Dambudzo Marechera The House Of Hunger Pdf
Marechera’s debut is as much a product of being down and out in Oxford, sleeping rough, being beaten up by thugs and policeman alike and struggling with alcoholism, as it is of the Rhodesia it describes. Marechera studied at Oxford and dressed like a dandy affecting a posh English accent, yet drank and fought outside pubs and railed against the authority of his professors. Forever an outsider, extrovert and trouble maker the tough years spent homeless after being diagnosed with schizophrenic together with his poverty stricken township childhood combined to inform the searing brutality of the semi-autobiographical.
The ‘hunger’ of the book’s title does not refer only to the literal starvation which was ravaging post-independent at the time. Rather it implies a more far reaching and metaphorical hunger of the soul – the vacuous yearning and emptiness within the national consciousness, aspiring for more but held back by poverty and corruption. The cynical and satirical vision of humanity exhibited within the book, is sadly a product of the world he saw around him.
Equally, the book’s instant acclaim (he won the 1979 Guardian prize for First Fiction award) propelled him into the world of literary celebrity but rather than saving him, his spiral of self destruction continued and he saw nothing but hypocrisy in the celebration of his own work. Though such destructive and alarming cynicism is obviously tragic and disturbing within so young and talented a man, it is what fuels the narrative of. Previous literary output from had been fairly conservative and writing as brave and avant-garde as Marechera’s had not yet been seen, nor was replicated with such strength by the many young writers who attempted to take up his mantle when he died. His style is characterized by anger and an aversion to all forms of authority, including that of narrative control which lends weight to his experimental prose nature, as does the tragedy of his restless and explosive life story.
I first encountered Dambudzo Marechera at an out of way boarding school in the farming district of Selous in Mashonaland west province in Zimbabwe. I was 14 years old. Our small school library had a full collection of all Marechera books. Download strike fighters 2 thunderbirds. The House of Hunger was the first book I read. I vividly remember moments I would. This paper analyses three works of art namely 'House of Hunger', 'The Black Insider' and 'Mindblast' by one of Zimbabwe's most famous, talented and controversial authors, Dambudzo Marechera, using mainly psychoanalytic tools of inquiry. The aforementioned works of fiction have been carefully chosen to sample the. Dambudzo Marechera was a Zimbabwean novelist, short story writer, playwright and poet. His short career produced a book of stories, two novels, a book of plays, prose, and poetry, and a collection of poetry.
Dambudzo Marechera Born Charles William Dambudzo Marechera ( 1952-06-04)4 June 1952, (then known as Southern Rhodesia) Died 18 August 1987 ( 1987-08-18) (aged 35) Cause of death Nationality Alma mater (expelled) (expelled) Occupation Writer Notable work Dambudzo Marechera (4 June 1952 – 18 August 1987) was a, short story writer, playwright and poet. His short career produced a book of stories, two novels (one published posthumously), a book of plays, prose, and poetry, and a collection of poetry (also posthumous). Contents.
Early life Charles William Dambudzo Marechera was born in Vhengere Township, (then known as Southern Rhodesia), to Isaac Marechera, a mortuary attendant, and Masvotwa Venenzia Marechera, a maid. In his 1978 book, and in interviews, Marechera often falsely suggests that his father was either run over by 'a 20th century train' or 'came home with a knife sticking from his back' or 'was found in the hospital mortuary with his body riddled with bullets'. Such incorrect accounts may be part of Marechera's penchant to revise even the 'facts' of his own life. German researcher Flora-Veit Wild seems to give too much weight to an account given by Marechera's older brother, Michael, about the destructive element in the younger Marechera's life. Michael suggests that Dambudzo was a victim of their mother's, implying that he was cursed in some way.
Interestingly, when Marechera returned from London and was made writer-in-residency at the, his mother and sisters attempted to come and meet him but he rejected them offhand, accusing the mother of trying to kill him. Still, it is known that Marechera never even made an effort to meet with any member of his family before he died in 1987. He grew up amid racial discrimination, poverty, and violence.
He attended St. Augustine's Mission, where he clashed with his teachers over the colonial teaching syllabus, the University of Rhodesia (now the University of Zimbabwe), from which he was expelled during student unrest, and, where his unsociable behaviour and academic dereliction led to another expulsion. Publishing success and decline His first book, The House of Hunger (1978), is the product of a period of despair following his time. Among the nine stories it contains, the long title story describes the narrator's brutalized childhood and youth in colonial in a style that is emotionally compelling and verbally pyrotechnic. The narrative is characterized by shifts in time and place and a blurring of fantasy and reality. Regarded as signalling a new trend of incisive and visionary African writing, The House of Hunger was awarded the 1979.
Marechera was the first and the only African to have won the Guardian Fiction Prize in its 33 years (it was replaced in 1999 by the ). (1980) has been compared with the writing of and but it did not achieve the critical success of House of Hunger. Loosely structured and stylistically hallucinatory, with erudite digressions on various literary and philosophical points of discussion, Marechera's second book explores the idea of as a formal intellectual position., posthumously published in 1990, is set in a faculty of arts building that offers refuge for a group of intellectuals and artists from an unspecified war outside, which subsequently engulfs them as well. The conversation of the characters centres on African identity and the nature of art, with the protagonist arguing that the African image is merely another chauvinistic figure of authority.
