Jennifer Armstrong
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First, let me congratulate you for two things--for the release of your memoir Minus the
Morning, and for being part of the historic Dambudzo Marechera Conference at Oxford
University. As I read the memoir, I am enjoying the way you tell the story, the way you
remember things, the way you do memoir. In what ways do you think your memoir breaks or
improves on memoir-writing rules?
Thank you very much Emmanuel. These are a thought-provoking questions indeed.
After struggling with my memoir for many years, I realised that it simply could not have been written in
a conventional way. A conventional memoir requires the continuity of a self – precisely, I should say,
the continuity of one self and not the introduction of multiple selves, or the breaking down of the one
self and the continuation as another self. Actually my migration to Australia along with my family in
January 1984 was totally catastrophic for me. I was of the age of sixteen, when I’d just mastered some
of the complexities of my culture, and here I was, being thrown into the deep end again, and being
forced to start anew in Australia, just when I had achieved my tenuous maturity based upon the
proclivities and mores of an entirely different, African culture. Quite clearly, looking back in retrospect,
I was unable to continue living with the same self. I had to develop a new one that could cope with new
cultural mores and totally different demands for survival. So I lost my Zimbabwean self for a while –
and it was hell! I wasn’t able to develop a new self because Australian culture didn’t mean one thing to
me, and I didn’t have any conception as to how it functioned. I was a babe in the woods at the age of
16 – trying to start again – but I don’t think anyone had the slightest idea of my internal distress.
It’s hard to lose everything at once, and then you try to start again without any adult help, without your
friends or companions who know what you are going through. There was also some hostility in
Australia at the time about anybody being white and coming from Zimbabwe – that, and a lot of
ignorance about Zimbabwean culture. Some of the Australians I encountered were trying to distance
themselves from their own colonial history, their hostility towards the Aboriginals who were the original
inhabitants of their country, so in the same way that someone who fears he may be homosexual goes
out and beats up a gay person, I received a lot of hostility from those Australian whites who wanted to
dissociate themselves from colonialism. This meant that it was really difficult to find my feet in the new
country. I’m still reeling! The attacks were savage, and the distance between who I actually was and
who I was perceived to be was enormous! So, in short, I couldn’t be the person who I had been whilst
growing up in Zimbabwe. It was too innocent a ‘mode of being’ for it to enable me to survive in this
new, cynical and worldly culture. The book is about this loss of self and what I did in order to survive it.
If you consider, again, that last idea, the “loss of self and what I did in order to survive it”, you will
consider that a conventional memoir could not take into its scope this kind of an issue. It really is an
intellectual and philosophical issue that would not be accommodated by pure narrative story-telling or
a purely reminiscing style. So, I had to find a different way of telling my story. I broke the storyline into
fragments, and allowed the form of it to speak for my broken self. I have included fragments that
derived from my newer, regenerated self, which turned out to be an intellectual. But there are still
fragments from the older self, and a lamentation of what this self lost in terms of Zimbabwe.
The second part of this question has to do with Dambudzo Marechera. What made you
decide to do your Phd on Dambudzo Marechera?
That’s a good question! I had made up my mind to study “African literature” originally, but I had no
idea yet who or what I would study. So, as you do in such a situation, I went to the university library
and browsed the section on Zimbabwean literature. From the dusty shelves I pulled books by
Chenjerai Hove, Charles Mungoshi, and others. One of them was the tribute book, a kind of obituary,
called Dambudzo Marechera 1952-1987. I was very much struck by his pithy sayings in it that seemed
to go way beyond (or, rather to decisively cut under) the logic of normal cultural conventions and the
idealising of one’s society that is so common. Here was a writer talking about how there were aspects
of his own cultural landscape to which he simply couldn’t relate. It was shocking but refreshingly so –
for me, it was like the sensation of plunging into a cold stream. The ability to speak honestly and the
sense of cultural alienation I perceived in Marechera’s work were initially what drew me to him. I was
very thirsty for this kind of honesty, since it seemed to me that so much psychologically defensive
nonsense had been told about Zimbabwe, with the whites digging in on one side and becoming
defensively right wing, the Australians purifying themselves from within by attacking the appearance of
evil rather than attempting to understand reality, and so on. Here was a writer who wasn’t idealising
the condition of liberated Zimbabwe as a kind of spiritually pure state or nirvana. It is Marechera’s
honesty that gives his writing a really full-bodied tone, rather than feeling lightweight and ethereal. His
insights go much deeper than idealism ever will or can.
To what extent to do you think some of his writing style (say in House of Hunger or Black
Sunlight) has influenced your own writing?
