Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Second Coming of Dambudzo Marechera by Tendai Huchu BUALA. I’m against everything Against war and those against War. Against whatever diminishes Th’ individual’s blind impulse. Shake the peaches down from The summer poem, Rake in ripe Luminosity; dust; taste. Lunchtime News – pass the Castor Oil, Alice. There’s a Dissident in the Election Soup! I have no ear for slogans You may as well shut up your arse I run when it’s I LOVE YOU time Don’t say it I’ll stick around I run when it’s A LUTA time I run when it’s FORWARD time Don’t say it we’ll fuck the whole night The moon won’t come down At first awkwardly, excruciatingly embarrassing But with Venus ascending, a shout and leap of joy. When the sheets are at last silent Don’t ask “What are you thinking?” Don’t ask “Was it good?” Don’t feel bad because I’m smoking They ask and feel bad who are insecure Who say after the act “Tell me a story” And you may as well know Don’t talk of “MARRIAGE” if this reconciliation is to last. Did You Ask What’s Wrong with War? There are no wrong words, right? There are no wrong trees, right? There is no wrong sand, right? I’ve slept the world in freely underwear Dreamed I buggered all the little boys who are future leaders Fucked all the funny little girls made of thatch and ghandy My anarchist arse has shat on society And LOOK millions of open flies are homing in on your wide-open lips. Comrade Dracula Joins the Revolution: A Wedding of Minds. For something to do let’s forever walk this Circle they call marriage (forever presumes neither Beginning nor end) The rigmarole of vows is over. Remember god allows himself the freedom to be the centre Of a circle whose circumference is everywhere (What Cynicism!) With caution & luck we too can be the image Of him. Love like history is bunk. Hence let your attractions range Free – I have no such intentions with humans at least. You in this world will dally to surfeit While I with the dead whose tombs are my brothels Will oil passion’s stiff joints. Do not be alarmed: As they say A LUTA CONTINUA even beyond the serried graves. fotografia de Bamba, Luanda. by Dambudzo Marechera. Rusape (1952) - Harare (1987), Zimbabwe. In his novella, The House of Hunger (1978), and interviews, Marechera often falsely suggests that his father was either run over by "a 20th century train" or "came home with a knife sticking from his back" or "was found in the hospital mortuary with his body riddled with bullets". Such incorrect accounts may be part of Marechera's penchant to revise even the "facts" of his own life. German researcher, Flora-Veit Wild seems to give too much weight to an account given by Marechera's older brother, Michael about the destructive element in the younger Marechera's life. Michael suggests that Dambudzo was a victim of their mother's muti, implying that he was cursed in some way. Interestingly, when Marechera returned from London and was made writer-in-residency at the University of Zimbabwe, his mother and sisters attempted to come and meet him but he rejected them offhand, accusing the mother of trying to kill him. Still, it is known that Marechera never even made an effort to meet with any member of his family until he died. 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). A brief survey of the short story, part 54: Dambudzo Marechera. "Like overhearing a scream", is how Doris Lessing described reading the Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera's 1978 book The House of Hunger. Comprising a novella and a series of satellite stories, it marked the arrival of an extreme and unusual talent that was cut short by death from Aids-related illness in 1987. As China Miéville has noted, Marechera demands "sustained effort from the reader, so that the work is almost interactive – reading it is an active process of collaboration with the writer – and the metaphors are simultaneously so unclichéd and so apt that he reinvigorates the language". Marechera described his writing as a form of "literary shock treatment", and the majority of his works are written in a sometimes difficult stream– of–consciousness style that owes a significant debt to European modernism. He has been called the "African Joyce", but the description is somewhat glib. After all, if you compare anyone with Joyce you had better specify which Joyce you mean. With its deliberately confused timelines, disorienting shifts between external event and internal process, and predilection for the grotesque, much of Marechera's writing lies somewhere between the night-town episode of Ulysses and JG Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition. Written in English, his second language (his first was Shona), Marechera's prose exudes tension. He considered English a form of combat, a process of "discarding grammar, throwing syntax