This, also, Marechera criticises:

The Reductive Rhetoric of African Anticolonialism

Marechera makes this sort of criticism in THE BLACK INSIDER.

The “liberated” nation of Zimbabwe has a new surface identity of rouge and lipstick, he insinuates. But the appearance of being liberated is all surface: “The winds of change have cooled our porridge and now we can take up our spoons and eat it. Go, good countrymen, have yourselves a ball.” There is strong irony, here, especially because it precedes a section of caustic criticism of the Muzorewa (interim government) regime.

If, indeed, THE BLACK INSIDER was written in 1978, then somehow the play within the play precedes this interim government situation, however. Perhaps, then, it was actually written a year later than the introduction to the book suggests?

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Pan- optics!

One of the things that the Westerner, with his or her identity politics, doesn’t understand is the internal facility of self mastery. This is generally because she had not been taught it. Yes — she has a lot of self-discipline, but this is all based upon “how others see me”. It is externally based — a self-imposed imprisonment of conscience, that has its sound and steady foundation on the subject’s deep fears of society and is determined by the anxiety of being negatively judged by others.

To the eyes of one who lacks it subtantially, self mastery appears not be what it is. It is based upon the principle of overcoming one’s fears of society. Therefore, it doesn’t appear to exist at all to some people. But that is because it is internally driven — that is, by the self — rather than being the outcome of social pressure. It can appear externally chaotic, to poorly trained eyes. To see a person who has little socially based self-discipline and much self mastery in this wrong light is to be perpetually deluded about people. The average Westerner has no training or insight into the realities of self mastery, I maintain. That is why she thinks the be-all and end all of social good behaviour is defined by the Panopticon.

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savage is as savage does…

It is funny what is termed “savage” these days. It is almost like the actual savagery of patriarchy (for instance) likes to walk around on high stilts, pointing out how ordinary behaviour is really the most savage.

Like my one-time acquaintance who had an early interest in my autobiography when I had self-doubts about it…. I had begun the writing as a much more naive thinker than I am today, so he saw the progress that I made with it from a rather apolitical kind of writing (which the right wing could quite satisfyingly appropriate to their needs) to something much more self aware and critical of the status quo. (Needless to say, he disliked the maturer, later parts.)

Well this friend seems to take the line with me that he represents civilisation and that my maturer thinking is a departure from that. Or something. More advanced thinking, coupled with courage is considered something trite by him — influenced by my readings of Marechera, but not by my own thoughts and experiences. (Women are inevitably passive non-thinkers according to right wing dictums.) Yet in failing to see my point about how narrow-minded (and patriarchal) thinking is oppressive, he is actually promoting social savagery (and not of the right sort!!!)

This ideological and social dynamic is typical.

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sick

I feel sick. I’ve had a strong allergic headache for a few days. Last night cold shivers clawed their way up the numbness of my legs. My neck is stiff with phlegm and heat. My ears and nose pulsate like somebody has just landed me with a left hook right cross right hook. Ahhhhhh! And I can’t bring myself to read any more bad news about Zimbabwe.

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The colonial virtue of knowing stuff

It seems to me that the colonial propaganda the regime put out in order to enforce the sense of white superiority also did much to obfuscate and confuse the thoughts of the Rhodesian whites — especially when they were taken out of their original environment. You know I actually think that many of them didn’t want to believe that knowledge actually came from education rather than from “natural superiority”. I think platonism — the idea that learning is only remembering what you know — might have been an attractive ideology in colonial-land. So, somehow you are just simply expected to know stuff — and if you don’t then that is a moral issue, not a matter to do with your education.

One of the great problems I’ve had with my parents — which still remains a difficulty today — is their underestimation about how much there is to know about the world. I think this relates to their being ultra-conservative, but brought up themselves within a small third-world context. So the range of realities, for them, had always been very tiny. Later — having denied me answers to my questions themselves — they began to lean on me to make sense of the world for them. Yet at this time — in my earlly to mid teens — I could barely carry my own weight, intellectually, never mind theirs. This leaning on me became even heavier, even more oppressive, after we emigrated to a context with a much broader and more complex range of realities. Their idelogical outlook became that reality was very simple fundamentally — and that I should fulfil my responsibility and tell them what it is. Failing that, I should expect to be punished for leaving them in the lurch.

