shamanism versus mediumship

The point I was trying to bring out in my paper is that no matter how evil
is conceptualised, whether according to the idea of spirit possession, or on
the basis of another cosmological system that also conceptualises good and
evil, health or illness, somebody like Marechera has to use the resources
available to him, as an individual, to try to turn things around. My view
is that the "spirit possession" was a cultural symptom, that Marechera
recognised as telling him that something was wrong within the social life of
his community. So, it registered on that very primary level of personal
experience, in his consciousness. Where he took it from there did not have
to do with the community's cultural conceptions of spirit possession, but
with his own sense of having become acquainted with a quality of evil in his
community which had become concretised -- so as to be experienced in his own
body and mind as a destructive force. This wasn't a conceptual feeling
for him, in the sense that it would be if he were participating in a larger
social and religious system of mediumship and possession. He was rather
reacting to, in a much more narrow way, a concretisation of evil, felt
directly in his body and mind, as if it were a sign to him that he had
become sick because his community was sick. It is this immediacy of the
experience, which is without conceptualisations being attached -- that is,
Marechera's feeling, "I am sick because my community has been made sick" --
that is shamanistic, rather than pertaining to mediumship or other such
modes of traditional religion. The shaman feels his sickness without direct
cultural mediation. He experiences his illness initially as a puzzle, as an
overwhelmingly shocking sensation, during his initiatory madness. He does
not, however, conceptualise within an established system of religion,
concerning the meaning of his illness. It remains, rather, for a long time,
a puzzle, an enigma. It is only later, after much personal investigation,
that he manages to make conceptual sense of it all. His later
conceptualisations of his illness and its possible meanings will not be in
terms of the traditional paradigms of religious practice, therefore, but in
terms of his own highly personal and individual solutions, which he
developed in the pratical processes of learning to heal himself. So the
shaman is a highly individualistic practitioner of healing, following
formulas that he has trained himself to know on a personal and private
basis, rather than following more well established, known and shared
cultural rituals of healing.

Perhaps it was that my father always wanted a boy as the eldest – and perhaps it was that he indirectly set up the conditions for me becoming one. When people call me “dear this” and “dear that”, I think, “that’s nice dear, but you do not know the thing that you’re addressing.” In fact, my life has been hard enough, on the psychological level. Most girls, apparently, are coddled by their fathers. That’s what gives them their Oedipus complex, and makes them ready and compliant to find a predetermined niche within the larger honeycomb of society. Nancy Chodorow says that women are more entwined in the identities of their mothers, and find themselves pulled in two directions of love – between the mother and the father. My own experience has been different – stand still long enough and you will be targeted, a principle I later transferred to the boxing ring.

I have been attacked by women because I don’t seem to understand the game of giving them reassurance through the kind of empathy that focuses on comparing insecurities – my own insecurities have been too real to me to indulge them in that way by making them a mechanism of common bonding. I don’t relate and pull free from the game, or in the past have played it badly, and with muddled fingers.

I relate to the absolute necessity of being physically and mentally tough, as if my life depended on it, because so often it has. When I got my first job, in the midst of a snowstorm of heavily allergies and general unwellness, as my body rejected the new Modernist and Modernising cultural organs it had been implanted with, my father didn’t congratulate me. Instead, he sat on the porch and pontificated about how “girls” were paid too much. It seemed to me that he always placed himself in direct competition with me, as if by any glimmer of success, despite the difficulties, I could be taking something from him.

And of course he had lost much. However, my compliance with what had been socially expected of me by the culture I was now in was only going to make things worse for him. I had to comply, but if I did, I was expected not to have. Rather, my father had to have me as a repository for his sense of failure, so that he might point to me, and say, “Look! This is a failure!” which would give him room and space to grieve about the way his life had turned out after his decent from his higher place of lecturer to factory man.

I, in turn, learned the ten year lesson, never to stand still psychologically in one place, enough for my father to get a mind lock on me. Keep moving, keep moving, keep your guard up at all times, jab, jab, jab, check the distance between you and your opponent. Final lesson of life and the boxing ring: It is either him or you.

non-knowledge

The difference between me and my friend Jenny, who sat next to me, and was from South Africa, is that she already knew what the limits of her existence were, and was quite happy with that. I didn’t know them even slightly if at all, and even if someone had told me what they were, I wouldn’t have accepted that. I wanted to find out what they were all the time. But Jenny had much more culturally in common with the Australians who sat around the classroom in my first year in Perth than she and I had together, even though we were both from Africa. Even though Jenny went along with some of my more interesting schemes – to meet the sunset at the break of dawn, for instance – there was something within her that was already settled, that knew what to expect from the sun, and didn’t anticipate anything more or less than what had been expected.

It was like so many of my friends who sat with me in my classes at the next school I went to, when my parents moved up into the Perth hills to a place called Lesmurdie. Even if they went to Mauritius for a break, and sunbathed there naked, you had the impression that they already knew what to expect, and had developed their sunbathing naked story to tell only for anecdotal purposes.

