READING MARECHERA’S THE HOUSE OF HUNGER AS ‘AT THE HEAD OF THE STREAM’.
The central feature of the novelette is the writer’s semi-fictionalised account of his life in Vengere Township in colonial Rhodesia. The writer gives vivid pictures of an “iron net thrown over the sky” (p 74, 75) in the sense of hungering for fulfilment and transcendence of what was effectively “a ghetto”, and yet being unable to attain that. His character is a mixture of arrogance and uncertainty about women. Above all, he is a character who disdains the vulgar level of survival necessitated by life in the black slums. His disdain of this kind of lifestyle is passed on as a disdain of women, whom he feels are dangerous as well as dangerously inhuman because of their ability to survive and nurture, even under the impossible terms of poverty and violence. The author’s attitude is one of hatred, nurturing a little seed of hatred until it grew:
I found a seed, a little seed, the smallest in the world. And its name was Hate. I buried it in my mind and watered it with tears. No seed ever had a better gardener. As it swelled and cracked into green life I felt my nation tremble, tremble in the throes of birth – and burst out bloom and branch. ( p 17)
This hatred, planted within the “house” of his mind – a hatred which is also represented as longing for “the black heroes” — was the likely force behind the his “shamanic initiation”. The inertia of everyday life in the “ghetto”, the reckless determination to hate the degradation of life in this environment, along with an intellectual and artistic drive that could not find nourishment within this limited environment was what pushed the writer and his protagonist to the point of crisis that undermined his sanity. An upsurgance of destructive effect from within was necessary to clear the space from which the author could construct a different platform for identity:
When the forces of growth overwhelm the forces of inertia, then a developmental crisis occurs. The symptoms of this crisis may vary depending upon the individual’s personality and maturity. They may range from primitive pathology to existential, transpersonal, or spiritual concerns (Wilber, Engler, and Brown). In the latter case the crisis has come to be known as a transpersonal crisis, spiritual emergency, or spiritual emergence (Assagioli; Grof and Grof 1986, 1989, 1990), and it is these that seem closest to and most helpful in understanding the shamanic initiation crisis. [Walsh p 116]
The novelette depicts what is really an involuntary shamanic initiation, in the sense that the writer didn’t set out with the goal in mind to become a type of shaman. Yet his hatred of reality nurtured and watered the psychosis that was to overtake him in the form of four hallucinated figures following him everywhere, when he was at the point of studying for his school leaving exam.
So much can be said for the involuntary aspects of the process of becoming “shamanised”. The wreckless watering of the seed of hatred no doubt had a voluntary aspect – at least in the form of the will of wanting to depart from reality. The writer also confesses, in autobiographical tone, to having enjoyed dagga (marijuana) ( p 3), which, as a drug, would have increased his chance of “shamanic initiation”.
Another aspect of shamanic consciousness was more obviously creative: “Friends who acted out of character affected me in the same way [as a tropic storm from which one needed to take shelter ... I was] creating for myself a labyrinthine personal world which would merely enmesh me within its crude mythology. That I could not bear a star, a stone, a flame, a river, or a cupful of air was purely because they all seemed to have significance irrevocably not my own.”
A “crude mythology” of his own making forms the basis for his escape from the violence of the here-and-now. This is acknowledged very directly and precisely by the writer, in terms that invoke the shamanic elements, of earth, fire water and air, as well as the heavens and the earth.
“On a baser level I could not forgive man, myself, for being utterly and crudely there. I felt in need of forgiveness. And those unfortunate enough to come into contact with me always afterwards consoled themselves and myself by reducing it all to a `chip on the shoulder’.
This is an excruciatingly accurate psychological self-portrayal of a young man who violently broke an oppressive external reality, in order to create a different reality within his mind.
