shamanic realism

If it wasn’t clear from the offset, a shamanic initiate does not choose their profession – at least not in normal circumstances. There may be some instances in which shamanic initiation does seem like a choice, but these are instances of “shamanic initiation lite”. The subculture of the 60s and Leary’s experiments with taking accident could be considered in the latter sense, as leading to explorations within the mind that do not come first at a great cost to one’s person.

Similar things could be said about New Age shamanism. Yet such lighter versions of shamanism, which are suited to more developed countries in which lifestyles have already become finessed do not invite a deeper sense of the logic of shamanism – that one becomes a shaman, traditionally, because of inherent pathologies within one’s community. It is these that give rise to the shamanic initiation, which is via profound wounding of some sort. Shamanism, although originating in cultures of hunter-gatherers, is also most ideally suited to the needs of oppressed communities of all sorts. It is their members who are most likely to be inducted – unwillingly, as I have suggested shamanic initiation in its truest sense must be – into shamanic knowledge. For, if the shaman is the manifestation of the disease of his community, he is also the counterpoint and its cure. Thus the logic of genuine shamanism is that it has a side of initiation into knowledge of the “other realm” and how things really work (as opposed to how they merely seem to work to blinkered and as yet unprobing eyes).

A shamanic initiate has eyes newly opened to the meaning and the cost of power, which has been in inscribed upon his body, like one of Kafka’s torture victims. It is in this profound sense of shamanism that Marechera’s book, The House of Hunger, finds its meaning and its raison d'être. [Footnote: This is not to underestimate the effect that the international youth subculture had on the author, or indeed the degree to which his use of cannabis –an entheogen—had the result of producing his “shamanic initiation”. However, it was the oppression of hunger and the poverty of opportunity that ultimately produced Marechera’s induction into the world of shamanic sensibilities.]
Marechera’s writing, righ

t from its first inception and presentation in The House of Hunger, has been shamanic. Yet, it is The House of Hunger that most closely embraces the conception of “shamanic realism” as presented by James Alexander Guerra Overton in Shamanic Realism: Latin American Literature and the Shamanic Perspective. Whereas some of his later works, such as (I have argued) Black Sunlight, is more wholly shamanic, The House of Hunger approximates, rather, that which Overton refers to as “Shamanic realism”, which is “a new classification or genre of literature - which [is] based on the coordinated juxtaposition in resolved antinomy of two antithetical worldviews, one shamanic and the other Western. [ p 63]. Overton speaks in this regard of texts relating to Latin America, however he also states that, “the roots of this [Latin American tradition of] esoteria were already well established in the weltanschauung of the three principal cultures which constitute the social and racial make-up of the Latin American continent: the Native American, the African, and the Iberian.[-- p 3]. It is perhaps for the reason that The House of Hunger contains so much Western “realism” that is has been generally better acclaimed internationally than some of his later produced works.


In the novella section of The House of Hunger, Marechera’s hunger for spiritual and intellectual sustenance – and not just food – takes place semi-autobiographically, in the black ghettoised ‘township’ of Vengere of white-ruled Rhodesia. The young man struggles with the rights and wrongs of gaining an education in English, at the expense of his parents and their suffering. He develops a crush on a local girl, Immaculate, and expresses certain traditional misogynistic attitudes towards her, despite his pity for her situation – which is worse than his. In due course, the inward hunger for a life that offered some dignity and sophistication, along with the pressure to complete his destiny through study and leave the ghetto at last, causes the protagonist’s mental breakdown. He starts to see hallucinations, which are banished only with a huge emotional release of tension in the community, which comes to pass with a sudden crash storm, which destroys much of the school and the local environment.

The spiritual hunger for life outside of the community remains, however, and the author takes us for a trip inside and outside of his head, as he draws inwards, to the point that inside and outside of this “house of hunger” – his head – can not be differentiated, (at least by the protagonist and perhaps by the reader, who is often left wondering if what is happening is actually real or is occurring symbolically and inwardly). The final passages of the book are in an entirely different tone and of a different quality from some of these tormented passages of tormented realism. It is in these last few passages that the “shamanic” elements are introduced into this otherwise excruciating but otherwise fairly “realistic” depiction of somebody’s descent into madness. These last elements are “shamanic” because they do not follow the normal pattern of human psychology, where there are only two polarities of being – madness and sanity (and the gradations in between). An unpredictable third element appears in the figure of the “wise old man” who appears at the young Marechera’s door, and nurtures him with his story-telling.

The fragility of this old man and the serendipity of his appearance and his story-telling (which is somehow intrinsically nourishing) lead one to believe that this is somehow Marechera who has affected a shamanic transformation, (after a difficult “initiation” and madness), in order to provide for himself, through his imaginative powers, that which he found to be lacking. Shamanic transformation and regeneration is the third element of the pendulum – one that doesn’t rightfully exist either logically or according to most Western psychology. Yet it is the introduction of this element of restorative freedom that gives Marechera’s work the appellation “shamanic realism”.


The rest of the short stories in the book are black humorous stories about the author’s experiences, as a writer, in exile, growing up in Lesapi, and in relation to the question of having a “black identity”. These stories are shamanic in that they involve a doubling of the persona of the author (much as we saw the beginnings of in the last section of the novella. In the story concerning his childhood in Lesapi, the narrative elements are animistic and broadly Romantic in its deep and evocative sense of connection with the capricious spirit of nature governing his village. The short stories of The House of Hunger portray women as manifestly strong, in terms of how they are represented according to the author’s own metaphysics. The writer represents his shamanic view of the world – with magic and reality supervening on each other.