shamanic sensibilities

In terms of making an overall aesthetic evaluation of Marechera's work, I will look at how Marechera’s earliest works make an attempt to communicate his knowledge about reality from the point of view of the shamanic initiate, who sees more than others, being non-initiates, do, into the nature of contemporary existence. I will show how there is the aesthetic construction of much of his writing is extraordinarily successful from the point of view of representing shamanic perspectives and insights into how the human psyche accommodates itself to existing power structures or resists these, without having made any conscious decisions in either of these directions. I will show how there is something different about the later works of Marechera, which came after his ambitious novels that attempt to impart to us his shamanistic visions wholesale (-- a near impossible task: to appeal to non-initiates from the point of view of one who sees “the spiritual” dimension as well as the realm of the real, and how they interact). The later works seem to be directed less towards communicating shamanic knowledge as though from one initiate to another, and more towards using shamanic motifs for entertainment. This represents Marechera’s last ditch attempt to write in a way that was “relevant” on the basis of general and easy accessibility