There is a key to both understanding and misunderstanding Marechera’s first published work of fiction – and it lies in the restoration of its intended name, “At the head of the stream.” For is it at the head of the stream – a shamanic designation, as I shall explain – that we find the author’s restored self, in the character of the old man at the end of the novelette. The other sections of the book, apart from the novelette, are nine short stories, semi-autobiographical, which reveal aspects of the author’s life experiences and psychodynamic states. The works in all were published under the name of The House of Hunger, and received recognition as a Joint Winner of The Guardian Fiction Prize in 1978. At the award ceremony, Marechera notoriously expressed his disdain by throwing items from his table at various presiding officials’ heads. He went on to write books that were not highly appraised as they were perhaps not so well understood. This early misunderstanding can be traced to the dropping of one name for the novel and the appropriation of another. David Pattison, a critic of the writer’s life and works points out that in the publisher’s strategic renaming of the work from “At the head of the stream” to “The House of Hunger”, the work obtained a broader and more poignant political focus than it would otherwise have had. This change of name was no doubt calculated to suit the marketing interests of the publishing company, who would been able to rely upon the negative publicity concerning the Rhodesia regime in order to generate interest in a book that seemed to be critiquing it. Whilst the change in emphasis made Marechera out to be a more conventionally political writer than he in fact was, Pattison points out that it also raised expectations for a certain level of conventional political service and engagement from the writer that was not to be forthcoming. That which was later viewed as the author’s failure to reach his audience was actually a failure of communication from the start, set into motion by this marketing ploy which misrepresented the author’s interests as being of a narrow, political variety, when his engagement would have been better understood in shamanistic terms, as suggested by his own title. Perhaps it was due to the overboiling of the author’s frustration at feeling wilfully misrepresented in his views that ended up with flying plates and bottles.
The concern of the writer was, and always has been, a shamanic one: He wanted understand as to the nature of trauma afflicted through political oppression. His writing was intended to give meaning to the afflictions of those who were fighting to liberate Zimbabwe from colonial interests, and who were dying by the day. He spoke on this when he accepted his award. His approach showed an intention to bring to light the suffering of his people in a transpersonal way, rather than to head a political movement in a way that objectively transcended the actual experience of suffering.
In order to understand that which Marechera as shaman wants us to understand, it is necessary, in shamanistic fashion, to cross an experiential and metaphorical bridge between the living and the dead. Discussing “the phenomenon of the ‘perilous passage,’ Eliade notes that whereas in illo tempore, everyone could pass easily over the bridge connecting heaven and earth, now, with the advent of a mysterious fall and consequently of death, that passage can be negotiated only ‘in spirit-either through actual physical death or in the simulation of death constituted by “ecstatic” practice.” [p 49, Perkinson] Michael Taussig’s concept of shamanic wildness as “the death space of signification” may also assist us here.
The colonized space of death has a colonizing function, maintaining the hegemony or cultural stability of norms and desires that faciliate the way the rulers rule the ruled in the land of the living. Yet the space of death is notoriously conflict-ridden and contradictory; a privileged domain of metamorphosis, the space par excellence for uncertainty and terror to stun permanently, yet also revive and empower with new life. ( p 374)
Thus, wherever life is prohibited from developing smoothly, a “death space” of signification (something that evades the possibility of speech and language) occurs. Yet this evasion of the dominant discourse also opens up a space for rewriting reality on one’s own terms. The concept above is particularly relevent to what occurs when societies are so oppressive that those living within them cannot express an adult identity except in a broken and shattered sense (as we shall see later in Marechera’s reference to himself perched upon the precipice of manhood but seeing only an “ape in the mirror”). Jim Perkinson, in his argument that blackness is a shamanic category in the myth of America, expresses the idea that certain groups of people can be “shamanised” as a result of their oppressive social contexts. For instance:
W.E. B. DuBois articulates the pain of enduring racial oppression in terms of the affliction of “double consciousness” that he also describes as the experience of “being born with a veil and gifted with second sight in this American world.”‘ This latter description (“born with a veil,” “gifted with second sight”) is itself a veiled reference to being born with a “caul” (or gauzy film covering the eyes) in African American culture-a sign of a peculiar shamanistic ability to see beyond the ordinary. [ p 19, Perkinson]
