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Discuss the traumas and anxieties experienced by the characters in Dambudzo Marechera's
'The House of Hunger' in relation to Zimbabwe and Africa's colonial history.

Zimbabwe was relatively late to gain majority rule, Ian Smith initially declared Rhodesia

independent from Britain, forcing ZANU and ZAPU guerillas, in a climate of increasingly

radicalised nationalist resistance, to take to the bush and fight to overthrow the Rhodesian state,

which had subjugated the black population for the last two hundred years. This was the context in

which Dambudzo Marechera, albeit in exile in England, wrote The House of Hunger, which was

first published two years before the end of the Second Chimurenga in 19801. Literature had been

heavily mobilised in the nationalist struggle and encouraged to promote discourses of the nation,

triumph, cultural revival and a unification of black people in the new Zimbabwe, an identity firmly

rooted in the land and in the struggle against the white coloniser. Despite these sentiments,

Marechera's widely acclaimed and hugely successful novel, presents a bleak outlook for the new

nation, plagued by violence, poverty, trauma and the gradual erosion of both the family and the self.

With the historical advantage of seeing the experience of many other African nations gaining

independence Marechera realised that a majority ruled state would be most likely to repeat the

regime of violence employed by colonial powers, rather than act as a force for true equality and

liberation. (Boehmer, 2005. p.254)

Along with other Zimbabwean writers at the time, such as Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi

Dangarembga, his writing aimed to integrate violence and suffering into the collective

consciousness of the new Zimbabwe. Marechera critiques static views of identity, presenting a

chaotic picture of the modern mind, and highlighting the fact that decolonisation is not complete

with the removal of the occupying power, rather, it begins and ends in the minds of the colonised.

Marechera was essentially an anarchist and strove to move beyond any sense of national identity in

his work, which is in essence focused on the universal decay of the modern human condition . He

1 All page numbers refer to the 2005 edition

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was famously quoted as saying, “If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck

you.” (Habila) This book can be read as an act of rebellion against the patriarchal nationalist

narrative that sought to dominate the process of 're-imagining' the new community. The traumas and

anxieties of the characters are indicative of the colonial legacy of alienation, both from ones own

culture and subjection to alien cultures, and the difficulties and necessities of the search for

authentic forms of expression.

The House of Hunger draws the reader inside the mind of an anonymous narrator, whose

experiences and opinions closely mirror those of Marechera. The root cause of a lot of anxieties in

his life is his colonial education, which has left him well-versed in an alien culture, but has led to

feelings of alienation from his own. His success in education is seen to be the cause of his ongoing

malaise, as Peter remarks, “Smith made sure that the kind of education he got was exactly what has

made him like this.” (p.20) The narrator is made to feel self-conscious and nervous by his own

family and responds to this comment by whistling 'little jack horner', highlighting that even in a

childish act of defiance he must still turn to foreign cultural traits. His mental space and

development has been invaded and colonised. At the age of nine he is beaten for accidentally

speaking to his mother in English and destroys his English books in an act of defiance, but he is

forced to borrow new books and continue as this is the only course of 'advancement' available.

(p.25) Later in life he is mocked by his girlfriend Julia for his use of English idioms, “How can a

black person be beaten black and blue?”(p.58) She also accuses him of hating his blackness to

which he responds, “No I don't hate being black. I'm just tired of saying its beautiful.”(p.60) The

narrator is clearly weary of being judged against a socially constructed measure of 'blackness' that

traps him in the confines of race. The expectations of society only serve to deepen the divide that

he is already painfully aware of within himself:

“I was, I knew, a dead tree, dry of branch and decayed in the roots. A tree however that was still
upright in the sullen spleen of the wind. And caught among the gnarled branches were a page from

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Shakespeare's Othello and page one of the Rhodesia Herald with a picture of me glaring angrily at
the camera lens.” (p.31)

