Poems, etc, intro

‘THRONE OF BAYONETS’ AND ‘PORTRAIT OF A BLACK ARTIST IN LONDON’


The two works could be easily dismissed as stylistic embodiments of movements already passé, were it not for a deeper level of discourse in both works patterned upon the author’s psychological acuity in knowing exactly what was going on in Zimbabwean and British politics respectively – the Zimbabwe that came into being after the minority regime that had run Rhodesia, as the country was then termed, was overthrown. ‘Throne of Bayonets’ is an elegy for the newly born -- and yet already failed -- nominally socialist state. It is written in way that has much in common with the Modernist style of TS Eliot, with segues of lamentations in the form of song (which has a rap like beat, tone and reflects the language of the homeless on the streets of Harare), high modernist poetic refrain concerning the demise of Western civilisation, the betrayal of the authentic impulses for freedom of the guerrilla fighters of the Chimurenga war, and then the ghostly echoes of the Stalinist slogans uttered through the state media. The other poetic work, which Marechera has termed a “choreodrama”, was written no doubt a couple of years earlier than the former, when Marechera was still a homeless Zimbabwean in exile in London. He was also unemployed and having overstayed his student visa, he was effectively an illegal immigrant.


Around the time he wrote the choreodrama, he had been staying in a ‘squat’ at Tolmer’s Square (p 7 TBI, p 263 Sourcebook), until it was “pulldown into rubble”. The tone and style of the writing is quite fractured, with its bursts of poetic rage, its caricaturising masks that represent the British image of the oversexed black vagrant and the idea of the primitive consciousness of the “Third Worlder”. These stereotypical elements of the British perception of class identity are amplified and thus are given a very hysterical dimension, in terms of both the poem’s structure and its overall content. In structure, the poem is a fragmented collection of grievances, intoned in the language of an angry black “negro” who has become accustomed to living on the streets. In content, it traces the logic of the political psychology of that time, which, in accordance with Marechera’s reading of it, deemed that black males represented an extreme danger to the virtue of young white females.

Marechera’s response to being held under siege by this political ideology is not just to fling the amplified and hystericised imagery of being “a political threat” back into the faces of the regime – ostensibly he would do this by publishing his “crimes” (including seduction of an underage white teenager) along with his anarchistic threats, as the psychological structure of the text suggests more than this relatively surface form of revenge. Rather, it would seem, the author intends to use the already existing levels of anxiety regarding the status and motivations of the blacks inside the British system as a political weapon of his own. Since the author was familiar with Jung, and understood that fears such as these lurk in the “shadow side” or unconscious part of the psyche, he recognised his political enemy’s weak point.

It was a psychological strategy established by the Surrealists to create paranoia in order to change society by getting people to question the accuracy of their conventional perceptions. This is the deeper level of Marechera’s strategic intent. So the first poem could be seen as High Modernist in a socially conservative sense, and the second work, the choreodrama, could be seen to exist within the literary genre of Surrealism. Such ways of categorising these works would be accurate an logical – except for the aspects that such facile categorising would overlook, which are the components of shamanism in each of these texts.
Both of these texts are quite simply haunted. “Throne of Bayonets” is haunted by the indelible nature of truth itself, which gives a surface appearance to reality, so that the historical sense of concrete change doesn’t seem to change anything at all. “Learn Mortality early and you are doomed To forever walk alone.” ( p 36). To confront death is to become shamanised, separated forever from simple faith in the norms of the community, in order to be of service to the Sacred. Marechera’s writing is profoundly shamanic in his profound understanding that “terror” and “truth” are fundamentally linked – since one must face terror if one is to have the courage to look into the unconscious (either one’s own or that of another).

Marechera speaks the truth about Zimbabwe, shamanically, through his wounds. He channels, via the telephone, his “poet self”, which he requires to assist him in giving him an accurate reading of Zimbabwe as it was during the early 80s. In the case of “Portrait”, however, it is less his wounds that he speaks through, but his whole body. The body of the hammered down migrant becomes the ghoul that at the end of the choreodrama gives testimony as to the reasons for his death. This poem suggests a threat of haunting his enemies from beyond the grave.


When viewed in this shamanic light, the difference between the two poems is palpable – it is a difference of intent. In the first instance (Throne of Bayonets), Marechera wants to employ his mediating shamanic skills in order to heal the new Zimbabwe. This is shown by the sustenance he bestows on the dead freedom fighters, as he interacts with their spirits. In the second instance (Portrait), Marechera is acting as a black shaman, who actually endeavours to employ destructive magic against his political foes by exploiting his psychological knowledge of their weak points.