Reading Marechera

Reading Marechera

Despite his death in 1987 Dambudzo Marechera continues to wield a lot of power in Zimbabwean literature – thanks to the benevolence and hard work of his admirers around the world.

There is more we can learn from the Marechera estate than we can criticize. If anything, Marechera scholarship must teach us as Zimbabweans how to appreciate and read our own writers in our own terms.

A new critical volume on Marechera has recently been published by James Currey publishers. The book edited by Grant Hamilton is aptly titled – Reading Marechera – and includes contributions from the notable post-colonial theorist Bill Ashcroft (co-author of The Empire Writes Back) and several Zimbabwean scholars such as Memory Chirere, Anias Mutekwa, Tinashe Mushakavanhu and Madhlozi Moyo among others.

This book follows another, Moving Spirit: The Legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in the 21st Century published in 2012. These two critical volumes are certainly important in the reading and evaluating of Marechera’s literary legacy.

Early scholarship tended to trivialise Marechera as a “mad man” or the “bad boy” of African literature. The focus was more on his troubled personality over the substance of his creative genius. The trend seems to be changing. There is more in-depth analysis of Marechera’s writings and clear engagements with his creative visions, vis-a-vis, the body of world literature. Yes, Marechera is certainly among there with the very best writers of the 20th century.

Perhaps, what is worrying is the absence of female Zimbabwean critics in the latest book or any Marechera critical study. What is it that fascinates male readers of Marechera and repels any female readers? Even Memory Chirere’s Marechera apostles are all male.

While Flora Veit-Wild’s championing of the writer could as well have been personal, one would have thought it would have made Marechera more female friendly but alas he stubbornly remains a guy’s guy.

And for a variety of reasons, the European sector has been more articulate and of overwhelming influence upon the Marechera scholarship. Sadly, Europe holds fast to its claim of being the owner of Marechera and therefore the natural custodian of him. The net effect is the imposition of their standards upon our writing. This is not a new phenomenon. J P Clark, a Nigerian poet, way back, even remarked that “the very machinery for publication and distribution of African works is to be found chiefly in the capital cities of Europe”.

The challenge remains for Zimbabwean academics to take ownership of their own writers. Marechera is ours; let’s read him as we want. Mad or genius, he is ours. Let’s learn from him and those who have written about him on our behalf, that way we will be far richer and wiser in appreciating and understanding our being as a people.

 

– By Tinashe Mushakavanhu.