out, subverting images from within, beating the drum and cymbals of rhythm, developing torture chambers of irony and sarcasm, gas ovens of limitless black resonance". Marechera grew up in troubled times. In 1965 Ian Smith's government issued the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), beginning a 15- year struggle that would end with Rhodesia becoming independent Zimbabwe in 1980. Throughout this period a civil war split the country into competing factions attempting to create white, black, democratic, Marxist and authoritarian states. In Marechera's work this state of affairs is represented by student spies working for the government, terrorist cells, violently suppressed street protests, and a general atmosphere of instability and threat. Marechera's characters are typically outsiders. He was separated from the inhabitants of his township by education (he won a scholarship to the first Rhodesian public school to admit black pupils), separated from his homeland by exile, from his fellows at Oxford by racism, and finally, on his return to Zimbabwe after independence, from those who had fought while he lived in London. As he writes in Black Sunlight, "Steve Biko died while I was blind drunk in London. Soweto burned while I was sunk in deep thought about an editor's rejection slip." Oxford, Black Oxford, meanwhile, is a scabrous assault on the way Marechera (who was a wild and ill-disciplined, albeit brilliant student) was belittled by both the university tutors and his fellow students. The story begins and ends with bitterly ironic visions of beauty and hope, but the despair at its centre suggests that these intermittent moments of joy are remnants of an optimism that is being ground away by adverse reality. The gap between the chaotic world of Marechera's fiction and his own life is small, although the manner in which he writes is far from typical autobiographical fiction. Rather, the works become struggles between what one critic describes as "competing identities". Often the narrator undergoes extraordinary transformations, like those found in the Polish author Bruno Schulz's stories, although with the accent more on dread than wonder. At the end of Protista, the narrator, who appears to have crossed from life into death, encounters a man from his village who drowned some time before: Yesterday I met Barbara's father in the valley. 'I'll get you in the end, you rascal!' he screamed. But I bit the silver button and turned myself into a crocodile and laughed my great sharp teeth at him. He instantly turned himself into mist, and I could only bite chunks of air. This folkloric element, effective as it can be, is untypical in Marechera; more often a character's reality is called into doubt in a way closer to the modernist crisis of the self. The effect is disquieting, and can, as in The House of Hunger, be little short of horrifying: A doorway yawned blankly into me: it led to a smaller room: numb, dark and also utterly empty. I could not bring myself to touch the walls to prove that they were really there… For some reason I began to wonder if I was really in there; perhaps I was a mere creation of the rooms themselves. Another doorway brooded just ahead of me. Nightmare visions and chaotic boundaries between fantasy and reality also characterise The Slow Sound of His Feet. In this short, devastating masterpiece, the narrator, an artist, struggles to come to terms with the consecutive violent deaths of his father and mother. Memory and reality are skilfully handled, with five successive mentions of waking up or opening and closing eyes blurring the line between dream and reality. The narrator tries and fails "to paint the feeling of the silent but desperate voices inside me". Of the many potent motifs in Marechera's work, the most definitive one is this inability to find one's voice. When the narrator's mother is shot dead in The Slow Sound of His Feet, his sister's hand, "coming up to touch my face, flew to her opening mouth and I could feel her straining her vocal muscles to scream through my mouth"; when the children bury their mother the sun is "screaming soundlessly"; in Protista, the narrator, attacked by the ghost of a drowned boy, cries out, "but I could not hear my own voice", while The Transformation of Harry ends with "something shrill" tearing into the narrator's ears: Startled, I looked up. Philip and Ada were also staring. The maddening high-pitched needles were coming from Harry. But he was not making any sound. The heart of Marechera's work, as these examples suggest, is a bleak territory. "Life", as he puts it in The House of Hunger, is like "a series of hunger-scoured hovels stretching endlessly towards the horizon". African critics attacked him for this attitude, Juliet Okonkwo writing in 1981 that his "excessive interest in sex activity, his tireless attempt