shamanic initiation

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.