Key Marecheran elements

Key aspects of Marechera’s writing

1. employs a mix of high and low culturally and conceptually; the concrete and the high Modernist Abstract, the local Zimbabwean lingo with the images and ideas of classical Western culture (eg. ancient Greek philosophy and literature)

2a Uses a mode akin to shamanism – an approach based on the employment of images to ‘read” a society, rather than directly using concepts as such.

2b. Uses ideas that appear to offer themselves up synchronistically (Jung) in conjunction with spontaneously encountered local images, to produce a penetrating political reading, as if in terms of a dynamically inspired dreamscape / nightmare scape.

3a. The political nature of his writing, which reorganises and reappraises our societal perspectives, supplying the basis for a new gestalt.

3b The revaluation of values (Nietzsche) as the intended outcome of his writing.