It is my argument in this chapter that the inability of the author and protagonist, the writer Dambudzo Marechera, to command a place in society as an adult citizen, with associated qualities of respectability, internal complexity, and ability to transcend some of the violence of subjection to the whims of others, leads to this shamanisation. According to Perkinson, shamanisation occurs when one is reminded of one’s inferior standing in society because of one’s skin colour. This produces a shift in consciousness whereby the subject who is so accosted is thrown backwards into an historical investigation in search of reasons for his current subjection. Such a backwards shift denies the validity of the current state of subjection and the identity associated with such devaluation. It also consolidates an alternative identity from that which is implied by the insult about one’s race. For instance, Fanon, when insulted on the street, may find that his consciousness is suddenly thrust back to the nature and identities of his ancestors. This occurs in the process of being unable to defend his position as an adult worthy of respect in the present. As Perkinson interpets it, there are shamanistic aspects to this occurrence for the oppressive circumstance compels a moving away from the consciousness of time in the present and its associated normal state of bodily awareness into something ressembling the world of spirits:
[I]n the moment of encounter on the street, where a little white boy says, “Look, a Negro!” and then continues, “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” the [slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world] crumbles. For Fanon, the moment is “an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spatter[s his] whole body with black blood.” Indeed, the world itself shatters: “All around me the white man, above the sky tears at its navel, the earth rasps under my feet, and there is a white song, a white song. All this whiteness that burns me.”‘ His corporeal schema is replaced by an epidermal one. He ceases to be aware of his body “in the third person” and instead becomes aware of it “in a triple person.”13′ He suddenly exists triply, responsible at once for his body, his race, his ancestors. {41, Perkinson]
It was as if the subject, being so assaulted by present reality and its political restrictions, separates from his bodily sense of being in the present and is thrown back to encounter the spectres of the past — in all of their qualities of blessing or horror. According to Judith Lewis Herman, writing on Trauma and Recovery, “traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death. “ ( p 33). Psychological trauma is also “an affliction of helplessness” ( p 33). There are some similarities between what the shaman makes of trauma and Michael Taussig’s notion of the “death space of signification”. Putting the two theoretical postulates together it would seem that a “death space of significaiton” (Taussig’s term) occurs when normal ego-based consciousness moves away from the ego’s normal construction of space and time, into a zone that cannot be represented in these everday terms of time and space. When one is denied the power – because of various state or social mechanisms, such as the institutionalisation of slavery – to transcend one’s extreme subjectification to the will of another, one enters this death space of signification. In shamanistic terms, one “crosses the bridge” [Eliade] between the living and the dead. In similar conceptual terms, one leaves one’s body (and the present) and enters the “spirit” world of the non-present. It would also seem that the oppressive force that compels the negation of one’s present persona in time and space also pressures one backwards to the past in some sense, — in Fanon’s case, back to the origins of his ancestors. This backwards movement can also be understood metaphorically in Marechera’s terms as a movement towards being “At the head of the stream” of life’s problems and dilemmas. It ought to go without saying that one must have encountered experiences of extreme oppression and of the extreme curtailment of one’s subjective will, in order to intuitively understand this notion of “death spaces”. This will not have been the case for most – hence the difficulty of engaging with much of the imagery and conceptual paradigms that Marechera loves to tease us with, in his writings.
The difficulty of understanding some of Marechera’s texts can be reduced by having an intellectual familiarity with what shamanism is, and how it can be found in this writer’s works– for there is a band of social and aesthetic logic running through Marechera’s oeuvre that by both accident of fate as well as artistic design, is shamanistic. “Three shamanic behaviors […] are the initiation crisis, mediumship, and shamanic journey.” [p 101 Roger Walsh, The Psychological Health of Shamans: A Reevaluation] In this chapter I will examine both his novelette and several of the short stories within the earlier section of his works published under the name of The House of Hunger. I will show that the novelette covers in a very psychologically comprehensive fashion his “shamanic initiation” and subsequent recovery to become a writer of a shamanic genre. I will focus primarily on the novelette published with this group of stories – which, like the title of this collection of writing also goes under the name of The House of Hunger.
T
The author’s acute observations of his psychological state are excruciating in their exactitude in terms of depicting a society’s psychological dynamics, and a young man’s psychic disintegration. […author.] has stated that shamanic initiation might be understood as the result of an internal pressure towards personal growth that breaks apart unconscious patterns of resistance. The tearing apart of the fabric of one’s being is a motif the writer has used more than once in the pages of the novelette. “I looked up. As I did so the old cloth of my former self seemed to stretch and tear once more.” ( p 17) Yet, the writer is also clearly driven to grow and develop despite his own limitations, thus the internal opposition that developed within him: “My fear of heights had not restrained me from climbing the cliffs of my nerves. And the demons, finding the House unattended, had calmly strutted in through the open door. Had I been a good atheist perhaps….” (p 29).
