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| Dambudzo Marechera Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas |
Marechera’s works in Spanish
María Fernández from the publishing house Libros sin tintero in Spain has just completed translating Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger from English to Spanish.
The volume will contain:
- Dambudzo Marechera and The House of Hunger
- An Interview with him
- The House of Hunger
- The Transformation of Harry
- The Slow Sound of His Feet
- The Christmas Reunion
- Burning in the Rain
- Protista
- Black Skin What Mask
- Thought-tracks in the Snow
- The Sound of Snapping Wires
- Fear and Loathing Out of Harare
- Things that Go Bump in the Night
The House of Hunger was first published by Heinemann in London in 1978, then as a collection of ten short stories in English. It won the prestigious Guardian Fiction prize the following year. In this volume, additional stories and an interview of Marechera (by himself) have been added. The first long short story or novella, House of Hunger, stands out and is more often viably studied on its own. It is 82 pages in length. The other stories are very short and are easily identifiable with the novella in terms of theme, character and setting. As one discusses the novella, one tackles the other shorter stories in the cross-fire.
In the circumstances of a series of expulsions, exile, homelessness, joblessness and the fear of being deported back to a hostile white racist Rhodesia, Marechera began to write The House of Hunger. Here, he attempts to artistically review his own life and that of his generation as a people who were going through a crisis that had disabled and dispossessed them. That is probably why the text is intense and vicious. Very early in the text the narrator says: “I was reviewing all the details of the foul turd which my life had been and was even at that moment.”
In colonial Rhodesia, black people were segregated against and were barred from the minority white schools, white roads and pavements, white toilets etc.
The novella is about an extremely sensitive young man growing up in Rhodesia with its racist laws and its oppression that gave black folk very limited space. It is about the fragmentation of the family unit and the individual. It is also about the struggle for physical and spiritual spaces. That is why; maybe, the word “house” is used in various ways. House means the physical home and its troubles. It also stands for the mind of the individual as that space with turmoil. Finally “house” could stand for troubled Rhodesia which is permanently in the background to this story.
In this book, Marechera adopts a style that is modernist and not linear. In that case, the story shifts constantly and in a seemingly irregular manner between home, school, home and bar. Reality in this story does not come in a chronological manner and is not true to ordinary day to day experience as we know it. Writing becomes almost like an act of dreaming.
In the story House of Hunger the only physical space that is travelled realistically is the journey from the point the nameless major character (who is the narrator throughout) packs all his things, leaves the house in anger and goes to the nearby pub.
From that point onwards, the story goes ahead in series of the narrator’s reminisces, colliding in and out of one another. At each point when an old acquaint ant comes into the pub, the narrator takes us back to his old days with him or her, but always coming back to the present.
Alongside all that, the nameless narrator reverts back to the house he has left behind. He revisits (haphazardly) the minute details of his relationship with every family or community member. This way of writing is often referred to in literary studies as Stream of Consciousness. This demonstrates Marechera’s very close experience with modernist literature especially with the writings of T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Kafka and others who felt that only a disjointed style would best describe a disjointed experience.
The nameless narrator in the novella traces his life in no clear pattern, targeting his boyhood, his family, his school days, his undergraduate days etc. He remains nameless throughout and sometimes he is called “bookshit” or “Shakespeare” by his angry brother, Peter. That he remains nameless may be a pointer to the fact that this young person represents all young people of a troubled Rhodesia . Throughout the novella we observe that the nameless narrator is a vulnerable individual. At home he is a victim of the violence of the father, mother, brother etc.
He is also vulnerable spiritually because he does not have a sense of belonging. He is also morally assaulted by the township experiences for example his observation with other children of the man who rapes his wife openly and in broad daylight:
“The older generation too was learning. It still believed that if one did not beat up one’s wife it meant that one did not love her at all. These beatings (not entirely one sided, because the man next door tried it and was smashed into the Africans only hospital by his up to then submissive wife) were always salted and peppered… The most lively of them ended with the husband actually fucking – raping his wife right there in the thick of the excited crowd. He was cursing all women to hell as he did so. And he seemed to screw her forever – he went on and on and on and on until she looked like death.”
The narrator’s response to this violent society is to write. He tries to respond creatively and his first short story is about the prostitute with the drip. The prostitute is, for the author, the symbol of Rhodesia.
