FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND BUSINESS STUDIES
Department of HumanitiesThe Immaculate Conception of Language
Uncovering “Unhomeliness” in Dambudzo Marechera’s
The House of Hunger
Portia Tarumbwa
2021
Student thesis, Bachelor degree, 15 HE English
ENG804.22509.2021 Supervisor: Marko Modiano
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Abstract
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Table of Contents
Abstract ... 2
1. Introduction ... 4
2. The Struggle for Anticolonial Language ... 8
3. Uncovering “Unhomeliness” in The House of Hunger ... 19
4. Conclusion ... 31
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Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. At whatever level we study it –
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
1. Introduction
The moment Marechera becomes a published writer, his public persona acquires a different name. In 1978, two years before Zimbabwean independence, he changes his name from the typically English first names “Charles William”, that appear on his birth certificate, to his original Shona name “Dambudzo” which means “Troublemaker” in his mother tongue (Veit-Wild, “Memoir” 1). This act seems symbolic. Not only is it redolent of a self-styled declaration of independence, a reclamation of the language that was replaced by that of his erstwhile colonial masters, but also aptly describes both his style of writing and his image. This essay will examine both Marechera’s approach to literature as well as explore how his image is a reflection of the troubled nature of his upbringing and the environment in which he grows up. This is a place this essay will dub his “unhome” in reference to his debut novel The House of Hunger which
summarily propels him to the dubious status of enfant terrible in the genre of African literature.
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1982. Thus, his life, like his writing, seems strewn with carefully orchestrated outbursts of mocking.
Indeed, not only was his behavior and lifestyle the object of scathing criticism by contemporary African writers as un-African, but also his writing. The first of this onslaught of disparaging reviews comes from Julia Okonkwo who writes in 1981 for
The African Journal of New Writing that Marechera has “grafted a decadent avant-garde
European attitude and style to experiences that emanate from Africa and Africans” who, in her opinion, can ill “afford the luxury of such distorted and self-destructive
‘sophistication’ from her writers.” This opinion is shared by many a contemporary who, in the heady days of independence ushered in on the coattails of a proxy cold war, possibly saw the main role of the African writer as an educator of the masses, teacher of African culture and, above all, a socialist realist.
This line of argumentation is carried one step further in the debate as to whether an African writer should write in their native language. Yet Marechera seems pitted against the greatest minds of the continent in his stance to write in English although the opposing side of the debate is powerfully summarized in Ngugi wa Thiongo’s iconic work Decolonizing of the Mind:
Amidst massive illiteracy, amidst the conflicting phonetic systems even within the same language, amidst the new superstitions of the bible and church, how can we talk meaningfully of the African novel? How could I contemplate the novel as a means of my reconnection with the people I left behind? My targeted audience – the people – […] How can I take a form so specifically bourgeois in its origins, authorship and consumption […]? (68)
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Ngugi arguably finds himself at pains to fathom why any postcolonial writer would use the self-same language of subjugation as an instrument of pedagogy or propaganda.
However, in a self-interview conducted in 1983, Marechera maintains resolutely that on this issue of language “Shona [his mother tongue] was part of the ghetto daemon [he] was trying to escape” (Marechera 7). On the other hand, he does acknowledge that “[f]or the black writer, [English] is very racist. You have to have harrowing fights and hair-raising panga duels with the language before you can make it do all you want it to do” (Marechera 7). In other words, Marechera effectively seems to be at war with English. This violence seems to represent at once a war with himself in his mind as well as with words. In essence, as he is writing he is simultaneously in the throes of creating a new language, a metalanguage, as it were, that is malleable enough for the hybridity of his identity. This suggests a style of writing that Ashcroft et al. (2004) in The Empire
Writes Back delineate as both abrogation and appropriation (37) of the colonial
language as a part of the seminal moment of its decolonizing.
In this vein, one such critic who sees Marechera as both fascinating and irreverent is fellow-Zimbabwean Dan Wylie. He even brands Marechera in 1991 as “a misfit,” adding that “The House of Hunger is a characteristically turbid, angst-ridden, dadaesque story virtually unparalleled in African fiction, by a profoundly dislocated writer living in a shattered repulsive environment of mindless violence, raw sex, filth and madness.” Nonetheless, this particularly salacious listing of the scatological, syncretic and readily poststructuralist elements of Marechera’s writing suggests perhaps a secret appeal Marechera still harbors for his contemporaries, elements which spill over into his biography and continue to shroud his life in legend.