The writer is beset by voices and rain that seems to knock upon his head, the metaphoric house of spiritual hunger. “For it was a strange thirst. An unknown hunger. Which had driven him from himself, from his friends, from his family, from the things of his first world.” ( p 79) There is one violent event after another. In the opening scenes the author’s cat is killed by a children’s gang, and by the end of the book the violence hasn’t quite relented. The impossibility of nurturing is visited in the nature of a beaten and not dead yet cat which still seeks affection. The author resists Immaculate’s affections, because he cannot quite understand how she could be so, within the context in which she lives. The lack of personal transcendence becomes a limitation of subjectivity – a trap wrapped around his wounded and stitched up head: “Those stitches like a net cast up into the sky tightened around my mind, and with the needle bit sharply into the tenderer parts of the brain.” The life in the land of gansters has already taken its toll on the sensitive young man by depriving him of speech, earlier in the book.
The descent into madness is as a result of not relating to the dominant social orders as a whole (although he does relate to it already very strongly in terms of his masculine-identified desire to keep himself apart from the contamination of women – at least in part an experientially founded attitude). In terms of the traditions of Shona culture – his culture of origin – he had shown his proclivities to be other than those of an obedient and respectful son. This had been as a result of unintentionally speaking English to his mother, and earning a hiding. Nor could he identify wholly with the colonial English speaking culture, which seemed to impress upon him the culture of the oppressors. If the “symbolic register” of language (the entrance into which marks adult maturity within Lacanian psychoanalysis) is taken to encompass language as the expression of the social and cultural values of each of these social milieus, both put strain on the young artist to adapt to his role as an adult in contradictory ways. Aspects of the values of both systems also seemed debasing to this high-minded artist. (He could not accommodate himself to life in the slums any more than he could ethically adopt the oppressor’s language.) Both alternatives would have been felt as extremely threatening in terms of undermining his previously happy connection with the world, that he experienced (p 85) as a child. His culturally conditioned role as a man, who cannot tolerate the possibility of womanly love or romance under the cultural conditions of the ghetto, blocked his only avenue for comfort and must have only exacerbated his condition. Perhaps it was specifically his unhappiness determined by his strongly uncompromising attitude of masculine transcendence, which broke the protagonist apart?
“I began to ramble, incoherently, in a disconnected manner. I was being severed from my own voice.” ( p 30). The author goes on to describe the fight, autonomously taking place as if apart from his own will or preferences, between the English and Shona parts of his psyche. Yet he himself has become incoherent. The refusal of the symbolic order is a refusal of meaning on terms other than the subject’s own terms. It is a refusal of the reality of the ghetto and its lack of scope for transcendence in the form of subjective self fulfilment. It is odd then, that such a rejection of language should lead to such an unexpectable outcome – whereby the author in later works comes to refer to himself as a “wordhorde”. Indeed, the exquisite precision of his writing, when it comes to expressing just the right word for each psychological state he undergoes gives testimony to the expressive potency of an absolute master of language. What happened to Marechera or the protagonist if we are to be more exact could have so changed his nature and identity?
I believe that there existed an attitude in the author that was already shamanic – that invited the outcome of shamanic intitiation. Along with the effect of being in a pressure cooker, which is effectively what the ghetto situation was, on a psychological and social level, the author’s own attitude to life was to push the envelope, to climb up to the height of his nerves in order to satisfy his curiosity about life. This openness to knowledge is what ultimately secured a path for him outside of the dominant cultural mores and its status quo. This approach is fully compatable with various shamanistic projects, which according to Perkinson, “entails internal flights of creative daring, laboring inarticulable depths of anguish into forms of self-knowledge that continually elude dominant culture categories and understanding. In this vein, we would also perhaps have to recognize a certain novelty of the enterprise in coming to enjoy shamanistic flight for its own sake.” ( p 47)
The writer’s reckless tendency not to save himself by allowing his life and being to be co-opted by language as both a subtle (value laden) and overt (aspect of public identity) control mechanism may be part of what caused language to depart from him – creating the underlying conditions for his shamanistic initiation. It is also what saved him. Increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus. “The spirits increase, vigor grows through a wound.” said Nietzsche. [Twilight of the Idols]. The vigour supplied through the experience of being wounded expanded the range of his imagination to take in unconventional insights. The same recklessness that caused his brain to suffer from hallucinations now enables him to master his own psyche and its insights as adventure: Rather than locate his subjectivity within a particular brand of cultural identity, he invites his brain to explode. Towards the end of the book the protagonist welcomes the subtle exploding of his mind as part of a shamanistic journey away from the political categories of identity:
‘White people are shit,’ Doug added with closed eyes.
