Dambudzo Marechera writes again to Samantha...

                               
 

     Dear Samantha

This is a deathbed epistle! Conversely, it is some kind of postscript. With sheer hindsight, I dwell on my impending death and what will happen after I am gone. The grime. The cheap and sordid details. Telling it all as if I had never died in the first place. Fasten your belt. Which of you two bastards is death?

 

In our culture they say, if you meditate long enough, you may eavesdrop into key events that will take place long after you are gone. Do you also have it in your culture?

 

The Shona mbira player is often a seer. Sometimes he wails, “Ndakanga Ndabaiwa! Ndakanga ndabaiwa! Hoyi hoyi!” Singing about that kaleidoscopic view of what takes place long after you have expired. Those kind of cheap and sordid details which are the channels through which the universe flows.

Sometimes you are allowed to gawk at your crestfallen doppelganger. There are lots of opinions about how long a departed soul remains in contact with loved ones and foes. Death does not kill, our people often muse, as they pass on the calabash of chibuku from one hand to the other, while sitting beneath the tall msasa tree whose branches scrape the corrugated iron roofs.

 

Yes, which of you two bastards is death? I am serious. Samantha, I am not hallucinating. By the time you read this letter, I could be six feet under. Right now, I am writing from a hospital bed in Zimbabwe. But when you read this piece in the future, these things will be happening exactly as I give them now. What is time but a revolving grenade, searching for a target who has since moved on!

 

It is strange how the thought of death both scares and emboldens me. However, I can say, like Dylan Thomas, I don’t want to go gently into the night. Like that poet with a tortured soul, I have also acquired a reputation as a "roistering, drunken and doomed poet." And there will be no silence in the cemetery because always there are burials and more burials of people.

 

But look, Samantha, here I am, raging, raging… against the dying of the light! To understand Dambudzo Marechera or any other writer for that matter, you first have to know his background, experience and influences.  I do not consider influences pernicious: they are a type of apprenticeship.

From early in my life, I have always viewed literature as a unique universe that has no internal divisions. I do not pigeon-hole literature by race or language or nation. It is an ideal cosmos co-existing with this crude one. I had a rather grim upbringing in the ghetto and have ever since tried to deny the painful reality of concrete history.

I have psychoanalysed myself because I don’t think anybody else can even come an inch to understanding who I am. Forget about what critics, friends, psychiatrists and even my relatives say about me.

 

I am surprised how literary critics trouble themselves trying to unravel the meaning of a writer’s work instead of first studying the writer. The degree of pain may differ but the torturer’s technique is the same. We are not at the beginning, we are at the end-we are at the mid-point of the scream, the eye of the storm.

 

They say Dambudzo loves white women, Dambudzo likes his bottle, Dambudzo this Dambudzo that! Am I really this Rasputin or black Cassanova they invent who is always hungry for white pussy? It is more complicated than that. And by the way, what I write about sex is largely from my extensive reading on sex than my own experience.

 

To understand me, go back with me on the horrid journey back to the slums of my boyhood. My life there formed in me the sharp contrast of wretched black decay and white paradise that I saw at the University when I first started encountering whites first hand.

 

This was worsened by my mother resorting to prostitution to feed us in the absence of our father. My love for white women is just a tolerable alternative to sleeping with black women since whenever I sleep with my own kind, I feel like I am sleeping with my mother!

 

Incest.

 

Imagine hearing sobbing sounds from your mother in the next room and getting a hard on! I remember one regular lover, some clerk in Smith’s government who used to leave a lot of money and foodstuffs like bread, butter, eggs and Mazoe… visiting our house one day and asking me if my mother was around. If only he knew the murderous demons that were brewing in my chest, he could have run away. Run boy run, like Shimmer Chinodya was going to write in some Zibf script writing competition. I could have killed the bastard body and soul. I could have crushed him to a stain.

I was shaking.

 

Well, I lied that my mother had gone out. Unfortunately, my mother, who was in the kitchen heard me and came out of the house to reprimand me for lying before retiring to the bedroom with that horny rascal. I had a strong temptation to creep back to the house, get a butcher knife from the kitchen and kill both of them. Instead, I had chosen to go out and cry.