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after participating in student protests against racial discrimination (Veit-Wild, “Memoir” 12). Additionally, he is expelled from Oxford University allegedly for
attempted arson and drunken disorderly conduct (Veit-Wild, “Memoir” 13). Upon being given the choice to either be admitted into a psychiatric institution or be sent down, he chooses the latter, in lockstep with his sympathies for R. D. Laing’s adage: “We are not lunatics; it is society that is mad” (Veit-Wild, “Memoir” 15). He thus never finishes a degree despite consistently excelling academically and consequently writes his sensational The House of Hunger in exile, squatting and undocumented (Veit-Wild, “Memoir” 13).
Not all the critics were against him, however. Marechera’s meteoric rise to critical acclaim comes in part through positive reviews from such established contemporaries as Doris Lessing, who writes in 1979, “This book is an explosion. Writer and book are both of the nature of miracles … It is no good pretending this book is an easy or pleasant read. More like overhearing a scream” (Veit-Wild, “Memoir” 13).
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You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse.
Shakespeare, The Tempest I.2.262-3
2. The Struggle for Anticolonial Language
This part of the essay deals with the problems associated with language choice in postcolonial literature. It will argue that Marechera makes the correct choice to write in English and will assess the ways in which he uses, or rather weaponizes, English in his unique and hybrid approach to literature. Then it will broach the subject of
“unhomeliness” at the close of this section before entering into a close reading. It is therefore with the double purpose of satiating a penchant for punning as well as to succinctly describe Marechera’s literary innovation in The House of Hunger that the title for this essay arose. Immaculate is a female character in the title novella who receives her name at the behest of a devout father and Roman Catholic priest. She is, however, summarily disowned once she falls pregnant out of wedlock (Marechera 48) presumably because her name and behavior do not match.
Yet, Immaculate is arguably more than just a tragic figure who is beaten mercilessly by the narrator’s brother since she is neither pure nor a victim. In fact, she mounts an audacious rebellion through “the pulses of her raw courage” (Marechera 14) with which she hopes to hold the dual brutality of patriarchy and colonialism at bay. And inasmuch as she seems to represent the archetypical Spivakian subaltern,
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Implied in the title is also the violence inherent in the metaphor of birth itself. Consequently, not only does an “immaculate conception” evoke the image of virginal purity and perfection encompassed within a kind of vision or prophesy, but it also suggests an inexorably violent trajectory towards that end. The means necessarily justifying the ends. This is at once an inversion of the argument Europeans used to justify the violent methods they resorted to in order to subjugate the indigenous
populations of Africa as an ostensibly necessary though regrettable means for achieving the incontrovertible ends of civilization.
In fact, as Tyson (2006) asserts, “[b]ecause their technology was more highly advanced, the colonizers believed that their whole culture was more highly advanced, and they ignored or swept aside the religions, customs, and codes of behaviour of the peoples they subjugated.” In other words, colonialism necessitated a physical as well as a mental form of subjugation, the latter inculcating the colonized with an inferiority complex similar to the slave Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest who decries, “I must obey. His art is of such pow’r.” On the one hand, one may see the “art” meant here simply as Tyson’s aforementioned technology or access to progress. However, if, by association, “art” can similarly be seen in terms of language then whether an African writer should choose to write in the language of their erstwhile colonial masters is similarly at issue.
Indeed, one could leap-frog (probably at one’s own peril) the historical and ideological cold-war chasm of the second half of the twentieth century straight into current discourses on modernity borne out by the fact that English has now become a global language, a lingua franca as it were. This essay’s working definition for
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further that the very understandable and all too-human incentive of desiring access to progress and modernity are synonymous with the “vernacular” of the English language, then the choice of an African writer to use English for its global reach is both as
opportune as it is opportunistic.
Nonetheless, there is a certain tension that arises out of choosing English over one’s own native language which is palpable in postcolonial writing. This is because the preference for writing in English, if it is indeed to supplant the colonial paradigm, must now use language in such a way as to deny its historical site of privilege. In The Empire
Writes Back, Ashcroft et al. (2002) describe this as being a twin process of abrogation
and appropriation positing that “post-colonial literatures are cross-cultural because they negotiate a gap between ‘worlds’, a gap in which the simultaneous process of
abrogation and appropriation continually strive to define and determine their practice” (38). And, for Marechera, this gap can be found both within his mind as well as in his effort to overcome his own circumstances of impoverishment almost certainly
represented by the title The House of Hunger.
Indeed, in a typical case of unflinchingly honest self-criticism, Marechera appraises his choice of English as follows: “The English language was automatically connected with the plush and seeming splendor of the white side of town. As far as expressing the creative turmoil in my head was concerned, I took to the English
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language of the colonizer – by the postcolonial amounts to a divided sense of self otherwise known as a hybrid sense of self.