This is a stark and lonely image of an alienated self that slowly rots whilst capturing fragments from

two different worlds. He is rooted, as a tree and cannot escape or hide from the barren landscape

that me must endure alone. Marechera makes a lot of use of powerful organic and elemental

imagery throughout the novel, “I was by this creating for myself a labyrinthine personal world

which would merely enmesh me with its crude mythology. That I could not bear a star, a stone, a

flame, a river, or a cupful of air was because they all seemed to have a significance irrevocably not

my own.” (p.17) He is alluding to the hijacking of meaning as a result of mental colonisation and

the necessity of the search for authentic meaning. The language of the elements produces a sense of

non being, a prominent anxiety that is linked to the modern condition. However, perhaps the

repeated use of organic images is an appeal to use nature, the land, and associated spirituality, as a

starting point for people attempting to place themselves as opposed to political rhetoric.

The traumas associated with his divided identity increase throughout the book, “When I

talked it was in the form of an interminable argument, one side of which was always expressed in

English and the other side always in Shona. At the same time I would be aware of myself as

something indistinct but separate from both cultures.” (p.43) His mind is a chaotic place seemingly

at war with itself, and he is struggling to find a way to reconcile the ruptures caused by colonialism,

which have left him searching for himself. Eventually, his inability to find meaning in life that he

can consider truly his own leads to mental breakdown, “It seemed to me that something was taking

over my body; the images and symbols I had for so long taken for granted had taken upon

themselves a strange hue; and I was losing my grasp of simple speech.”(p.43) In real life

Marechera felt endlessly persecuted and was said to be paranoid and depressive. The narrator

experiences psychosis and is followed and taunted by visions of the 'black heroes', “three men in

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faded clothes and the woman of the faded shawl.”(p.41) Even after these spirit-like beings, the

embodiment of the ancestors, disappear the narrator remains obsessed with the question of 'where

are the black heroes?' In a society where the presence and influence of ancestral spirits is part of

daily reality the ruptures in the connections people have to the land and each other caused by

colonialism are symbolised by these wandering, dispossessed spirits. He searches for the black

heroes of his own time but finds his culture has been colonised by western consumerism and feels

alien to him:

“The walls were all plastered with advertisements for skin-lightening creams, Afro wigs, Vaseline,
Benson and Hedges. There was a skin-lightened Afro-girl who was nuzzling up to her coal-black
boyfriend and recommending the Castle lager. As the music boomed against the advertisements and
the arse colours and lights flickered on and off I lost count of the time and simply soaked myself in
the stuff. I was no nearer to discovering the authentic black heroes who haunted my dreams in a far-
off golden age of Black Arcadia.”(p.36)

He portrays the nightclub as a sickening, confusing mangle of advertising for products marketed by

exploiting the insecurities in people's perception of themselves. In heavily ironic tones Marechera

is questioning whether the heroes of the past would approve of the mindless consumption and self-

deprecating fashions of the day. People are being deceived by a false consumerist freedom, which

continues to enslave them and degrade their culture by encouraging them to hate what they are; this

is a a result of neo-imperialism all around the world.

During a number of visionary narratives and altered states of reality there is a blurring of the

boundaries between the House of Hunger and the narrator's mind, “trying not to think about the the

house of hunger where the acids of gut-rot had eaten into the base metal of my brains. The house

has now become my mind; and I do not like the way the roof is rattling” (p.24) The idea that the

state of a person's house reflects their mental state is an image that I have noticed recurring a lot in

works by Zimbabwean authors. The disarray of the 'house' of Zimbabwe is indicative of the mental

disarray of it's inhabitants and this in turn breeds further chaos and corrosion. Images of stains and

erosion are to be found on almost every page, “The barman, impressed by her massive breasts, was

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thoughtfully reducing her to a stain on a sheet. A true hero of our time. Reducing everything to

shit.”(p.55) Marechera is insistent that both the self and society have been reduced, corroded and

blemished. He refers to himself and his compatriots as having gut-rot, and his writing is full of

repulsive and explicit images of disease and infection, symbolising the physical and mental legacy

of colonialism as internalised. Colonial powers brought technology, “The old man died beneath the

wheels of the twentieth century. There was nothing left but stains, bloodstains and fragments of

flesh, when the whole length of it was through with him. And the same thing is happening to my

generation.”(p.60) Colonialism is synonymous with the crushing forces of modernity represented by

the train, also a symbol of migrancy, and Marechera shows is responsible for the reduction of

generations of Zimbabweans to mere stains. The old man could not escape from the train and there

is no escape from the need to find meaning and relocate the self in the stained modern world.

