Mercuneutics

I begin to wonder about the imminent canonisation of St Dambudzo. A lot of criticism and adulation focus on the radical, the enfant terrible , the creative terrorist. Rather like Milton’s Satan, Marechera (in the growing, popular image) stands and denies his point of creation. Where was it then? Time? Place? Witnesses? He is an artist without lineage…simply original. He is . Such is an odd view. Marechera was a very well read author and all kinds of influences are present within his fiction. In 1982, Marechera returned to Zimbabwe. The sequence of stories in Scrapiron Blues , Tony Fights Tonight , were written, so it is suspected, shortly after his return. These stories are contemporary with Throne of Bayonets , a quartet of poems mixing free-verse, with rhyme and formal stanzas. The subject matter of Throne of Bayonets is Zimbabwe—more specifically, Harare, which stands as a world-in-a-city, like London in The Wasteland — but the technique arises from Eliot and Africa’s Eliot,

Marechera’s introduction to the Amelia Sonnets (suggested by Flora Veit-Wild) contains this statement: “Every act of love is a recapitulation of the whole history of human emotion.” ( CM , p.167). At a glance that suggests that love is a repeat (as in music). An individual act rehearses what has gone before. This is what Barthes senses in A Lover’s Discourse . Love is a repeat of certain tropes and a lover is at once bound to an individual series of emotions and a general series of recognitions: “I know that scene of language.” ( ALD , p.4). If love binds the lover to the unique, it also binds him or her to a general history of love, factual as well as fictional. This double awareness is non-surprisingly double-edged. It raises the lover to a universal pattern of events (Leda and Zeus, Romeo and Juliet, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, Cathy and Heathcliff) but also lowers the lover into a darker realm: many have been here before. One of the problems with the Amelia Sonnet

At the close of his 1984 interview with Flora Veit-Wild, Marechera reflects on his image of women and the ambiguity of the Amelia Sonnets . His exact remarks are: “This is also what silences me sometimes, usually when I feel that I love somebody. I then remember all the things that I have been brought up with. This is also the reason why some of the poems are about Amelia are ambiguous. In one poem I treat her as if she is dead, in another as if she is a ghost …as a prostitute…[.]” (p.217). This is what strikes so oddly in the sonnets. Traditionally, the Beloved is perfect. She is immaculate and unitary. She is the One. She is an integral integer. There can be no diversion from a single point-of-view when viewing her. Psychologically, she is the whole, often the Platonic Form, before the fragmented mind of the poet. She is the organising factor. Typically, within his art, Marechera’s Amelia is uneven, inseparable from the discontinuities within the poet. Sonnet IV and VIII are po

Poem III in the Amelia Sonnets , is titled “Her hand my eyes closes”. The closing of the eyes is a familiar image of death, one of the final acts offered to the corpse. The irony here, however, is that the dead (Muse) seeks to close the eyes of the living (Poet). In this poem, Marechera addresses two aspects of love: how the memory of love is attached to objects and how the language of love is open to the demonic. Sonnet III opens in a plain language. It is a language that fits the ordinariness of objects so close to Amelia. All that’s left of Amelia is all this pottery, Silent, soothing, yet eerily arranged around my memories. All is clay. In kitchen bedroom, bathroom: All is her nights and days moulded in clay. (1-4). The smooth syntax creates a sense of order. There is a sense in which the poet has become an archaeologist surrounded by artefacts. Pottery provides the central imagery within this sonnet. Marechera is afraid to “dislodge” details, as if details were pots,

One of the most loathed texts of Modernism was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury . Wordsworth, represented by “She was a Phantom of Delight” (CLXXIV), was one of its many objectionable texts. Wordsworth’s poem of worship to his wife, Mary, draws upon Gothic imagery: “Phantom” (1), “Apparition” (3), “Spirit” (12). She is an other-wordly being, but of this world, “with something of an angel light” (30). In Sonnet II, “A Phantom of Delight”, Marechera begins an anti-Romantic autopsy of love. It is a brutal sonnet in which he desires to “crush” “love’s false city…And bury it”. Were these fists boulders And these shoulders a sudden earthquake And my disgust lakes of seething lava I would love’s false City crush And bury it ever underneath my cooled passion. Meaning rolls on through the internal rhyme “boulders” “shoulders”, linking the body and seismic activity into a whole, such that anger becomes volcanic, and by implication, a mirror-image of sexual explosion. Metaphorically, volcanic