But, I wasn’t able to live up to this task. Above all, it seemed to me, even then, that reality was very complicated — so much so, that I couldn’t quite manage to grasp it accurately, yet, myself.

The above feeling and attitude led to more abuse — it as as if I had deliberately chosen not to know about things which I had genuinely no idea about. (I had had no political training in school, I hadn’t yet been able to apply with any practical advantage, any aspects of sociology, I didn’t have any understanding or intuitive feel for the modernist society I was now trapped within, and so on.) Anyway, I received a lot of parental punishment for hesitating and seeming to suggest that things were complicated.

And probably, this is what culminated in the abuse on the night that I was told that I couldn’t be an intellectual, and I should give up reading books, because according to my father, I couldn’t even talk properly.

But this is all because the answers that I now have to give them wouldn’t have satisfied them anyway. They were (and still are?) looking for some simple conservative explanation about how the world really works, and that is not an answer I can give them.

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Marechera as shaman

Dambudzo Marechera (his first name means hardship or strife) was certainly a man of troubles – at least insofar as he was gifted with two opposing qualities – being at once a fighter and one gifted with great intellect and artistic sensitivity. Those psychologically opposite characteristics – features of the historical mood and changes of the time gave him an exhuberant attitude to life despite the early disadvantages of poverty and violence that surrounded much of his youth. There is more to it – and the complexity of Marechera’s early life and continued literary existence is deeply entwined with notions of spirituality. His profound intellectual and self investigations are never without this aspect. In all, he wanted to find out about his world and about himself so as to be able to heal the social and political rifts he encountered – particularly those in Zimbabwe, which was a place dear to his heart. Due to his profoundly experiential approach to investigating the world as he passed through it, and due to his attempts to push his own subjectivity to extremes – perhaps at times almost beyond its limits – one has to look at Marechera’s quest for knowledge and for healing of himself and others in a different light that that of the merely literary. His use of psychoactive drugs in order to enhance his awareness and creativity, and his use of literary doubles (or, at times, multiple versions of his self) are always mingled with political critique in his work. The peculiarity of the Marecheran genre, which integrates social and political critique with classical and high modernist literary and aesthetic motifs, which partake together with ghostly apparitions of the past and present, suggest that his approach had much in common with the cultural phenomenon known as shamanism. It seems that Marechera, in his determination, and by virtue of his gifted creative mind, invented and improvised various ways of coping within some of the most extreme social situations imaginable by following a pathway of development that has been revealed by those who study the subject as being “shamanistic”. These are: The initiation crisis, communion with spirits, and healing of the community.

There are other ways in which Marechera’s life and work can be considered shamanistic. His intellect is deeply cosmological in its approach – he seeks, through his poetry, prose fiction, and plays, to critique what is currently out of balance in the societies he passed through. His often darkly humorous but sometimes devastating criticisms of the cultural status quos are accompanied by dialectical intellectual and psychological engagement with “the spirits” of his time. Thus his writing ought to be seen as representing a programme to restore to that within society that has been politically corrupted or damaged, a balanced relationship between the cultural realms of high and low. This role of opening up communication between the heavens, the earth and the underworld (in Marechera’s case, we could take this as signifigying the realm of personal and autobiographical torment) is — symbolically at least – shamanistic. Mircea Eliade describes the ability to establish a spiritual unity between these three realms as the defining role of the shaman. I will take an approach that assumes the spirits that Marechera encountered in his literary journeys were not seen by him as literal ghosts, but were more rather his way of expressing figuratively and aesthetically his encounters with certain political and ideological currents. I do not wish to deny, however, that Marechera’s writing, in its inception, was probably deeply influenced by a cultural undercurrent of traditional Zimbabwean religious thought, which posits the actual existence of ancestral and demonic spirits.

– Stephen Chan, in his biography of Robert Mugabe, pinpoints how an essential aspect about Marechera’s own life has been overlooked by his critics. He says:

What the [Marechera literary] industry does not deeply invesitage is the spiritual cause of fracture within the delicate being of Marechera. Possessed of a spirit, Marechera’s mother relieved herself of it by having it ritually transferred to Marechera.