 

I had read about the Yorkshire killer Pete Sutcliffe who, like me, had heard voices while working as a gravedigger. He claimed the voices originated from the headstone of a Polish man, Bronisław Zapolski, and that the voices were that of God. Sutcliffe pleaded guilty to seven charges of attempted murder. Despite my voices being indecipherable unlike Sutcliffe’s voices that ordered him to kill prostitutes, I knew their source.

 

For Sutcliffe, all women were whores and it was only his “perfect” mother who lived up to his warped ideal of womanhood but even that illusion was shattered when her secret extramarital affair was revealed.

 

To me my mother was chaste, a Madona figure up to the time my father died when she became a harlot. Despite the circumstances, I found it impossible to accept and hated her with a passion.

 

I remember the first time I lost my virginity shouting Venezia, my mother’s name and withdrawing my dick just after several thrusts. The woman I was making love to pulled me back, surprised at my action. She didn’t realise that she was making the same sobbing sounds I had heard from my mother’s bedroom when her numerous lovers visited. I felt like I was making love to my mother! Thought is more fatal than bilharzia.

 

Somehow I identify with Malcolm X’s relationship with Sophia, a "Negro-crazy" white woman in the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Because of Sophia, Malcolm jilted Laura — because Sophia was more of a status symbol than his black girl. I eventually jilted all black women for my white Sophias, Samanthas and Floras. Either the relationships with black girls was short and unromantic or they brought a feeling of immense guilt.

 

Samantha, there is the other equally formative experience that together with my sexual memories would make people come close to understanding me.

 

Towards 1969 or sometime in the early 70s, I am not sure when, my grandmother, who was accused of being a witch and left in the bush to die a slow painful death sometime in the 1890s started haunting the family to find a host to live in. Dying the way she had died in such a gruesome manner meant that her spirit never rested and came back to haunt my mother who lost her mind.

 

She just lost it the same way I somehow did when the same spirit entered me birthing the Dambudzo the world knew and respected or despised in equal measure.

 

My mother’s madness I am told caused so much despair that when she sought advice from a witchdoctor, he told her that she could only get rid of the mental illness by passing it on to one of her children.

 

She did not choose my eldest brother Lovemore, because he was her favourite. Neither did she choose my other brother Michael because he was named after a powerful ancestor whose spirit would protect him from such things.

 

The bitch chose me instead.

 

You remember Samantha how that tarot reader at an Oxford fair reacted when we went into her tent. She hysterically asked us to leave complaining that I was going to disrupt her energies because I had a more powerful spirit than hers. You laughed it off as mere superstition but I knew better.

 

The spirit that possesses me is the Dambudzo Marechera the world knows. The innocent boy Charles died many years ago to be replaced with a disruptive, bohemian, bellicose and wayward being.

 

Throughout my life, I have secretly been connected to this spiritual realm. The contact is devastating and oppressive. What people see are only results of this relationship emanating from the spirit that has possessed me. That is why in my works, I have explored madness, dreams and day-dreams, abnormal states of mind and all kinds of erratic inclinations.

 

Do you remember at Oxford, how I continuously played music by the Doors especially the song Light My Fire long before I discovered that the band’s frontman Jim Morrison was a shaman like me. Like me, Morrison was called to play a particular role in life before being called to the other world at an early age.

 

Jim's experience on the New Mexico highway as a five-year-old is an excellent example of this type of "calling" experience. And while his family stated that they did not recall the event, this in no way negates its authenticity.

 

While driving from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, the family came upon an overturned truck. Beside the truck, and scattered along the highway, were numerous passengers, one of whom was a Medicine Man who was in the process of passing into spirit.

 

Throughout his life, Jim could vividly recall the spirit of this shaman entering his own body when he died. This was the initial calling and meeting with his guide, according to tradition.

With me my guide is the spirit of my grandmother who was left in the bush to die and could not rest till it found home in a family member who happened to be my mother and later me. Since being hospitalised, I am more aware of who I am.

I contain different characters what you people call dissociative identity disorder or multiple personality disorder, a mental health condition where you have two or more separate personalities that control your behaviour at different times.

I know the sources of my personality; my grandmother’s spirit and sexual disorientation-driven Dambudzo that is the strongest and most dominant of my character. The other me is humble, shy, cowardly and peaceful. It is this me that has come out to reclaim its place as I lie dying in the hospital ward waiting my fate.