Sonnet 1, “When Love’s Perished” opens with a piece of self-mockery. The drama of love is cast in a rhetorical idiom. “Here comes one who in silence Howled a thousand torments.” There are cultural echoes here of The Bible , of burial in silence, and the following lines develop the opening with “silence” becoming “polite phrases” and “howled” transforming into “screamed terrible curses”. The first quatrain of the sonnet focuses on the suppression of grief. A typical Marecheran ambiguity begins in lines 5-6: “One whose slow measured pace to the altar Raised more dust that buffalo stampeding.” The “One” is both the poem and the poet: the first line moves exactly at the pace of a mourner. Then, this is undercut with an image in which the dust of burial becomes a commonplace, a profanity. This suggests that the elegiac pace of the speaker shows more reverence than the hurried wailings of the many. “Altar”, here, appears as an image of Death and sacrifice, not Life and marriage.

Heine’s Walpurgisnacht is very much a night of the Romantic imagination. (It is neither a Satanic image nor a Pagan image). Love is connected to darkness and witchcraft, marking sexual emotions as a product of enchantment and women’s sinister power. The Amelia Sonnets are written in this vein, offering an ambiguous image of women and poetry. The sonnet tradition is almost inseparable from that of Amor. The poet’s relationship to the Beloved is cast as poet-muse. Amor creates poetry and Divine Love is enshrined within the Beloved. Shakespeare’s sonnets to the "Dark Lady" are an inversion of the tradition as it stretches from Cavalcanti, Dante, Petrarch into the Elizabethan sonneteers. In an introduction to the eight Amelia Sonnets , Marechera dwells on the link between love and mortality. This suggests an Orphic pattern to his sequence. Amelia is dead. So, he approaches her as Orpheus to Euridice. His own “Dark Lady” is a woman of power, one who has the power to make him s

Marechera wrote the Amelia Sonnets in 1984, after his return to Zimbabwe. In a December interview with Flora Veit-Wild, he offered a biographical background. The muse of the title takes her name from Heine’s letters to Amalie Heine/Friedlander. The poems describe an inter-racial sexual attraction: Black male-White female. Following Burgess’s suggestion in Nothing Like the Sun (1964) that Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” of the Sonnets was African, Marechera takes Shakespeare as a forerunner of the Amelia Sonnets in terms of inter-racial sexuality. During the discussion with Veit-Wild, Marechera plays-down the importance of the Black-White duality: “for me, personally, it is not a problem. ( Cemetery of Mind , p.125). Yet, Marechera was the person who brought the duality into the conversation and linked it to a noted historical precedent. Marechera does not specify the connection between himself and Heine. He merely says that Heine represented a “kind of emotional chaos” and a “mystical…n

In the world of criticism, there is a type of critic that bears a love-hate relationship to their chosen area of specialism. Pound criticism is fraught with such critics, people who are tantalised by what they read, but frustrated that the act of reading will not yield what they seek to find, even when they do their best to find perverse meanings amidst obscurity. In his poem “Christmas 1983”, Marechera jokes about the security officers sitting beside him at the bar: …the man on my right And the man on my left Are both listening to what I have not said Which their itching handcuffs would have me say… Such a comment could just as well be a comment against the shackles of literary criticism in the hands of critics who want to find evidence of what they want to hear and manage to detect intentions in the slightest authorial cough. David Pattison has such a relationship with Marechera. In his essay “The search for the Primordial I”, Pattison suggests that Black Sunlight

