repost

Shamanistic insight comes from the point of no repair and from the point of utter desolation, when everything that one had learned to lean upon as reliable and comforting reality has been destroyed. In order to survive theshamanic death, the person must become an entirely different person, as if putting the flesh on the bones again, building up from scratch. Shamanistic insight is therefore insight into the illusory nature of all that seems to be firm. Having such an insight prepares the shaman to be able to manipulate reality — hence much of the shaman’s power is associated with trickery. Yet he is more robust than others who share his culture and peer group, for he is able to play with various realities in a way that others do not dare to do, for fear that it would socially or psychologicallydestabilise them. Thus is the nature of the actual shaman, as contradistinct from various intellectual or “spiritual” notions about him.

After the storm bursts through and then is vanquished the apparations also disappear. The disease of mind is temporarily removed, or at least a sort of ledge on the precipice is reached. Other forms of violence, however, break out, again, propelled by the hostilities between the protagonist and hisRhodesian agent school friend, Harry. The degree of the violence leaves the writer depleted of a soul, desolate and empty, concussed. Thus the writer decides to leave the house of hunger, but not without first taking revenge on Harry.

The surviving madman is now a shaman and finds wisdom in the fragmentation of aphoristic ideas. The sexually modest and intellectually sensitive school boy has developed the kind of soul that can accept violence as part of life. Henceforth, the existence of violence becomes not just a problem for Marechera, and a metaphysical nut to be cracked, but something that is part of his identity. He understands it implicitly, like an animal he has tamed. Yet a shamanistic pathway is not necessarily one towards psychological purity and aloofness: Just as his spirit has now expanded to accommodate the facticity of violence, he finds that in terms of the metaphysical problem that it represents, and the thrill of danger that it envokes, it is something with which he cannot do without.

All of Marechera’s writing shows a calm precision and control at the aesthetic level when dealing with the topic of violence (the emotions depicted may be and often are very different and are not to be confounded with what occurs at this artistic level). He moves through explorations of emotional, political and psychological violence in order that he may himself understand these aspects better (and as an indirect effect, to develop understanding on behalf of others – his readers – to whom he wishes to give without reserve.). The level of fearless balance and precise emotional (psychologically refined) loading of his depictions of escapades into violent ideas, situations, and perspectives are testimony to his shamanic expansion of the mind and personality to incorporate the possibility of violence at any time, as a psychologically endurable norm. Intellectually, however, he still recoils against violence, and on the other hand he remains most at home with such extreme conditions.