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| My original 1988 cartoon |
I confess: I don’t much like Dambudzo Marechera’s work. Or I
should say: I still don’t like it.
Back in 1988, a year after Marechera’s untimely death aged
only 35, I wrote a brief assessment for
the Zimbabwean magazine Prize. I
acknowledged that the wild child of Zimbabwean literature was enormously
“talented, imaginative and sensitive”, capable of “brilliant moments and often great delicacy”. Up to a point, I
admired his honesty and his assault on conventional English. In retrospect, I
would have stressed more the astonishing breadth of reading and sharp if spotty
philosophising, unmatched by any other Zimbabwean writer then, and perhaps even
now. But his anarchistic thoughts, striking out in every direction with a blend
of raw self-exposure and lancing political critique, were too solipsistic, too
uneven, too wallowing in self-disgust and misanthropy, never marshalled into sustained
craftsmanship, to provide a really fruitful model. So I argued.
I think I largely stand by that, pompous as it was, though
Marechera’s fans and acolytes would doubtless retort that time has proved me
wrong: he is still inspirational, 33
years later. Innumerable academic
articles and theses have argued in his favour, albeit with, in my view, a
certain amount of special pleading. Australian scholar Jennifer Armstrong even
wrote a PhD suggesting he is a kind of shaman, ultimately healing – a
suggestion I think Marechera would have found mystifying, if not offensive. But people will get what they get from
literature, and good luck to them. For this pampered and over-sensitive white
boy, at least, it makes for some tediously ugly fare. Black Sunlight, his second short novel, I now find unreadably vile.
Anyway, I found myself returning to his best-known work, The House of Hunger (1978), while
looking for instances of dagga-use in southern African literature. It appears
the collection’s phantasmagoric effects are stimulated more by alcohol than mbanje – but in the course of that
earth-shattering discovery I became intrigued by another aspect altogether: the
frequent appearance of animals. What are they doing there?
As far as I’ve found, no one has looked in detail at this
aspect. One Chinese scholar has suggested, I think a bit tendentiously, that
Marechera modelled much on Chinese tales of the Monkey King trickster figure of
Eastern folklore. I am not persuaded that the parallels go as deep as he
claims. Other articles mention the animal appearances only in passing. One of
the best articles I’ve read, by Christopher Wayne and Bridget Grogan, explains
Marechera’s fragmented and tortuous obsessions as projections of what Julia
Kristeva has famously termed the “abject”. Abjection – literally ‘throwing-away’
– involves taboo subjects and materials, primarily excreta, viscera, waste and
the corpse. Exposing these repressed aspects of life can be used to express
other ‘unspeakable’ subjects, including violence, political marginalisation and
rebellious or dislocated personal identity. Wayne and Grogan focus on the
latter, but I suspect that a reading of animal presences can also usefully be
viewed through the lens of abjection. After all, Marechera seemed to view all
of life as comprised of multiple layers of abjection: our “chicken-run
existence”, he called it in Black
Sunlight: trapped, inferior, and doomed to slaughter.
A vicious example occurs early on in the titular story in The House
of Hunger. A girl, Immaculate, is being beaten up by one Peter, “raw
courage” still showing in her “animal-like eyes”. At the same instant as she is
knocked “sideways”, a cat somewhere screams in “utter agony”. The unnamed narrator
also gets pummelled: it is as if everyone’s agonies are shared, of a piece. The
neighbour’s children shout “break its neck”, then in the darkness “a furry and
wet thing” , bloody and half burnt, hits him in the face: “It was my cat. It
was dead.” Tension between the narrator and Immaculate he takes out on the cat’s
body, giving it a hefty kick, sending it flying right out of the yard. So
embittered, “mixed-up”, enmeshed in his “labyrinthine personal world”, hating
humanity just “for being utterly and crudely there”, that he has no room for compassion or loss for the actual
cat. Indeed, the animal seems to serve as mere cipher for the violence that
pervades his township world, his “disturbed universe”, his political
oppression, his turbulent “soul-sickness”.