I am deeply indebted to Marechera for giving me the courage to tell the truth about things. Initially, I
had believed that the only way to write a memoir was to idealise reality as a way of trying to heal it. I
was stuck in the right-wing, conservative mode of thinking that my writing had to be triumphalist,
depicting situations where, although I’d faced hardships, I had overcome them all with the pure
strength of my gigantically determined mind. That is the right-wing loss and redemption narrative that
many of the whites who have suffered the injurious loss of their country have been desperately trying
to play out in their daily lives. Yet this redemption narrative is false. So often the loss of home and
country has not been faced sufficiently, and as a result you have a thin veneer of adaptability, with
many of these whites, but underneath this there are cracks and mental illnesses starting to form. You
cannot deal with such great loss through idealism or through triumphalistic notions for that matter.
You are not heroic because you are now living in the West, where everything is nicely white and
civilised – you have still lost everything. Let us have a little bit of honestly, for a change.
In other ways, the freeform style of Marechera’s writing also appears in my book. When you are
mapping your inner soul, you don’t necessarily listen to the conventions of genre, since you are
attending to a different kind of principle and discipline. The discipline of mapping the soul’s structure
is no less exacting and demanding than the discipline of conforming to the requirements of a
particular genre, yet it imposes a very different form and structure. You are listening inwardly and
trying to create a form of expression that will exactly correspond to the hidden inner-life of the psyche,
rather than following a formula for structure that is already known and publicly defined.
On your blog Unsane and Savage you reflect on and discuss Marechera a lot. Your study of
Marechera, I have gathered from your blog posts, is connected to shamanism. And yes,
how have you been connecting Marechera to Shamanism?
The way I have come to see a connection between Marechera and shamanism is through the idea,
entailed in both, that the structure of the self is actually mutable and transformable. It’s not something
static and fixed forever – we do not each have only “one soul” but potentially, at least, we all have
multiple souls. The shamans of yore considered that we could merge our spirits with those of animals
or other entities. These shamans could depart from their bodies and visit other planes of existence in
order to get the resources they needed for daily life. That meant that their souls were forever
changing. Like in Black Sunlight, the soul of the traditional shaman is not the same but mutable.
Shamans and the anarchists in Black Sunlight are both “changelings”. They enter different planes of
consciousness from the norm, as an esoteric practice that will enable them to exert power within their
societies, and to change it.
You remind us, on the blog, that the original title of House of Hunger was At the Head of the
Stream. Do you think this title would have been more powerful and significant for
Marechera's landmark novella?
I think the title, At the Head of the Stream, would have given the novella a more shamanistic sense to
it. After all, what do shamans attempt to do but to go back to the origins of our being? They seek to
intervene at the primordial level of human consciousness in order to alter the way we think about
things, so that we don’t continue plodding on in the same destructive ways, but get to the bottom of
whatever is injurious to us. The shaman has to go back to the psychic origins of the political injury that
he and his society have sustained – the injury of colonialism – in order to heal his society. He goes
back to the “head of the stream”, where the psyche (which is to say the political psyche of Zimbabwe)
has its origins. Further down the stream, life already has its own determinations. It is already too late
to change them, since one thing must lead to another and damage to societal consciousness will
produce anguish and a desire for revenge. But by going back at the beginning of the stream of life,
an intervention would still be possible. A would-be shaman must therefore return, spiritually, to the
primeval origins of consciousness, in order to achieve the necessary intervention. It is a return to the
head of the stream of life in order to change the direction of its flow that is profoundly shamanistic!
Of course, shamanism is pretty esoteric, but I think that if my concept of it is understood and applied
to Marechera’s writing it does serve to sharpen the focus concerning what sort of political intervention
Marechera was aiming for. The shamanistic angle makes Marechera out to be much more radical and
logically consistent in his position than he is often assumed to have been.
Lately, there has been debate about people claiming to know Marechera even if they have
not read a single work of his. One camp has argued for an avoidance of associating
Marechera with beliefs or positions he may not even have held while another says people
can say anything they want about Marechera's life and writing. There is even a new line of
thinking that argues that we let Marechera down by not recognizing that he needed help
for his mental illness, alcoholism, etc.
What's your position on these issues?
I think that Marechera is the kind of writer that people will understand on different levels. Myself, I see
him as a kind of philosopher and of course a shaman. I do see the reasoning underpinning his work
as being logically consistent in much the same way as the work of that great philosophical de-
systematiser, Friedrich Nietzsche, is logically consistent. This logic is, however, the logic of the
psyche, so it can be hard to ascertain unless one reads the author deeply. Most people will probably
not spare the time for a deep perusal of Marechera’s works. I have been extraordinarily lucky to have
had the time to do this. So there will be people who want to take Marechera primarily as a poet, or
people who think he told great adventure stories, or whatever. I think the anarchistic spirit of
Marechera would have permitted all sorts of interpretations; however, it would be a shame if the
interpretations remained superficial and did not take enough into account his radical political agenda
for Zimbabwe that included psychological (or, ‘spiritual’) healing. We need to individually return to the
origins of the pain of war, colonialism, and loss of country for that matter, in order to receive healing.
