This volume features startling stories of distinction by a remarkable writer who vividly describes the township squalor of growing up in settler-exploited Rhodesia.
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"Marechera has in him the stuff and substance that go to make a great writer."-Doris Lessing
About the Author
Dambudzo Marachera was born in 1955 in Rhodesia and died tragically young, in 1987, a victim of the AIDS virus. His other work includes Black Sunlight, Mindblast and The Black Insider.
--This text refers to an alternate
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Scatological Irony,
By
This review is from: The House of Hunger (African Writers) (Paperback)
Marechera in his short story "The House of Hunger" writes in a stream of consciousness and in what some have called a carnivalesque "the world is upside down" approach. His writing is both difficult to comprehend and repulsive to digest. Scatology is dominant. I quote one tame image.
The toilet bowl did not flinch when I sat on him. The paper protested crisply but I did not show mercy. When I shook his arm gratefully he flushed, roaring immovably as I pulled up my sullen trousers. (40) His creation of images and manipulation of diction are striking. There's hungry people out there. There's homeless people out there. There's many going about in the rags of their birthday suits. And they're all mad. They's all got designs....There's clouds of flies everywhere you go. There's armies of worms slithering in our history. And there's squadrons of mosquitoes homing down the cradle of our future. What do we do? Clutch and drown each other, that's what, and if we can't do ourselves in properly there's congregations of missionaries and shrinks to do it, and they have on their side cops and soldiers and Australia and New Zealand and China and the USA and France and the bloody Germans. The poor are not the only ones who've got designs! (59-60) His irony is forceful. Actually class-consciousness and the conservative snobbery that goes with it are deeply rooted in the African elite, who are in the same breath able to shout LIBERATION, POLYGAMY without feeling that something is unhinged. (44) As he wrote, so he lived. He was expelled from mission school for challenging the colonialist teaching, from the University of Rhodesia for protesting racial discrimination, from Oxford for allegedly attempting to burn down part of the school. Once he had a solo protest march against the white government of Ian Smith in Rhodesia (Zimbawbe) and had to flee the nation. When his nation became independent, in London at the celebration at the African Centre in London where exiles had come in their patriotic ethnic dress, he came in English horse-riding gear as if he were an English lord ready for a fox hunt , a parody of both the English elite and the African nationalists. His life raged for a brief 35 years.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Zimbabwean Celine,
By
This review is from: The House of Hunger: A Novella and Short Stories (Hardcover)
Apartheid reigning over mind and body, infecting the world even through it's most wronged victims. Dambudzo Marechera's head cracks open, spills molten bile over all the African slums. Now dead, completely unknown in America, he was as angry as Louis-Ferdinand Celine (a true accomplishment) and every bit as talented. This book is a shiv. In dangerous situations such things are necessary.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Worthwhile,
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This review is from: The House of Hunger (African Writers) (Paperback)
This was Marechera's first book. It was published in 1978 and contained an 80-page novella comprising half the collection, eight shorter stories and a brief comic poem. The pieces described what it was like to live in the House of Hunger: the state of "soul-hunger" and gut-rot the title story's narrator saw all around him in his homeland and in himself. Where underlying spiritual and social traditions were felt to be lost, and where the overwhelming influence by Western culture, which had so deeply shaped the writer's outlook and others, was felt to be alien. Where people were depicted as lacking natural connections with each other and seeking endlessly to satisfy material desires. The alienation was compounded when the narrators in some of the other stories traveled to the West and struggled to put down roots.