In numerous places the narrator sees human life being reduced
to, or at least on a level with, the animal. Humans exist in “the crocodile’s
jaws”. A character Philip expostulates: “There is nothing to make one
particularly glad one is a human being and not a horse, or a lion, or a jackal,
or come to think of it a snake ... There’s dust and fleas and bloody whites and
roaches and dogs trained to bite black people in the arse” (58). A little later
he figures himself as victimised animal: “You tuck your tail between your legs
and some enterprising vandal sets fire to your fur, as you streak through the
dry grass of your fears” (59) – echoing the earlier cat casualty.
The question of our commonality with animals is treated at
greater length in the hallucinatory, alcohol-fuelled outpouring – it is hardly
a ‘story’ – entitled “The Writer’s Grain”. Apparently being attacked by his own
false teeth at a party, the narrator suddenly goes down on all fours and starts
braying like a donkey, “like a pack-ass lost in the desert” (108). He flees into
the streets, is robbed and knocked out. He comes to:
A mongrel was licking my face and
sniffing me with its wet black nose. Its eyes were large and clear and black and
hesitant like a child who knows that the world can hurt. Up to this point in my
life I had always hated dogs. And all
animals, really. Not so much hated them – because that may imply a ‘reason’ –but
because I was afraid of them. There is something in every animal which is also
in us... (109)
He attributes this partly to a childhood diet of horror
films, and a consequent fear of turning into a werewolf or a vampire, gorging
on his sister’s neck or even, tellingly, his own neck. Weirdly, animals still seem
to like him.
One day I went up to my room late and
drunk. There was a strange cat on my bed. It had fixed its eyes on my own. It
was only half-grown; with white fur gilded here and there and long thin white
whiskers. Its eyes were green, and the transparent green was brilliantly shot
through by a terrible apprehension of its position. (110)
Its position is being trapped with an hysterical human bent
on its destruction. A full page is devoted to a graphic description of the “kitten”
being smashed to a pulp. It quickly transpires that the cat is an avatar of
white privilege: “These feline shits are so used to being treated better than
we blacks are treated it probably thought ... Why should I care what it
thought?” With vicious irony, the
narrator uses a series of iconic ‘white’ books – Shakespeare, Hardy, the Concise Oxford Dictionary and, for the
coup de grace, the Encyclopaedia
Britannica – to despatch the kitten before ejecting – abjecting – the corpse
across the street. In this visceral
fashion, the writer-narrator symbolically attempts to rid himself of a
dependency on cultural influences he sees as creating a false or
self-destructive identity – and turning the very language he has learned to use
against itself. The disgust the cat-lover will feel at this unashamedly heartless
passage is, of course, precisely the effect Marechera desires.
The scene segues immediately into a wider thought:
Animals. Animals were a steak on a plate,
a lamb chop, a gammon, roast chicken... And one was supposed to eat them
correctly with a knife and fork and with correct manners and correct
conversation. ... And the only ones that could afford them were the bloody
whites. And the bloody animals looked and sounded and behaved as though they
liked to be eaten only by whites. Not niggers, bleated the sheep. (111)
Typically, what might sound at first like a critique of the
appalling industry of mass animal slaughter resolves into a personalised howl
of protest. One can both agree and disagree that the “thing that happened to
the Jews has never been unleashed against animals. And the things which bloody
whites – among them Jews – are doing to my family, to my countrymen, to black
people everywhere, have never been done to animals. What is done to the animals
is nothing compared to the grisly history of man’s appetite for inflicting
misery on other men.” There is both perspicacity and incoherence in all this –
as might be expected from someone self-admittedly “cracking up”.
Insects also recur, both physical and symbolic. Humans are depicted
as delicate skeletons caught in a spider’s web. In “House of Hunger” Philip
says: “There’s clouds of flies everywhere you go, flies eating our dead.
There’s armies of worms slithering in our history. And there’s squadrons of
mosquitoes homing down onto the cradle of our future” (59). Existence is “God’s
wound and we were the maggots slithering in it” (70). In another passage of
extreme existential abjection:
Does the corpse protect the thick black
flies that are laying their horrid eggs in his eyes? Flies fascinate me. Their six legs. Their silver scissors of
wings. Their huge compound eyes. Vomiting upon the food we eat. And calmly
washing their forelegs. The way they fall into your soup and calmly pierce you
with an upward stare as you debate what to do. They prize the unguarded cracks
of our soul. (105)
The motif of being scrutinised by the animal also crops up often.