Chan goes on to suggest that this may have been an underlying cause in what he sees as the suspension of Marechera’s “mental balance in its own esoteric scales.” ( p 182). My own views concur with those of Chan, in agreeing that much of Marechera’s emotional distress was related to his family of origin and their values, experiences, and demise. What Chan’s point does illustrate for us is that the spiritism of Marechera’s writing (whether taken as figurative or literal) has deep cultural resonances within the traditional cultures of Zimbabwe. For, “spiritual endorsement of the liberation stuggle was vital to the guerillas, both as a link to the rural peope who helped protect their whereabouts and as a validation of themselves who were at risk of being killed. (p 182). So, much of what may be taken as mental imbalance in Marechera’s works may, in fact, be based, more solidly on cultural attitudes and motifs. This assessment applies as much to Chan’s critique as to others. The views that Marechera descended into a state of mental unbalance – even if this state were to be caused by spirits — seems to me to be too simple an explanation of his life and perspectives. His extremely sharp and emotionally engaging political critiques were made by him whilst in situations of immense hardship – financially in particular. (He was homeless for many months at a time, both in London and later in Harare.) That is to say that these were made from within contexts in which most of us would be struggling to remain lucid in order to say anything intelligent at all – much less hitting the nail on the head with such flamboyance and aplomb. Once again, this almost supernatural quality of coping skills seems to indicate the presence of a superior character – and not just, as western Romantics might have it – a superior mind cracking under stress. According to the literature on shamanism, shamans are generally of exceptional mental health, very robust and energetic. Given the circumstances that Marechera encountered in life – and especially taking into account his early origins, which were extremely disadvantaged – we do see this kind of exceptional resilience in Marechera.

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The meaning of marriage

AROOO: Public Experience Poll

See the above link and my response to it below:

Unsane said…
In my personal experience, I only ever received the sense that marriage was a mystery that had no bearing on who I was or what I would be doing at any point in my life. I think this was due to the colonial attitude of Victorianism, which appeared to posit that there is a vast difference between what children are and what adults are — so much so that there was no point training children to think in terms of adult concerns. Once the children crossed the threshold into adulthood, they would automatically be divinely bestowed with a sense of the meaning of marriage and how it was inevitable for them. Until then, they had no need to know about that which didn’t concern them.

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on sparring with demons

The shamans have played an essential role in the defense of the psychic integrity of the community. They are pre-eminently the antidemonic champions; They combat not only demons and disease, but also black magicians. (p 508 Eliade)

Of course, in the case of Marechera, who had a very advanced modern sensibility, all of the above should be taken figurately – the “demons” he combats are psychosocial forces which also have a political dimension – such as in terms of racism, and ideological systems that promote acceptance of political inequality. What seperates him and his writing from everyday social and political criticism is that he first seeks to find the effects of these social evils within himself – by using methods of introspection, by imbibing psychoactive substances and by pushing his own experiential limits to the extremes. In aiming to experience the extremes – in terms of poverty, exposure to the elements, social and politicial antagonism and confrontation with authority – he expects to encounter the “spirits” that permeate and instruct society. This would enable him to diagnose the political diseases of society which he can learn about by looking into his own experiences – that is, into himself.

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Crossing our bidges when we come to them.

According to Mircea Eliade, “Shamans, like the dead, must cross a bridge in the course of their journey to the underworld.”

“[E]cstasy implies a “mutation,” to which myth gives plastic expression by a “perilous passage.” ( p 482 Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy)

In THE BLACK INSIDER Marechera speaks about how sometimes when you are crossing the bridge, you may encounter your own self going in the opposite direction. The bridge, according to Eliade, may also be a symbol of ascent in Shamanistic initiation. The “rope (bridge) …connects the birches and is hung with ribbons of different colours (the strata of the rainbow, the different celestial regions. p 121).THE BLACK INSIDER seems to invoke the colours of the rainbow, now and then — for instance in the ribbonlike visual effect of the traffic lights as they are transformed into running colours by the speed of the car making its way through London city. In Marechera’s book, this seems to imply the movement and sensations of the shaman crossing the bridge.