Marechera (1952-87) expressed cultural and mental dislocation with visceral imagery and rapidly shifting, restless prose. In doing so, it's been claimed, he expanded the boundaries of postcolonial African writing. The sensibility in his writing that came through -- restless, sensitive, mocking, tortured -- felt very contemporary. Nearly all the stories were narrated in the first person. In one of the few exceptions, the narrator discussed another man who was perhaps also the narrator, since he was known so intimately. Some of the works took place in Rhodesia when the narrator was a boy, then a student and young man. Three pieces were set in England, two of them specifically at Oxford University, where the author had gone in 1974 to study. The poem that ended the collection, "Characters from the Bergfrith," described the secondary school in Rhodesia that the author attended as a youth. The edition of this book that I read could've used an introduction putting the author's work in context and discussing his intentions. The writing contained powerful fragments. Often these were embedded in stories that for me were uneven. At their best, the pieces sensitively combined feelings, dream visions and melancholy -- as in "The Slow Sound of His Feet," a story about loss and death that managed to suggest a world in three pages -- or succeeded in matching violent thought and action to a suitably vigorous style. At other times, there was continual digression, flashback and forth, formlessness, and lack of clarity as to direction and point, as in "The Writer's Grain," which was virtually unreadable. Or the title story, which was dominated by seemingly aimless shifting between restless conversations and sudden confrontations, the narrator's thoughts, physical injuries and other sensations, feverish straining for effect, and termination without resolution. Maybe the style was suited intentionally to the subject matter. In some of the stories, the narrator seemed only a few steps away from the disintegration of personality, described vividly. In one, the narrator was bullied by local whites, then suffered the death of those close to him. Later, in the middle of a sensation that was half-brotherly and half-erotic, he had a vision that the dead had returned from their graves. In another, the hallucinating narrator saw himself as an ape in a mirror, a demented Santa Claus, and later a European man painted white. In another, he turned into an inanimate object. Sometimes the author's sense of humor came to the fore in his style and situations, as when the narrator poked fun at his own dissipation as a student at Oxford, or his hesitation about a traditional rite he had to carry out while visiting his family in Rhodesia, or when he mocked a magazine that had commissioned an article on the "modern African family" that was expected to consume the products of "white civilization." Or when one story's narrator portrayed a situation that led to a violent but hilarious encounter between himself, his wife, his twin brother, a student and a talking dog. In subsequent books written during the remainder of his short life, the author intensified the portrayal of his own psychology and the social pressures he saw around him. Amid great personal hardship, much of it self-inflicted, his path led to anarchism, an increasingly impenetrable, stream-of-consciousness style, and an insistence above all on his integrity as a writer. Some excerpts from the book: "And there we all were; in an uncertain country, ourselves uncertain. A land with a sly heart; and ourselves ready to be deceived. A morally corrosive atmosphere, and ourselves base metals ready for the acids of maturity." "Life stretched out like a series of hunger-scoured hovels stretching endlessly towards the horizon. One's mind became the grimy rooms . . . Gut-rot, that was what one steadily became. And whatever insects of thought buzzed about inside the tin can of one's head as one squatted astride the pit-latrine of it, the sun still climbed as swiftly as ever and darkness fell upon the land as quickly as in the years that had gone." "It seemed to me 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. . . . I was being severed from my own voice . . . . 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." "The underwear of our souls was full of holes and the crotch it hid was infested with lice. We were who--s; eaten to the core by the syphilis of the white man's coming." "'You're full of filth, do you know that?' 'I have long suspected it,' I said, losing interest." "Soon there were tremendous groans and grunts erupting from that bed and the energy of it was like god's fist shaking satan's shirtfront." "I smacked them right back, buffeted them down, thumped them back, whacked them down, as they pummelled and pounded and battered into me. I kicked, booted, kneed, and cudgelled into them as they bulldozed into me and pile-drove me into one lump of pain. I clubbed, coshed, slugged, whipped, flogged and bashed into them as they sledge-hammered into me." "He dreamed he was sleeping on a bed of creaking human skulls and that the quilt which covered him was in fact made of human bones and human ribs. The ribs had fastened closely round his small body and each time he so much as moved a finger the bed of skulls and the quilt of ribs creaked and grinned and cackled and creaked merrily as though immensely amused by something." "Her fleshless hand lay still in his fleshless fingers." "He had -- at long last! -- broken the surface and emerged sucking in great armfuls of breath, laughing and beating the silver shimmering lattices around him. At the head of the stream, that's where they had, with great violence, fused into one and it was among the petunias so unbearably sweet that they had become afraid and listened to the staring motionless thing which made the rivers flow. The rushing rapids of them had crashed onwards into the Indian Ocean. If only life was like that always and, yes, one did not have to see the reflections of one's own thoughts. If one was rock."
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