to rake up filth, is alien to Africa – a continent of hope and realisable dreams". Marechera's position? "If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you." Marechera is a challenging writer. Even supporters like John Wyllie, a reader for the publisher Heinemann who thought Marechera "a sort of African Dylan Thomas only much more intelligent than Thomas ever was", despaired after trying to recommend changes to one particular work: "I have worked through Black Sunlight three times and now feel that I need to go away into the nice quiet Irish countryside and have a nervous breakdown". But what some see as wilful or naive complication is, for Marechera, an honest accounting of his reality. It can be confounding, sometimes tedious, but also exhilarating, and often reads like no other writer you know. As Marechera's alter ego in The Black Insider states, "To write as though only one kind of reality subsists in the world is to act out a mentally retarded mime, for a mentally deficient audience". This uncompromising stance is a cogent challenge to conventional narrative styles, a declaration that the most convincing versions of reality might not be smooth or fluent, but chaotic and fractured. Abubakar Adam Ibrahim. Abubakar is a Nigerian writer and journalist. He is the author of the novel Season of Crimson Blossoms and the short story collection, The Whispering Trees. A 2013 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Fellow and 2015 Civitella Ranieri Fellow, he was shortlisted for The Caine Prize for African Writing, 2013 and won the BBC African Performance Prize, The Amatu Braide Prize for Prose. He is also listed in the Hay Festival Africa 39 list of the most promising sub-Saharan African writers under 40. He writes for the Daily Trust newspaper in Abuja. Archives. Recent Posts. Playing Telemundo with a country June 12, Nigeria and a history of failed promises The paper tiger: Nigeria’s rising presidential condemnation count Justice Dahiru Saleh, June 12 and his ‘Special Order 191’ A Disaster Emporium. Widgets Search. Moonchild's Temple. Abubakar Adam Ibrahim's Blog. Tag Archives: Tendai Huchu. ‘The Myth of Marechera has become louder than his literature’ Zimbabwean author Tendai Huchu , author of the well received TheHairdresser of Harare is at it again. He has a new book out. It is called The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician and will also be released in Nigeria later this year. He discusses about his novels, writing in Zimbabwe, being shortlisted for the Caine Prize and talks back at Ben Okri. Enjoy! I have always been curious about how writers are made. You started off studying mining engineering at some point and now you are a podiatrist. How was Tendai Huchu the writer made? That’s always a tricky question, because there’s no eureka moment. Instead you join up a few arbitrary stars in the constellation which becomes the writer’s origin myth. In my case: well stocked primary school library plus enthusiastic teachers plus high school newspaper, the Churchill Times plus discovering the Russians in my 20s. Then at some point young Huchu went to the book store and couldn’t find the book he wanted to read, so he wrote it. Interesting. And that book you wrote, your first novel The Hairdresser of Harare was published to critical acclaim in Zimbabwe and elsewhere in the world. How significant do you think it was in opening up discussions about same sex relationships especially in Zimbabwe were it is still considered a taboo subject? First we have to look at the role and status of literature in Zimbabwean society, and you may agree that it’s not the most popular art form going. A kid on Twitter spouting his views or spray painting graffiti on a wall will probably have a greater reach. I don’t think the book has much significance outside its role as a piece of entertainment for the few middle-class folk who can spare their American dollars on it, while the majority concentrate on the more urgent business of day to day survival. The Hairdresser of Harare. But the Hairdresser is not just about same sex; it is among many other things a nuanced social commentary on the situation in Zimbabwe as well. Considering how people are afraid to talk because apparently phone messages are being monitored, how important a role do you think literature can play in documenting through fiction the realities of life in Zimbabwe? Again, I must refer back to the limited role literature plays in the lives of most Zimbabweans. We have only been a literate society for the last 140 years or so; in historical terms that’s the blink of an eye. Literature is an alien art form which must prove its utility for it to claim any significance. As a practitioner of the art form, I’m tempted to play up its importance, but I feel a truer answer, in this regard, would be that literature may