Failing this, Zimbabwe will never be healed, and will go on reacting to its wounds, and that will be an
ongoing disaster.
As for Marechera’s ‘mental illness’, I’m not at all sure that he had a serious one at the latter stages of
his life. He may simply have been suffering only from what is now known as post-traumatic-stress-
disorder, which caused him to avoid submitting to authorities, and led to a life on the streets of
Harare. The key points that art theorist Anton Ehrenzweig identifies as features of “schizophrenic art”
are certainly not present in Marechera’s work at all. They are, he tells us, a mixture of horror and
sweetness, with an inability to fully plumb the depths of consciousness. But plumbing the depths of
consciousness is what Marechera’s work fully does, I have argued. I think that there are likely many
who have mistaken Marechera’s irreverent sense of humour – which is, by the way, quintessentially
Zimbabwean – with a kind of sickness and a failure to take politics seriously. But what they mean by
politics is “identity politics”, which they see as the only sort. My argument is that of course, Marechera
took politics very seriously indeed – but he did so as a cultural Zimbabwean; as one who could still
laugh at the black humour of the tragedy of emancipation postponed. And certainly, we should have
taken Marechera more seriously, given that his critiques were not mentally ill at all, but deep and far
reaching – and entirely necessary to take on board, for the development of Zimbabwean art and
politics.
So what can you tell us about your conference topic/paper? Just a preview, or an abstract,
to get us interested.
I’m looking at how the author returns, in Black Sunlight, to a primordial psychological state – actually
that defined by Kleinian psychoanalysis – in order to create the basis for a new self and a new
society. The shamanistic state of ‘ecstasy’ is actually auto-destructive. One destroys one’s self, one’s
old mind, in order to get a new one.
Zimbabwean literature is on the rise. Much of it has finally caught up with the kind of
honesty Marechera was rejected for in the eighties. What do you think about this new
upsurge in evocative writing?
I confess that I haven’t had the time to read much of it, not even Brian Chikwava’s Harare North. I think
it is necessary for Zimbabwe’s authors to aim to be very honest if they are going to try to influence
Zimbabwe’s politics for the better. As I said earlier, what really doesn’t work is to idealise a situation
that is already less than ideal, or to play the game of triumphalism. Telling the truth as it really is might
seem to be an altogether too humble proposition, but it is actually an extremely audacious thing to do,
since as humans we are less comfortable with the truth than with various sorts of lies and dressing up
– like the garishly made-up woman that Marechera speaks about in The Black Insider. The best
tribute a writer can give to Marechera would be to try to make sure that Zimbabwean independence
means something, so that the authentic courage of those who fought a war of liberation for a better
life does not go to waste.
About memoir writing. What do you think is the future of the memoir or autobiography in
Zimbabwean writing?
I really love the genre – although, as I say, I have not been able to write according to the genre. I think
it is very important to reflect deeply upon one’s own experiences, because after all, the individual is
the ultimate unit of society, and unless we reflect deeply upon our own personal experiences, society
will not be rich and will be depleted of its true spiritual resources. I also think that since Zimbabwe is
still a rough terrain, geographically and politically, it lends itself especially well to those who want to
write about it in the form of a memoir. In the more developed world, life and the people in it are much
more regulated, as a general rule. We have the situation there that Theodor Adorno refers to as “the
administered life”, where bureaucrats and others in power do your thinking for you. People in
Zimbabwe can still reflect upon their own lives, and to the degree that they have the material
resources to do so, can chart their own courses in life. Even if they don’t have much of the material
resources, as Dambudzo has shown us, it is still possible to chart a way that is one’s own.
Zimbabwean citizens are very resourceful people, since they had to be that way in order to survive.
There is a great deal they can write about that would surprise people in the First World. But it is
necessary to be honest – not to idealise one’s self or one’s country.
You have lived outside of Zimbabwe for many years. How has this enhanced or hindered
your writing? What other writing are you working on?
I think that living outside of Zimbabwe is what triggered my writing – at least in terms of my memoir. In
a way, I faced such a traumatic blow to my very being (a situation of workplace bullying after I had
already struggled so much to adapt to the Australian way of life) that I, like Dambudzo, had to go back
to the very source of my being, back to the head of the stream, in order to try to make amends.