Unsane and Safe has pointed out a fascinating source for Marechera’s novel Black Sunlight : Bataille. This is quite clearly a missing link, something that I felt was there—hermeticism—but felt unlikely. Bataille speaks of two motions in alchemical thought: rotation and sexual activity. These are conceptual metaphors in the history of alchemy, for the Great Work cycles and the image of the Great Work is frequently depicted in terms of coition (invariably heterosexual, King and Queen, Brother and Sister, but occasionally homosexual). In the light of this it is significant that the central character in Black Sunlight is able to “screw like a circular saw” (p.47): this unifies exactly the occult terms shaping Bataille’s thought. When Bataille discusses the dark aspect of the sun, he is drawing upon a well-established trope of alchemy, namely, the Black Sun. The Sol Niger , according to Jung in The Psychology of the Transference is “the black shadow” of the psyche, the depres

Reading the Intellect (4) Reading Marechera hermetically. In the History Class". Dress the question in jeans And sweater And black-bull-skin sandals The hair Gorgonlocks of the dead Man’s father: Gunter Grass’ jellied Pig’s head Salome of Babylon Serves on a brass platter; Night’s drumsticks in overpowering Crescendo pulse within; massed oxhideshields And knobkerries like blackrain sea in pounding Tumult toward the Gatling Gun. Truth Dealt his assegai, drove to the bone-hilt The uttermost point of the tumult. Where then The sire and hero of our time, the all-amassing massive msasa? Written 1982-83, this poem from Mindblast is one of the few poems that Marechera published during his lifetime. The poem belongs to his return to Zimbabwe. It is not surprising therefore that the imagery has both a public and African feel to it. The public aspect of the poem appears in the development of imagery, metaphors progress one another and are rather more studied. Even so, they make fe

Reading the Intellect (3) In 1984, Marechera gave an interview to Flora Veit-Weld (the text of which appears as an epilogue to Cemetery of Mind ). Most reviews of Marechera’s poetry come from generalisations made by writers which relate to what they think his poetry was about. Here is an attempt to look at what he actually thought himself and try and understand the implicit sources. At the start of the interview, Marechera associates and then disassociates himself from Eliot. Marechera states that is the “poet’s job” (M) to find as Eliot put it, in 1919, “ a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” (E). He re-terms “objective correlative” (E) as “verbal correlative” (M). That could be a half-recollection of the term, or it could be something more pointed: Eliot’s emphasis on the objective a

Reading the Intellect (2). In 1982-83, Marechera wrote a number of poems that he published in Mindblast (1984). Supposedly, these were poems written after his return from so- called exile: exile assumes that a person belonged, not something that should be assumed in Marechera’s case! One of the poems from Mindblast , “The Poems Semantics”, seems to offer itself as a programme poem. The “seems” would appear to be the point under attack. The Poems Semantics =The title, grammatically, is not possible. Surely, an apostrophe is required? “The Poem’s Semantics”? This is quite a problem with Cemetery of Mind (his collected poetry) which is assembled from un-revised manuscripts. (after Rainer Maria Rilke)= “after”= Sonnets (1922) ie. I, i and II, xii. Not the tree but the space (within The eye) which contains the tree = “Da steig ein Baum. O reine Ubersteigung!/O Orpheus singt!” “A tree rose up! O pure over-reaching!/Now Orpheus sings!” Almost as a Black Orpheus, Marechera casts hi

What is reading? There is definitely something to be offered by a study of Cognitive Poetics. I am quite intrigued by Conceptual Metaphor, the basic images beneath how we feel and respond. Behind “The book was like a banquet” or the “The book was a wholesome stew for many readers”—simile and metaphor—is a conceptual metaphor: READING NOURISHES . Conceptual metaphor underlies how we perceive the world, certainly how we read. It is the basis, in many ways, for poetics or making. Peter Stockwell, in his introduction to cognitive poetics, takes up one conceptual metaphor for reading: READING IS A JOURNEY . This notion lies obviously behind such books as The Lord of the Rings or Gulliver’s Travels , where the story, as with a journey, grows with the telling. Reading is transportation (says Stockwell): we cross into a new land; we track characters; we pursue the bends of a plot. Often, this metaphorical journey influences our immediate responses to a book. “It didn’t really go anywh

