“My name is not money – but mind”
This article was first given in 1988 at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany. It is reprinted here with the permission of the author.
Dambudzo Marechera’s writing has upset the literary scene and its established criteria of ‘good’ writing. Since Marechera neither lived up to the expectations of others, nor intended to do so, his writing and work is considered un-African, self-indulgent, elitist, immoral, disillusioned, obscene and destructive. Consequently, his work is not perceived as participating constructively in the structuring of an African or Zimbabwean identity and nation-building, whatever this may be.
I think the criticism of Marechera’s work ought to be viewed positively, since a true writer stands imaginatively outside and beyond social reality and engages his inside in an intricate dialogue. Therefore, of most interest to me is this dialogue itself, since the topic of the inside-outsider dilemma addressed by Marechera on various occasions is a basic condition of the existence of the writer and artist in society.
Marechera was aware of this condition when he remarked in The Black Insider: "And yet man is rooted only in what is there, beginning with birth and death and the state of his guts." But he concludes: "Human society is, in reverse, a definition of the impossible that incredibly surrounds us. We are what we are not, is the paradox of fiction. What is not observed, sharply observes that which is. What is not said qualifies all that is said."
The topos of the writer as inside-outsider or as Doppelgaenger – a major theme in literature since the Italian Renaissance of the 15th century – is well known but not always accepted. For example, for many Africans during colonial rule and after independence this concept is perceived as being negatively provocative and destructive. With the end of colonial rule the main aim of African governments was to engage in creating and constructing a national identity and culture based on territories defined by boundaries of the previous colonisers – what irony. Art, music and especially writing had to contribute positively towards this end. Dambudzo Marechera refused to serve this purpose. Rather disappointed he notes in The Black Insider: "It’s a pity nation-making moves only through a single groove like a one-track brain that is obsessed with the one thing. It is not enough to be in power but to be power itself and there is no such thing except in the minds of people with religious notions."
For him, art and writing cannot be subordinated to political goals. He thus remains the uncompromising inside-outsider – but as a black insider. He expressed emphatically: "Oh, black insider!" and lets his fictive double ask: "What did you mean by ‘insider’? His fingers drummed impatiently on the arm of the chair. He muttered: ‘Does it matter? Do you know how to make a man who walks away from his shadow?"
Marechera found a solution for himself in the artful, unrestricted and multivocal DIALOGUE which he presented in his writings, especially in The Black Insider: If I understood him right, Dambudzo lived this DIALOGUE as a form of aesthetic action, which is a precondition for freedom and humanity.
In this sense Dambudzo reclaimed for himself what writers in the Italian Renaissance had lived up to. The writers of the European Renaissance had a major problem in defining themselves in relation to art in general in the mediaeval world. During the renaissance period, in addition to the writer and artist appeared the scientist, and together they created a totally new form of communication: the DIALOGUE ‘as’ and ‘for’ free, independent spirits, recognising no boundaries between them and the objects of their contemplation; wandering around the world, amidst other cultures, exploring, comparing, evaluating, but also producing a totally new world-view; beyond that of existing traditions, religions, politics and the culture of the Dark Middle-Ages. These so-called humanists were the first ‘free’ human beings to emerge on this planet, turning their back on centuries of traditional politico-religious systems and ways of existence. They rejected any attempt to colonise their mind for which many had to pay a high price – that of rejection and outcast.
The humanists were the first who tried to create a world beyond racist, ethnic, traditional, religious or gender determinants. They were in the full sense ‘universal’, beyond any restrictions. Therefore they were the critics per se of all forms of restriction. The Renaissance DIALOGUE was practiced in meetings of writers, artists and scientists in an attempt to create a humanist world.
For example in remote places in the Toscana in Italy, and besides drinking, eating and making love, they engaged in controversial discussions about everything, and were completely satisfied with a situation that did not aim at achieving a consensus about ideas, issues and theories. Everything was open for discussion, and through this openness, a temporary closeness could exist, but not vice versa. They produced no closed and thus restricted systems – they were the outsiders – but at the same time practices in a system – being insiders – but of a special kind. But there was a rule: one person present was chosen and had to remain sober in order to write the protocol of the dialogues – as did the individuals who chose to write the protocol of Dambudzo’s dialogues. This chosen writer produced a system which could only be a glimpse of the non-system as dialogue, but should be seen to be just as polyvalent and multivocal as the DIALOGUE itself. Thus the DIALOGUE is both the condition of art – as non-system and of science – as system. Today we see a dialogue as a condition of postmodernism.
Marechera lived and thought congenially. He once wrote: "I have viewed literature as a unique universe that has no internal divisions. I do not pigeon-hole it by race or language or nation. It is an ideal cosmos co-existing with this crude one . . . If brightness can fall from the air, then, as with Heinrich Heine, poetry is the art of making invisibility visible. Translating the literary imagination into fact may perhaps make writers acknowledge legislators."