As for what else I’m working on, I want to write a Voltairesque manual on some of the follies of
contemporary society and the ideologies that govern it. The book will be called, Condemned by
Chaos.
Tell us a bit about your boxing. Does it have any bearing in your writing whatsoever? I
know at least one writer--Kathy Acker of Northern California-- who used weight-lifting to
inspire her stories.
Boxing and kickboxing are like shamanistic rituals for me. When I step into the ring for a sparring
session, I know that my old self, along with whatever I was thinking or feeling at that time, will be
destroyed. If you are sparring properly, with full intensity, your body does the thinking for you. Your
mind is too slow to register the punches, or the kicks, which are coming at you, so your body has to
do all the work, with all the reflexes you have trained into it. As an intellectual, I find myself on a totally
different footing in the boxing ring. I am, in a sense, no longer myself, but another. I cannot think
deeply intellectual thoughts anymore, if I want to survive and defend myself adequately. My
intellectual mind is totally destroyed during the duration of boxing. It is like being in a very fast spin-
cycle of a washing machine. Once the sparring is over, I can return to my normal state – but it is never
the state of mind that I started out with. Already I am thinking differently and new ideas are popping
into my head. Boxing is like a shock to the system – but one that I can recover from. You are working
with a different part of the mind – the part that is primeval, that is oriented towards aggression and
defense. The intensity of focus that you need to try to attain to in a sparring session is actually
meditative – although what you are meditating on is the stream of pure aggression that is being
directed at you, which you have to try to evade. Somehow it is actually possible to purify your
consciousness by facing this stream of aggression. Your mind digs deeply and finds resources for
you that you didn’t know you had – and some of these resources that filter through, you later find, are
very creative resources.
What effect do you think the Dambudzo Marechera conference will have on Zimbabwean
literature?
I hope that it will invigorate minds to think about Zimbabwe in a political sense, and what is needed –
what forms of courage and audacity – in order to improve the situation there. I am myself less
interested in literature than in the confluence of ideas and strategies that conjoin literature and
politics. I think that the spirit of Marechera is crying out for new recognition of the joint nature of these
projects.
Post-Festival Questions [updated on July 16, 2009]
So what was your impression of the conference? Did it go as you had expected?
I think that the conference paid good homage to Marechera's ghost, in particular the final day's walk
around Marechera's old haunt that is New College. There we went against the directives of the
warden by entering the dining hall whilst the students were eating, and taking pictures, which this
warden had explicitly forbidden. We also passed along a very constricted and winding back alleyway
to see a pub where the students were free to drink. On that morning we also climbed a bell tower and
reflected on Bergfrith.
I was pretty pleased with how the conference went, in general. I met a lot of people who had known
him personally, and it gave me a real impression of Marechera's character.
Based on the presentations at the conference, what type of scholarship is coming out on
Marechera?
There is quite a diverse range of scholarship coming out now, and most of it looking at Marechera in
the light of categories of discourse that have developed over the past twenty years or so. The
approaches of the papers came from the direction of gender studies, queer studies, postmodernist
aesthetics, pedagogical theory, and socio-cultural approaches.
I think that people particularly enjoyed Canadian Julie Cairnie's take on Marechera's children's
literature, because that is something that has been overlooked pretty much, until now, and Julie was
able to put 'Fuzzy Goo' into a Zimbabwean socio-cultural context, and show the relevancy of what
Marechera was trying to say in terms of the reality of Zimbabwean children's lives. These children
don't have the same experiences as Western children do, growing up, so the way that Marechera
pitches his stories to them tends to take into account their poverty, the threats of war surrounding
them and so on. What is known is that his children's stories were originally refused publication due to
what was attributed as 'cynicism' and because there was simultaneously an adult and a child's
perspective represented in them -- kind of like the Simpsons cartoon on TV today has two levels of
meaning. I think what Julie's presentation brought out was the degree of empathy that is present in
Marechera's children's writing. It's wrong to see only cynicism and a confusion of voice in his writing.
Perhaps -- and this is something that probably hasn't yet been considered -- he was writing in that
more adult way to children who were growing up too soon?
Morning, and for being part of the historic Dambudzo Marechera Conference at Oxford
University. As I read the memoir, I am enjoying the way you tell the story, the way you
remember things, the way you do memoir. In what ways do you think your memoir breaks or
improves on memoir-writing rules?
Thank you very much Emmanuel. These are a thought-provoking questions indeed.