I agreed.
‘And black people are shit,” Doug blew cinders and ash from his shirtfront.
Before I could agree again Philip interrupted:
‘Everybody human shits, that’s the trouble.’
I nodded, watching my mind explode deliciously.’ ( p 67)
This epistemological destruction of difference is indeed shamanic, for it is a way of giving in to the conventional fear of losing one’s identity and the stability of self, only to find what one had been looking for all the time – the unity of one’s self as a preposterously humourous undermining of conventional tropes of identity. According to Joan Halifax [quoted in Perkinson (page 23)] “The shaman is a figure “balanced between worlds,” teaching that trauma can be “a passageway to a greater life where there is access to great power at great risk.” Indeed, the shaman often becomes androgynous, “balancing” or equalizing problematic social roles and creating healing through paradox. The initiatory quest here is one that opens the mystery by “becoming it,” transcends death “by dying in life,” pierces duality “by embracing opposites,” reunites fractured forms by fashioning oneself as “a double being.” ” In this case, the shaman journeys beyond the psychic damage imposed upon him by the political antagonisms between tribes of black and white.
***
If the story of the author’s life detailed in the novelette is indeed at least partly fact and not fiction, the author’s “shamanic intitiation” must have achieved the effect that turned him into a writer. It must have led to a greater stengthening of mind, insight and creative energy. The elaborate richness, acuteness of observation and humour of the writing in this group of works lends certainty to the idea that there is a salient difference between the person depicted as Marechera in the stories and the writer who completed the semi-autobiographical texts. A lot of the richness of the text is ironical. Marechera’s conscious or subconscious concession to an ironic view of himself as a kind of shaman is indicated through a viewing of his bones after having undergone an X-ray. Shamans, traditionally, count the number of their own bones. “But he let me see the X-rays on the illuminated screen. The sight of my own bones chilled me.” ( p 77) There are shamanic insinuations in the earlier parts of the text, wherein the writer conceives of himself as prematurely grey, and has his wise old man status affirmed by a bird’s dropping on his head. Perhaps the shaman is necessarily one who is prematurely aged? – As Perkinson says about Frida Kahlo, it was as if life, after her accident, suddenly had no secrets from her. The ‘old man’ speaks of a hunger that couldn’t simply be nurtured by hate. “He fed on hatred of all things; but that did not quench his thirst.” ( p 79) In the terminology of Carlos Casteneda’s don Juan, (whom Marechera read) he longed for “infinity”.
As stated in the beginning of this chapter, the clue resides in the very name of the book in its original intention: At the head of the stream. The shamanic resolution of the binary aspects of the author’s mind (particularly “spirit” versus “vulgarly there”) has its meaning in this term. In both Lacanian and in interpersonal terms, the shamanic iniitation experience would appear to involve a going backwards; a regression. This is in fact the case; however the regression solves a particular purpose of taking one to a place where the contradictions of life can be seen in a different light. What makes the difference is that Marechera discovers a nurturing aspect within himself, in the reformulation of his father – the “old man” who “died beneath the wheels of the twentieth century” under a train. “There was nothing left but stains, bloodstains and fragments of flesh, when the whole length of it was through with eating him.” ( p 45) – to an older and nurturing version of himself, who is a story teller. This revitalised old man takes the young man under his wing, by telling parables and snatches of stories and amusing him with his absurd ideas agasint the backdrop of his mother’s condemnation that his isn’t growing up quickly enough: “But the old man was my friend. He simply wandered into the House [which the writer tells us is the protagonist’s mind] one day out of the rain, dragging himself on his knobby walking stick. And he stayed. His face was like a mesh of copper wire; his wrists, strings of muscle [….] What he loved best was for me to listen attentively while he told stories that were oblique, rambling, fragmentary. His transparent, cunning look, his eager chuckle, his wheezing cough, and something of the earth, gravel-like, in his voice – these gave body to the fragments of things which he casually threw in my direction.” (p 79) This old man is, in fact, Marechera the writer as a shaman. Shamans are cunning and perhaps dubious characters by all accounts – however, what defines them is that they have mastered “the spirits” that had previously tormented them, just as the writer has mastered the necessary fragmentation of life, and the need for creative stitches to bind reality together, so as to give it some digestable semblance of form.
