One of the disadvantages of growing up during a war is that you have to learn to act and think like an adult, rather too early. So, you are not really emotionally nurtured as a child, or indulged as a child, or given useful teaching as a child ought to be given. You are taught to at least give the appearance of being self-reliant OR to be very, very ashamed of yourself. There is no other path out of the forest. For a child, war is not necessarily good for the soul.
I’ve had to go a great deal to overcome my own emotional emaciation, and it wasn’t easy. If you are accustomed not to receive much emotional nourishment, you don’t know how to take it in, especially and above all when the environment changes – one no longer knows how to forage.
To me, Marechera’s motif of sacrifice – a kind of suicidal rain at the end of BLACK SUNLIGHT – meant the drought of war was over. Shamans sacrifice themselves to end something very negative in the community, so I understood his writing implicitly in this sense, although I haven’t been able to explain my reaction until now. Bataille says the poet sacrifices himself and that the work of art is meant to be devoured. I don’t think the nature of this sacrifice makes sense to non-warlike people. They have no need for some final ritual of purification.
The whole book of BLACK SUNLIGHT is clearly conciliatory between black and white people, since it dissolves the differences. It reduces everything to HUMAN experience, or even to animal alertness as to what it means to be alive and threatened. It is quite clear to me that in several parts of the book, there are textual references to some of Bataille’s writing.
So war is not good and we need ritual purification from it – but the kind of ritual needed is related to the experiences of suffering, long term endurance and emotional emaciation. If you haven’t had those experiences, the whole book can read like postmodern nonsense or like (the opposite of what it is) a celebration of gratuitous violence. If you don’t have the basic emotional state of neediness, this book does not speak to you. If you do have that warlike state of being conditioned into you, then it overloads you with emotional imagery of violence and then finally calls an end to your whole inclination to be at war. It makes it seem too much, a kind of madness, and unnecessary. In that sense, the suicide at the end of the book portends a rebirth of the kind of subjectivity that is NOT warlike.
So I do not have a hunger for war. I really managed, finally, to solve my problem of emotional emaciation through means other than by continuing to be at war.
I think Marechea’s use of Bataille’s motifs of presenting all of serious intent and human aims potentially laughable, sacred, sad and ecstatic, broke me out of my own linear thinking patterns and the necessity for retribution. I no longer had that in me, after I had read the book about 20 times.
I am left with a residual sense that somehow I owe myself a great deal for having the persistence to have finally broken through in terms of my consciousness, although I feel that I owe Marechera a lot more for taking the risks he did to write in this way. He genuinely wanted to heal his society, but without taking sides.
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