That which is shamanic about the short story, Burning in the Rain is, first and foremost, the way that identity is understood. As I have taken pains to mention in the introductory chapter, shamanic knowledge is not strictly speaking “epistemological” (paradoxically, of course).
That is, it is not knowledge in the conventional sense that we understand knowledge. Rather, shamanic knowledge is ontological. This means that when it comes to understanding identity from a shamanic point of view, one will not understand it according to conventional systems of knowledge, not even according to according to one that is as informative and politically and historically aware as that provided by the archaeological approach to knowledge about social identities furnished by Michel Foucault. Marechera’s writing is not postmodernist, but rather deeply psychological. His understanding of how the black identity comes into being is based – shamanically – on personal experience, and is related, also shamanically, by means of a doubling of the self.
The literary doubling – and even tripling – of the self, as per the literary aesthetics of Edgar Allen Poe, is not quite what I am referring to here. Rather, I am intent upon conveying my recognition as a reader of the intense self-knowledge that the author expresses concerning the way that social and political forces interpellate an as yet unformed psyche, so that the self becomes party to the needs of various Ideological State Apparati, by adopting an identity that fits in with politically determined values and systems put in place before the individual being affected by them was free to make choices.
Thus it is the unusual self-awareness of the writer than enables him to describe the ontological deformations of selfhood that were the only ones available to him as a young man growing up in colonial Rhodesia, in the process of “coming of age”. The ontological aspects of the story reveal themselves to us in the way the young man’s path of development is sabotaged rather than facilitated by the options available to him within colonial Rhodesia. The psychical wholeness that he had previously experienced in synchronisation with nature is confronted by a treacherous two-pronged fork in his path, which could lead to acceptance of the status of being an ape, or a false white aristocratic demeanour and consciousness. Alternatively to these paths, however, is the shamanic path, the way of which is woven throughout the storyline as contradictory to the troubles described in the”realist” version of the story and as a redemptive narrative.
The shamanic narrative involves the idea of a “manfish” who can dive deeply into the subconscious, as a result of facing his fears (and in this significant sense, facing death, as well). Another of Marechera’s short stories tells us that a “manfish” is a drowned man, whose spirit has turned into a fish, and is a danger to children who want to swim at the place of drowning. A shaman is likewise someone’s whose continuity life has been interrupted by an encounter with death. In a sense, their old life has “drowned” and they are now living on borrowed time. Yet, for all this, the access that such a shamanic individual has to this borrowed time is redemptive – for it implies a continuity of life beyond a point that life should logically be considered to continue: A drowned man does not, conventionally, live on, not even as a “manfish”. So the “manfish” – or rather, imaginative power – redeems the situation that the author finds himself in, which is dire.
One looks to Lacan as well as to the post-Kleinians, to understand how a mirror may “interpellate” a person into having an identity that they have not chosen. “The mirror, I suppose, was at the heart of it.” That is how the story begins. The “mirror stage” implies seeing oneself as a whole person for the first time, rather than as experiential chaos and multiplicity. One can see it as implying the beginning of self-consciousness, a point of transcending political unconsciousness and a dependency on a state of nature (represented in Kleinian theory as “the mother”), towards arriving at an awareness of one’s separate personhood. (The question of identity cannot be far behind.) In some parts of Africa, one may arrive at this crisis point of identity particularly late, due to a lack of efficiency in systems that would integrate one into the processes of conforming to the Ideological State Apparati much earlier. (A lack of industrial technology may be to blame.)
Marechera’s shamanic awareness is implicitly postcolonial -- since his understanding reveals that he is aware that what has the power to interpellate him into the state of having an adult identity is an alien power. To put it plainly: the options available to him, if he wants to take up a role in adulthood, are all predefined by colonial power structures. This is why it seems to him that a natural life, in which he “had been happy, unbearably happy, as a child” (p 85) is experienced as suddenly being subjected to alien spiritual powers. The author, in his profound awareness of what was at stake at that period of his life, can take a certain distance from his earlier experiences, since the shamanic endowment of “borrowed time” has earned this for him. “But time had rubbed pepper into his eyes and the stinging of it had maddened it out of him. The mirror said it all and in it he knew his kinsman; the ape, lumbering awkwardly into his intimacy.” ( p85.) The tone is tragi-comic.
The “ape” is the colonial concept of the black man. The writer is describing his dawning of consciousness as to what it means to come of age in a political system that has reserved a particularly lowly place for you because of your colour. The alien nature of this consciousness – alien because it is colonial – is represented by the author’s representation of this consciousness as interrupting his otherwise normative and happy life in an occult (unnatural) fashion, which is represented by the mirror because of its capacity to double and even possibly even distort existing reality (as per the term, “smoke and mirrors”). The mirror reveals one to oneself objectively, but not if “objective reality”—that is, the formal ideology of the dominant political order – is already invested in distortions.
Finally it should be said that Marechera’s short story involves a redemptive narrative: Although the intervention of the “ape in the mirror” (representing the intervention of madness due to the need to make an impossible choice) leads to disruption and a sense of violence in the relationship between the girl, Margaret, and the man who wants to impress her with his adult identity, in a parallel shamanic sense, all is already redeemed. “At the head of the stream; that’s where they had, with great violence, fused into one.” ( p 84). So, even before the story descends into the inevitable chaos, in recognition of the protagonist’s inevitable madness, the form and structure of the narrative has already been redeemed by the actions of the “manfish” and the concomitant powers of his imagination.