What is unique about shamans is not that they complain of persecution by spirits; it is that they eventually learn how to master and use them [(Eliade; Shirokogoroff) in 112 Roger Walsh]
If language and its symbols were indeed the young Marechera’s tormentors as he claims in relation to his protagonist, then by the end of the book the master has definitively established his mastery over them. This “old man” has also, quite obviously, overcome the younger writer’s hostility towards all that nurtures, which had been fueled by his sense of a gender dichotomy (wherein women foolishly sought nurturing and nurtured, whereas men were tough gangsters.) What has significantly happened is that the young man has overcome his disturbed psychological state by pushing on through the various stages of shamanic intiation.
One need go no further than Nietzsche to see how shamanic initiation follows a certain trajectory of taking things seriously, of throwing off the shackles of confining thought, and finally rebuilding the character structure in a way that is on one’s own terms. For the three metamorphoses described in Thus Spake Zarathustra, the weightbearing spirit changes into a destructive spirit which changes in turn into a playful spirit. This represents a logical transformation of one’s character from being part of a particular cultural group, to being one who has undergone the experience of being shamanised. We can see how this works through the mediating mode of subjectivity – the capacity for language. To have learned a language, only then to unlearn it or to be unable to speak it, is different from never having learned a language at all. One has developed a certain intellectual discipline, a certain social awareness as the result of language’s cognitive and social demands. To be able to speak a language is also to become aware of the political nuances of one’s culture, to learn its ins and outs, perhaps even to learn of its potential to hand you over into life or death (under the circumstances of a civil war, such as the Rhodesian bush war / Second Chimurenga): “Many heavy things are there for the spirit, the strong load-bearing spirit in which reverence dwelleth: for the heavy and the heaviest longeth its strength.” [Nietzsche] If language gives the character a social basis for identity and structure, (as would be the case according to Lacan), then a loss of ability to communicate one’s self is a form of destruction of that character: “To create new values—that, even the lion cannot yet accomplish: but to create itself freedom for new creating—that can the might of the lion do.” To have the capacity to speak a language and to lose it is to lose one’s capacity for conformity. Yet the foundation for a new structure for identity has already been developed as a result of the original psychological discipline of having to learn a language. “But tell me, my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why hath the preying lion still to become a child?” [Nietzsche]
In terms of his “three metamorphoses”, [in Thus Spake Zarathustra], Nietzsche delineates that path of the shaman, from an experience of building one’s character, to one of demolishing the binds of social conformity (and thus, implicitly, losing one’s social identity and social character structure) to the point of embracing life on one’s own terms. “Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.” The final outcome, in this prescription for shamanisation, is the individual who is radically self-determining as well as being imaginative and playful. This is the outcome that we do in fact see in the last few pages of Marechera’s novelette. The following prose is a radiant example of such shamanistic playfulness and the psychological clarity that comes from transformation and spiritual recovery [whether full psychological recovery from trauma is ever possible is another question entirely.] It involves a sense of struggle followed by a (paradoxical, certainly–) joyous embrace of life as an artist-exile (one who has developed the capacity to face life as a new kind of person, free of limiting binds of social conformity.) The outcome of persistence through the stages of shamanic initiation is detailed in the following playful fashion, towards the end of the novelette, where the book takes on a much more concentrated magical-realist tone:
[A hunter of women] fed on exhaustion of mind and body, but the brain only dies at its own behest and the body is a precious thing which, fading and knotting within itself, generates a new being who shimmers around the old body and does not die unless the great star comes down. And so exhaustion did not slake his thirst and weariness, did not stop the gnawing of the hunger in his belly. He came to a great city, but when he tried to enter the guard at the gates laughed a great laugh and the whole thing faded into nothing but sand-dunes. It may not even have been there. There were great beautiful birds in his vision, but when he called out to them they turned into vultures and awkwardly out of his sight. It was like a sudden irritation. In fact he actually scratched himself tenderly between his legs. That’s when he said: “I will live in the heart of a grain of sand.” And he also said: “I will light a match: When it flares I will jump straight into the dark heart of its flame-seed.” But as he listened to himself, to the thirst and to the hunger, he suddenly said in words of gold: “I will live at the head of the stream where all of man’s questions began.
