Poetic madness

I am right about Marechera — that he was basically sane apart from his PTSD. He drank to avoid the feeling of facing the kinds of crushing situations that are the aspects of memory which PTSD pushes up to the forefront of the mind.

What Flora Veit-Wild detected, then, was correct — “Drink makes him forget. It takes away his feelings of guilt and inferiority from him but at the same time creates new ones.”

These feelings (guilt and inferiority) are not at all what appeared in Marechera’s writing. Therefore they would have to be from a differentiated part compartment of the memory in which his trauma had been stored.

To have PTSD does not make one out of one’s mind, although the memories of violence that make up the trauma are disturbing. The trauma is part of history’s imprint upon one. To act as if Marechera’s trauma makes him mad (as I am suggesting that it is indeed trauma that made him drink) is to acknowledge that experiential reality itself bestows upon us elements of madness, as part of its natural course — since there has never been a human history without violence.

To dismiss what he says because he is “mad” or because his works have the erratic and nonsensical flavour of a “poetic genius” is to sidestep the senses in which he wants to communicate to us.

Going out of one’s way to avoid communication from someone who had very much to say is extremely odd human behaviour, though. Perhaps it is we who are mad?