What many people saw in public and in my writing is a masquerade that belied the true image of the Dambudzo that is unadulterated by my experience in Rusape and the spirit that is coming to claim me the same way my grandmother was violently claimed.

When the Oxford college authorities earlier offered me the choice of a treatment or expulsion, I agreed to see the psychiatrists at the Warneford Mental Hospital, where the doctors concluded that I was not mentally ill, and instead suggested counselling.

I did not take up the offer because I knew the Dambudzo they wanted to treat and what ailed him. It was not an illness that any psychiatrist could diagnose. That was long before I finally took my things and left.

Like I have stated before, Samantha, the other me is craven and peaceful. The other side of me that you and others saw so frequently was a cover-up.

This reminds me of the collective courage you see in soldiers especially in battle. The masochism you see is usually borrowed courage expressed by singing and pretending to be brave.

My cousin who fought in the second Chimurenga where a number of his colleagues had earlier been killed told me a story of a very macho and outwardly valiant commander who barked his commands at everyone and meted out punishment at the slightest misdemeanor.

One day, when the group of soldiers was about to go out for some operation following an earlier heavy loss of his colleagues, my cousin went into the commander’s office to report something. To his surprise he caught a tearful commander praying with a picture of his daughter and a Bible clutched to his chest.

Don’t forget that cowards are pretty consistent in their cowardice. They can sometimes do something brave. The truth is if you put a courageous person next to a coward, the coward will become less scared.

However, it is possible that the coward is just acting brave because he is afraid of the consequences of having a braver person witnessing his cowardice.

For me my audience was society comprising anyone in authority. Later it was literary critics, Zimbabweans at home, my family members, university students and of course the white populace, the latter group where I sought validation.

I can confess that my experience at my first contact with whites did not just provoke protest against their racism but a strange craving for anything white and a loathing for anything black.

In America, I could have right come out as some Uncle Tom, which I am inwardly, but because of fear of being shunned by the so-called progressive Africans, I have always tried to fit in as some revolutionary leftist unhappy with the status quo of white dominance. It is as a result of this loathing that I come out loving white girls and shunning my black women because of what is perceived as my shameful Shona heritage.

I was like Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. He is a coward inwardly but pretends to be brave just to be accepted in the Ibo society that valued bravery over cowardice.

In that vein I regret how I treated a fellow writer Aaron Moyo who writes in Shona when we went to a book function at a township school some years back after my return to Zimbabwe. His inimitable Shone novel, Ziva Kwawakabava was still hot from the oven and the brother was having his time in the sun. A friend had shown it to me in London and I read it all, catching the smell of my own mother's armpits in every line.

People appear to recall that I once shouted at Aaron, “Take him out; he is not a writer, he is a munyori!”

It was at a writer’s event in good old Harare. “Uri munyori iwe, not a writer!” they say I thundered.

I am a writer in the English sense and Moyo is a writer in the African sense since he writes in our native tongue. He must fully embrace the term munyori in order to promote the language that he writes in. Is that not accurate? I wanted to horsewhip Aaron for appearing to hesitate to take the munyori label!

The cases of Charles Mungoshi, Chenjerai Hove and Musa Zimunya and others, who write both in English and Shona and winning awards always left me envious. Was my soul spinning? There are writers like Dostoevsky, who only wrote in Russian but the sheer power of his art sent all translators rushing around like mad, translating his works into many world languages. 

Garcia Marquez’s most successful work as a writer is the long and expansive Spanish language novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude which became a huge success in the years after its publication in 1967, selling more than 10 million copies in more than 30 languages! It made Márquez a leader of the Latin American literary "boom" and an international phenomenon.

My own The House of Hunger would really look shit in Shona, Twi, Amharic, Kiswahili, Zulu and other African languages if translators out there had guts!

Bless Tinashe Mchuri and others for finally rendering Animal Farm into Shona. Who could have imagined such a miracle in our days except perhaps Ngugi Wa Thiongo himself? And to think that guy Ignatius Mabasa has written a whole PhD thesis in Shona! What a coup! Language is like water. You can drink it. You can swim in it. You can drown in it.

All that makes Aaron Chiundura Moyo a pathfinder! When will his Ziva Kwawakabva burst into other languages beyond Shona? God, where are our translators?

