PRELUDE
In his 1986 interview with Alle Lansu, Marechera, speaking on Black Sunlight and Mindblast, relates concerning his “unconscious” desire to write in a way that is destructive or disruptive in order to save people from the “slow brain death” of thinking in an institutionalised way. (40-41). “I try to write in such a way that I short-circuit, like electricity, people’s traditions and morals. Because only then can they start having original thoughts of their own.” ( p 40). 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. [ref e.g. Bataille]).
This sense of ecstasy is based on no uncertain sense of tangible achievement: that one has plumbed the bottom of one’s psyche, the place where, according to Freud, all sorts of hidden psychological complexes have their origins, and that one has survived the intrapsychological encounter – the coming face to face with one’s worst inner fears. Shamanic journeying is guided and facilitated by an inner drive to uncover and resolve conflicts so as to recover psychical equilibrium, reunites one with the creative and energising facility of the Unconscious. Yet, an initial encounter with all the aspects of the self (including the culturally and politically generated self) that have been buried in the psyche due to their capacity to their earlier capacity to overwhelm the ego, is the most difficult form of shamanic journeying, and because of its painful nature, can be understood more as a primary shamanic journey or “initiation”.
Black Sunlight’s narrative invokes the latter sense of things as it is a confrontation not only with the author’s own psychological complexes, formed during the pre-oedipal stage, but with Zimbabwe’s political complexes. The writer, in shamanic guise as a photographer, (recording grimy reality) journeys to the lower levels of the psyche (the pre-oedipal level of consciousness). By undergoing the ritual of ego death and then ego restoration, he allows the hidden nature of the Zimbabwean psychological complexes to speak through him, and thus he “irrigates” the pathologies that are hidden beneath the surface of the body politic. This assures that healthier life can grow, through self-knowledge.
The broad scope of Black Sunlight (as guided by the author’s shamanic healing 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”. Transgression of the superego and its commands is the means by which Marechera’s protagonist gets in touch with the contents of his psyche that would otherwise be buried. We, as readers, are encouraged to journey along with him via the shamanic liminal state between ordinary human society and its conventions, and the submerged unconscious and its hidden laws. The metaphysical paradigm of shamanism suggests that a shaman intervenes in this unconscious, hidden world, on others’ behalves. However, in the case of Black Sunlight, given that it is a novel, it seems that Marechera truly wants to take us on his journey – as an actual experience of shamanic initiation.
The difficulty, however, in writing having any success with his audience in bringing about a similar initiation 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 initiate us into shamanic alertness and aliveness by the shock value and intensity of his writing. Yet, there are also deeper psychological nuances to his work – for instance, the imagery that unifies (post-Oedipal) sexuality with pre-Oedipal psychological structures or “primary processes” (such as trance induced fantasy and the array of Kleinian dynamics that are produced when an immature (pre-Oedipal) consciousness seeks to come to terms with reality in way that suits its psychological needs, but produces only a jumbled or distorted sense of reality.
Given the predominance of these pre-Oedipal structures (magical thinking, dissociation, splitting of identity, projective identification) in Marechera’s writing it seems, that he wanted us to be reminded of our passing through this pre-Oedipal stage on the way towards gaining a solidified and certain adult identity within society’s system of social hierarchies (the main ones in the novel being man versus woman and white versus black). In fact, through partaking of the adventure of the protagonist into the most primal caverns of his own Unconscious (the statedly primeval caves at “Devil’s End”), Marechera is inviting us to revisit our own psychologically fluid states prior to the acquisition of an “I” (Lacan’s mirror stage) and prior to our sense of having wholeness. (The psychological sense of wholeness is achieved by psychologically drawing all the otherwise disorganised sensations of the mind together as being part and parcel of a coherent subject. Lacan sees this developmental “mirror stage” as taking place in a way that parallels or replicates the sense of a child starting to recognise himself in a mirror).
According to Lacan, this liquid state of pre-Oedipal consciousness is lost forever to self-awareness when a child finally gains a formal identity in society proper (patriarchal, male dominated society) and learns language as ‘the law of the father”. Marechera’s writing is thus shamanic, as he seeks to restore to us this long lost, and forgotten, state of awareness, when one was (so far as one’s awareness went) ontologically at one with one’s mother and with the sensations emanating from the immediate environment.
This unity of self with otherness is mystical in the sense that any recollection of this primeval state is barred by later milestone developmental processes that produce repression (in Lacan’s system, at the point of learning language, and in Freud’s system at the oedipal stage.) To be able to re-experience this earlier mode of psychological liquidity (the primal state of pre-identity) whilst as a fully developed adult (as indicated by Marechera’s powerful motifs of adult sexuality throughout the novel) is to undergo shamanistic initiation. One crosses the barrier of adult identity, back to the early pre-Oedipal self via transgression of the commands of the oedipal superego. The regression that is achieved consequently can be understood a form of temporary psychosis (the shaman enters this state much in the same way as a patient suffering from severe trauma is put into an induced coma), but it is one that is guided and facilitated by the fully developed adult ego. [footnote: ie. in the Freudian sense that the shamanic journey is for a rational and considered purpose, and thus serves the reality principle, but more so in the Jungian sense, since the contents of the Freudian Unconscious are also theoretically barred from one’s direct and personal investigation, and must be theoretically conjectured.
Shamanism, however, is a system that holds in principle that one can obtain direct access to Unconscious states.] In accordance with my metaphor above, the shaman (Marechera in this instance, but represented by his main protagonist, Chris) enters a state of mind in which his rationality is suppressed – a realm of drives, necessities, and a sense of oneness with everything else that exists. He is guided in this by a vestige of his adult ego that has not been obviated by the suppression of rationality. Thus his “psychosis” is really an adventure of self-exploration into one’s Unconscious – a “shamanic journey”. The novel, Black Sunlight, is also the author’s exploration into the ways in which identity is manufactured, at its pre-ontological stage, in Zimbabwean (or, as it was, Rhodesian) society.
Yet, it is difficult to get a reader experience the book fully, and this may be because of our normative faculties of repression, which do not allow us to cross easily from "language" to immediate experience without putting up a fight. The text is loaded with precisely the kinds of elements that are psychologically and socially disruptive and intended to speak to us on the level of communication which recalls for us the states of being that pre-existed our entrance into language as the dominant and logocentric mode of interacting. According to the philosophy of Georges Bataille, these elements can be referred to as pertaining to a system of “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.
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