Despite Zimbabwe not having even been fully formed until two years after this book was

first published Marechera is direct in his opinion of the character of the new nation:

“I found a seed, a little seed, the smallest in the world. And its name was Hate. I buried it in my
mind and watered it with tears. No seed ever had a better gardener. As it swelled and cracked into
green life I felt my nation tremble, tremble in the throes of birth – and burst out bloom and branch.”
(p.29)

Again he makes use of powerful organic imagery to give force to his message, transforming it into

an image that lingers in the mind. He is clear that the mental foundations of the new nation lie in

hate, as a result of the colonial state but no different to it. The image of the Zimbabwean nation

frequently appears in relation to blood and violence, as a critique of the brutality that Marechera

saw at the heart of militant nationalism. He was critical of all hierarchical political systems, but he

was particularly afraid of the lack of diverse political affiliation in the nationalist movement and its

aggressive but shallow appropriation of culture, “I am afraid of one-party states, especially where

you have more slogans than content in terms of policy and its implementation.” (Marechera, 1984.

p.8) Like many writers of the time, he was particularly critical of 'big man' politics, “It's just tickets

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to nowhere, everything is. There's big men now. There'll be big men always to dig pit-latrines for

you and your children to fall in.”(p.75) He believed that revolution and democracy would not bring

greater equality just a change in the faces of the big men, and continuing poverty and suffering for

the people.

The character of Stephen is a portrayal of such 'big man', a loud mouthed bully. He is

contrasted with the courageous and loyal Edmund to highlight the distinction between bloodthirsty,

egotistical africanism and true courage and loyalty. (Gagiano, p.43) Stephen bullies Edmund and

taunts him about the fact that his mother was a prostitute so Edmund, despite being physically

disadvantaged, challenges him to a fight and is left lying in the mud severely beaten and repeating

the words, “I'm a monkey. I'm a baboon.”(p.83). Colonial racists used to compare Africans to

monkeys, Stephen's cruelty also reduces Edmund to this state. Nonetheless, later in life it is

Edmund who appears on the front page of the paper as the sole survivor of a massacre of guerilla

fighters. Edmund had courage while Stephen remains locked in a divisive belief system, “Stephen

was an avid reader of the Heinemann African writers series. He firmly believed that there was

something peculiarly African about anything written by and African and said that therefore

European tools of criticism should not be used in an analysis of 'African literature'”(p.80) Here we

see Marechera almost mocking himself but also expressing his frustration with literary typologies,

and the confines of racially based thinking.

He was himself a sharp cultural critic, who often revealed the humorous reality of the past

in a down-to-earth manner, “Of course the understatement of the year came from Lobengula, who

said of white men; “You people must want something from me.”(p.57) Lobengula was the hero of

the First Chimurenga and has been lauded since independence with street names and statues, he was

also the leader who was tricked into signing the country away to Rhodes. The one-party state

sought to confer legitimacy on itself by aligning itself with historical figures of resistance such as

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these. ZANU-PF encouraged the production of literature that celebrated the heroism of resistance,

and created a version of history that was in line with its beliefs and in which it's leaders play a

central role. Marechera was critical of this, “What I mean is; is this all there is to our history?

There is a stinking deceit at the heart of it.”(p.57) The character of Philip shows the most suspicion

towards the lack of authenticity in history and culture, “There's white shit in our leaders and white

shit in our dreams and white shit in our history and white shit on our hands in anything we build or

pray for.”(p.75) To try to escape from this Philip writes poetry, which the narrators describes in an

almost mocking tone, “Gloomy nights stitched by needles of existentialism. Black despair lit up by

suicidal vision. The false dawn, charcoal black, trembling in the after-throes of passion. And songs

of a golden age of black heroes; of myths and legends and sprites.”(p.74) Marechera highlights the

tendency to react to cultural imperialism by romanticising ones own culture, he wants to search for

the authenticity and humour behind the rhetoric.

