Repost: Black Orpheus

If Marechera’as self-exile from the world of conventional mores had a reason, then that reason was to repair an internal sense of loss. According to Alan Collier Ostby, H. Ellenberger (The Discovery of the Unconscious, 1970) says traditional healers saw psychological problems in terms of “soul loss” (Otsby p 166). Contemporary object relations thinking of the psychoanalytic school speaks, instead, in terms of “object loss”, however the qualities of sickness they are describing are phenomenologically similar, one presumes, apart from the obvious factor of cultural differences, which contextualise this inner sense of loss in different ways. To place oneself into a mode of temporary exile facilitates an opportunity to recover the lost “object” that is experienced as a lost part of one’s self. The partially regressive return to the “womb” — that is to a state of mind in which reality is dealt with on simpler terms than those on which a healthy adult would normally be inclined to deal with it — can be facilitative of healing. Restoration of the lost object would restore one’s hope in humanity, enabling re-integration into the social realm of everyday human relations. Suchpsychological regression turns one towards the psychologically receptive mode that pertains to the pre-oedipal field, wherein reality appears to be defined less by society and more by one’s internal object relations. This state of being involves the apertures of the mind narrowing to reduce the data taken in from the outside world, in order to emphasise the particular nature of the internal dynamics of love, hate and knowledge (ref. Bion) that make one idiosyncratically who one is. Marechera’s refusal to adopt the mantle of social conformity, in order to fit into his society, was based on his need to continue his “soul journey” to find the lost parts of his being that would enable him to feel whole.

What were these parts in particular, that he felt he had lost? Indications from reading his book of Hararean exile, Mindblast, give the strong impression, through many different textual “clues”, that what he sought was the continuation of a peaceful Zimbabwean society, from childhood on up, that would have nurtured him as part of it. The breakout of civil war (the second Chimurenga), which began in earnest around 1966, around the time that Marechera’s father was suddenly killed in a road accident, destroyed the sanctity of everyday life for the teenaged Marechera. This loss of internal security, a loss emphasised still more in his mind through the increasing intensity of war in the society at large, robbed him of the sense of security he required in order to feel “at one” with himself. Henceforth, he could no longer believe in “society” and had lost it as an object of love. Having lost his belief in this object – society – he also lost his feeling of security that would have enabled him to be at peace with himself. In a shamanistic sense, Marechera was suffering from “soul loss”. His stint as a tramp on the streets of Harare were an attempt to simplify life in such a way that he would be able to focus his mind on finding something valuable and emotionally precious that would stand in as a replacement for that original loss, and would have enabled him to integrate himself more effectively into society. (Unfortunately, his life was cut short, so he was unable to fulfil his project, and we don’t know what the outcome of it would have been had AIDS not intervened.)

In Mindblast, Marechera uses the term, “womb”, to describe Harare. It is a “womb” for Marechera not just in the sense that it is the place with which he identifies as the core and origin of his Zimbabwean identity. It is symbolically the womb because it is the place where he seeks to lose his self, in order to find it anew, and in a better way than before. Like Orpheus, he is in search of his lost other half, and he hopes to find it again, in the world of the dead, and to bring it home with him. In Mindblast, Harare has the quality of being both a “womb” (a place of psychical regression) and a quality of being “hell” — in which the author struggles with a sense of the ethereal nature of his art in relation to a counterveiling reality of the practical nature of the middle-class lifestyles, artistically empty and lacking in depth.