At Oxford University, Marechera struck his professors as a very intelligent but rather anarchic student who had no particular interest in adhering to course syllabi, choosing rather to read whatever struck his fancy. He also had a reputation for being a quarrelsome young man who did not hesitate to fight his antagonists physically, especially in the pubs around Oxford. He began to display erratic behaviour, which may have been a result of excessive drinking or but which the school psychologist diagnosed as. Marechera threatened to murder certain people and attempted to set the university on fire.
He was also famous — or notorious — for having no respect for authority derived from notions of racial or class superiority. For trying to set the college on fire, Marechera was given two options: either to submit to a psychiatric examination or be sent down; he chose the latter, charging that they were mentally raping him. At this point, the trajectory of Marechera's life became troubled, even landing him in a Welsh jail for possession of marijuana. He joined the rootless communities around Oxford and other places, sleeping in friends' sitting-rooms and writing various fictional and poetic pieces on park benches and regularly getting mugged by thugs and terrorized by the police for vagrancy. During this period he also lived for many months in the squatting community at Tolmers Square in central London, and it is believed that this is where he finished writing his first book. It was thus from the combined experiences at the University of Rhodesia, Oxford and vagrancy on the streets of England and Wales that Marechera's most celebrated work, The House of Hunger, emerged. After The House of Hunger was taken on by at and published in their, Marechera became something of an instant celebrity in the literary circles of England.
However, his self-destruct button proved irresistible and he constantly caused outrage. At the buffet dinner for the award of the 1979 Guardian Fiction Prize to him for House of Hunger, in a tantrum Marechera memorably began to launch plates at a chandelier. Nevertheless, offered him a position as writer-in-residence - something that Marechera liked to misrepresent as a professorship, though this may have been part of his eccentric tendency to have several narratives for virtually everything about himself.
It seems that Marechera thought the British publishing establishment was ripping him off, so he resorted to raiding the Heinemann offices at odd times to ask for his royalties. Still, he lived in dire poverty and his physical health suffered greatly because he did not eat enough and drank too much. Friends, fellow Zimbabwean students such as (a poet in his own right), Rino Zhuwarara, (another gifted writer) and mere casual friends were all suspected by Marechera of being involved in his many troubles even when they acted in good faith. In the end he hung around with the down-and-outs who lived on the fringes of the literary establishment, barging into parties and generally getting into trouble and more than once, being bailed out by Currey. To complicate matters, many Africans, including fellow Zimbabwean students, did not feel Marechera was helping his cause by putting on airs, affecting an upper-class English accent and having an eccentric sense of dress. For his disruptive behaviour, he was regularly thrown out of the, the cultural meeting-place in London's for African and Afrocentric scholars and students.
Dambudzo Marechera House Of Hunger Pdf
Some accounts suggest that Marechera married a British woman but not much is known about the union. Return to Zimbabwe and final years Marechera returned to the newly independent Zimbabwe in 1982 to assist in shooting the film of House of Hunger. However, he fell out with the director and remained behind in Zimbabwe when the crew left, leading a homeless existence in before his death there five years later, from an -related pulmonary disorder, aged 35. (1984) was written the year after his return home and comprises three plays, a prose narrative, a collection of poems, and a park-bench diary. The book criticizes the materialism, intolerance, opportunism, and corruption of post-independence Zimbabwe, extending the political debate beyond the question of nationalism to embrace genuine social regeneration. The combination of intense self-scrutiny, cogent social criticism, and open, experimental form appealed to a young generation of Zimbabweans, the so-called mindblast generation, who were seeking new ways of perceiving their roles within the emergent nation.
Marechera's poetry was published posthumously under the title (1992). Like his stories, his poems show the influence of modernist writers from and to and, and confirm his proclivity for perceptive social critique, intense self-exploration, and verbal daring. In an interview Marechera said of himself: 'I think I am the doppelganger whom, until I appeared, African literature had not yet met.' This is an accurate assessment of Marechera's role in shocking the reader into looking at himself anew through the eyes of the other. His individualism, literary experimentation, and iconoclasm ensure that his work resists narrow definitions; it is constantly shifting and crossing boundaries. Legacy Dambudzo Marechera remains Zimbabwe's most important cultural product on the creative writing front. Since his death, dozens of younger writers and many of his colleagues have written numerous accounts and biographies detailing his troubled life and works.
In the 1990s, the most prominent were foreigners, especially the German scholar Flora Veit-Wild, who has written both a biography and a sourcebook of Marechera's life and works. What Wild misses dismally is the fact that Marechera edited his own life as he went along. Wild seems to take many of the things she got from Marechera as facts. In an article in magazine in March 2012, Wild replied to the question about why she 'did not write a proper Dambudzo Marechera biography' by saying: 'My answer was that I did not want to collapse his multi-faceted personality into one authoritative narrative but rather let the diverse voices speak for themselves. But this is not the whole truth.
Dambudzo Marechera Quotes
I could not write his life story because my own life was so intricately entangled with his.' She then described in detail her very personal involvement with him over an 18-month period. Bibliography. 1978:. 1980: Black Sunlight. 1984: Mindblast or The Definitive Buddy. 1992: The Black Insider.
1992: Cemetery of Mind. 1994: Scrapiron Blues References.