The munyori incident reminds me of a comedian I saw at some show in Harare. The comedian sent the audience laughing by juxtaposing African names with European ones. He said the mangy dogs you saw in townships were imbwa-dog in Shona, while those well-fed dogs one saw in white suburbs were ‘dogs.’

He went on to say that the uncle from townships or villages who came to social function in urban areas were sekurus while those who drove cars and had acquired western education were ‘Uncles.’ He went on to give parallels of African and western things to the delight of the audience.

Some people have begun to wonder if I ever wrote in my mother tongue, Shona. However, I did write in Shona even when people rarely talk about it. I have written a Shona play ‘The Servants’ Ball and it is a sequel to ‘The Toilet.’ Don’t faint. It is real.

It is not difficult to place the play ‘The Servants’ Ball.’ Other than being in Shona, it is in the mode of my Mindblast plays like ‘The Toilet’, ‘The Coup’, ‘The Gap’ and several others which satirise the new African elite and the local and international white racist and corrupt associates for not showing responsibility in their exercise of power and business. It is written in scintillating, Chiungwe, the dialect dominant in my Rusape district in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Province. ‘The Servants’ Ball’, like the Mindblast plays, is an attack on the corruption of the newly-independent Zimbabwean society.

Various scenarios seem to have driven home the idea that I would never write in Shona. In an ‘interview’ with Veit-Wild in which I interview myself in 1983, I declare my relationship with the Shona language. I had asked myself if I had ever thought of writing in Shona. I answer: “It never occurred to me. Shona was part of the ghetto daemon I was trying to escape. Shona had been placed within the context of a degraded, mind-wrenching experience from which apparently the only escape was into the English language and education…I took to the English language as a duck takes to water…”

 

However, earlier on, on 6 May 1982, I did put my so-called diatribe against Shona into context. I am quoted by Veit Wild as having said:

“In Zimbabwe we have these two great indigenous languages, ChiShona and SiNdebele… Who wants us to keep writing these ShitShona and ShitNdebele languages, this missionary chickenshit? Who else but the imperialists?”

 

Here, I was simply putting forward the argument that the kind of Shona and Ndebele narratives churned out from the 1950’s to 1980, were heavily manipulated by the establishment through the Southern Rhodesian Literature Bureau.

 

A study on this matter reveals that the bureau was created in 1956 as part of the Ministry of Information. Its salient objective was to direct the novel along ‘the path of least ideological resistance to the Rhodesian government.’

 

Its founding director, a Mr Krog, set out to search for subversive material in every manuscript before it was published. This was counterproductive to the development of the novel in Shona and Ndebele rendering it generally “silent on contemporary socio-political crises” and “having characters who are neutral on colonial economic policies.”

 

This saw the development of a fiction dabbling in stereotypes based on idealistic morality and caused ‘a dearth of exploratory historical fiction.

 

As I watch Zimbabwe degenerate into a failed state just like Nigeria, Congo DRC and Somali under Mugabe’s dictatorship, I have realised that maybe I have been too hard on this regime. I have acted like a strict father trying to control his child who has a learning disability.

 

Well, Africans have their own way of doing things inherent in their DNA. Imposing westernisation on them is like expecting a dog not to bark. I say this knowing how most western interventions fail to sprout on African soil.

 

Oh Samantha, I have to end here, I have started feeling nauseous, feverish and a little bit dizzy. I wish to die during the day. Nights are nightmarish with unbearable spiritual visitations that I cannot stand.

 

Remember in our class how I loved quoting Dylan Thomas. He is even more relevant now since I am asking myself whether it is right to surrender to death, or to resist it.

 

Yours faithfully, Charles.

+ Austin Kaluba is a Zambian journalist, poet and short story writer. He is the author of the epistolary short story "Dambudzo Writes to Samantha" that went viral especially in Zimbabwe. Many Zimbabweans believed it was written by Dambudzo himself because of the similarity of the language Kaluba employed and that of the late writer. Kaluba has turned the Marecherean writing methods into a stand alone art form. Kaluba who also lived in Oxford and frequented some social joints where Dambudzo used to hang out after being expelled from the university, has been a keen follower of the troubled writer as evidenced by this sequel to Dambudzo Writes to Samantha. Here he unravels Dambudzo's troubled background especially after his father died and the family secret of a grandmother haunting the family for a host and the many things that have taken place ever since Dambudzo's death....

+Dambudzo Marechera pic by Ernest Schade