Dambudzo Marechera
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Dambudzo Marechera (Charles William Dambudzo Marechera, b. in Rusape, Rhodesia, June 4, 1952, d. in Harare, Zimbabwe, August 18, 1987) was a Zimbabwean novelist and poet.
[edit] Early life
Marechera was born in Vengere Township, Rusape, Zimbabwe (then known as Rhodesia) to Isaac Marechera, a mortuary attendant, and Masvotwa Venenzia Marechera, a maid. He grew up amid racial discrimination, poverty, and violence. He attended St. Augustine's Mission, Penhalonga, where he clashed with his teachers over the colonial teaching syllabus, the University of Rhodesia (now University of Zimbabwe), from which he was expelled during student unrest, and New College, Oxford, where his unsociable behaviour and academic dereliction led to another expulsion. In his short career he published a book of stories, two novels (one posthumously), a book of plays, prose, and poetry, and a collection of poetry (also posthumous).
[edit] Works
His first book, The House of Hunger (1978), is the product of a period of despair following his time at Oxford. Among the nine stories the long title story describes the narrator's brutalized childhood and youth in colonial Rhodesia in a style that is emotionally compelling and verbally pyrotechnic. The narrative is characterized by shifts in time and place and a blurring of fantasy and reality. Regarded as signalling a new trend of incisive and visionary African writing, the book was awarded the 1979 Guardian fiction prize. Black Sunlight (1980), although it has been compared with the writing of James Joyce and Henry Miller, did not achieve the critical success of House of Hunger. Loosely structured and stylistically hallucinatory, with erudite digressions on various literary and philosophical points of discussion, it explores the idea of anarchism as a formal intellectual position. The Black Insider (1990) is set in a faculty of arts building that offers refuge for a group of intellectuals and artists from an unspecified war outside, which subsequently engulfs them as well. The conversation of the characters centres around African identity and the nature of art, with the protagonist arguing that the African image is merely another chauvinistic figure of authority.
Marechera returned to the newly liberated Zimbabwe in 1982 to assist in shooting the film of House of Hunger but fell out with the director and remained behind in Zimbabwe when the crew left, leading a homeless existence in Harare before his death five years later, from an AIDS-related pulmonary disorder. Mindblast; or, The Definitive Buddy (1984) was written the year after his return home and comprises three plays, a prose narrative, a collection of poems, and a park-bench diary. The book criticizes the materialism, intolerance, opportunism, and corruption of post-independence Zimbabwe, extending the political debate beyond the question of nationalism to embrace genuine social regeneration. The combination of intense self-scrutiny, cogent social criticism, and open, experimental form appealed to a young generation of Zimbabweans, the so-called mindblast generation, who were seeking new ways of perceiving their roles within the emergent nation.
Marechera's poetry was published posthumously under the title Cemetery of Mind (1992). Like his stories, his poems show the influence of modernist writers from Arthur Rimbaud and T. S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg and Christopher Okigbo, and confirm his proclivity for perceptive social critique, intense self-exploration, and verbal daring.
In an interview Marechera said of himself, 'I think I am the doppelganger whom, until I appeared, African literature had not yet met'. This is an accurate assessment of Marechera's role in shocking the reader into looking at himself anew through the eyes of the other. His individualism, literary experimentation, and iconoclasm ensure that his work resists narrow definitions; it is constantly shifting and crossing boundaries.
