They Called You Dambudzo: a memoir by Flora Veit-Wild (review)

Flora Veit-Wild has written a fascinating, disturbing and painfully honest account of her relationship with the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera during the last years of his life and covering the time after his death when she became responsible for his literary oeuvre. Her first account of her personal relationship with him in ‘Me and Dambudzo’ (2012) revealed the truth of her hitherto unknown sexual affair with the black Zimbabwean poet but tended not to rest on the tremendous uncertainties involved in that relationship. Their tempestuous affair had been something of an open secret in Zimbabwean literary circles but, despite her public, scholarly work in preserving his biography and writing, it was not acknowledged in the larger world.

Although They Called You Dambudzo, does not explicitly explain why she has now undertaken to revisit their time together, it is clear that since his death in 1987, and particularly in the eight years since the first publication, she has had many second thoughts about their liaison. Growing as a writer, she has now allowed all her personal anguish and her larger sense of loss to shape her narrative. Loss has both diminished her sense of self and widened her understanding of her lover and of literature.

In the early part of the book, Veit-Wild’s narrative of their time together is full of hesitations, questionings, and self-doubts. These questions are also a rhetorical means of hinting at what is to come, so that leaving many of them apparently unanswered is central to the book’s dramatic mode, as in this proleptic gesture which anticipates their final separation:

Even now, as I want to recreate those moments, I stumble. It is so hard to talk about it. So painful.Did Dambudzo want to punish me?Did I really think it could work? Was I that naïve?

(179)

Veit-Wild is leading in to an account of her attempt to create three days of untrammelled happiness for Marechera and herself in a lodge at Lake Mcllwaine, and is facing the unpleasant task of acknowledging that it all went wrong. After the first night of bliss, Marechera hated it there and resented what she had attempted to achieve. Consequently, he subjects her to ‘emotional annihilation’ (188). Her self-questioning implies that the reasons for Marechera’s cruelty lie in his resenting her power to plan their time together (his wish to punish her), but then her probing halts at the possibility of her naivety. It rests at a personal level, and so, painfully honest as it is, her questioning never reaches quite as far as it could.

There are numerous other scenes where these issues are starkly presented, but still display this limited reach:

I was the one who allotted the time we could spend together. Dambudzo went along with it, but the grudge that I was the one in charge rankled. It gave rise to the never-ending series of tantrums that sabotaged my dream of our amour fou.

(102)

Tantrums: the difficulty here is that Veit-Wild refuses, or is not able, to expand her gaze from the personal to the larger context; she does not feel the connection between her position of power and that of the colonial masters against whom Marechera still rails, ultimately so helplessly. In other words, she does not try to imagine the situation from his point of view so as to understand what, in the historical dimension, it means for him to be controlled by someone else, no matter how benevolent or how loving.

Veit-Wild often indicates that she feels liberated by Marechera’s own declared rejection of racism and colonialism but her wish to find reassurance for herself seems to have blinded her, at least at first, to the fact that Marechera is not in fact free to live outside the system, and that he knows it. To an outsider, a reader perhaps, his constant anger, his disruptive behaviours and suspicions of anyone who cooperates indicate that his rebelliousness can go...