Yet, in his diatribe against African writers using English, or any other European language for that matter, instead of their native tongue, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986) inadvertently emphasizes the innovation of such a feat. He writes: “What we have created is another hybrid tradition, a tradition in transition …” (26). That the African writer is thus in the process of establishing a new genre of literature is of central importance to Ngugi. Still, he lambasts the attempt to embark on such a journey, since for him, this would be congruent with abandoning “the people’s anti-imperialist struggles” (29).
However, it is precisely this departure from both African and European literature which seems to situate Marechera’s alignment with hybridity. In fact, in The House of
Hunger, Marechera describes this sense of a hybrid self as being “aware of myself as
something indistinct and separate from both cultures” (43). One can even say that Marechera is fiercely outspoken about defending this hybridity as something distinctly artistic, rejecting any hyphens or labels. For him, it is simply writing, and his
biographer, Veit-Wild, documents this unwillingness to be restricted to any label except that of a writer in a 1982 interview when Marechera says, “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.”
Interestingly enough, both Ngugi and Marechera are unified in their critique of the francophone black consciousness movement of Négritude associated with such famous writers, poets and philosophers as Aimé Césaire from Martinique and Léopold Senghor from Senegal. Albeit for different reasons, the two anglophone writers find fault with the seminal precepts of Négritude, believing that the movement is
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is its language of choice Ngugi construes as “subservience” (19), indeed collaborative with the status-quo of colonialism. Marechera, on the other hand, denounces its chauvinistic tendencies of unequivocally idolizing all aspects of black culture (see archived Marechera interview by Alle Lansu in 1986). Both assessments, however, fail to assess the emergence of Négritude as an appropriate reaction to the particular
metropolitan policy of the French called assimilation.
In contrast to the British, the French colonies overseas are viewed merely as provinces of France and, as such, the metropolitan administration seeks to replace all things African with all things French – including language. Therefore, as McLeod (2010) makes clear, Négritude arises out of a response from the two towering intellects Senghor and Césaire who, despite being from very different backgrounds, both find “themselves commonly identified in France as négres” (94). McLeod continues to describe the movement as “an attempt to rescue and reverse blackness from its
definition always in negative terms. Blackness [is] reconstructed as something positive and valuable, behind which black peoples throughout the world could unite” (95).
Therefore, Négritude seems to exploit the paradox of incomplete assimilation because, although the French allegedly seem to want to transform the Africans into Frenchmen, they do not treat them as equal citizens. In actuality, the African neither possess agency in their socioeconomic nor their private affairs and Négritude’s effort to redress this imbalance both addresses the hypocrisy of assimilation as well as
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However, as Ashcroft et al. (2002) are quick to point out, the danger in making this claim is that blacks may enmesh themselves in an ideology that is not really any different from the one they seek to eschew because, in the analysis, it remains the “antithesis of the thesis of white supremacy” (20). Yet, what Ashcroft et al. seem to fundamentally criticize is the marginalization of whiteness by saying that it is, at its core, the same as what whites do to blacks. However, if one is to consider Spivak’s nuanced analysis of “random othering” leading to “dispersing rather than reversing opposites” (see The Rani of Sirmur) in this context, then both views must be challenged since Spivak implicitly demands that there both be a decolonization of the colonizer as well as the colonized.
In other words, Ashcroft et al. warn against Négritudes’ embracing of the experience of being “othered” on the basis of skin color as “a double kind of possessive exclusivism” (23). Hence, to their mind, Négritude makes the same mistake as
“curiously reflected European prejudice” (20). However, what they seem to ignore in their critique of “black” writing is that the onus of establishing a sound superseding philosophy in support of decolonization of the mind lies just as much with Europeans.
Thus, it would follow that Europe requires its own form of decolonization since it is just as much a part of postcolonialism, albeit now on the periphery. To quote Sartre in his famous introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: “[F]or we in Europe too are being decolonized: that is to say that the settler which is in every one of us is being savagely rooted out. Let us look at ourselves, if we can bear to, and see what is
becoming of us” (24). And, sadly, since there certainly still exists racial discrimination against blacks in the world today, an inherent exclusivism in such an experience seems to necessarily remain in parallel for both black and white.
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and foremost a human being. The only difference is the socialist realism which follows from this assertion for the former in contrast to the latter who constantly rebels “against whatever diminishes the individual’s blind impulse” (Veit-Wild, “Memoir” 231). In fact, Marechera describes this dichotomy as “two traditions in African literature” (Veit-Wild, “Source Book” 44) saying further that while he positions himself as a
“modernist”, the opposing “traditionalist group […] is very moral, it’s easily used in schools as textbooks, and especially in Ngugi, it is very socialist” (44). Therefore, the split between the two authors seems to stem from a difference in political agenda rather than philosophical orientation. Instead, what both writers appear to strive for is
subversion of colonial institutions, especially of those in power, and attempting to counter the inevitable violence which this resistance engenders.