After struggling with my memoir for many years, I realised that it simply could not have been written in
a conventional way. A conventional memoir requires the continuity of a self – precisely, I should say,
the continuity of one self and not the introduction of multiple selves, or the breaking down of the one
self and the continuation as another self. Actually my migration to Australia along with my family in
January 1984 was totally catastrophic for me. I was of the age of sixteen, when I’d just mastered some
of the complexities of my culture, and here I was, being thrown into the deep end again, and being
forced to start anew in Australia, just when I had achieved my tenuous maturity based upon the
proclivities and mores of an entirely different, African culture. Quite clearly, looking back in retrospect,
I was unable to continue living with the same self. I had to develop a new one that could cope with new
cultural mores and totally different demands for survival. So I lost my Zimbabwean self for a while –
and it was hell! I wasn’t able to develop a new self because Australian culture didn’t mean one thing to
me, and I didn’t have any conception as to how it functioned. I was a babe in the woods at the age of
16 – trying to start again – but I don’t think anyone had the slightest idea of my internal distress.
It’s hard to lose everything at once, and then you try to start again without any adult help, without your
friends or companions who know what you are going through. There was also some hostility in
Australia at the time about anybody being white and coming from Zimbabwe – that, and a lot of
ignorance about Zimbabwean culture. Some of the Australians I encountered were trying to distance
themselves from their own colonial history, their hostility towards the Aboriginals who were the original
inhabitants of their country, so in the same way that someone who fears he may be homosexual goes
out and beats up a gay person, I received a lot of hostility from those Australian whites who wanted to
dissociate themselves from colonialism. This meant that it was really difficult to find my feet in the new
country. I’m still reeling! The attacks were savage, and the distance between who I actually was and
who I was perceived to be was enormous! So, in short, I couldn’t be the person who I had been whilst
growing up in Zimbabwe. It was too innocent a ‘mode of being’ for it to enable me to survive in this
new, cynical and worldly culture. The book is about this loss of self and what I did in order to survive it.
If you consider, again, that last idea, the “loss of self and what I did in order to survive it”, you will
consider that a conventional memoir could not take into its scope this kind of an issue. It really is an
intellectual and philosophical issue that would not be accommodated by pure narrative story-telling or
a purely reminiscing style. So, I had to find a different way of telling my story. I broke the storyline into
fragments, and allowed the form of it to speak for my broken self. I have included fragments that
derived from my newer, regenerated self, which turned out to be an intellectual. But there are still
fragments from the older self, and a lamentation of what this self lost in terms of Zimbabwe.
The second part of this question has to do with Dambudzo Marechera. What made you
decide to do your Phd on Dambudzo Marechera?
That’s a good question! I had made up my mind to study “African literature” originally, but I had no
idea yet who or what I would study. So, as you do in such a situation, I went to the university library
and browsed the section on Zimbabwean literature. From the dusty shelves I pulled books by
Chenjerai Hove, Charles Mungoshi, and others. One of them was the tribute book, a kind of obituary,
called Dambudzo Marechera 1952-1987. I was very much struck by his pithy sayings in it that seemed
to go way beyond (or, rather to decisively cut under) the logic of normal cultural conventions and the
idealising of one’s society that is so common. Here was a writer talking about how there were aspects
of his own cultural landscape to which he simply couldn’t relate. It was shocking but refreshingly so –
for me, it was like the sensation of plunging into a cold stream. The ability to speak honestly and the
sense of cultural alienation I perceived in Marechera’s work were initially what drew me to him. I was
very thirsty for this kind of honesty, since it seemed to me that so much psychologically defensive
nonsense had been told about Zimbabwe, with the whites digging in on one side and becoming
defensively right wing, the Australians purifying themselves from within by attacking the appearance of
evil rather than attempting to understand reality, and so on. Here was a writer who wasn’t idealising
the condition of liberated Zimbabwe as a kind of spiritually pure state or nirvana. It is Marechera’s
honesty that gives his writing a really full-bodied tone, rather than feeling lightweight and ethereal. His
insights go much deeper than idealism ever will or can.
To what extent to do you think some of his writing style (say in House of Hunger or Black
Sunlight) has influenced your own writing?
I am deeply indebted to Marechera for giving me the courage to tell the truth about things. Initially, I
had believed that the only way to write a memoir was to idealise reality as a way of trying to heal it. I
was stuck in the right-wing, conservative mode of thinking that my writing had to be triumphalist,
depicting situations where, although I’d faced hardships, I had overcome them all with the pure
strength of my gigantically determined mind. That is the right-wing loss and redemption narrative that
many of the whites who have suffered the injurious loss of their country have been desperately trying
to play out in their daily lives. Yet this redemption narrative is false. So often the loss of home and
country has not been faced sufficiently, and as a result you have a thin veneer of adaptability, with
many of these whites, but underneath this there are cracks and mental illnesses starting to form. You
cannot deal with such great loss through idealism or through triumphalistic notions for that matter.
