Marechera’s body of work enables us to locate ourselves in the universe on the basis of a shamanistic metaphysics. It is the revelation of this ontology of this shamanistic metaphysics that enables us to understand not only what it means to live a human life, but to make the best use of our lives so as no to waste them. The shaman uses his imagination to travel into other spheres of being, which can be called ‘nonordinary reality”. The exploitation of the contents of the psyche undergoing shifts of consciousness – (shifts that are sometimes but not always facilitated by taking of drugs) – enables one such as Marechera to simply know more than those who do not facilitate shifts in their consciousness for the purpose of investigating what it means to be human and to be alive.
The shaman travels “in spirit” to the past and the to the future, and in psychological terms, this means to travel back to infancy and to the womb, as well as travelling towards the possible future of humanity and towards the inevitability of death. Thus Marechera’s “Cassandra complex” relates to his ability to read political events in a much more subtle mode than most of us are psychologically attuned to. The shaman also travels to the heights and the depths of human experience in order to map these in his texts – he travels to the heights of human ecstasy and to the depths of human despair. Thus he traverses, in varies ways, the four directions of the Axis Mundi, and does so “as spirit” – which is to say, via flights of the imagination, in search of self-knowledge.
Marechera’s writing is shamanistic in all of this. Yet it is also shamanistic in terms of the way traditional shamans attempted to use their knowledge of the “spirit world” or the realms of “nonordinary reality” in order to try to change their societies for the better. A shaman uses his knowledge of human potential – which he has gained by mapping the psyche during his shamanic voyages – in order to set a new agenda for a new kind of society. He also taps into the power of existing political and social trends, in order to turn them towards his own ends, such as to heal, restore and improve existing societies. Utopian and restorative modes of through both coincide and overlap in a shamanistic discourse, depending on the level of consciousness that the writer-shaman has accessed during a particular journey of the imagination. The shaman, however, must always return from his disembodied journeys, to bring back his knowledge for the real world, and thus he is positioned, by this logic that necessitates return to concrete reality and to everyday existence, as someone who is bound to use his knowledge practically in the world.
Shamanism is thus a form of cognitive dualism, which makes use of a conceptual framework of ontological dualism (the idea that we are two things – body and spirit) in order to enhance humanity’s ontological knowledge – that is, its knowledge of itself: where it has come from, where it is going, its possibilities for experiencing highs and lows. In seeking to discover the outer boundaries or limits of possible human experience, shamanism projects humanity beyond the limits of the spheres of human experience and knowledge that have been accumulated to date. It can be viewed theoretically as a mode of speculative thinking (that is, a mode of spirit, unbound by limits of time and space) that, however, ultimately returns to a grounded reality by virtue of the ontologically situated nature of the body in its historical and political context of ordinary, linear time. One might view shamanism, as Nietzsche has done concerning his own writing (which is arguably shamanistic) as a “tragic” discourse, since a shaman always seems to go beyond his time in terms of knowledge and depth of character, and thus he becomes the victim of his time and place, which subsumes him physically without usually understanding the knowledge that he wishes to impart.
As a shaman who could anticipate the future, Marechera was “ahead of his time”, and so it is not surprising that he met an early demise as a victim of his times. His work leaves a lasting intellectual legacy of insight into the ontological structures of identity – not just as it is constructed under Colonialism, but in terms of the way in which those dominant and submissive identities are generated under those systems of domination that we encounter as part of our everyday lives. Such is the very broad scope of Marechera’s oeuvre, which makes him more than just a “Zimbabwean writer”. He wrote as much in relation to the human spirit and its capacity for self-knowledge as he wrote concerning Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans and their particular needs during this time and place in history.
The shaman travels “in spirit” to the past and the to the future, and in psychological terms, this means to travel back to infancy and to the womb, as well as travelling towards the possible future of humanity and towards the inevitability of death. Thus Marechera’s “Cassandra complex” relates to his ability to read political events in a much more subtle mode than most of us are psychologically attuned to. The shaman also travels to the heights and the depths of human experience in order to map these in his texts – he travels to the heights of human ecstasy and to the depths of human despair. Thus he traverses, in varies ways, the four directions of the Axis Mundi, and does so “as spirit” – which is to say, via flights of the imagination, in search of self-knowledge.
Marechera’s writing is shamanistic in all of this. Yet it is also shamanistic in terms of the way traditional shamans attempted to use their knowledge of the “spirit world” or the realms of “nonordinary reality” in order to try to change their societies for the better. A shaman uses his knowledge of human potential – which he has gained by mapping the psyche during his shamanic voyages – in order to set a new agenda for a new kind of society. He also taps into the power of existing political and social trends, in order to turn them towards his own ends, such as to heal, restore and improve existing societies. Utopian and restorative modes of through both coincide and overlap in a shamanistic discourse, depending on the level of consciousness that the writer-shaman has accessed during a particular journey of the imagination. The shaman, however, must always return from his disembodied journeys, to bring back his knowledge for the real world, and thus he is positioned, by this logic that necessitates return to concrete reality and to everyday existence, as someone who is bound to use his knowledge practically in the world.
Shamanism is thus a form of cognitive dualism, which makes use of a conceptual framework of ontological dualism (the idea that we are two things – body and spirit) in order to enhance humanity’s ontological knowledge – that is, its knowledge of itself: where it has come from, where it is going, its possibilities for experiencing highs and lows. In seeking to discover the outer boundaries or limits of possible human experience, shamanism projects humanity beyond the limits of the spheres of human experience and knowledge that have been accumulated to date. It can be viewed theoretically as a mode of speculative thinking (that is, a mode of spirit, unbound by limits of time and space) that, however, ultimately returns to a grounded reality by virtue of the ontologically situated nature of the body in its historical and political context of ordinary, linear time. One might view shamanism, as Nietzsche has done concerning his own writing (which is arguably shamanistic) as a “tragic” discourse, since a shaman always seems to go beyond his time in terms of knowledge and depth of character, and thus he becomes the victim of his time and place, which subsumes him physically without usually understanding the knowledge that he wishes to impart.
As a shaman who could anticipate the future, Marechera was “ahead of his time”, and so it is not surprising that he met an early demise as a victim of his times. His work leaves a lasting intellectual legacy of insight into the ontological structures of identity – not just as it is constructed under Colonialism, but in terms of the way in which those dominant and submissive identities are generated under those systems of domination that we encounter as part of our everyday lives. Such is the very broad scope of Marechera’s oeuvre, which makes him more than just a “Zimbabwean writer”. He wrote as much in relation to the human spirit and its capacity for self-knowledge as he wrote concerning Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans and their particular needs during this time and place in history.
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