It was in this context of the colonisation of the mind and resulting alienation on one hand,

and the emerging unitary, self-serving nationalist appropriation of history on the other that

Marechera conducted a search for authentic forms of expression and a new source of meaning. In

part, he achieved this through his portrayal of marginalised experiences and a plurality of

viewpoints. He tells the story of the harsh reality of the prostitutes who take their clients to the

bush, “we could see on the gravel road splotches and stains of semen that were dripping down her

as she walked. Years later I was to write a story using her as a symbol of Rhodesia.”(p.64) He is

conscious of his position as a writer turning suffering into symbolism, but nonetheless portrays a

gruesome image of something that is normally taboo. He presents a gruesome and detailed

catalogue of the many instances and motivations for violence such as racial, political, economic and

domestic, “The older generation too was learning. It still believed that if one did not beat up one's

wife it meant that one did not love her at all.”(p.64) He brings out the brutality and suffering

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caused by male domination and the marginalisation of women. Indeed, the coloniser-colonised

binary that has dominated the country for so long is an all male idea, that leaves out women entirely.

Nestar is repeatedly referred to as 'one of the most famous whores in the country'. The

narrator's summary of her origins reveals how she came to be this way:

“The married man who made her pregnant beat her up when she went to him for help. She was
twelve then. She slept in waiting room and lavatories at the bus station and at the railway station. I
don't know what she ate to keep herself going. Later when I asked her if she had thought of suicide
she almost bit my head off.” (p.66)

Poverty is part of the system of patriarchal violence that is an important power dynamic in

Zimbabwe. We are invited to picture her suffering and see it as unique and real, although she does

not want to be portrayed as a victim. Having survived extreme poverty Nestar believes money is

power and she talks at length about the vulgar sex acts she has performed in order to gain material

wealth, a marked contrast to her origins, “An elegant TV nestled in the corner, by a marble statue of

Venus.”(p.67) It is interesting that Marechera chooses to give voice to a successful prostitute who

has managed to drag herself out of the trap of poverty. She is hard-hearted and confident in herself,

she isn't afraid to speak her mind or to assert herself to men. It is interesting to see her reaction

when her son, who is a rapist, is beaten. She initially remains calm, accepting the fact of violence

and the male need to seek revenge, but at the end she gives out a little justice of her own, “I had no

sooner taken her hand than I somersaulted into the air and landed heavily at her feet. I was too

surprised for words.”(p.71) We see a woman get a rare chance to join in the seemingly endless

cycle of violence, resulting from misogyny, hatred, revenge, that plagues society.

The narrator perceives an innate wisdom in women, “They seemed to know that the upraised black

fist of power would fill up more lunatic asylums than it would swell the numbers of our political

martyrs.”(p.65) This is a direct critique of the macho fact that the voices of women are often

excluded from nationalist discourse, and a succinct vision of the political future of the country.

Ultimately, despite his attempts to find meaning through the representation of marginalised

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experiences, I think Marechera was most successful in his portrayal of the confusion or lack of

meaning that results from the modern condition that exists across the world and was brought to

Zimbabwe via the vehicle of colonialism, “A cloud of flies from the nearby public toilet was

humming Handel's 'Hallelujah Chorus'. It was an almost perfect photograph of the human

condition.”(p.21) This image is repeated throughout the book, it brings together the lowest level of

existence, flies, with the refined image of classical music, a symbol of 'high culture' and

imperialism. Western culture has pervaded all levels of existence to the extent that it defines the

modern but it is also combined with images of repulsion and disease. It has been suggested that

what distinguished colonialism from other forms of hierarchy was its insistence that its subjects

accept its method of viewing the world, ideas like 'logic', 'rationality' and a linear view of time and

space. (Boehmer, 2005) The very structure of the book itself is an act of resistance to this idea. A

fast paced stream-of-consciousness that employs flashbacks, jumps in time and place often

connected by fragments of poetry, sounds and images. There is a marked contrast to the socialist-

realist genre that pervaded at the time. Rather than simply relating events, Marechera infused them

with many different levels of symbolism, meaning and humanity. He sought a fusion of literary

styles and made deliberate criticism of critically defined literary typologies. He presents life as a

fractured narrative , too diverse to be neatly contained in a singular framework of understanding;