You are not heroic because you are now living in the West, where everything is nicely white and
civilised – you have still lost everything. Let us have a little bit of honestly, for a change.
In other ways, the freeform style of Marechera’s writing also appears in my book. When you are
mapping your inner soul, you don’t necessarily listen to the conventions of genre, since you are
attending to a different kind of principle and discipline. The discipline of mapping the soul’s structure
is no less exacting and demanding than the discipline of conforming to the requirements of a
particular genre, yet it imposes a very different form and structure. You are listening inwardly and
trying to create a form of expression that will exactly correspond to the hidden inner-life of the psyche,
rather than following a formula for structure that is already known and publicly defined.
On your blog Unsane and Savage you reflect on and discuss Marechera a lot. Your study of
Marechera, I have gathered from your blog posts, is connected to shamanism. And yes,
how have you been connecting Marechera to Shamanism?
The way I have come to see a connection between Marechera and shamanism is through the idea,
entailed in both, that the structure of the self is actually mutable and transformable. It’s not something
static and fixed forever – we do not each have only “one soul” but potentially, at least, we all have
multiple souls. The shamans of yore considered that we could merge our spirits with those of animals
or other entities. These shamans could depart from their bodies and visit other planes of existence in
order to get the resources they needed for daily life. That meant that their souls were forever
changing. Like in Black Sunlight, the soul of the traditional shaman is not the same but mutable.
Shamans and the anarchists in Black Sunlight are both “changelings”. They enter different planes of
consciousness from the norm, as an esoteric practice that will enable them to exert power within their
societies, and to change it.
You remind us, on the blog, that the original title of House of Hunger was At the Head of the
Stream. Do you think this title would have been more powerful and significant for
Marechera's landmark novella?
I think the title, At the Head of the Stream, would have given the novella a more shamanistic sense to
it. After all, what do shamans attempt to do but to go back to the origins of our being? They seek to
intervene at the primordial level of human consciousness in order to alter the way we think about
things, so that we don’t continue plodding on in the same destructive ways, but get to the bottom of
whatever is injurious to us. The shaman has to go back to the psychic origins of the political injury that
he and his society have sustained – the injury of colonialism – in order to heal his society. He goes
back to the “head of the stream”, where the psyche (which is to say the political psyche of Zimbabwe)
has its origins. Further down the stream, life already has its own determinations. It is already too late
to change them, since one thing must lead to another and damage to societal consciousness will
produce anguish and a desire for revenge. But by going back at the beginning of the stream of life,
an intervention would still be possible. A would-be shaman must therefore return, spiritually, to the
primeval origins of consciousness, in order to achieve the necessary intervention. It is a return to the
head of the stream of life in order to change the direction of its flow that is profoundly shamanistic!
Of course, shamanism is pretty esoteric, but I think that if my concept of it is understood and applied
to Marechera’s writing it does serve to sharpen the focus concerning what sort of political intervention
Marechera was aiming for. The shamanistic angle makes Marechera out to be much more radical and
logically consistent in his position than he is often assumed to have been.
Lately, there has been debate about people claiming to know Marechera even if they have
not read a single work of his. One camp has argued for an avoidance of associating
Marechera with beliefs or positions he may not even have held while another says people
can say anything they want about Marechera's life and writing. There is even a new line of
thinking that argues that we let Marechera down by not recognizing that he needed help
for his mental illness, alcoholism, etc.
What's your position on these issues?
I think that Marechera is the kind of writer that people will understand on different levels. Myself, I see
him as a kind of philosopher and of course a shaman. I do see the reasoning underpinning his work
as being logically consistent in much the same way as the work of that great philosophical de-
systematiser, Friedrich Nietzsche, is logically consistent. This logic is, however, the logic of the
psyche, so it can be hard to ascertain unless one reads the author deeply. Most people will probably
not spare the time for a deep perusal of Marechera’s works. I have been extraordinarily lucky to have
had the time to do this. So there will be people who want to take Marechera primarily as a poet, or
people who think he told great adventure stories, or whatever. I think the anarchistic spirit of
Marechera would have permitted all sorts of interpretations; however, it would be a shame if the
interpretations remained superficial and did not take enough into account his radical political agenda
for Zimbabwe that included psychological (or, ‘spiritual’) healing. We need to individually return to the
origins of the pain of war, colonialism, and loss of country for that matter, in order to receive healing.
Failing this, Zimbabwe will never be healed, and will go on reacting to its wounds, and that will be an
ongoing disaster.