Nonetheless, there is another aspect of Marechera’s objection to writing in his native language Shona which is of relevance in the struggle to find an anti-colonialist language as opposed to an ante-colonialist language. In other words, the fact that Shona merely predates colonialism does not seem to automatically qualify it as the only suitable medium for a language of resistance to colonialist ideology. The latter is aptly described by Tyson (2006) as “inherently Eurocentric, [and] a pervasive force in the British schools established in the colonies to inculcate British culture and values in the indigenous peoples and thereby forestall rebellion.” Therefore, if Shona were to counter this force of repression, it would, in Marechera’s mind, fail to be eligible to do so on two main counts.
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viewed as a synthetic construction cobbled together by European missionaries from the nineteenth century onward. In fact, according to renowned African languages expert Chimhundu (1992), the real reason why missionaries sought to establish a unified orthography of “Shona” languages was so that it would become easier to minister to (or rather administer) a diverse ethnic group that until then had only known of itself as
vanhu or “people” (89). Furthermore, as Mazarire in his “Reflections on Pre-Colonial
Zimbabwe” (2009) asserts, “[t]he term [‘Shona’] is not in use before the nineteenth century, and even then it was seen as an insult, a term used by one’s enemies; no one thought of themselves as ‘Shona’” (2).
Thus, it can be seen as compounding the external manufacturing of a linguistic entity called Shona when the racist settler regime of Rhodesia establishes a censorship board in 1953 euphemistically named “The Literature Bureau” (Veit-Wild, “Source Book” 38). Although the goal is ostensibly to promote literature in Shona and Ndebele (the two majority indigenous languages of Zimbabwe), every manuscript is screened for subversive content and from 1965 onwards, when Rhodesia formally severs ties with Great Britain in the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), it even becomes punishable by certain imprisonment and perhaps even death to write anything overtly mentioning African nationalism (Veit-Wild, “Memoir” 70; Novak 33).
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this useful aspect of influences from European literature in his 1986 lecture entitled “The African Writer’s Experience with European Literature” when he says:
From early in my life, 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 […] We are at one of those points in literary history where peoples cannot concretise their own situation in any way other than a temporal one […] There is a healthy interchange of technique and themes between Africa and Europe, especially in terms of the novel. If there is not, then it should be there. That Europe had, to say the least, a head start in written literature is an advantage for the African writer. He, at least, does not have to solve the problems of genre and structure. They have already been solved. I do not consider – and I must emphasize this – influences as pernicious. They are a type of apprenticeship.
Indeed, as much as the word “apprenticeship” may grate on the present-day postcolonial ear, the trajectory of Marecheran thinking is clearly based on the temporariness of this relationship which Barry (2017) calls the “‘adopt’ phase of colonial literature” (198) pending the following ‘adept’ phase. In fact, Marechera himself must be considered to represent the branch of postcolonial theory which argues that:
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colonials [should therefore] embrace the multiple and often conflicting aspects of the blended culture that is theirs and that is an indelible fact of history. (Tyson 422)
It is at this juncture, after having examined Marechera’s approach to language and literature, that this essay now proposes to enter The House of Hunger. This approach is, in summary, one in which Marechera lays claim to the English language and its literature as his rightful inheritance of the mind to do with as he wishes. For Marechera can be seen as weaponizing English, remolding it into a double-edged sword that cuts at both ends – colonialism and nationalism. This is because, for Marechera, both ideologies appear to enforce a stable African identity, whereas his own
experiences, as well as his struggle for identity, point him in the direction of a permanent state of flux.
This essay will therefore argue that the driving force behind a dynamic and constantly evolving nature of postcolonial culture is the pervasive sense of
“unhomeliness” (Bhabha 13) which is at the same time what The House of Hunger seems to represent. It is a place which may never be considered home because it is violated. Regardless of whether it is his family home or the township where the narrator grows up, or colonial Rhodesia, or indeed his own mind – for Marechera the kind of trickle-down violence starting from the top as state-sponsored violence seems to “unhome” the postcolonial individual, and it is this alienation which this essay now aims to explore, beginning with its harbinger – violence.