And then we have, in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra:

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Overman — a rope over an abyss.

A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.

Last night, I had a dream that I was staying in a port city. I had come to buy an expensive car. Next, I was roped together with a younger person, who went in front of me, in order to cross a dangerous bridge. It was in some respects more like a quay, dividing dangerous ocean (on the one side) from placid sea (on the other). The waves were very violent and would certainly have swept us into the waters. I went so far and experienced the violent waves. I assessed the situation and I called it off. The person in front was younger than me. We went back and decided to stay in the port city. As I departed, a voice came from the gigantic waves: “And take that back with you to the leader of the free world!”

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As we have seen in the prior chapter, the collection of works in The House of Hunger outlines the nature of the author’s initiation crisis in the form of visitations from humanoid spirits and the experience of doubling and hallucinations. In the following chapters I am interested in pointing out the general pattern of Marechera’s artistic development along the lines of Shamanistic development of the traditional practioner. This is not at all to suggest that Marechera was self-consciously a shaman or that his views are in any sense to be understood as being constructed out of “primitive” or “magical” beliefs. Rather it is the shamanistic process (not the origins of shamanistic behaviour that might seem to determine the content of the writer’s books) that I am interested in. To further clarify my point here, it is evident that Marechera brought to table of world literary thought a very sophisticated – indeed in many respects literary and social modernistic consciousness – but however, used a process of psychological self-cure that had the same pattern as that has been analysed concerning the development of the shaman.

In the next two books – The Black Insider as well as Black Sunlight – Marechera’s artistic and intellectual development involves an encounter with his own Unconscious (in the form of various versions of himself, some directly historical in a Zimbabwean sense, and some representing literary figures that stand in the place of archetypes (relevant to the matter at hand since, from a Jungian perspective, the experience of archetypes within one’s own unconscious is part of the process of gathering insight that enables the shaman to heal.) Marechera’s writing is original in that it draws its creative and intellectual inspiration from reference to classical literary and intellectual figures – such as Cicero and Helen of Troy, standing in as archetypes for certain cultural attitudes – rather than from the Jungian archetypes, which Jung controversally claimed were universal. His ideas and choice of literary tropes are not conventional or formulaic in any terms, but reveal something specific about his own historical and psychological junctures at the point in time in which he wrote. In a more direct political sense, The Black Insider is also interested in exploring the farcical puppet state of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. (1979-1980 was the year in which the colonial regime tried unsuccessfully to install a pro-white regime with Bishop Abel Muzorewa as its figurehead.) The imagery that Marechera uses to portray his sense of reality (concerning his own situation as a homeless individual in cultural exile in Britain and in terms of the political nature of the regime at home) was the idea of “limbo”. Thus, just like the State of Zimbabwe, and the state of world racial relations, all in limbo, since imperfectly manifested – the black identity, too, was “not yet born”.
That is the reason for the shamanistic flight or soul ecstasy of the writer, who must, by conferring with the spirits (in his mind) past and present, come up with a solution to this political and social dilemma of finding social justice to be as yet in limbo.

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A myth of Western culture (nobody) and the foreigner

Polyphemus

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TBI — dialectics!

The main components of this dialectic of power as portrayed in the book are, as stated, the ideologies that determine the use of war to assert one’s interests or defend oneself versus the use of the intellect as an individualistic or socially beneficial force. Through asking the question in relation to himself and his readers concerning the relative merits of these opposed social forces (actual, physical war versus the powers of the intellect) Marechera is seeking to come to terms with a question that is both universally profound as well as particularly salient within the context of African politics – Does the intellectual have much value within a society in despair and in consolidation of a society after the throes of revolution, if he has not chosen to physically fight? No doubt the question weighed heavily upon Marechera’s consciousness, plaguing him with the feeling that he had been personally effete in resisting the call to engage physically in the liberation struggle of 1966-1980. His sister after all – a mere female even within the contexts of leftist political ideology (for many were treated as such in doing their parts in the anti-colonial struggle – which is to say, were treated secondarily, and sexually exploited) — had done her part in active engagement in the war. Was it better to fight oppression with military weapons or with the intellect? This is the question that Marechera poses to his subconscious, in Shamanistic fashion. It is a question to which his culturally tormented mind – culturally conditioned by white colonial, African tribal and indeed, the Modern post-revolutionary State’s pro-war ideological consolidation of the outcome of “the struggle” – had brought to a head. Since his psychological self-investigations – take place within the literary context of his experiences in Britain, there is a curious conceptual overlay between his more present context and the source of origin of some of his questions. It is important to understand the nature of the autobiographical palimpest of social memory that gives Marechera’s question about the relative merits of actual war versus intellectual challenging of social injustice, its urgency. Needless to say, his approach which seeks to find the answer to this pressing question (both personally and socially relevant) has resonances with the approach of shamans seeking to radically get to the bottom of the matter, through their own internal journeys:

{Francisco R. Demetrio, p 60 ]First, in every community there are actual conflicts and roots of conflict; to disregard this social fact can have very serious consequences. Shamanism, it seems to me, is a very realistic coming-to-terms with the phenomenon within the social body. Nor is it only an unabashed acknowledgement of conflict. It is also a serious down-to-earth endeavor to solve the conflict to its roots, not by means which are obvious and within reach of every member of the tribe, but primarily by means which are often esoteric and beyond the cotidian capacity of all.

His ultimate conclusion in this book – that war was both necessary and inevitable ( along with the sacrifice of “all [he]’d ever wanted” in the shape and form of his young lover Helen viewed allegorically as Helen of Troy) – can be seen as foreshadowing his return to Zimbabwe, to live out some of the kinds of harships that the war veterans must have experienced, in his life of a vagrant on Harare’s streets. Thus, the force of the political and rhetorical ideology of war trumps that of the independent intellectual and artistic approach to life, at least in terms of Marechera’s own specific and historically constructed psyche.

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Ralph Dumain: "The Autodidact Project": Review: Inside ‘The Black Insider’

A review of The Black Insider

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BREAK FREE

{Self defence for those in need}

Related news:

ZINASU Gender and Human Rights Secretary badly assaulted by police after
leading a demonstration.

Over 150 tertiary students took to the streets of Bulawayo in a peaceful
protest which later turned bloody after the police forcefully dispersed the
crowd. Gender and Human Rights Secretary, Privilege Mutanga, who is nine
months pregnant, was badly assaulted and suffered a broken hand and a
twisted ankle, she is currently admitted at Galen House where she is
getting medical attention. The ZINASU President Clever Bere, NUST Secretary
General Isheunesu Nyoni and ten other students were briefly detained at
Bulawayo Central were they were subjected to inhumane treatment.
Three of the arrested students were forced to masturbate and some were badly
beaten. The street action was motivated by the continued decline of
education standards. Students also expressed the crucial need for a free and
fair election in the coming March 29 polls; they were also denouncing
political violence and the use of physical coercion and intimidation of
innocent citizens by politicians. The violent retaliation by the regime is a
pure reflection of the growing political mayhem as Zimbabwe approaches the
March Presidential, parliamentary and local government election and clear
evidence that the regime is not prepared to afford democratic space for free
participation to all.
Meanwhile.

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Navigating the dangerous ideological floodwaters

For my generation at least — although not, perhaps, in the case of my parents’ generation — the cultural gap between ourselves and those brought up within bourgeois modernist society is greater than any that could exist (in our experiences) between blacks and whites.

The part of my autobiography that those of the generation above mine do not like is where I concede this fact.

This concession — those who are a generation above might perhaps conclude — feeds into the old ideological chestnut whereby the “colonials” were perceived to be relative country bumpkins in relation to the sauve bourgeois sophistication of the world’s urban centres.

In a superficial sense, it could seem that I am corroborating this general world view of the white colonials as being unsophisticates, due to not having a proper bourgeois state. The charge that was directed at many white colonials — that they could not “make it” within the very proper context of the bourgeois state — may also seem to be corroborated in my writing.

Yet that would be a very superficial assessment of what I am saying, and the realities I am attempting to describe.

