing writerly material.
This side of Marechera’s way of thinking should not be overlooked. Yet how is his work shamanic? It’s in the link between having been “marked for suffering” in a deep way and being in a position to convey something important to others. The shamanistic motif is clear in the story sequences about “Buddy” who is another persona for Marechera, living and surviving on the streets. This particular Marechera persona is stabbed in the side one day.
Marechera’s writing is never without autobiographical significance – and it appears that this stabbing is shamanic, pointing to the author’s psyche as having been wounded, and the author’s status as that of a “wounded healer”. It seems that unconsciously, Marechera’s two years [check this] of life on the streets was lived out in an attempt to find a remedy to heal a sick Zimbabwe. It is through one’s own existential crises that one can find remedies for healing others. In archaic terms, making oneself sick is a means to encounter spirits that may be of assistance. Thus, part of Bataille’s shamanic meditation is: “The depth of the sky, lost space is joy before death: everything is profoundly cracked.” [ p238 ibid].
It’s a risk, of course to take this less known path, and the risk is the same one that Yates’ April and Frank experienced, which is that of “soul loss” or the diminishment of the fundamental sense of being alive.
It is the process of arriving at this outcome which is very different, depending on whether one takes the shamanic path or the path of compliance to existing social expectations. In the latter case, one never knows what it means to “look in the mirror and see the beautiful person that is there”. In the former case, one has simply ridden the wave of life and its contingencies to its final conclusion. It’s at this point that the pressure on one’s energies mean that one cannot sustain a strong enough sustaining link between mind and body anymore. One’s fundamental psychological focus becomes shattered.
There are signs of this “soul loss” in the final story published about Buddy, who cannot sustain the pain of responsibility of the shamanic wound, and loses his ability to distinguish between his own writing and that of a young woman with poetical aspirations but no talent. The writer sees his task as how “to spit the atom of the story and in the mindblast survive the theme [that is] psychological holocaust.” ( p 144). The question could be simply restructured: “How might one manage to get through to others without entirely destroying one’s self?”
Something is destroyed inwardly in the process of submitting to social expectations and economic necessity. The results are more far-reaching than the modest choices made by the protagonists in Revolutionary Road would have led anyone to anticipate. A last minute, desperate grab for freedom leads to a disastrous attempt to contract a miscarriage, leading to the female character’s tragic death. The superficiality of the suburban life that Frank and April had embraced, against the counsel of their more lively instincts, is shown in stark relief, in the face of how much potential was sacrificed in order to conform to the social expectations of the 1950s
Mindblast takes up effectively where Revolutionary Road leaves off.
The Zimbabwe of the early to mid-1980s is the American suburbia of the 1950s. The African writer has already taken into account the question of freedom versus conformity that April and Frank spent the most part of the movie trying to come to intuitive terms with, like a couple of trapped birds feeling their way to a cage exit. Marechera’s life has already taught him that a cage is often waiting for him, and that he must be as wily as a cat to escape it. In the opening section of the book, he depicts his character, as one who would try to escape the cage of authoritarian social control, as a “juvenile delinquent”. The sophistical authoritarian that wants to re-educate the boy to bring him in line with conformity to society’s expectations is Rix the Cat. His method of entrapment is something patently obvious – the use of logic. The identity of these characters will need only a small amount of decoding.
A “juvenile delinquent”, after all, is the stereotype bestowed by conservative regimes on those who will not follow in the paths allotted for them – that is, by taking up a 9- 5 job, and opting for a home in the suburbs, [this, and the characteristic of attempting to be upwardly mobile by appeasing a powerful father figure (this last point was the final nail in the coffin for April and Frank and their dream of a more satisfying life in Paris) is dealt with more thoroughly in Scrapiron Blues. The cat represents authoritarianism and the game of “cat and mouse” that various authorities (including the authority of the state and its secretive keepers of ideological order, the CIO) were playing with the writer during his time in Zimbabwe. (The writer had earlier attempted to leave the country by plane, but had been prevented from doing so by government advised airport authorities.)
Marechera, in Mindblast, is on the real revolutionary road – the one that his fictional predecessors had missed.
He is living in post-independence Zimbabwe, where nothing is guaranteed, not even a bed to sleep on at night. This kind of revolution, the one that the writer opted for, guarantees absolutely nothing -- except the reality of being true to oneself. With such a hardline attitude, one doesn’t submit to authority, but takes a position of independence, ‘come what may’, and no matter what hardships may intervene to make life difficult. Living on the streets was the least of Marechera’s worries. He managed, despite his economic hardships (which were obviously substantial) to set up an advisory centre for Zimbabwean writers. However, this establishment was closed after five days by nameless goons. He shared park benches with people who may or may not have been armed, and he often coughed up blood. Despite this, he managed to have a sporadic affair with a scholarly woman from Europe, who often put him up in a hotel for a couple of nights at a time.
Marechera’s writing in Mindblast expresses the quintessential outsider’s perspective. It is the perspective advanced by Georges Bataille, particularly when he said that “human striving is no longer directed at powerful and majestic limits; it now aspires, on the contrary, to anything that can deliver it from established tranquillity.” [ p 217, Visions of Excess]. There is wilfulness in exploring the possibilities of living life on the streets, especially in terms of the possibilities of producing writerly material.
This side of Marechera’s way of thinking should not be overlooked. Yet how is his work shamanic? It’s in the link between having been “marked for suffering” in a deep way and being in a position to convey something important to others. The shamanistic motif is clear in the story sequences about “Buddy” who is another persona for Marechera, living and surviving on the streets. This particular Marechera persona is stabbed in the side one day.
Marechera’s writing is never without autobiographical significance – and it appears that this stabbing is shamanic, pointing to the author’s psyche as having been wounded, and the author’s status as that of a “wounded healer”. It seems that unconsciously, Marechera’s two years [check this] of life on the streets was lived out in an attempt to find a remedy to heal a sick Zimbabwe. It is through one’s own existential crises that one can find remedies for healing others. In archaic terms, making oneself sick is a means to encounter spirits that may be of assistance. Thus, part of Bataille’s shamanic meditation is: “The depth of the sky, lost space is joy before death: everything is profoundly cracked.” [ p238 ibid].
It’s a risk, of course to take this less known path, and the risk is the same one that Yates’ April and Frank experienced, which is that of “soul loss” or the diminishment of the fundamental sense of being alive.
It is the process of arriving at this outcome which is very different, depending on whether one takes the shamanic path or the path of compliance to existing social expectations. In the latter case, one never knows what it means to “look in the mirror and see the beautiful person that is there”. In the former case, one has simply ridden the wave of life and its contingencies to its final conclusion. It’s at this point that the pressure on one’s energies mean that one cannot sustain a strong enough sustaining link between mind and body anymore. One’s fundamental psychological focus becomes shattered.
There are signs of this “soul loss” in the final story published about Buddy, who cannot sustain the pain of responsibility of the shamanic wound, and loses his ability to distinguish between his own writing and that of a young woman with poetical aspirations but no talent. The writer sees his task as how “to spit the atom of the story and in the mindblast survive the theme [that is] psychological holocaust.” ( p 144). The question could be simply restructured: “How might one manage to get through to others without entirely destroying one’s self?”
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