However, a few words on the origins of the concept of “unhomeliness” coined by Homi Bhabha (1994) ought to preface the ensuing close reading of The House of
Hunger. This is because although “unhomeliness” seems to owe its transliteration from
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of Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny”. Here, Freud looks for the etymological roots of
unheimlich in order to arrive at its psychoanalytical derivative. In so doing, he reveals
that the reason why it is possible to suddenly become afraid of people, places and things which appear familiar (or heimlich) on the surface is because they seem to be hiding something at the same time. The word heimlich therefore appears to hold two contradictory meanings – it implies both a notion of familiarity as well as secrecy. Freud thus exposes the contradiction within the etymology by proving that the meanings of both unheimlich and its opposite, heimlich, coincide since they both allude to
something openly secretive or “everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come to the open” (Bhabha 14, Freud 132).
So, this essay now hopes to trace the “unhomely” moments within The House of
Hunger in three main stages. Firstly, it will look at “unhomeliness” as it can be traced
within the narrator’s home and surrounding. Then, in the second stage, it will address where the narrator’s own mind shows signs of “unhomeliness” or unheimlich (used in both the Bhabhan and Freudian sense interchangeably throughout the essay). And finally, it will examine “unhomeliness” as it pertains to the whole country. Put
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Yet he is the bringer of violence in the home and into the mind of the native […] that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
3. Uncovering “Unhomeliness” in The House of Hunger
At the time of writing The House of Hunger, Marechera is exiled and homeless in Great Britain while his homeland is at war. However, the autobiographical nature of the novella and its themes all seem to stem from the tension between his exposure to the violent events unfolding in Rhodesia and his conflicted dislocation from them. But this dislocation does not seem to begin with his exile in Britain. It is also evident throughout the title novella during scenes in which the narrator is still physically present in
Rhodesia though arguably already in a state of internal exile, as it were.
Marechera’s text is characterized by “a discontinuous narrative and random seeming collages” (Barry 84), constantly jumping between, people, places and time in what one might call an itinerant staging of the narrator’s identity formation. What arguably also nudges the text over into a genre typical of postmodernism is how, as Barry (2017) describes it, “fragmentation is an exhilarating, liberating phenomenon symptomatic of [the writer’s] escape from the claustrophobic embrace of a fixed system of beliefs” (86).
Indeed, this breaking free from one fixed system to next is what Marechera purposes in his writing, both for himself within his own mind as well as that which he aims to provoke in others. On being asked by Dutch journalist Alle Lansu in February 1986 what the message in his writing is, Marechera replies:
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thoughts of their own. I would like people to stop thinking in an
institutionalized way. If they stop thinking like that and look in the mirror, they will see how beautiful they are and see those impossibilities within themselves, emotionally and intellectually – that’s why most of what I have written is always seen as being disruptive or destructive. For me, that slow brain death I was talking about can only be cured by this kind of literary shock treatment (Veit-Wild, “Source Book” 40-1).
Hence it is precisely this “literary shock treatment” which this essay turns to now. Moreover, since it is evident from the quote above that Marechera does not want the reader to take anything in his text for granted, the following close reading will focus only on a few scenes in the novella. The scenes are chosen in such a way as to expose the unheimlich or “unhomeliness”, and what better place to begin than in the narrator’s own home, his first House of Hunger, as it were? Here, the narrator seems to find escape from wanton violence in erudition which, in turn, provokes resentment from his family as well as shame in himself. His brother calls him “bookshit” (15) before he hits him, and then the narrative breaks, suddenly switching to a scene which takes place almost a decade earlier when his mother beats him for speaking to her in English (24). As an interlude in this break, the narrator laments, “[t]he House has now become my mind; and I do not like the way the roof is rattling” (24).
The narrator lives in Vengere township, a former detention camp for suspected Nazi collaborators during the second world war turned urban resettlement for blacks fleeing the rural areas in droves in order to find employment (Veit-Wild, “Source Book” 6). A place, which was, according to Marechera in an interview, “full of sex and
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from the nearby public toilet […] humming Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ […] an almost perfect photograph of the human condition” (21) also disrupts the narrative at points where this scatological metaphor appears to be a double criticism.
Not only does it seem to be a first footprint of the “unhomeliness” this essay hopes to trace in the novella in that it implicitly marks the irreverence the narrator harbors for his surroundings, but also the literary war he wages against socialist realism. If a reader is irritated by the profanity of this image, it might be apt to mention that in Vengere there are no private toilets. Thus, all members of the township actually share a filthy private space in common, a latrine, which at once represents “everything which should remain hidden but has come to light” – the epitome of the “unhome”.