As for Marechera’s ‘mental illness’, I’m not at all sure that he had a serious one at the latter stages of
his life. He may simply have been suffering only from what is now known as post-traumatic-stress-
disorder, which caused him to avoid submitting to authorities, and led to a life on the streets of
Harare. The key points that art theorist Anton Ehrenzweig identifies as features of “schizophrenic art”
are certainly not present in Marechera’s work at all. They are, he tells us, a mixture of horror and
sweetness, with an inability to fully plumb the depths of consciousness. But plumbing the depths of
consciousness is what Marechera’s work fully does, I have argued. I think that there are likely many
who have mistaken Marechera’s irreverent sense of humour – which is, by the way, quintessentially
Zimbabwean – with a kind of sickness and a failure to take politics seriously. But what they mean by
politics is “identity politics”, which they see as the only sort. My argument is that of course, Marechera
took politics very seriously indeed – but he did so as a cultural Zimbabwean; as one who could still
laugh at the black humour of the tragedy of emancipation postponed. And certainly, we should have
taken Marechera more seriously, given that his critiques were not mentally ill at all, but deep and far
reaching – and entirely necessary to take on board, for the development of Zimbabwean art and
politics.
So what can you tell us about your conference topic/paper? Just a preview, or an abstract,
to get us interested.
I’m looking at how the author returns, in Black Sunlight, to a primordial psychological state – actually
that defined by Kleinian psychoanalysis – in order to create the basis for a new self and a new
society. The shamanistic state of ‘ecstasy’ is actually auto-destructive. One destroys one’s self, one’s
old mind, in order to get a new one.
Zimbabwean literature is on the rise. Much of it has finally caught up with the kind of
honesty Marechera was rejected for in the eighties. What do you think about this new
upsurge in evocative writing?
I confess that I haven’t had the time to read much of it, not even Brian Chikwava’s Harare North. I think
it is necessary for Zimbabwe’s authors to aim to be very honest if they are going to try to influence
Zimbabwe’s politics for the better. As I said earlier, what really doesn’t work is to idealise a situation
that is already less than ideal, or to play the game of triumphalism. Telling the truth as it really is might
seem to be an altogether too humble proposition, but it is actually an extremely audacious thing to do,
since as humans we are less comfortable with the truth than with various sorts of lies and dressing up
– like the garishly made-up woman that Marechera speaks about in The Black Insider. The best
tribute a writer can give to Marechera would be to try to make sure that Zimbabwean independence
means something, so that the authentic courage of those who fought a war of liberation for a better
life does not go to waste.
About memoir writing. What do you think is the future of the memoir or autobiography in
Zimbabwean writing?
I really love the genre – although, as I say, I have not been able to write according to the genre. I think
it is very important to reflect deeply upon one’s own experiences, because after all, the individual is
the ultimate unit of society, and unless we reflect deeply upon our own personal experiences, society
will not be rich and will be depleted of its true spiritual resources. I also think that since Zimbabwe is
still a rough terrain, geographically and politically, it lends itself especially well to those who want to
write about it in the form of a memoir. In the more developed world, life and the people in it are much
more regulated, as a general rule. We have the situation there that Theodor Adorno refers to as “the
administered life”, where bureaucrats and others in power do your thinking for you. People in
Zimbabwe can still reflect upon their own lives, and to the degree that they have the material
resources to do so, can chart their own courses in life. Even if they don’t have much of the material
resources, as Dambudzo has shown us, it is still possible to chart a way that is one’s own.
Zimbabwean citizens are very resourceful people, since they had to be that way in order to survive.
There is a great deal they can write about that would surprise people in the First World. But it is
necessary to be honest – not to idealise one’s self or one’s country.
You have lived outside of Zimbabwe for many years. How has this enhanced or hindered
your writing? What other writing are you working on?
I think that living outside of Zimbabwe is what triggered my writing – at least in terms of my memoir. In
a way, I faced such a traumatic blow to my very being (a situation of workplace bullying after I had
already struggled so much to adapt to the Australian way of life) that I, like Dambudzo, had to go back
to the very source of my being, back to the head of the stream, in order to try to make amends.
As for what else I’m working on, I want to write a Voltairesque manual on some of the follies of
contemporary society and the ideologies that govern it. The book will be called, Condemned by
Chaos.
Tell us a bit about your boxing. Does it have any bearing in your writing whatsoever? I
know at least one writer--Kathy Acker of Northern California-- who used weight-lifting to
inspire her stories.
