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Key to Marechera’s "shamanism" was his ability to gain astounding insights whilst cognitively undergo a level of ego deflation (which, of course, he relates to us in a state of mind that is moderated by cognitive maturity). This is a useful state of mind employed by artists, that Anton Erenhzweig terms “dedifferentiation” (and which pertains, in psychanalytical terms, to the "pre-oedipal" field -- the strange sense of power dynamics that one locks into in early childhood).  At the most primal level of this infancy stage, thing melts into another, whereby male and female, black and white identities do not yet exist. Once all the solid elements of reality have been reduced as part-pieces of a primeval “oneness”, the hidden relationships between these elements can be explored.

Facing them in their relatively molten state of cognitive “dedifferentiation”, Marechera is able to see new alignments of the dynamic forces that constitute identity, and to reintegrate the elements at will, into his artistic and Utopian political vision. What is shamanistic about this is that he appears to see, as it were, the spiritual counterparts of concrete social and historical identities, as being more than fixed in the solidity of the Rhodesian world, in terms, for instance of the crystalline identity of the white master and his black servant. Instead, Marechera’s viewpoint is inherently redemptive (politically and artistically), for he views those he comes across in terms of their creative but repressed potentialities and not just in terms of their limits within the historically contingent reality.

One’s identity in the primal field is also a product of probability – as in the novel, Black Sunlight.  If 'wave theory is unto particle theory as the unconscious is to the conscious mind,' a shamanistic turn might be wave theory is to particle theory as is primal self in relation to its actualised fact (and contextually limited actuality). Work produced on the basis of a cognitively dedifferentiated sense of the world, may be grasped by the reader not logically -- that is in terms of cause and effect, or in terms of a subject and his field -- but intuitively and holistically at a subliminal and visceral level.

Marechera’s contemporary shamanism is creative as well as being politically purposeful. It evokes  the three stages of artistic process defined by Anton Ehrenweig. There is first the breaking down of reality, by deliberate cognitive dedifferentiation, next is the rearrangement of the elements of cognition in a new artistic pattern (did the ancient rock painters engage in this same process?). Finally, Ehrenweig points to a stage of reassimilation of the features created in the work of art, under the guidance of unconscious processes, into the conscious awareness of the artist who created the work. This final stage lies behind the paradoxical outcome of the shaman’s psychological “great health” (despite his obvious maladies) as well as the artist’s higher level of insight compared to others.

Ref.

Godwin, Robert W 1991. Wilfred Bion and David Bohm: Toward a Quantum Metapsychology. . Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 14 (4):625-654