The flies buzzing around the filth to the tune of Handel, arguably reveling in delight at their meal, strengthen this “aesthetic of vulgarity” described by Esty (1999) in “Excremental Postcolonialsm” as typical of Achille Mbembe’s description of political conditions in the postcolony. To put it differently, this township or “unhome” appears to be an indictment of any claims white settlers make to cultural supremacy since its unsanitary conditions are not worthy of human habitation. It is also the site of nightly incarceration of forced African labor and, as such, the embodiment of a hypocritical and failed European culture.
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complacency when the narrator’s brother farts “long and loudly” at the same time as he is cursing about “capitalists and imperialists” (20) to which the narrator adds, “‘And the bloody whites’ […] for this trinity was for him the thing that held the House of Hunger in a stinking grip” (20).
So too is it possible to see how the narrator is a “psychological refugee” (Tyson 421) being neither at home where he grows up, nor being at home in his own mind. This is the second stage of “unhomeliness” whereby the narrator implicitly acknowledges this refugee status with the assertion: “I was all mixed up” (17). In the novella, he proceeds to tear up his schoolbooks as a boy in remorse and stubborn self-recrimination because he is presumably mortified by the fact that he did not immediately realize how the English language had both taken over his mind as well as alienated him from those he loves (25). There follows an arguably lewdly masochistic scene where the nine-year-old narrator refuses dinner and instead watches his mother salaciously devour the meal (25):
And she began eating it right there, with loud smacks. I watched her in silence. She made me so hungry I could have strung myself up from the roofbeams. When she finished she actually licked the plate with her red tongue and licked each of her fingers in turn and gave a little belch of delight. It made my soul tear suddenly like the old cloth in the Temple. And the room seemed to move – but it was me getting to my feet.
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instantiate the narrator’s splintering identity. In other words, when he notices that he can no longer be his whole self with his mother, but rather a single acceptable version, the narrator is then forced to generate and manage another identity for purposes of nothing short of psychological survival. This flexibility or “soul tearing” as quoted above suggests a rite of passage into the hybridity of the postcolonial identity in The House of
Hunger.
The other aspect of this scene which can be considered to stem from the “unhomely” is the reaction of the narrator after being brutalized by his mother. The turning inward of his destructive desire seems redolent of a Freudian death drive or as the narrator describes it: “The freedom we craved for – as one craves for dagga, or beer, or cigarettes or the after-life [emphasis added]” (13). Here the narrator seems to allude to the death drive or Thanatos as an inversion or even possibly a perversion of freedom.
As it relates to the scene with his mother, this lack of freedom to speak English as part of an authentic version of himself appears to generate a fissure, an unbridgeable gap in his sense of identity which needs to be filled. As Tyson (2006) puts it: “This feeling of being caught between two cultures, of belonging to neither, rather than to both, of finding oneself arrested in a psychological limbo that results not merely from some psychological disorder but from the trauma of cultural displacement […] [is] referred to by Bhabha and others as ‘unhomeliness’” (421). Thus, it is arguably this “psychological limbo” which seems to be the actual dwelling place of the narrator.
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metaphorically as a disorientation in which he finds himself within his mind, as if the world is out of sync with his own version of it, only to realize that it is he who is out of sync with the world or simply his surroundings. This heady state also suggests a certain rush of relief in the sudden shift in perspective because it enables him to see that he is actually the one in control. Put differently, it is this off-kilter, decentered perspective, as it were, which is front and center in the narrator’s experience. To press the point further, it is the unheimlich or that which should not come to the fore which consequently becomes the core of the narrative.
Now, turning to the matter of state-sponsored violence in the context of the
unheimlich or “unhomeliness”, which is the last stage under analysis. At this time, it
must be reiterated that Rhodesia is a state at war. And as such, on the surface it may seem surprising to a reader familiar with the history of this war that Marechera brings up state-sponsored violence only obliquely, one could even say, almost incidentally within the narrative. With the exception of one scene in the title novella (90-91), the violence that is described at all levels of society in the novella – be it domestic (14, 24, 26, 63, 95), rape (65) or retaliatory violence for rape (69-71, 93), political (39, 47, 49) or state-sponsored violence (73) – all these different types of violence may be
characterized as primarily black bodies brutalizing other black bodies. The only exception may thus not even qualify as such since it is a crazed student mob of white supremacist zealots who beat both the narrator and his white girlfriend, Patricia, to within an inch of their lives (90-91) and can therefore also be seen as white-on-white violence.
However, upon closer scrutiny, this seems typical for Marechera because he presumably knows what kind of literature is more likely to be welcomed of a black writer at the height of international anti-Rhodesian sentiment in the late 1970s.
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the trickle-down effects of state-sponsored violence in the everyday lives of blacks living in the slums and ghettos of Rhodesia like Vengere township in Rusape where he is born and grows up – The House of Hunger.
