"At the Receiving End of Severe Misunderstanding”: Dambudzo Marechera’s Representations of Authorship

The Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera (1952–1987) is the object of a cult phenomenon: his figure represents a relevant site of sense-making and his earlier unfavorable African criticism is challenged. Marechera’s fiction has a strong autobiographical dimension that results in a metadiscourse on the meanings of authorship, where the notion of misunderstanding represents a central trope. This essay aims not only at drawing an overview of Marechera’s representations of authorship, but also at suggesting that Marechera was actively involved in the construction of his authorial image, and that the notion of misunderstanding captures the changes that have taken place in the contexts of his critical reception. Further, the essay addresses Marechera’s positioning in relation to the notion of commitment and argues that the relevance of the Marecheran dissident writer-figure stems from the fact that it represents a position from which repressive truths of the postcolonial nation-state can be contested.