Marechera's Black Sunlight

Marechera’s Black Sunlight is the cornerstone of his oeuvre, for it is the most shamanistic of all of his writing. The book invites us to undergo, with him, a recapitulation of the past – meaning the specific historical past of Rhodesia, and the psychological states that were common to it during the time of the bush war. The term, “recapitulation”, has a specific meaning in terms of shamanism [footnote: it is from Carlos Casteneda’s books]. One very useful way to look at it is in terms of Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence”, which is central to his book on how to shamanise, and thus recover from the past, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

To recapitulate one’s past, one must first have a need to do so – that is, if the past has left one with any psychological traumas, one must revisit the past in order to recover from these. This is not to say that all traumas can be recovered from, since some cut too deeply for the one who desires healing to be able to benefit from a recapitulation. Black Sunlight, nonetheless, is a novel that invites us to go along with the author as he experiences his recapitulation of past events. The book invokes his mental anguish, as it relates to the anti-colonial revolution in Rhodesia. Marechera invites his readers to go on this highly subjective inner journey, where everything that we would hold to be true and fixed and objective about the world seems to melt into the air, and we are left only with a feeling of complete immersion in the emotions of the time, increasing to an ultimate sense of paranoia and terror as the reader is positioned on the side of the anarchist revolutionaries against the encroaching Rhodesian security forces.

The recapitulation that Marechera invites us to undergo in his book is highly effective – for his psychological approach and aesthetics force us to confront ourselves in “immanence” – meaning in terms of the dynamics of an infant’s early consciousness, before a reality-based ego had been developed [footnote: in terms of Kleinian theory, the paranoid-schizoid position].

This means that there is no escape for us in using the transcendent power of logic and safe conceptual references to the idea that we have permanent (and hence unassailable) identity, in order to escape the psychological immediacy of the historical trauma that is revisited upon us. In facing the trauma of the past, we are in fact facing a temporary and relative state of death of our transcendent ego. And yet – paradoxically – through recapitulation, one reclaims the elements of one’s psyche that had been lost to the whole sense of the self at the time when one was overwhelmed with frightening events that caused part of one’s vitality flee away from the present, leaving a consciousness that was left to face the world in a mode of dull resignation.

Marechera’s style of writing compels us to recapitulate those moments when we lost parts of our “soul” to trauma. If we are strong enough to do so, we can affirm our present lives with the fullest measure of awakefulness and vitality: by facing death we will be better equipped to face life. His book also hints that we will become revolutionaries, if we are able to face ourselves without repressing our traumas.

The revolutionary aspect of Black Sunlight – for the book is not just narrowly shamanistic, but has another message to impart -- is represented by a number of social dropouts, many for whom, for good reason, are female. [Footnote: Marechera’s psychological insights/sympathy with women]. The logic to this is that shamanism, since it revitalise the soul, also puts one at odds with the political status quo, which is based upon resignation and acquiescence to conventional roles in life, (which one acquiesces to because of subtle traumas, which have damaged the vitality of the inner self.)