Indeed, he writes on the very first page that “no-one could in future blame their
soul hunger on anybody else […] and when the black policemen paraded and saluted beneath the flag and the black clerk of the township sauntered casually towards the Lager trucks and a group of schoolchildren in khakhi and green ran like hell towards the grey school as the bell rung I felt I was reviewing all the details of the foul turd which my life had been” (11). This quote possibly frames the institutionalized manner of domination that the white-settler colonies implement in order to make the indigenous people collusive in their own colonization.
Because the slums are segregated from the white part of town, it is the blacks who trap themselves in a kind of Foucault-like panopticism. The perverse nature of this inversion of natural law or sense of justice or even human decency thus seems aptly encapsulated in the narrator’s recurring image of “the turd” which is arguably as succinct as it is profane. However, from Foucault’s perspective, this can be more thoroughly studied as “the panoptic modality of power” or “counterlaw [which has] the precise role of introducing insuperable asymmetries and excluding reciprocities […] [by] the way in which it is imposed, the mechanisms it brings into play, the non-reversible subordination of one group of people by another, the ‘surplus’ power that is always fixed on the same side” (212).
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image of “black policemen” (11) parading and saluting the flag, or the black
schoolchildren in brightly colored uniforms “running like hell” (11) to get to their drab-looking school. Indeed, they probably do this in an attempt to get good grades so they too may scale the restricted heights of a social ladder where the summit consists of similarly being either “black clerks” (11) or black policemen who continue the dubious privilege of administering to their own subservience. This is therefore considered by the narrator as a sickening vicious cycle in which he himself still participates. “You hate being black” (59), the narrator is accused by his current girlfriend Julia, to which he tellingly has no reply. Hence the arguably appropriate and “unhomely” image of the turd.
However, to all intents and purposes, there is a full-blown war ongoing where blacks are being killed by whites en masse. And this is not merely a conventional war but one which can rather be characterized as guerrilla warfare since the African nationalists are unable to meet the powerful Rhodesian forces technologically on an equal footing. The reason for this is two-fold. Firstly, the Rhodesian forces consist of a cadre of elite soldiers and pilots, most of whom are decorated veterans of the second world war and who subsequently emigrate to Rhodesia after having trained there and, in so doing, more than double the pre-war white population (Vickers 425).
And secondly, since Rhodesia is landlocked and only Zambia has gained its independence by this time in the region, the freedom fighters find themselves not only surrounded by enemy territory but are also unable to establish a foothold within the country (de Boers 36). In fact, some might describe the first decade of insurgency between 1966 and 1976 as a lost cause for the guerrilla fighters. Moreover, according to de Boer’s 2011 article entitled “Rhodesia’s Approach to Counterinsurgency – A
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Thus, couched within this historical context, the reader is able to grasp the “unhomely” horror the narrator probably feels when he discovers a photograph of his former schoolmate turned guerrilla, Edmund, in a Rhodesian newspaper (76). Because the newspaper shows “twenty-two dead guerrillas laid out for display and in the center of them stood the ‘prisoner’, a dead-looking youth staring morosely at the camera” (76), it is clear at this stage in the war that Edmund, despite being captured alive, will
probably soon be murdered (since the Rhodesians are not known to take prisoners). This scene brings the essay now to the final stage of exploration of unheimlich or
“unhomeliness” in the narrator’s home country since the Edmund tragedy seems to be simultaneously a projection of the narrator’s own “unhomeliness.”
The origins of Edmund’s tragedy appear to be located by the narrator in his own childhood twin tragedy of a father dying “of alcoholic poisoning after a fantastic night out on the town with my father” (77) and a mother who opts for prostitution rather than destitution (77). The fact that Edmund’s father dies as a consequence of alcohol
addiction which culminates in a last drunk with the narrator’s own deceased father is a first sign of the narrator projecting a version of his own fractured identity into his fictional friend’s fate. This is compounded by the assertion that it is Edmund’s mother who turns to prostitution upon unexpectedly becoming a widow in order to continue supporting her family since Marechera’s mother allegedly does the same thing (Veit-Wild, “Memoir” 11).
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in the novella. However, the unheimlich or “unhomeliness” is revealed in precisely Edmund’s narrative because of the fact that Marechera is probably too afraid to face the shame he himself felt when his own mother is forced into prostitution in order to send him and his eight siblings to school, an occupation for which the writer allegedly “never forgave” her (Veit-Wild, “Memoir” 11).