“There were thousands of windows out there and there were heads sticking out of them. Heads

black like me.”(p.52)

At the end of the book an old man appears who speaks in a beautiful, cryptic style of

fragmented stories and flashbacks:

“I will live at the heart of a grain of sand” And he also said; “I will light a match: when it flares I
will jump straight into the dark heart of its flame-seed.” But as he listened to himself, to the thirst
and to the hunger, he suddenly said in words of gold: “I will live at the the head of the stream where
all of man's questions begin.”(p.98)

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Again these symbols are references to the elements, as well as to the search for a home and

meaning. Even through his fractured style the old man seems to summarise prominent themes and

messages that have been diffused and fragmented throughout the story. The narrator is mesmerised

by him and spends long hours sitting listening to his rambling speech, he is also a reflection of the

narrator's own mental space. I think the old man is a deliberately ambiguous symbol implicitly

suggestive of several meanings, it is not even certain from the text if he is real or another of the

narrator's vision. He could also be a genuine black hero, speaking to the narrator in his familiarly

fractured stream-of-consciousness, or he could be the old man who was killed by the Twentieth

Century train coming back to offer fragmented snippets of myth and wisdom. Most importantly, the

old man embodies resistance to the colonial ordering of the world as his wisdom is neither logical

nor linear, “Just bits and pieces I picked up and pocketed.”(p.100) I think The House of Hunger

was written largely as a conscious act of defiance by Marechera, a refusal to be stifled into a single

literary or philosophical pigeon-hole, and a dogged quest to pick meaning from a chaotic and

oppressive world.

Marechera uses an arsenal of dense, fast paced imagery to chaotically de-construct and

criticise modern society and present the trauma of a divided post-colonial identity. He at once

deplores the misery of violence and poverty, and painstakingly portrays how these are manifested

and exacerbated in Zimbabwe. However, he is keen to situate this condition as part of a universal

expression of human experience rather than something that is unique to Zimbabwe or black people.

He is desperate to escape the confines of race, class, gender and nation and in a truly anarchic

fashion, he seeks an authentic way of understanding himself and the world around him. This book

was written before the horrors of the emerging one party state, such as Gukurahundi, were fully

realised, but Marechera seemed to foresee a continuation of a regime of violence. Confirming his

bleak outlook the ZANU-PF regime also went on to pursue an aggressive and unitary cultural,

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which sought to 'divide and rule' and define peoples perceptions of themselves in the same way as

the colonial state. It was this hijacking of meaning and lack of authenticity in thought that

Marechera ultimately sought to fight against. He hoped that his exploration of the meaning of the

new Zimbabwean identity and his voicing of a variety of marginalised experiences, against a

backdrop of alienation and decay, would be his contribution to the resistance and the re-imagining

of his community despite his condition of exile.

Bibliography
1. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2005. Print.
2. Habila, Helon. "On Dambudzo Marechera: The Life and Times of an African Writer." VQR
» Virginia Quarterly Review. 2006. Web. 13 Mar. 2011.
<http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2006/winter/habila-on-dambudzo-marechera/>.
3. Gagiano, Anne. “Marechera's wordhorde and the scrapiron of war” in Muponde, Robert, and
Ranka Primorac. Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture. Harare:
Weaver, 2005. Print.
4. Marechera, Dambudzo, 1983. “An Interview with himself” in The House of Hunger.
Harlow: Heinemann, 2009. Print.
5. Marechera, Dambudzo. The House of Hunger. Harlow: Heinemann, 2009. Print.
6. Muponde, Robert, and Ranka Primorac. Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to
Literature and Culture. Harare: Weaver, 2005. Print.
7. VeitWild, Flora. "Words as Bullets: The Writings of Dambudzo Marechera." Zambezia 14.2
(1987): 113-29. Web.

Word Count: 4161 (with quotes)

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