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Reviewed by:
  • Reading Marechera ed. by Grant Hamilton
  • Jane Bryce
Reading Marechera Ed. Grant Hamilton Woodbridge: James Currey, 2013. x + 196 pp. ISBN 9781847010629 paper

This collection heralds a bold new approach, not just to Marechera, but to "African literature" as a concept. While Marechera scholars acknowledge Flora Veit-Wild's foundational archival and critical work, especially the Source Book on His Life and Work (1992) and the Emerging Perspectives collection of essays (coedited with Anthony Chennells, 1999), the time is right for a fresh literary perspective on this most protean of writers. Reading Marechera, along with another recent essay collection, Moving Spirit: The Legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in the 21st Century (eds. Dobrota Pucherova and Julie Cairnie), which addresses his significance to popular culture in Zimbabwe and his meaning for a younger generation, offers that direction.

In taking "reading" as their informing principle and focusing on Marechera's intellectual background, the ten essays mobilize and bring into revealing dialogue a range of relatively unorthodox philosophical perspectives. The writers are younger scholars, with the exception of Bill Ashcroft, and are based variously in Zimbabwe, the UK, Hong Kong, Finland, and Australia. This diversity of location is perhaps related to new contexts for and ways of seeing Marechera, bringing him into the same frame as a range of writers, from Rilke and Dostoyevsky to Wilde, Camus, Burroughs, and Kerouac, as well as Nietzsche, Kathy Acker, Basquiat, Mos Def, and Spike Lee. By questioning the symbiotic relationship between nation-building and social realism—which has occluded "difficult" writers like Gabriel Okara, Wole Soyinka, Ayi Kwei Armah, Zakes Mda, and even Ben Okri—the collection pushes beyond twentieth-century epistemic boundaries and unsettles the canonical imperative by which texts are categorized.

Grant Hamilton describes the project of the collection as dealing with what "lies behind" the popular image of Marechera as rebel, by interrogating the "universe of literary thought that one can see written into (his) fiction." (10) The essays show that this universe encompasses anarchism, classical allusion, Shona myth and custom, Said, Baudrillard's "interpretive violence," Deleuze and Guattari's "nomadism," Mbembe's "embodied violence," Derrida's "trace," Fanon, Hardt, and Negri's Empire, as well as Marechera's more familiar engagement with Bakhtin, Bakunin, and Menippeanism. Mark Williams provocatively frames Black Sunlight alongside the work of two fantasy writers of the black diaspora, China Mieville [End Page 167] and Darius James, to examine how "Marechera's fiction functions as a counter-literature within globalization" (120), while Eddie Tay deconstructs the whole project of the collection by arguing against literary analysis of Marechera. Tay's confrontation of postcolonial theory, by which "the postcolonial is rendered supplementary to nation building discourses" (176), is salutary and provides a sharp counterpoint to earlier ways of reading Marechera, such as Bill Ashcroft's contention that ". . . the recognition of his place at the turning point of African literature may bring him 'home' to his rightful place in postcolonial studies" (97).

Tay warns that, "to locate Marechera's poetry in accordance with identity markers based on ethnicity, nationality and history, [is to] violate that private universe . . ." (174). At the same time, he acknowledges the tension between Marechera as a writer in history and Marechera as "autogenous," self-creating. The high degree of self-reflexivity with which almost all the contributors negotiate this tension is a tribute to the integrity with which the collection was conceived. It offers a really new and different path to appreciating Marechera's enduring relevance in the contemporary context, showing how critics need not be afraid of crossing borders or breaching what Lewis Nkosi once described as the "cordon sanitaire around African art and criticism" in his Preface to Tasks and Masks (n. pag.).

Jane Bryce
University of the West Indies, Cave Hill
Jane.bryce@cavehill.uwuwi.edu

Works Cited

Nkosi, Lewis. Tasks and Masks. New York: Longman, 1981. Print.
Pucherova, Dobrota, and Julie Cairnie, eds. Moving Spirit: The Legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in the 21st Century. Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2012. Print.
Veit-Wild, Flora. Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on His Life and Work. London: Hans Zell Publishers, 1992. Print.
Veit-Wild, Flora, and Anthony J. Chennells...

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