Thus, there appears to be several hidden layers of unheimlich or “unhomeliness” in this scene which this essay seeks to trace. On one level of this analysis, there appears a binarism of love/hate for a maternal figure who is both mother and a whore. This is a predictable binarism at par with right and wrong which, however, seems to also set up the doppelganger for failure. It is at once Marechera criticizing himself as well as excusing himself for not having actively joined the liberation war on the side of the guerilla fighters. One may see this in the fact that not only does Edmund’s story, as a narrative, stay true to the facts of what happens to Marechera’s own parents, but the similarities between the two do not end there.
Edmund is also an avid bookworm, who loves Russian literature (Marechera 77-8) like Marechera himself does. And like Marechera, Edmund’s character “wanted to write. He had actually written dozens of novels (all unfinished) and short stories (all unfinished) whose stories alternated between the painstaking exploration of the effects of poverty and destitution on the ‘psyche’” (78). From this, it can therefore be surmised that the narrator himself explores what could have happened if he had acted as Edmund subsequently does and ended up joining the armed liberation struggle. This is in itself the “unhomeliness”, the revelation of the narrator’s deep-seated fear – not of death per se since this essay has already conjectured that the narrator does have a death drive.
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backdrop of this superficial similarity between Marechera and his doppelganger Edmund, that the narrative bifurcates into the violent scene which unfolds. It is almost as if the character of Edmund splits from Marechera on account of his being
preprogrammed to fall into the trap of simple black or white thinking, eventually leading to his downfall. The narrator describes Edmund as going into battle against his opponent with such myopic single-mindedness despite his very slim odds of winning: “Edmund had set his face towards Jerusalem; […] A strange fatalism seemed to have aged him. ‘What else is there?’ he asked” (82).
Thus, the fight scene occurs because Edmund is provoked into a fight with his nemesis Stephen who “one day let it be known that Edmund’s mother was a ‘common drunken whore’” (81). In response, the “small, undernourished and extremely poor” (77) Edmund challenges Stephen – the “typical African bully” (80) – to a fight. This, however, produces some hilarity from everyone in earshot (81) because it seems
immediately obvious from the difference in stature of the two hostile boys that Edmund is doomed to lose. As is evident from photographs of the author, Marechera is also scrawny looking.
Similarly, in this agon, it must therefore also be inferred that Stephen represents the narrator’s nemesis as well since he appears to have opposite views on literature as those championed by Marechera and previously reported in this essay. Stephen is, in comparison, “an avid reader of the Heinemann African Writers Series [who] firmly believed that there was something peculiarly African in anything written by an African and said therefore European tools of criticism should not be used in the analysis of ‘African literature’” (80). As an aside, it might also be of interest to note that
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That being said, the narrator considers that the “Edmund-Stephen fight was the most talked-about event the year it happened. It even outclassed Smith’s UDI” (80). And this is because the fight appears to not simply be about two boys beating each other on school premises, but it is simultaneously representative of the proxy ideological war between communism and capitalism being waged between guerrilla fighters and Rhodesian forces at the time.
Yet, this David and Goliath trope appears to also bifurcate in that it includes an allegory for “the military wings of two political parties, ZANU and ZAPU, who both claimed to legitimately represent the people of Zimbabwe” (Taitz 38). Therefore, this fight traces “unhomeliness” in the way it separates multiple dualities of good/evil or African/un-African all the way through to colonizer/colonized. This final
“unhomeliness” reveals how the narrator is fearful of the brutal in-fighting between potential African nationalist allies against the Rhodesians which some critics have called prophetic in light of continued tribal conflict in Zimbabwe today.
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4. Conclusion
In conclusion, this essay finds criticism levelled at Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987) for being “un-African” due to his distinctive use of the English language to be
unfounded. After having delved into the debate about whether an African writer should use their native language, this essay posits that the winning argument falls to those, like Marechera, who claim English as their own. Indeed, it is Marechera’s violent
annexation of the English language – which he coins “literary shock treatment” – that sets him apart as an aggressively anarchic figure. However, he is also considered by many to be a prophetic voice who vehemently refuses any kind of political agenda to form the basis of his writing. Marechera simply claims the English language by way of syncretism because he believes that a dynamic exchange between Europe and Africa should form the foundation for fruitful postcolonial writing. Nonetheless, upon closer examination, Marechera’s stance may be linked to what Homi Bhabha refers to in The
Location of Culture as “unhomeliness” stemming from the violent trauma of cultural
dislocation prevalent in the postcolonial era. Moreover, the feeling of being “unhomed” is not found to refer to a state of homelessness per se but rather to a state of permanent internal exile irrespective of the “home” one currently occupies. This essay therefore uses a close reading to uncover specific states of the unheimlich which lay bare
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