Reading the Intellect (1). In Camera Lucida , Barthes refers at some length to the studium , which is what the critic likes to do, make a sweep of someone’s work, draw themes, then include or exclude photographs, depending on whether they fit or not. The critic likes or dislikes, according to this streamlined view. Poetry criticism has this same problem. The critic of poetry creates certain themes, Romanticism, pastoralism, surrealism, the Movement, and poetry becomes a reading in relation to something else. This approach allows critical authority. For poets, the quest is to find the (mythical) voice that allows the poetry to become recognisably theirs: poetry springs from a unified consciousness which hallmarks the work: Eliot is immediately recognised as Eliot. Such poets write with authority, in control of their voice. But do they? I look at Marechera and question all I have ever been told. Is he uneven, sloppy in his diction, careless in his imagery, lacking refinement…or

A Vampiric Tale for Hallowe’en. The cover of Marechera’s The House of Hunger shows a deathly face with a long wound that is being sewed by a spider’s web. This illustration alludes to "The Slow Sound of His Feet", one of the volume’s short stories. Robert Fraser has studied this particular work in some depth, but he finds the seriousness of the piece in the wrong quarters. For Fraser, the opening epigram draws a serious parallel between the story and JDC Pellow’s poem on Christ. His effort to make this parallel, however, causes him to miss the wicked joke by Marechera. Pellow was a minor Georgian poet, a civil servant who wrote civilized, devotional poetry. The lines that Marechera quotes are from the poem Tenebrae , included in the volume Paternalia . Marechera’s short story offers a very un-English mental blackness and a very non-Classical festival for one’s dead parents. The story is a post-Blakeian vision, a dark gospel that testifies to an all-circumscribing Death

Words are the chemicals that H2O human intercourse...Everywhere you go, some shit word will collide with you on the wrong side of the road. You can't even hide yourself because your thoughts think of themselves in the words you have been taught to read and write. Marechera. And The Black Insider never allows the reader to forget how we possess what Eco (in his latest novel) calls our "paper memory" such that texts mesh with the tissue of life. The range of literary texts in The Black Insider records something of Marechera's own "paper memory": Abrahams Achebe Anixamander Apuleius Aristophanes Armah Arnold Austen Barthes Beti The Bible Blackmore Blake Boccaccio Brontes Burroughs Capote Carroll Castaneda Caswall/Clairvaux Cervantes Chandler Chaucer Chekov Coleridge Conrad De Sade Defoe Dickens Donne Dostoevsky Euripedes Everyman-dramatist Fanon Faulkner Fitzgerald Forster G. Eli

The writer Dambudzo Marechera was born in Zimbabwe, 1952, and died in Zimbabwe, 1987. His life, as a novelist and poet, was a life spent in opposition, his poetry emerging as an unfamiliar collection of straight-forward and hermetical images, his death occurring as a mystery: he died from the terrible cryptogram AIDS, a disease that was still being named and one that continues to be nameless in much of Africa; also from what appeared to be a sustained assault. Soyinka has described Marechera as a “profound if exaggeratedly self-aware writer”. And that phrase depicts what Marechera was opposed to, as a writer and an activist—as a human being. He argued that Africa had a place for depth, but was so steeped in tradition that anyone with a self and personal life automatically became an outsider . Marechera’s biography is undoubtedly one of extremes. He was expelled from the University of Rhodesia because of how it rigorously carried through racist practices. This was followed by a

The First Epistle of Peter speaks of Christ’s entry into Hell. This was an early commonplace of Christianity. Within the literary tradition, the concept became significant within Anglo Saxon literature and then Medieval literature. From the Old English hergian though the Middle English herwen , this descent by Christ became known as the “Harrowing” of Hell. The Harrowing of Hell lasted three days…from Christ’s death on Friday to his resurrection on Sunday. In true ironical vein, Marechera picks up this detail in Black Sunlight and re-works it as his protagonist’s entry into Devil’s End. Marechera’s Christian education and his English studies at Oxford University would undoubtedly have acquainted him with the “despoiling”and its sources: I followed him into the tunnel. We passed through huge rooms in which vague human figures were poised in very excruciating postures. (One hung upside down and dangled by his testicles). Some were on a red hot treadmill. Some were transfixed