That is, it is not knowledge in the conventional sense that we understand knowledge. Rather, shamanic knowledge is ontological. This means that when it comes to understanding identity from a shamanic point of view, one will not understand it according to conventional systems of knowledge, not even according to according to one that is as informative and politically and historically aware as that provided by the archaeological approach to knowledge about social identities furnished by Michel Foucault. Marechera’s writing is not postmodernist, but rather deeply psychological. His understanding of how the black identity comes into being is based – shamanically – on personal experience, and is related, also shamanically, by means of a doubling of the self.
The literary doubling – and even tripling – of the self, as per the literary aesthetics of Edgar Allen Poe, is not quite what I am referring to here. Rather, I am intent upon conveying my recognition as a reader of the intense self-knowledge that the author expresses concerning the way that social and political forces interpellate an as yet unformed psyche, so that the self becomes party to the needs of various Ideological State Apparati, by adopting an identity that fits in with politically determined values and systems put in place before the individual being affected by them was free to make choices.
Thus it is the unusual self-awareness of the writer than enables him to describe the ontological deformations of selfhood that were the only ones available to him as a young man growing up in colonial Rhodesia, in the process of “coming of age”. The ontological aspects of the story reveal themselves to us in the way the young man’s path of development is sabotaged rather than facilitated by the options available to him within colonial Rhodesia. The psychical wholeness that he had previously experienced in synchronisation with nature is confronted by a treacherous two-pronged fork in his path, which could lead to acceptance of the status of being an ape, or a false white aristocratic demeanour and consciousness. Alternatively to these paths, however, is the shamanic path, the way of which is woven throughout the storyline as contradictory to the troubles described in the”realist” version of the story and as a redemptive narrative.
The shamanic narrative involves the idea of a “manfish” who can dive deeply into the subconscious, as a result of facing his fears (and in this significant sense, facing death, as well). Another of Marechera’s short stories tells us that a “manfish” is a drowned man, whose spirit has turned into a fish, and is a danger to children who want to swim at the place of drowning. A shaman is likewise someone’s whose continuity life has been interrupted by an encounter with death. In a sense, their old life has “drowned” and they are now living on borrowed time. Yet, for all this, the access that such a shamanic individual has to this borrowed time is redemptive – for it implies a continuity of life beyond a point that life should logically be considered to continue: A drowned man does not, conventionally, live on, not even as a “manfish”. So the “manfish” – or rather, imaginative power – redeems the situation that the author finds himself in, which is dire.
One looks to Lacan as well as to the post-Kleinians, to understand how a mirror may “interpellate” a person into having an identity that they have not chosen. “The mirror, I suppose, was at the heart of it.” That is how the story begins. The “mirror stage” implies seeing oneself as a whole person for the first time, rather than as experiential chaos and multiplicity. One can see it as implying the beginning of self-consciousness, a point of transcending political unconsciousness and a dependency on a state of nature (represented in Kleinian theory as “the mother”), towards arriving at an awareness of one’s separate personhood. (The question of identity cannot be far behind.) In some parts of Africa, one may arrive at this crisis point of identity particularly late, due to a lack of efficiency in systems that would integrate one into the processes of conforming to the Ideological State Apparati much earlier. (A lack of industrial technology may be to blame.)
Marechera’s shamanic awareness is implicitly postcolonial -- since his understanding reveals that he is aware that what has the power to interpellate him into the state of having an adult identity is an alien power. To put it plainly: the options available to him, if he wants to take up a role in adulthood, are all predefined by colonial power structures. This is why it seems to him that a natural life, in which he “had been happy, unbearably happy, as a child” (p 85) is experienced as suddenly being subjected to alien spiritual powers. The author, in his profound awareness of what was at stake at that period of his life, can take a certain distance from his earlier experiences, since the shamanic endowment of “borrowed time” has earned this for him. “But time had rubbed pepper into his eyes and the stinging of it had maddened it out of him. The mirror said it all and in it he knew his kinsman; the ape, lumbering awkwardly into his intimacy.” ( p85.) The tone is tragi-comic.
The “ape” is the colonial concept of the black man. The writer is describing his dawning of consciousness as to what it means to come of age in a political system that has reserved a particularly lowly place for you because of your colour. The alien nature of this consciousness – alien because it is colonial – is represented by the author’s representation of this consciousness as interrupting his otherwise normative and happy life in an occult (unnatural) fashion, which is represented by the mirror because of its capacity to double and even possibly even distort existing reality (as per the term, “smoke and mirrors”). The mirror reveals one to oneself objectively, but not if “objective reality”—that is, the formal ideology of the dominant political order – is already invested in distortions.
Finally it should be said that Marechera’s short story involves a redemptive narrative: Although the intervention of the “ape in the mirror” (representing the intervention of madness due to the need to make an impossible choice) leads to disruption and a sense of violence in the relationship between the girl, Margaret, and the man who wants to impress her with his adult identity, in a parallel shamanic sense, all is already redeemed. “At the head of the stream; that’s where they had, with great violence, fused into one.” ( p 84). So, even before the story descends into the inevitable chaos, in recognition of the protagonist’s inevitable madness, the form and structure of the narrative has already been redeemed by the actions of the “manfish” and the concomitant powers of his imagination.
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