As well as noting that the shaman is forbidden to enter “the city” – which can be read as indicating conventional community — another way of reading this is that the shaman lives at a point of experience that precedes and oversees the nature and development of the dichotomies of social meaning. Another way of looking at this comes from the short story, “Burning in the Rain’, in which the writer encounters his own hesitation “on the threshold of manhood” ( p 85) and encounters an apparition of an “ape in the mirror” (a sure sign that his transcendence into manhood is threatened by social limitations intrinsic to growing up in racist society). In this story, the destruction of his old self (in three different ways) is also counterbalanced by a submerged existence which nonetheless has compensatory value, “at the head of the stream”. ( p 84) . Speaking of a persona of a lover accused of being a whore, he writes, “At the head of the stream, that’s where they had, with great violence, fused into one and it was among the petunias so unbearably sweet that they had become afraid and listened to the staring motionless thing which made rivers flow. (84) This union that takes place as a form of creativity overcomes the male-female dichotomy that had been limiting his scope within the normative symbolic register of divisive cultural evaluations. It is precisely this refusal of the normal symbolic order and the recovery of a self that exceeds the epistemological scope of the common verities within a particular culture, that enables the shaman to develop into a wiseman: Shamans “show proof of a more than normal nervous constitution.[…] shamans not only recover but may function exceptionally well as leaders and healers of their people [p115 Eliade quoted by Walsh].
The “head of the stream” is the place of recovery, the explosively creative place in which the shaman dwells in the spirit world (along with the “manfish” – another symbol of a drowned soul) – yet it is also, most certainly paradoxically, a place of creative renewal of one’s lost identity. “At the head of the stream” one encounters the unity of one’s unfragmented self. This is an originatory position, conceptually pre-ontological, which, however, lies beyond the comfort zone of humanity and its social organisations. It is the position of the creator, who uses his or her creative insights in order to direct reality, without succumbing to the ideological force of language that would command cultural conformity (and in fact, which had previously been the basis for the protagonist’s disturbances). The shaman’s position is that of a cultural outsider, who nonetheless has the inside track on a particular culture and maintains a sense of freedom through psychological distancing from the norm. Assuming what I am calling a “pre-ontological position” towards life enables a shaman to see the present manifestations of cultural reality, in its realised and concrete senses, represents just one possibility for life out of many imaginable alternatives. This fuels the creative insight, found throughout the book: that ontology is actually indeterminate; that more than one person can occupy the subject-position of any one story (such as in “The Writer’s Grain,” wherein Marechera encounters his double).
The shaman is one who has fully acclimatised to a condition of wildness and marginality. The acceptance of an outsider status (by one who nonetheless knows the inside of a culture like the back of his hand) – actually a shamanic position – is one that Cixous wants to claim for women: “she is outside the city, at the edge of the city-the city is man, ruled by masculine law.” [49, In her article, “Castration or Decapitation,” 1981]. The shamanic mode is orchestrated to send a spanner into the works of a culture that has become stale, narrowly constrained and atrophied by conventional expectations and assumptions. A pre-ontological position is neither necessarily male not female. It is a realm of selfhood commanded by the imagination rather than by societal constraints. It is neither male nor female. Nonetheless in his embrace of a state of psychological exile as natural and inevitable, the shaman’s mode of writing has much in common with the mode of writing of the female position in society as implying an inevitable psycho-social exile:
A woman-text gets across a detachment, a kind of disengagement, not the detachment that is immediately taken back, but a real capacity to lose hold and let go. This takes the metaphorical form of wandering, excess, risk of the unreckonable: no reckoning, a feminine text can’t be predicted, isn’t predictable, isn’t knowable and is therefore very disturbing. It can’t be anticipated,” [emphasis mine, p 53 Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation”]
The writer’s hard-earned perspective is this mode that is imaginatively antecedent to– and yet practically surpasses — the more conventionalising mode of language (and its narrow dichotomies both within ourselves and against others). It is from his detached position in relation to normal, everyday life, that Marechera is able to accurately measure and diagnose societies’ ills. From his position that transcends death, the manfish – submerged, radically transformed by his experiences and somehow still alive (if not in the social sense, quite) – the subject reviews the politics of his culture (for as his short story tells us, the manfish is nothing if not political). So the writer gives to the politics of his day breadth and meaning through diagnosing the signs of his own wounds. At the same time, there is hope: the Marecheran term, “stream” invites us to recognise that cultures can be given a breath of new vitality — through creative drive expressed as stream of consciousness.
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FOOTNOTES
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