continue to play a minor role alongside other art forms and digital media. Regardless, it is important to document this things and documenting fiction through literature in Zimbabwe’s recent history can be traced to the writer Dambudzo Marechera who still has huge cult-like following and I think a lot of young writers aspire to be the next Marechera, sort of like a writer activist. How big an influence has Marechera been to subsequent generations of Zimbabwean writers? More people know of Marechera than actually engage with his work. I worry, over time; the myth has become louder than the literature he produced. I view him with a mix of amusement and skepticism. I’m more interested in his unique literary style and technique, his contrarian and multifaceted ideas, than the voyeuristic obsession we have with his biography. He is an icon of our new and growing canon who deserves to be read seriously and analysed, but for any young writer who wants to be the next Marechera or ____, I would say find your own voice and be yourself. So how much influence has Marechera had on you as a writer, assuming your dreadlocks are not inspired by him; and which other writers have influenced you the most? I think I appreciate him a little more now than I ever could when I was younger feeding off the romantic myth of the mad writer. I paid homage recently by penning a pastiche; The Second Coming of Dambudzo Marechera here. When it comes to my influences, I get a bit confused, because when you read a lot, you can pick and choose from the buffet. For example, Sarah Ladipo-Manyika was my metronome to regulate Vimbai’s voice in The Hairdresser. At other times I might look to Dostoevsky, Jim Thompson, David Mitchell, David Foster Wallace, Mridula Koshy, Tanuj Solanki, I could go on and on here. I pick, choose, discard, pick, choose… Your second novel, The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician has just been released in Zimbabwe and will be coming out in Nigeria sometime soon. What more can you tell us about it? Tendai’s new book, The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician. We spend a lot of time discussing the problems of the intra-African book trade, so I’m very grateful to the guys at Farafina for taking a risk and buying the book. It’s about the lives of three dudes living separate realities in Edinburgh, doing their thing. I don’t think it has a central theme (my work seldom has because real life doesn’t) but the book has stuff about the city, love, music, deception, ideas. Let’s talk about the Caine Prize now. You were shortlisted last year for your story The Intervention. How did you find the period between the shortlisting and the eventual announcement of the winner? It was great fun! I enjoyed it immensely and it went by as a blur. Running in Green Park, lots of free food (yeah, I’m Zimbabwean, what’d you expect?), great events, meeting interesting folks interested in interesting stuff. The Caine is a fantastic institution and there should be more like it. Anyone who forks out their cash to support literature gets my vote. Considering the kind of reception The Intervention received among certain critics, do you think, as Ben Okri seems to think in his recent Guardian article, that there is a certain expectation in the west of what an African writer should be writing about? I think the contemporary debate about “African Literature” and/or “African Writers” has reached the crescendo of cliché, to which I’m unlikely to add anything usefulmeaningful. Name one writer who wakes up in Lagos or Lubumbashi or Lilongwe and goes, “God, I wonder what westerners want me to write?” Of course we poor Africans have no agency; the wicked west has its claws on our literature, on our very powers of imagination. Dude, we’re so, so obsessed with what the west thinks. We go ape when our books are put in the ethnic section, we go insane that our books are read as anthropological documents, we moan when editors italicise text in African languages, we’re in a constant neurotic state about what we produce, how it may be perceived, and what Africa’s image may or may not be. The way I see it, this only masks our deep seated anxieties that we are of little relevance on the continent itself, that it is impossible to actually earn a living from sales on the continent, that our most prominent writers are the ones that sell lots to wicked westerners, ergo, we conclude that they’re pandering to western expectations. I think it is remarkable in and of itself that western consumers actually pay their money to read stuff from outside their borders and engage with it. Maybe we ought to start saying African footballers playing abroad only play for western audiences too. I think Ben Okri is both highly intelligent and a supremely talented writer, but he could do with reading work by from independent publishers