marechera's world

I am writing about Marechera’s take on the world in the role that he fell into during his life – that of a shaman. Shamans often appear, we are told, during times of social and political crisis. There could be a reason for this: Shamanism in past and present has to do with a need for soul retrieval. It brings essential aspects of what has been lost in the recesses of memory, or down the memory hole of history, into the present to revitalise it. This will be my reading of shamanism as it has to do with Dambudzo Marechera. Of course, the shamanistic tradition itself is broader than that which I will be applying in this case. Dambudzo Marechera’s “soul journeys”, his interaction with and mastery of spirits, and his attempt to heal his society all resonate with the shamanistic modes of thinking and behaviour. Despite these similarities in method, mood and intent, Marechera was extremely sophisticated and modern. This meanst that his literary approach to knowledge, power and healing was, in turn, an attempt at a cross-cultural discourse, melding contemporary modernist ideas of introspective creatitive and psychological sophistication with modes of thinking that derive from a more traditional base in Zimbabwean society, which is animistic and spiritualist. I will not go into the complexities of these two culturally different sides of the coin in this paper, since I am keen to look rather at the practical and aesthetic insights that Marechera wanted to give us, through his literary works, concerning the state of health of the body-politic of different nations, rather than the theoretical basis for his shamanism, in terms of his origins and development. My point, in terms of this paper, is that Marechera’s literary approach is focussed on shamanistic goals of using altered states of consciousness to read, diagnose, and potentially to heal social pathologies. The following definition of shamanism is helpful with regard to Marechera’s writing.

They use these journeys in order to acquire knowledge or power and to help people in their community. Shamans also experience themselves interacting with and controlling "spirits." While many of their fellow tribespeople might claim to see or even be possessed by spirits, only shamans claim to be able to command, commune, and intercede with them for the benefit of the tribe. The use of the term "spirits" here is not meant to imply necessarily that there exist separate entities that control or communicate with people. Rather the term is simply being used to describe the shamans' interpretation of their experience.

As he was a writer who attempted to communicate a transcultural perspective, incorporating at least two different epistemologies and perspectives – both the Western modernist one, and the Zimbabwean traditional spirituality – it is preferable to leave ambiguous whether the “spirits” he engaged with were real or not. My own approach – and Marechera’s too, I believe – would be to interpret his perspectives in a psychological light. The view I will be assuming here is a complex one – that Marechera was particularly well positioned, due to his early exposure to great extremes of life and culture, and due to his remarkable intellectual and creative propensities, to assume many of the traditional roles of the shaman, but within a self-consciously contemporary and modern context.

The methods of achieving insights through an altered state of consciousness in a shamanistic sense, I am going to argue, are linked with psychoanalysis and with Jungian psychotherapy. Both shamanism and these approaches deal with psychological trauma and associated senses of loss, whilst seeking to transcend these conditions only by embracing their reality and meanings – in other words by dealing with them in a state of immanence. The confrontation with trauma is the confrontation with a sense of one’s own mortality – thus, a confrontation with death. The redemption that can then occur brings such a sense of spiritual holism, made up of temporary, fragmentary insights, which in terms of the Western shaman, Georges Bataille, count as an encounter with the Sacred.

Shamanistic insight, it is necessary to understand, comes about through an experience of the world in terms of immanence – or in direct relation to the realm of sensory and emotional immediacy (which like the biological rhythms of the mother giving feed, no doubt has its own rythms and vicissitudes). Just as the elephant senses through is feet the vibrations of the earthquake or upcoming environmental disaster, so the shaman also experiences the changes in political or social consciousness through his extreme state of psychological immanence – which I have codified as a feeling of one’s proximity to death. It may also be seen in terms of pre-Oedipal development (although of course the adult shaman descends to this level, and draws adult wisdom from such a revisitation of this prelogical and “magical” stage of development.) It is by these means – and often by means of his ultra-sensitive, since shattered or traumatised sensibilities, that the seer experiences the dynamics undergirding so-called “rational society”. These insights include a look into the dynamics of splitting of identity, projective identification and repression of cognitive awareness. The shaman uses pre-rational and pre-Oedipal modes of awareness in order to open up the windows of the imagination – that is both to know what he knows as well as to create what might be (that is, what he doesn’t know.) This is important, for, whereas repression might work well as an ego defence preventing psychological disintegration in normal circumstances, the repression of historically based social trauma might only serve to entrench the social pathology from one generation unto the next. Thus, the shaman, who represses less of his consciousness than others might serves the important role of diagnosing and healing the partly hidden illnesses of society, which others may not perceive so sharply. My view is that due to Marechera’s own shattered past – due to the violence through poverty that he experienced under the colonial regime of Rhodesia – he was able to understand more about his social world than would be available to those who are relatively emotionally and psychologically protected from the negative extremes of human experience due to higher status, class privilege or social wealth. The shaman, rather, mediates a reality that is without shock absorbers.

The role of the shaman or seer is to viscerally and emotionally engage with the dynamics that play within a society in crisis. The shaman as poet, prophet and political critic comes into play after a state of national or personal crisis (as I’ve suggested the state of national crisis is bodily reproduced in the state of personal crisis experienced by the poet-seer.) The extracts from Marechera’s texts we will examine reveal him in this role of social and political critic, poet and seer, intent upon examining the sources of social pathology within the body politic, and of providing a remedy for healing. The task the writer takes on in relation to Zimbabwe and to Britain is to provide a vitalised and up to date reading of the the state of the nations, sewing together the important elements of the past with those that appear within the present to create a sense of the present reality that is “true”. Needless, perhaps, to say, the Zimbabwe of today has more need for Marechera’s shamanistic writing and shamanistic diagnostics –Marechera’s critique of the newly liberated Zimbabwe of the early eighties is even more pressingly relevant to the Zimbabwe of today, than it was relevant to then. This paper concerns the shaman’s occult perspective on Zimbabwe and Britain, however it is necessary to bring the shaman himself up to date, in shamanistic fashion, to revitalise our sense of the here and now. We will look, then, at Marechera’s visionary critique of two countries, and then suggest visionary outline for a critique of a third: A shamanistic vision of Australia.