What attracted me? Quite precisely, it was that the colonial way of life I’d been bought up to experience as normal was no longer viable for me. This is, to sum it up, what attracted me. Beyond this, also that I was brought up to have a colonial feminine personality. My superego was very badly formulated, that is, it was formed to suit a very different culture, which was also now defunct. It also made me subservient to men — my superego. This was all very, very bad for me. I’d reached a dead-end so far as my psychological survival went. So, I got into this mode of “facing death” for renewal. I discovered this method originally through Nietzsche, but it is also highly prevalent in Bataille, and one can see the death and renewal motif in Marechera’s writing, especially THE HOUSE OF HUNGER, although his is the most anguished of the three. I suspect that psychological pressures from home, also accompanied by an extreme sense of the social and cultural frameworks shifting, brings about the existential crises that can lead to a beneficial reappraisal of one's purpose and state of being.
This solution has turned out to be very, very useful to me. On it’s basis, I have an extremely viable marriage/relationship, I only do the work that fulfills me, I have found deep companionship with many black Zimbabweans (which my superego had later drawn limits against, post-migration). I go against the grain that has been established for my peers, many of whom are housewives. I do kickboxing. I have a high (no longer repressed) sex drive. And so on.
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