on the continent like Modjaji, amaBooks, Laanga, Kachifo, Kwani? et al Better still, visit the African Books Collective, before making sweeping pronouncements. I won’t go on because Sofia Samatar (here) already gave an eloquent rebuttal and dropped the mic. Mukoma Wa Ngugi has said before, we’re not tourism officials. As for me, I write whatever the fuck I want, whatever matters to me. Finally, Tendai, you have developed a style of using humour to address serious issues as we have seen in your two novels. How did you develop this style? At least from an existential perspective, one can’t help but get the feeling that humanity is the butt of some grand cosmic joke. Humour is one of those things, either you have it or you don’t – either you get it or you don’t, it can’t be forced. I never quite think that I am addressing serious things; it’s just that the world has these interesting dichotomies, like you’re having a pint with your mates and a plane crashes halfway across the world. Those two events co-exist in frightening and disorienting ways. I’m interested in how we live our ordinary lives under the umbrella of these grand events, how we fall in love even as we are aware of the inevitability of our own deaths, how we manage to be engaged and apathetic simultaneously as Schrodinger’s humans. Dambudzo Marechera. The second sentence in The House of Hunger is: The sun was coming up. It must have seemed pretty sunny and promising on the plane after the initial difficulties. But then the third sentence reads: I couldn’t think where to go. With Dambudzo things always had a way of falling apart just at the moment when they seemed most promising. In Berlin he was promptly arrested by the frontier police and threatened with deportation to London. By the time he was rescued by the conference organizers, the news had spread through the conference halls that a writer was being detained. The festival, tagged “Berlin International Literature Days,” had brought to Berlin almost all the prominent African writers: Bessie Head, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus, Nuruddin Farah, and many others. When he finally arrived at the festival hall, Marechera—perhaps the youngest writer there at twenty-seven—was already a star. Though his name was not on the leading list that night, he was given the opportunity to read. He gave an impassioned reading from The House of Hunger, which was greeted by a standing ovation, and from that moment on, the German media had discovered a hero. The truth is that the audience had never met an African writer quite like Marechera before—a man with such a sense for the dramatic, a man to whom the boundary between the fictitious and the real is so thin as to be almost nonexistent. He was hijacked from the main conference by another, left-leaning, group who had organized an alternative conference and who now wanted him to give a press conference on his “travails” in the hands of the German police. Dambudzo Marechera. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Dambudzo Marechera , (born 1952, Rusape, Southern Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe]—died Aug. 18, 1987, Harare, Zimbabwe), Zimbabwean novelist who won critical acclaim for his collection of stories entitled The House of Hunger (1978), a powerful account of life in his country under white rule. Marechera grew up in poverty. He reacted against his upbringing and adopted an increasingly self-destructive lifestyle. He studied at the University of Rhodesia but was expelled after participating in a demonstration over the wages of black staff members. He obtained a scholarship to New College, Oxford, but he was expelled in 1977 for trying to set fire to the college building. While living in England, he wrote The House of Hunger, his name for his country. Despite critical and popular recognition brought by the publication of his book, Marechera remained disruptive and confrontational. In 1980 his novel Black Sunlight was published; less acclaimed than his first work, it is an explosive and chaotic stream-of- consciousness account of a photojournalist’s involvement with a revolutionary organization. Marechera returned to Zimbabwe in 1981; his mental and physical condition deteriorated, and he was often homeless. Mindblast, or the Definitive Buddy (1984), the last collection published during his lifetime, includes four plays, a prose narrative, poetry, and a section of his Harare journal. A novel, entitled “The Depths of Diamonds,” was rejected for publication reportedly because of its obscenity. Marechera’s health deteriorated, and he soon died of AIDS. Posthumous publications of his works, compiled by Flora Veit-Wild, include The Black Insider (1990); Cemetery of Mind (1992), a powerful collection of his poetry; and Scrapiron Blues (1994), a collection of stories, plays, and a novella.