Boxing and kickboxing are like shamanistic rituals for me. When I step into the ring for a sparring
session, I know that my old self, along with whatever I was thinking or feeling at that time, will be
destroyed. If you are sparring properly, with full intensity, your body does the thinking for you. Your
mind is too slow to register the punches, or the kicks, which are coming at you, so your body has to
do all the work, with all the reflexes you have trained into it. As an intellectual, I find myself on a totally
different footing in the boxing ring. I am, in a sense, no longer myself, but another. I cannot think
deeply intellectual thoughts anymore, if I want to survive and defend myself adequately. My
intellectual mind is totally destroyed during the duration of boxing. It is like being in a very fast spin-
cycle of a washing machine. Once the sparring is over, I can return to my normal state – but it is never
the state of mind that I started out with. Already I am thinking differently and new ideas are popping
into my head. Boxing is like a shock to the system – but one that I can recover from. You are working
with a different part of the mind – the part that is primeval, that is oriented towards aggression and
defense. The intensity of focus that you need to try to attain to in a sparring session is actually
meditative – although what you are meditating on is the stream of pure aggression that is being
directed at you, which you have to try to evade. Somehow it is actually possible to purify your
consciousness by facing this stream of aggression. Your mind digs deeply and finds resources for
you that you didn’t know you had – and some of these resources that filter through, you later find, are
very creative resources.
What effect do you think the Dambudzo Marechera conference will have on Zimbabwean
literature?
I hope that it will invigorate minds to think about Zimbabwe in a political sense, and what is needed –
what forms of courage and audacity – in order to improve the situation there. I am myself less
interested in literature than in the confluence of ideas and strategies that conjoin literature and
politics. I think that the spirit of Marechera is crying out for new recognition of the joint nature of these
projects.
Post-Festival Questions [updated on July 16, 2009]
So what was your impression of the conference? Did it go as you had expected?
I think that the conference paid good homage to Marechera's ghost, in particular the final day's walk
around Marechera's old haunt that is New College. There we went against the directives of the
warden by entering the dining hall whilst the students were eating, and taking pictures, which this
warden had explicitly forbidden. We also passed along a very constricted and winding back alleyway
to see a pub where the students were free to drink. On that morning we also climbed a bell tower and
reflected on Bergfrith.
I was pretty pleased with how the conference went, in general. I met a lot of people who had known
him personally, and it gave me a real impression of Marechera's character.
Based on the presentations at the conference, what type of scholarship is coming out on
Marechera?
There is quite a diverse range of scholarship coming out now, and most of it looking at Marechera in
the light of categories of discourse that have developed over the past twenty years or so. The
approaches of the papers came from the direction of gender studies, queer studies, postmodernist
aesthetics, pedagogical theory, and socio-cultural approaches.
I think that people particularly enjoyed Canadian Julie Cairnie's take on Marechera's children's
literature, because that is something that has been overlooked pretty much, until now, and Julie was
able to put 'Fuzzy Goo' into a Zimbabwean socio-cultural context, and show the relevancy of what
Marechera was trying to say in terms of the reality of Zimbabwean children's lives. These children
don't have the same experiences as Western children do, growing up, so the way that Marechera
pitches his stories to them tends to take into account their poverty, the threats of war surrounding
them and so on. What is known is that his children's stories were originally refused publication due to
what was attributed as 'cynicism' and because there was simultaneously an adult and a child's
perspective represented in them -- kind of like the Simpsons cartoon on TV today has two levels of
meaning. I think what Julie's presentation brought out was the degree of empathy that is present in
Marechera's children's writing. It's wrong to see only cynicism and a confusion of voice in his writing.
Perhaps -- and this is something that probably hasn't yet been considered -- he was writing in that
more adult way to children who were growing up too soon?
Jennifer Armstrong lives, works and thrives in Perth, Western Australia,
thanks to an instant connection to Japanese culture and to Zimbabwean
culture via the Internet. She has recently clocked 41 years of age, and
thinks that all is going well, for the most part, except for the lack of the little
hermit house in the Bvumba, along with three chickens and four goats,
which all might have to wait until more money start rolling in. To passify
herself in the face of this delayed eventuality, she spars quite mightily (in
semi-contact kickboxing) against her husband, Mike, and works
relentlessly on her Marechera thesis. She finds that forms of violence
open little windows in her mind.
thanks to an instant connection to Japanese culture and to Zimbabwean
culture via the Internet. She has recently clocked 41 years of age, and
thinks that all is going well, for the most part, except for the lack of the little
hermit house in the Bvumba, along with three chickens and four goats,
which all might have to wait until more money start rolling in. To passify
herself in the face of this delayed eventuality, she spars quite mightily (in
semi-contact kickboxing) against her husband, Mike, and works
relentlessly on her Marechera thesis. She finds that forms of violence
open little windows in her mind.
| Emmanuel Sigauke Interviews Jennifer Armstrong [There are two parts to this interview. I interviewed Jennifer before she left for the Marechera Celebration, and sent her follow up questions after the Oxford festival.] |