solidarity

There were also no doubt aspects of post traumatic stress,  added into the mix of cultural, historical and social influences on Marechera’s outlook. Having been subjected to the harsh rule of the ghetto as well as harsh ideological authoritarianism in the religious (Anglican) school system, Marechera’s drive was towards personal independence as an escape from mental pain and mind control. Yet much of this inner anguish had an intergenerational flavour, for it was those of Marechera’s parent’s generation who bore much of the brunt of the violence of colonial segregation into poverty and the bush war. Indeed, whereas Marechera’s sister fought the second Chimurenga, Marechera himself was, by virtue of his intellect, spared some of the more direct onslaught of violence, after his senior school years and award of an Oxford scholarship. Yet the burden of the guilt for having thus escaped did not leave him unaffected. Indeed, there may have been something of a more active guilt-enhancing mechanism in the approach his mother took to their relationship, reminding him that his going to high school was at the cost of her prostitution of herself. Ira Brenner’s Dissociation of Trauma: Theory, Phenomonelogy and Technique ( p 91 -104) suggests that holocaust survivors can sometimes resent the pleasure that their children are able to experience, as a result of not being subjected to the levels of agonies that the parents had been subjected to.

Faimberg (1988) has conceptualised a type of identification with a “telescoping of generations.” She postulates an intergenerational narcissistic problem in which the parent appropriates the capacity for experiencing pleasure from the child and is internalised as a dominating and intruding object. ( p 96).

Thus, the safety and comfort of “traditional culture” and its responsiblities to parents had all the lure and promise of pleasure for him as would have been symbolically represented in selling out to the “bloody whites” -- that is, nil and less than that in fact. At least this is the point of view of Marechera’s unconscious mind:

And that mongrel was licking my face and sniffing me with his cold nose and swishing his stumpy tail softly to and fro, but somewhat uncertainly. It seemed I had been talking to him while I was unconscious. I know I woke up telling him about how my parents starved themselves to give me an education and to make me what I am now. I was saying: ‘Never under any circumstances consent to be blackmailed by hard-suffering parents to be made the sacrificial investment for their old age. Usually that means they have decided to sell your mind and soul to the bloody whites.’ The dog regarded me pensively for a few seconds and then nodded his head. He licked his lips and in a sad gravel voice he said: ‘What you have been saying is true. Very true, indeed. But do get up, or else someone will think I attacked you: not that I mean anything at all about your fighting spirit or my own, but merely that men are so quick to draw wrong conclusions all the time