My generation were “Africanised” to a far greater degree than the generation of my parents. That is to say that much of the cultural feelings that we unconsciously developed were in fact aspects of black colonial culture. In a significant sense, we were not fully “white”.

So, whilst I cannot lend my support to the conservative’s notion that the colonial should prove to the bourgeois critics that we are as socially and culturally competent as they are and more, I can offer my own critique of bourgeois society from my Africanised perspective: It is a little too mechanical and impersonal.

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autobiographical review

Hi Jenny,

I finished reading your book… I found it exciting right to the end.
You sure did pass some rough and bumpy times!! I am very very happy though that you made it out of this mud!
Life has a many obstacles. When I came to XXXX I struggled a lot too and just could not function in our society.
Only since 1999 have I been able to keep a job. Beforehand I used to get fired and people just wouldn’t believe in me.
I can feel so well when you write about not existing and you describe it so truthfully.

Thank you for this gift of reading…

Hugs

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transformation

Marechera’s work contains various psychological and social analyses of power relations that are deeply philosophical, although he is at least as much, if not more so a poet than he is a philosopher. Quite evidently, he vigorously pursues various complex systems of aesthetics to give form to his insights and to make them seem to emanate from a sixth sense. In taking this approach, the author works under stress – since cultural change and the pressure to adapt to new and foreign circumstances is always a great stressor. Seen in this light, Marechera’s ability to face life in a way that embraced the possibilities of self-transformation and living, as opposed to giving in to psychological and social stasis and dying (the lure of thanatos, when things get too hard), is really remarkable. It is not that suicide was not entertained by him – it was in both Black Sunlight and it is mentioned as a seduction to be rejected in his journal entry in Mindblast. Overall, he approached what was negative about life with a view to transform it, in terms of what James M Glass (in his 1974 discussion of the similarities between philosophers and shamans) calls “eros”. This is the positive or socially unifying aspect of the human psychological potential. Marechera critiques in order to destroy the rhetorical force and political reality of what he sees as being negative social forces – eg. racism, austerity, degradation and poverty. He wants to create a new cosmological relationship between the literary and mythological forces of the past as well as present and humanity itself. Thus there is an element of eros (the desire to rebuild and start anew) even in his criticism, which must first clear the way for such a transformation of the human potential, inside and out.

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Glass on Shamanism

From: The Philosopher and the Shaman: The Political Vision as Incantation
James M. Glass, Political Theory, Vol. 2, No. 2. (May, 1974), pp. 181-196.

Each [the philosopher and the shaman] conceives of his role as a vocation.1° Each creates and performs in a highly individualistic, personalized fashion, the shaman establishing “his relationship to the spirit world through his own quest.”‘

Both the shaman and the philosopher find themselves separated from the “normal” routines and assumptions of their societies and cultures; each maintains a perceptual distance, embodying in their acts the “abnormal”;’~ both claim a special insight and manifest that insight through the curative capacities of a public “statement”

Both seem to thrive in times of intense stress and transformation.

Each holds out the regenerative potentiality for image (shaman) and concept (philosopher); their visions seem to reflect what Eliade calls a “felt need for an entirely new beginning, an incipit vita nova-that is, of a complete regeneration.”" The shaman often has a significant role in the reformulation of traditional cosmological concepts;

Eliade places great importance on shamanic “ecstasy”; it is a peculiar state of mind vital for the shaman’s communication with the “super- naturals.” Ecstasis separates the shaman from other priestly or religious roles and functions; “only the shaman, by virtue of his relations with the spirits, is able to enter deeply into the supernatural world; in other words, he alone succeeds in acquiring a technique that enables him to undertake ecstatic journeys at will.’

Oddly, however, Glass sees the “cure” offered by both shaman and philosopher to be in the form of a conceptual idealism (my own words,not his) which liberates us from non-philosophical forms of knowledge, such as “social or historical knowledge” — which he claims only approximates or distorts truth.

Odder still, Glass uses Marx (a materialist) as one of his three philosophical examples to support his assertion that philosophy is necessarily Idealism.

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Help those who help themselves

It is hard to help those who do not want to help themselves. It would be nice to teach the women of Zimbabwe how to use some self defence. Not only would it make them better — and perhaps more courageous — political activists when they need to be. It would enhance the status of women in society by improving confidence, self-reliance and self esteem.