When the narrator goes to school, he experiences a crisis in regards to language and reality, for example, he finds an interest in English. He is haunted by his vernacular, Shona. English and Shona fight in his mind until this results in a paralysis that drives him to stammering. This is a pointer to an identity crisis common with all colonized people who wonder whether they belong to their own roots or to those of their colonial masters.
At school, the nameless narrator finally experiences a mental breakdown. This is symbolic of his failure to relate to his social environment, the content of the educational system of the time and to his inner self.
The narrator’s attempt to write drives him deeper and deeper into the crisis. His life remains without focus and direction. It is a journey leading towards the house of hunger. The journey takes him into a room inside a room, in which there is another room and another room. It is from within that room that the narrator looks through the window as if to determine what is outside, only to face multiple visions looking at him in absurdity! In Rhodesia, the black people face a hunger for food, knowledge, love, even for a sense of identity.
Marechera’s lines contain abstract imagery and have a violent tone like “Peter threatened to crunch the sky into nothing” or “There was not an oasis of thought which we did not lick dry” or “The grey matter of my brains was on fire with loathing for her” etc. Some of the passages are brutally descriptive and overdone, showing a kind of hypnotized feeling like:
“My hunger had become the room. There was a thick darkness where I was going. It was a prison. It was the womb. It was my blood clinging closely like a swamp in the grass matted lowlands of my life...”
There is also
“There is nothing to make one particularly glad one is a human being and not a horse, or a lion, or a jackal, or come to think of it a snake. Snakes. There’s just dirt and shit and urine and blood and smashed brains. There is dust and fleas and bloody whites and roaches and dogs trained to bite to bite black people in the arse...”
The family and various forms of perversions
The family in Marechera tends to mirror the larger social set up. The crippling poverty caused by a Rhodesian economy that has little to offer to Africans makes it difficult to maintain a dignified family. The relations and roles of family members here have been turned upside down.
Father, mother and the children sleep in the same room and there is the horror of witnessing one’s parents in the act of copulating. Often the sons witness mother’s promiscuity whenever father is away on duty, driving long-distance lorries. At one occasion the son, Peter is involved in a fist fight with one of mother’s lovers. Father is also portrayed as only a stud in the family. He is also a shameless alcoholic who gives to his son an anti venereal diseases set as a birthday present as if to encourage him to indulge. Mother gives the son some very elaborate sex tutorials on how to take a woman to bed.
Even outside the central family childhood is brutal and painful. Every child has an early indulgence in sex and the journey to prostitution is predictable as seen in Julia, Nester and Immaculate. These young women’s first encounter with sex is tragic but they pick up the trade with some vengeance, becoming sexual vampires. Their route into prostitution is ready made.
The youth search for education and freedom but Rhodesia is closed up. The search is only a dream until they turn on each other as seen in Peter hitting Immaculate “to a stain”. and Stephen hitting Edmund, reducing him to an animal. The school is no exception as seen in the hitting of the priest who preaches humility to a group of students. The children are therefore trapped in a system which they cannot positively change.
Marechera is a cult hero in Zimbabwe today amongst the university students and the young writers. His stock themes of hunger, suffering and persecution tend to appeal to Zimbabweans who have variably known deprivation from the colonial era to the present. Part of Marechera’s popularity is also to do with his unique and creative command of the English language. It should be understood that Marechera himself fought the English language quite phenomenally that in Zimbabwe it is often jokingly said that he does what he wants with English.
Outside the University community, you come across high school dropouts, job seekers, young farmers, budding guitarists, sculptors, and people herding cattle and goats and house servants who attempt to read Marechera. You realize that other than understanding a few selected passages, part of their joy only is in knowing that they are reading “something by Marechera”.
They enjoy being part and parcel of the Marechera legend. These people redefine reading. For them to read is not necessarily to comprehend, to get to the essence of the text but to know that what you are looking at are the narratives of one of your own considered (even by foreigners) as extraordinary.
We are not surprised that Marechera’s influence continues to grow outside his native Zimbabwe and this timely translation means that Dambudzo Marechera has become available to the Spanish world for the first time. We are certain that he will touch many hearts and minds.
- By Memory Chirere.
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