Reading Marechera ed. by Grant Hamilton (review)

Grant Hamilton’s collection of critical essays, Reading Marechera, demonstrates that Dambudzo Marechera’s maverick work continues to inspire literary scholars and to invite reassessment, comparison and re-contextualization. This is already the third critical book-length volume on the writer, who at the time of his untimely death in 1987 was regarded by many as an eccentric, a failed writer, and even a madman. Only after his death was Marechera’s work reassessed as the product of a mind that was ahead of its time. The ground-breaking essay collection Emerging Perspectives on Dambudzo Marechera (1999), co-edited by Flora Veit-Wild and Anthony Chennells, offered readings of Marechera that drew on postcolonial and feminist theory, showing that he occupies an important place in the canon of African and postcolonial literature. Nevertheless, what these readings had to contend with is the fact that Marechera’s work refuses to be categorized and contained. It was with this in mind that I co-edited, with Julie Cairnie, Moving Spirit: the legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in the 21st century (2012), a multi-media collection of textual, visual and audiovisual works inspired by Marechera, arguing that the singularity of Marechera’s engagement with language demands an active, performative response. The present book of scholarly essays builds on this existing work, taking new angles, creating new contexts and sometimes making surprising connections. Rather than understanding Marechera as ‘merely’ a postcolonial writer, the book situates him as an exilic figure outside accepted modes of signification.

The uniting idea of the book is that Marechera was an outsider – an exile from history, from his country, continent and himself – and that his work can be reassessed in the context of other literary exiles, from Shelley and Wilde to Dostoyevsky, Miéville and Rilke, among others. Situating Marechera within this ‘universe of literary thought’ (p. 7), the contributors draw on Deleuze, Bakhtin, Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva, Baudrillard, de Certeau, Hardt and Negri for understanding and interpretation. Marechera emerges from these reflections not only as a romantic outsider, radical individualist and intellectual anarchist, but also as a quixotic idealist, existentialist, classical satirist, utopian writer, postcolonial modernist, postmodernist and avant-gardist, and yet as someone who never quite fits into any of these categories.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu reads Marechera alongside Shelley, another Oxford anarchist, arguing that what was perceived as their ‘madness’ was their ability to diagnose the psychological condition of their societies, as well as their utopian visions. Mark P. Williams compares Marechera with two radical contemporary writers – China Miéville and Darius James – arguing that all of them are part of an internationalist avant-garde, writing across cultures and forming an ‘anti-canon’. Anias Mutekwa analyses Marechera’s self-proclaimed ‘intellectual anarchism’ in Mindblast through Baudrillard’s antirealist theory of simulation, giving a sophisticated reading of Marechera’s short plays that have, so far, been neglected by critics. Anna-Leena Toivanen builds on work by Jane Bryce and Huma Ibrahim to read Marechera’s grotesque evocations of the body and sexuality through the lens of Bakhtin and Mbembe’s thought. Grant Hamilton’s essay uses the Derridean trace to focus on the image of the stain in The House of Hunger, interpreting it as the ‘absence of presence’ that Marechera finds in the independent Zimbabwe. Bill Ashcroft focuses on the utopian and ‘outlaw’ aspects of Marechera’s work through Bakhtin’s notions of Menippeanism and heteroglossia. David Huddart reads Marechera alongside Fanon, interrogating the autobiographical strategies in The Black Insider and in Black Skin, White Masks and showing how the autobiographical becomes a form of political resistance. Madhlozi Moyo’s analysis of classical allusions in Marechera’s prose works foregrounds the writer’s dialectic between the universal and the local, while Memory Chirere’s essay considers Marechera’s only work in his native language, Shona, the play The Servants’ Ball, in the historical context of post-independence Zimbabwe and positions Marechera in the debate on the language of African literature.

In the final essay, Eddie...