However, it is also the case that the roots of Christianity have runners all along and beneath Zimbabwean soil. Beware lest you teach someone something that has an Eastern philosophy attached — no matter how remote from practical matters of technique. This kind of learning is deemed “Satanic”.

There are those who would prefer ‘the Lord’ help them rather than help themselves.

They are the ones whose blind trust makes them truncheon fodder.

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claims to objectivity in TBI

And for some reason the author has determined to give us a sense of the uncanny in The Black Insider. It’s all contained in a paradigm of inclusion and exclusion which is not just related to the environment of the exile but also works as a model of his own mind: “Inside out is outside in.” The book is critical but from the inside, and also from what in dependency theory would be called a “margin” (a colony/ex-colony) … so, marginal and central at once. Yet being on the cultural margins can be a useful exercise from the point of view of standpoint epistemology. Furthermore, accepting ones’ weak or weakened position in relation to the society as a whole can give one a sense of heightened objectivity about the nature of the social and political phenomena that one encounters. In this book, the author seems to suggest that autobiography was an approach he has put behind him. He explains his autobiographical orientation of the past as relating to his need to assure himself that he existed, as a way of compensating for his weak social status in rural, colonial Africa. Now, it seems, he is met with the psychological surprise of British liberal society’s accommodation to his needs. It’s not that everything is perfect – there is still the racist aspects of British society to contend with, and the grinding poverty that he seems to have made his lot, with only intermittent reprieves (in forms such as small payments of writer’s royalties from Heinemann or a job as writer in residence at a local college.) However, the subjective force of the autobiographical genre appears to not to be what is needed by the author at this time. Rather the perspective is one of the black intellectual, who reads the society he is in from the point of view of an outsider – a foreigner – but from the perspective of one who is down and out, looking at the British culture from the inside out. By means of the insights granted to one on the margins (as per standpoint epistemology) and by means of a focussed display of intellectual knowledge, breadth and depth, Marechera claims the role of an objective social critic, in this book.

“Inside out is outside in” is the philosophical point that the book rests upon. It is also the fulcrum upon which the dramatic episodes of the book’s fictional narrative aspect find a basis for movement, finally. The inside-out/outside-in complementarity feeds into the final reversal (inversion) whereby the insiders who had been intellectuals and cultural outsiders and — particularly — pacifists — take up arms to oppose (but at the same time become) the militarised world that they were previously opposing. This is a passive state of revolt, but a state of revolt all the same:

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what is the role of the liberal intellectual?

What Marechera deals with in TBI are issues that have been prematurely solved in terms of a resigned attitude and pragmatic acceptance within many spheres of otherwise advanced society. What is the real value of social darwinism, and doesn’t it undermine the very basis for humanity’s enjoyment of itself? Isn’t it better to stay, “shut up in one’s head” than to compete in this fashion? What is the role of the intellectual within a society that is either metaphorically or literally at war? Indeed what is and isn’t “civilised” about fighting? Marechera seems to be identifying with political liberalism in TBI — but also explicitly accepts a conservative valuation that intellectuality is a form of sickness or a “plague”. In this, he is a person of his time and place. This outlook appears to reproduce in part a colonial perspective which sees “sickly” liberals as opposed to the forceful warriors of society by virtue of their own weak natures. Whilst Marechera accepts this dichotomy as a useful general delineation for the parties – insiders versus outsiders – in the book , he in fact perceives things from the point of view of the sickly “insider” and thus reverses to some degree the force of this right wing value judgment. His questions are culturally conditioned but deeply humanistic, for they seek to discover what the meaning of society ought to be for those who are intellectual and accepting of dissent.

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Dream from last night

In last night’s dream we were all going on a big camping trip. I’d packed my packpack with all sorts of goodies from the department store, including a big military sombrero, in army green, and some deck chairs, which I attached to the outside of the suitcase, having been given some special advice about how to do it.

