There is a downside to all shamanism, all of this propensity to “shape-shift” and to enjoy “soul journeys” into other psychological realms. The difficulty is the wound, that original wound, by which one was initiated. Does it produce anything more than the sensations and reactions that are now medically defined as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)?
That which requires that shamanistic solution of constant self regeneration might be precisely this, which also prevents one’s untroubled re-entry into conventional modes of society and more ‘normal’ patterns of integration? A marginal and not untroubled character, the shaman might be considered to be one that makes the best of his or her less than fortuitous circumstances, and often delivers way beyond what would be considered normal in terms of creative productivity, and not least in terms of the productive nature of the shaman’s self-awareness. It is in this sense, rather than in the sense defined by anthropology as traditional religious practice, that I see Dambudzo Marechera as being a shaman.
Clearly, what the writer was not is simply mad. A lack of self-awareness is that quality defining what we have conventionally and historically (in terms of the Western tradition concerning pathology and its genesis) considered to be a defining factor of madness. One would be better served by looking at the issue from the point of view of the shaman being the recipient and conducting material of society’s madness – a socially engendered madness that he also tries to cure within his own body. When a shaman “reads” his own symptoms in order to come to terms with them, he or she is actually reading that which society disavows about itself.
The shaman is thus positioned by accidents of fate as society’s unconscious. Marechera’s particular skill was to be able to interpret the particular unconscious structures of colonial Rhodesia by interpreting his own symptomatology. The role of “shaman” was clearly not one he had consciously or even willingly chosen. Yet he was stuck with it. No doubt, the term for his condition and above all for his response to it would seem entirely alien were I to have somehow, by chance of luck, encountered the author and suggested it to him. He might protest, resoundingly, that he was a Modernist author, and by no means something so archaic sounding as what I have been suggesting – a traditional medicinal practitioner. The universalism of shamanism, understood as being a result of our shared human neurological structures, would help to explain how someone as advanced in intellectual study could still have nonetheless enacted the role of a shaman. Not least, one may be considered a shaman if others can obtain healing from one’s perspectives. As Marechera was a gatekeeper to the other world of the colonial unconscious, those suffering from colonial afflictions will be best positioned to obtain healing from his cultural mediation.
That which requires that shamanistic solution of constant self regeneration might be precisely this, which also prevents one’s untroubled re-entry into conventional modes of society and more ‘normal’ patterns of integration? A marginal and not untroubled character, the shaman might be considered to be one that makes the best of his or her less than fortuitous circumstances, and often delivers way beyond what would be considered normal in terms of creative productivity, and not least in terms of the productive nature of the shaman’s self-awareness. It is in this sense, rather than in the sense defined by anthropology as traditional religious practice, that I see Dambudzo Marechera as being a shaman.
Clearly, what the writer was not is simply mad. A lack of self-awareness is that quality defining what we have conventionally and historically (in terms of the Western tradition concerning pathology and its genesis) considered to be a defining factor of madness. One would be better served by looking at the issue from the point of view of the shaman being the recipient and conducting material of society’s madness – a socially engendered madness that he also tries to cure within his own body. When a shaman “reads” his own symptoms in order to come to terms with them, he or she is actually reading that which society disavows about itself.
The shaman is thus positioned by accidents of fate as society’s unconscious. Marechera’s particular skill was to be able to interpret the particular unconscious structures of colonial Rhodesia by interpreting his own symptomatology. The role of “shaman” was clearly not one he had consciously or even willingly chosen. Yet he was stuck with it. No doubt, the term for his condition and above all for his response to it would seem entirely alien were I to have somehow, by chance of luck, encountered the author and suggested it to him. He might protest, resoundingly, that he was a Modernist author, and by no means something so archaic sounding as what I have been suggesting – a traditional medicinal practitioner. The universalism of shamanism, understood as being a result of our shared human neurological structures, would help to explain how someone as advanced in intellectual study could still have nonetheless enacted the role of a shaman. Not least, one may be considered a shaman if others can obtain healing from one’s perspectives. As Marechera was a gatekeeper to the other world of the colonial unconscious, those suffering from colonial afflictions will be best positioned to obtain healing from his cultural mediation.
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