The Poetry International site ( http://zimbabwe.poetryinternational.org/cwolk/view/17261 ) has published some new, uncollected poems that Dambudzo Marechera (Zimbabwe, 1952-1987) wrote in 1986, the last year of his life. I find them stunning.
What follows the three poems is excerpts from a talk about Marechera by Bettina Schmidt-- seems like the person for whom these poems were written. Proponents of naive nationalism and nativism in Indian poetry would do well to pay attention... "Inscape" is a Gerald Manley Hopkins word; and Hopkins' hand is all over these poems. V. For Bettina, a Tuesday Prologue From nightsky’s black earth Rare lilies, like stars, Flower into life, yours and mine. Orion, Andromeda, these startling sickles. Of each our nights, recumbent beyond mere mortal Rest, are not fixed but pliant to our motion When courage lip to lip embraces despair. Do not to the deep sorrow surrender But ever twine upward to the silver light Eyes a blast furnace terror to untruth. Through windowpane I view the wide vistas Of improbability become possible, hugging each to Other in heartrending love: no more the one step That’s a giant stride for mankind, but you and I In fiery leap burning bright become starfruits Over stony ground. To Bettina, with Angry Tenderness Great Zimbabwe, Matopos: they to me return You feverish with visions of mortality: I dare not hold your fragility tightly But through anger’s gentle kiss remould you With my intimacy to your former state. Brief acquaintance, dredged by shared experience, Is now a harbour for the biggest tankers Of the human spirit: Mainz, Harare,Maputo, Cologne, Lusaka: the loneliest breeze Is part of the astounding cyclone. Forget ever the pain that teases your eternal sight: Finite impurities will never dim your tormented inscape! Shock: for Bettina Like meteorites, through my long Isolated heart-atmosphere, you Burst incandescent over my platinum history. My future in earthquake reeled; my present only on Seismograph could point to the cataclysm – no Evidence of you attached to my stone and flesh, Only nightmarish passions which I can still hear When you shake your head. Shake it vigorously. Nuclear tests of underground love! “My name is not money – but mind” Dambudzo Marechera, an uncompromising Doppelgaenger by Bettina Schmidt (written 1988) 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. [....] 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. [...] 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. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. 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