In a strange way, this limit drawn on taking a risk was also the limit drawn on their friendships. They knew who they were and that was it, whereas I was always querying it. I just sought, as if to assuage an inner dryness in my throat, others who could feel the same inner yearning. When I found skydivers many years later (SCUBA divers weren’t quite up to snuff), I knew I’d found my spiritual and social equals. I had come home at last – at least for a little while, to where the grain of life seemed normal, satisfying and healthy. A child of war, I had to live up to this level of excitement. My partner at the time got cold chills. “I couldn’t jump,” he said. “The newspaper article on the wall at the dropzone said that a man had been sucked up to thirtythousand feet, had nearly frozen to death, and had drifted hundreds of kilometres away from where he had been dropped. I was afraid that this could happen to me.”

I sneered at him a little, I’m sorry to say, since this artefact alone had been more than enough incitement to persuade me to jump. What if the hand of god had snatched you away and given you a really journey to experience? How would you write home if that had happened? All the things that you would want to say ……..

utter nonsense!

I smelled my natural enemy in any system that sought to orchestate my attitudes and behaviour from beginning to end. That was my best excuse to introduce a symptom of the here and now – to snatch the fellow girl guide’s hat and throw it anywhere, to disrupt the circle of sleepy conformity by introducing the presence of myself as tangible reality, the obstructor of the system that would have us sleep walking along, failing to recognise each other.

I had to create an effect, through my scheming and planning, to prove that I was out there. In seeing myself performing, I would know that I actually existed, like cold shivers of excitement descending down my spine, I’d know through the immediacy of the experience that I was actually alive.

In another way, it was my reverence for authority that simply compelled me to scheme and plan another practical joke. I wanted to know better the boundaries of order imposed by authorities, and how these functioned. I simply had to find out. I enjoyed the terror that such knowledge seeking invoked  – it whet my appetite and made me certain that I and authority belonged to each other, like pairs, like opposites in a symbiotic tangle. If I could find out what authority thought of me, I could feel, in that moment, alive. 

To finish to train

Despite my several days break from training whilst I was in Melbourne during the last week, I managed to return to training today and do a full half hour of aerobics work, plus some other goodies. I'm still far from fit, which is what happens when I have any sort of break, but somehow had much more energy than I had been expecting to have.

NO Zim Dollars

fetal madness?

With regard to my mother I did some things which would not have helped.

“This is a dinosaur,” I proclaimed to my first year painting class, brandishing an image of my mother doing the ironing. The shape I’d imposed on the panel of electric blue was reminiscent of the shape and form Dino, with a harsh expressionistic outline, and jarring intermittent spots on the red and yellow, that decorated the figure’s preposterous torso.

We had entered our second year in Australia, and I was reacting to things, I tell you. I saw the possibilities of feminism, of freedom, and I was expressing what I felt, without regard, without consideration. “Why is the woman so emaciated?” asked a fellow class member, at the production of a wasting female nude, straight from the Unconscious, on my first day in class. “Emacey… what?” I’d answered. It was a picture of my self, jauntily rendered, arms angled and outstretched to reveal a hanging garment of transparent batlike skin clinging to ribcage.

The fact is that my mother and I lost much of the depth and emotional resonance of our relationship since the “turning” when I was in Zimbabwe. This was when I was supposed to be when I had come of age, and when I was rendered into the condition of the typical female madness. I’d started to spend time alone – a sure sign to my mother that everything about me was going awry. I lay on the hay in the stable, and reflected. “Where were you?” she demanded to know.

“Getting some privacy, lying on the hay,” I uttered.

Whereas freedom in the past had been my birthright, my inheritance, right now that I was in danger of being afflicted with typical female madness, it wasn’t so. I had to account for all the hours of my whereabouts, so that it could be monitored and ascertained whether or not I was already going mad.

This was distressing. “Sometimes you sit in a fetal position and just hold yourself!” asserted my mother, brandishing her weapon of my certain descent into madness. “Fetal?” I queried.

It was all quite transparent that something was about to, or had already come over me. My female cousins on my father’s side have all exhibited one mode of madness or another around the teenage years, for instance by becoming suddenly unmanageable and going nuts and running away from home. In Masaai culture, I have since learned, the experience is similar. In this patriarchal culture, the villagers apply decoration to the young woman’s body and chase her away from the village she’s grown up in, with insults and abuse, designed to assure that she remains with her husband from the other tribe, never to return. Sometimes females needed a harsh and helping hand like that.

I heard my mother proclaim a few months ago that nobody can tolerate teenagers, because it is a stage at which the human mind goes mad. “But I was exceedingly tame for a teenager, wasn’t I,” I said, “because I did nothing at all.”

“Yes,” you were,” my mother conceded, without perceiving the contradiction between her ideology and the concrete and historical reality.