Later I was in charge of a gorilla and a chimpanzee. I let both of them run free in the crowd, but the chimp ran into the toilet blocks near the train station and then disappeared. I asked the gorilla to find him, but the gorilla said that the chimp was certainly very scared and may not be able to be found. As I was coming down the steps from the train station, I wondered about my dilemma. That was when I saw one of the officials from the university who seemed to be puzzled as to what I was up to. I decided not to tell her the full story.

Meanwhile the gorilla was whistling the same tune through his teeth (sounding remarkably like a magpie does in real life). He was trying hard to summon the chimpanzee.

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First and last resorts

Shamanism, it should be noted, could also be a fairly obvious first and last resort from the point of view of someone who was brought up with an ethos of rugged self-reliance — a frontier mentality.

intro the black insider

How does Marechera’s shamanism relate to his next novel? In The House of Hunger, the story of his injuries – psychological, social and historically-founded – are chronicled as so many miniature skeletons of genius diverted from their goals of developing into one unified and linear-thinking person. These skeletons are trapped in the webs of their concrete historical circumstances. These little genuines of throught and word are fragments of the organic entity that is the author, Marechera. His The House of Hunger novelette and short stories may be full of the darkest humour, replete with paradox and ironic turns and twists, and yet what we can fully know about his own life, from this writing and these stories is that Marechera felt deeply injured due to the circumstances of his past, and the injustice of his having to live life in (effectively) the slums of Zimbabwe. His next book, The Black Insider, is a much more intellectual – indeed academically oriented – study of the life of an exile. On the surface, at least, is is this more. In terms of expressing Marechera’s own development as a modern shaman, we can see that he interrogates the meaning of his cultural and political exile, but also tries to come to terms with the nature of evil in terms of the ways in which humans make their devastatingly irrevokable decisions – on the basis of “attitudes” – and in terms of the colonial plundering of Africa. The fact of his having underlying emotional pain creates an intellectual distance between his appreciation for his degree of newfound freedom whilst living in Britain, and his sense of the evils (of exile and of past colonial oppressions and present British racism) hidden beneath the surface of the nice, glossy, Modernist society of London and Great Britain in general. There is consequently a certain intellectually detached quality – in fact an intellectual coldness – that pervades the feeling of this book. Yet the author is nonetheless emotionally involved, in quite a passionate way, in attempting to discern whether a feeling for “the temperature of the blood” was as good a basis for action and community as principles more intellectual might be.

Ultimately, this shamanistic see-er is faced with this realisation that intellectual attitudes – although mere surface attributes of consciousness and identity – tend to be the guiding principle by which we all sink or fall. The book is a tragedy, because the writer’s astute observation of his own psychological state and the psychological states of those around him, gives him to conclude that having become emotionally and psychologically “subtracted from” their own selves through a state of being in cultural exile, the exiles must necessarily become victims all to the insidious effect of adopting and succumbing to cultural “attitudes”. This leads to their deaths and undoing. The Black Insider is thus a book wherein the shamanistic aspect of the writer diagnoses the root source of evil in the world. As a shaman – who deals with the questions of life and death in relation to the spirit world – would, the author also encounters his answers in parallel relation to the spirit world. For shades and ghosts abound within the labyrinths of the abandoned arts faculty in which the cultural exiles dwell and death is “only a drop of blood away”. Indeed, the exiles, like ‘the black identity” awaits in Dante’s limbo, in legal purgatory (as vagrants) and in a state “not yet born”.

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Hear what I think, not what YOU think!

The Blog of Henry David Thoreau: Thoreau’s Journal: 19-Feb-1855

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Shamanism –Eliade

So from what I can gather in terms of reading the introduction chapter of his book on Shamanism, shamanism is a highly individualistic mystical engagement for those rare spirits amongst us who have the drive to engage in such a way.

One must have a speciality as a shaman — for one presumably needs one’s own particular way to reach the spirits. One must also be able to engage with these spirits in a way that wards off danger (that is, one ought not to become subject to them, but to control them).

Reading between the lines, the shaman’s specific problem is to deal with the issue of there being evil in the world– especially the psychological experience of evil introjected somehow as part of historically founded memories or feeling of bad omens. The shaman’s task is to understand enough about these evil psychological aspects to be able to fend them off.

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