In other words ‘literature as a unique universe’ is the DIALOGUE, and the ‘ideal cosmos’ stands for the openness or non-system itself. The ‘invisible’ is made visible by the writer in silent dialogue with the reader – in a state of mind beyond any restrictions, and even beyond any expectations. Here the ‘acknowledged legislators’ refer to the writer of the protocol. And it was Marechera’s co-existence with the crude reality that led to his inside-outside dilemma of the Doppelgaenger.
As Dambudzo received the letter from the publisher commenting on his manuscript of The Black Insider, he had to face this crude reality. His publication was rejected with the arguments that it was unstructured, unsystematic and therefore not worthwhile to be accepted as a piece of ‘fine’ literature.
It is the writer and the reader who manifest and define socially that they are communicating within the sphere of art and not of any other communicative system and not at all in the realm of politics and science.
Publishers define themselves according to their profit and loss accounts. Neither the publisher in the sphere of economy, nor the scientist in the sphere of literary science, nor the politician in the arena of politics, are qualified to judge a piece of art, nor the critic, who is outside the sphere of the DIALOGUE of ART. In The Black Insider Dambudzo referred to this in his own eloquent manner: "Since reading is an industry in its own right somebody somewhere is getting the profits: publishers, critics, lecturers, second-hand booksellers and shoplifters. It’s a complete study of how parasites and their hosts exist. At the same time there are all the rest of them breathing down the writer’s neck telling him he must write in a certain way and not in another way; and there are those who think that because they have read that has been written have got perfect or say just about anything to the writer and he is supposed to take it calmly."
During his lifetime he was at war with his critics, with literary scientists and interpreters of his work, their closed and static views of simplistic interpretations of his work. He resisted it with all his means until he no longer had any strength, anticipating what would happen after his death. Until today the intellectual potential of Dambudzo’s genius thinking and writing has not been revealed and fully understood. Why? It is our fear in loosing ground of our narrow-minded and tidy world full of restrictions and ‘does-and-don’ts’ which do not allow us to cross over into the world of the Doppelgaenger and inside-outsider.
Within the artistic milieu there is neither good nor bad, right or wrong, usefulness or uselessness: art is totally depragmatized, and thus absolutely outside any pragmatization but nevertheless related to the ‘crude cosmos’. With regard to all pragmatized thinking and action in the ‘crude world’, art is a prerequisite of an internal challenge of ‘crudity’ whilst simultaneously a permanent source of this ‘crudity’.
Marechera was aware that as a black writer in the African context he lived within these dialectically related realities. Apart from the one or other occasional companion he was lonely in this fascinating vibrant reality. Irrespective of this loneliness he opted for the transcendent universality of art. He expressed this strongly by stating: "I think I am the Doppelgaenger whom, until I appeared, African literature had not yet met. And in this sense I would question anyone calling me an African writer. Either you are a writer or you are not. If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you . . ."
Marechera may or may not have been the first Doppelgaenger on the African continent. Nevertheless what he writes is a typical renaissance humanistic credo. Back in Zimbabwe, he longed and searched for the DIALOGUE: days of discussion, drinking, writing, and making love.
Neither the dialogue of the Italian Renaissance nor the writer Dambudzo Marechera discovered art. Social conditions made the social realisation of the FREEDOM of ART as DIALOGUE possible. This implies that autonomous individuals as writers, artists, scientists and last not least citizens are able to think and act in unrestricted openness. Thus it is the free and independent individual which makes invisibility visible. No longer do rulers and religious functionaries decide on behalf of other individuals. In colonial Rhodesia and in the post-colonial society Zimbabwe, Dambudzo consciously opted for freedom. He departed radically from existing traditions and politics. His thinking and doing was the product of the change from colonial rule and traditional bondage to modernity with its openness and individual freedoms.
George Kahari, Professor of African Languages and Literature, discussed in his publications the work of Zimbabwean writers. About those writing in the 70s and 80s he highlighted that they all addressed the drastic changes which affected people in African societies. In his words, the changing situation was "as if an entire period of renaissance with limitless discoveries had fallen upon them." It "has developed so that it is beginning to revolt against the traditional folk’s world view, and it embodies the new sensibility to the industrial situation with its progressive and revolutionary movements".
What happened to this revolutionary renaissance movement, the realisation of the FREEDOM of ART as DIALOGUE? What about the dramatic impact and pain repressive politics has on people and society, the way and means those in power silence the mind? Dambuzdo had a warning word for those who glorified the liberation struggle as free ticket to power: "I am against war and those against war – I am against whatever diminishes the individual’s blind impulse.
Hence among those who were and are silenced in Zimbabwe there is a great yet silent admiration for Dambudzo who lived his individualism and life as a writer and artist whether people reacted with appreciation or disapproval. The freedom he stood for was uncompromising and in no way would he ever surrender irrespective of all the pain.
Dr. Bettina Schmidt can be contacted at [email protected] or [email protected].
