Book of a Lifetime: Mindblast by Dambudzo Marechera

The cliches about that non-category “African ‘literature” have it that, particularly for prose fiction, it has tended to gravitate towards a social(ist), or a vaguely magic, realism. While there are extremely fine works in both veins, such either-or taxonomy is ludicrously limiting. But the patronising paradigm’s strength is clear in the sheer shock occasioned by the work of the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987).

Mindblast (1984), the last book printed during his life, is unforgivably neglected. It is a literary scandal that it has never been published outside Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean College Press edition was an affordable paperback, but the book is now almost impossible to find. Marechera’s first book, The House of Hunger, opens with self-exile: “I got my things and left.” He did. He left to make something unlike any other literature. As with many writers who can be simultaneously praised and dismissed as enfants terrible, their work as sui generis, Marechera’s perverse oeuvre has militated against systematic engagement.

Mindblast is a showcase, encompassing all the forms in which he obsessively worked. Three excoriating playlets about post-independence Zimbabwe; short fiction; poems with the brilliant titles he always gave them; and his park-bench diary, a kind of Down and Out in Harare and the Mind. Here is his iconoclasm: his explosive anger, wit, humanity and despair; his unorthodox but unremittingly radical politics; his experimentalism, his drive to do new things with words. This struggle was political: “For a black writer,” he said, “the language is very racist; you have to have harrowing fights … before you can make it do all that you want it to do.” And the flaws are there too: the solipsism and sentimentality that can recur, though it’s hard to regret them completely when inextricable from the passion that makes reading Marechera so startlingly emotional an experience.

Influenced by the Beats, Surrealists, pulp fiction, anarchism, the avant-garde, Marechera was a Modernist, but a gutter Modernist. This is no insult: refuse and rubbish were central to his own conception of what he did. And it is in Mindblast that there is the most clear expression of this methodology, this militant trash bricolage.

“I obtained my first [book] … at the local rubbish dump where the garbage from the white side of town was dumped … You never knew what you would find in that rubbish dump … One brilliant blue morning I found what I thought was a rather large doll but on touching it discovered it was a half-caste baby, dead, rotting.” When he finds an encyclopedia, he reads it “from cover to cover … There was no end to the marvel the whole world was. And I was in it. It was an early flowering of my imagination, all caused by a chance encounter with a Victorian imperialist on a rubbish dump in a small town in Zimbabwe.”