thesis abstract

My thesis looks at the life and writings of Dambudzo Marechera, a black Zimbabwean writer who adopted a particularly Modernist style of writing. He lived from 1952 –1987 and was a prolific writer during his short life. His psychological approach was born out of the social catastrophe of the second Chimurenga war against Rhodesian colonial authorities that took place from circa 1966-1980. Dambudzo Marechera was a boy born into a state of war and troubles. His first name loosely means "strife" in his Shona language. The thesis examines the way that psychological trauma in an African context is linked to an opening of the lens of consciousness into a very different understanding of identity than approaches relying on tradition or even contemporary identity politics. I argue that this alternative perspective has much in common with traditions of shamanism and with philosophical modernist notions of shamanism (Nietzsche and Bataille). I argue too that Marechera's approach to writing literature, and to understanding the deeper nature of the world around him, relies on a conceptual doubling of the self. In this doubling process part of the identity stays in the here and now, that is it is anchored by the physicality of the body and its realistic identity, based on historical fact and recognisable physical characteristics – such as race and gender; whilst another part of the identity "journeys" into the spirit realm. This second level involves understanding that a shamanic practitioner psychologically dissociates from the body to experience a state of phenomenological disembodiment. He or she does so in order to search for solutions to society's problems that are not accessible to the mind in its state of everyday consciousness. A shaman may journey to the higher realms of consciousness, to the lower realms, as well as into the past and the future. The thesis argues that Marechera's writing reflects the quintessence of shamanistic practice and illustrates this by an analysis of his rich output of literary texts across a variety of literary genres.