In the story “Burning in the Rain”, the narrator confronts himself in the
mirror, his body mocking him with “a certain ridiculousness”. An ape, in short,
which gets “the better of him ... Those hairy hands and the backs of his hands
where the scars ... Monster!” A kind of
Frankensteinian patchwork; he will retaliate by dressing like a human, or rush
out into the rain of “self-pity” (83). He meets a lover named Margaret, but he seems
incapable of accepting the lyrical beauty and love she represents; rather she
is “the punishment for the ape in the mirror” – “his kinsman, the ape,
lumbering awkwardly into his intimacy”. It is a kind of doppelgänger – a term
Marechera used of himself – “laughing sarcastically”, with a “power over him”
to make romantic encounters “more sordid, more unbearable” (86). It “seemed to be treasuring a huge but secret
joke at his expense”. The ape seems to be a figure of all the narrator’s
self-doubts, taintedness, victimisation within a “national catastrophe”.
The idea that only clothes distinguish a man from the ape or
animal within reappears in the story
“Black Skin What Mask”, in obvious allusion to Frantz Fanon’s book Black Skin White Mask. “If clothes make
the man, then certainly he was a man. And his shoes were the kind that make
even an elephant lightfooted and elegant. The animals that were murdered to
make those shoes must have turned in their graves”. That’s a nice irony: to
cover the inner beast one wears covers fashioned from other dead beasts. But
this character is obsessed with the impossibility of belonging (one assumes the
story is set in England – Marechera went to Oxford). He tries to make every
other African about mimic him: “After all, if one chimpanzee learns not only to
drink tea but also to promote that tea on TV, what does it profit if all the other
god-created chimpanzees out there continue to scratch their fleas and swing
around on their tails chittering about Rhodes and bananas?” (94). Doubtless
this is also in ironic counterpoint to white colonists’ habit of equating
Africans to simians. A little further on, the character tells the dishevelled
writer-narrator: “You ought to take more care of your appearance, you know.
We’re not monkeys”. But, the narrator
thinks nastily, his friend’s dancing made him
look like a monkey. All this owes more to Kafka’s ape than to the Monkey King,
perhaps.
The second part of “The Writer’s Grain” is a bafflingly fantastic piece involving a
small boy (another Marechera doppelgänger) being lectured by a sardonic Mr
Warthog, with two dinosaurs as sidekicks. I’m not sure quite what this
nightmarishly illogical sequence is all about, apart from a lot of
neo-cannibalistic eating and literary name-dropping. It does seem to boil down
to Mr Warthog’s one extended instructive speech exalting
Your right to put the spanner in the
works. Your right to refuse to be labelled and to insist on your right to
behave anything other than anyone expects. Your right to simply say no for the
pleasure of it. To insist on your right to confound all who insist on
regimenting human impulses according to theories psychological, religious,
historical, philosophical, political, etc. ... Insist upon your right to insist
on the importance, the great importance, of whim. There is no greater pleasure
than that derived from throwing or not throwing the spanner into the works
simply on the basis of one’s whims... (122)
This, a little simplified, is Marechera’s manifesto,
reiterated many times, and enacted in the very tumult of his delivery. Animal
presences are part of his disorientating techniques, though ultimately they are
mere psychic instruments, not ethically considerable in themselves.
While Marechera remains unique in the Zimbabwean context, and
his work is particularly challenging in the scope of its self-referential
disgust, it’s worth recalling that his stance is echoed by others. The scholar
George Steiner has written of the French modernist poets whom Marechera
admired, Mallarmé and Rimbaud:
The poet no longer has or aspires to
native tenure in the house of words. The languages waiting for him as an
individual born into history, into society, into the expressive conventions of
his particular culture and milieu, are no longer a natural skin. Established
language is the enemy. The poet finds it sordid with lies. Daily currency has
made it stale. The ancient metaphors are inert and the numinous energies
bone-dry. ... He will seek to resuscitate the magic of the word by dislocating
the traditional bonds of grammar and of ordered space ... He will rescind or at
least weaken the classic continuities of reason and syntax, of conscious
direction and verbal form ... the public crust of language must be riven. Only
then shall the subconscious and anarchic core of private man find voice. (After Babel, 178)
Marechera applied such a programme to his colonial and
post-independence milieux, with a particularly visceral, animal-populated
twist.
By the way, if you know of any southern African literary works
in which dagga plays a prominent role, do let me know.
*****
