Old post

As I head towards the season of NIHIL and wonder what it is I feel so angry about, mine eyes alight upon the most recent key word search on my blog: “kickboxing castration”. If this does not frustrate you, nothing will. Reading oxymorons frustrates the brain and heart (and I do not want to know about your other problems).

Therefore, I move on; the fight moves on into another arena. The metaphor of fight is indispensable for the powerless. Whereas I permit myself all things -- and playing dead is one of them -- the reality is that one never ceases to fight. And mostly the level of fight is psychological. IN a way, even the physical aspects of life are psychological. One keeps going when one has no energy through psychological tenacity.

It is not the colour of skin that matters, but the social conditions we live in, which give us our contexts. One can understand the psychosocial dynamics that lead to certain outcomes. In this instance, Marechera’s life experiences parallel mine. His family were poor and stressed – or stressed rather, because poor. Perhaps they were also poor in spirit. Yet, tradition is tradition. One must support one’s children and the father went out truck driving, but died crossing the street. The mother brought up her children by resorting to the only option left to the impossibly poor: prostitution.

Not an easy job, I imagine, in any respects. This lowliness of doing whatever one feels necessary to do, in order just to scrape by is highly ignoble in the social sense. The child wants more than this – a life with some dignity. It is easy to reject such a sacrifice in order to save one’s own sense of well-being. Perhaps this is in fact the law of existence, which is why one should think twice about becoming a parent. Just scraping by is not going to impart the sense of spiritual nourishment that a child needs. Marechera sought to grow away from his origins. His mother, also feeling the burden, rejected her child. Who wants a budding intellectual around, who shares few of the same values anyway? The work appears a pointless sacrifice to make for such a child.

While the conscious mind binds itself in the task of duty, the unconscious mind is free to wander and prevaricate  to find means to rid oneself of the child who is a burden, all the more so because he is not similar to one in many ways.

Madness is a good excuse to deal with such a changeling. Marechera’s mother went mad, whereupon she visited a witchdoctor who then advised her to get rid of the illness by passing it to one of her offspring. She chose Dambudzo.

Evil had descended upon the family in the form of bad luck – the father’s death, the turn to prostitution, the son’s sense of shame and cultural betrayal. One had better get rid of that son, in the hope of also getting rid of a general turn of bad luck.

I think the same psychology pertains to my father’s attitude toward me. When he proclaimed that I was sitting in a room not light enough, and trying to improve my understanding of the world by reading books on philosophy, he also added in even more paranoid tones, “You are responsible for spreading bad vibrations throughout the house.” It seems impossible to me to imagine that he was not trying to pass on to me the sense of his own mental illness.

He tried in other ways to hurt – he told me that I could not speak properly, and that he thought I was disgusting. Marechera’s parents scolded him for reading books in English until his guilt reached such a peak level that he burnt all his books (then proceeded to replenish them again with the very little money he had.)

Marechera’s almost frantic independence came from the same source mine did. He felt that his family and his culture had rejected him. It was for this reason that he took solace in books.

Now, Christmas comes and one must whitewash happy family photos. Sometimes an almost paranoiac need of independence is a consequence of brutal lessons learned: That one can only manage to stay sane by an absolute emotional detachment from those whose interests differ from one’s own.

Thus Marechera preferred loneliness.