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6 - Black, But Not Fanon

Reading The Black Insider

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2013

David Huddart
Affiliation:
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Grant Hamilton
Affiliation:
Chinese University of Hong Kong
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Summary

My skin sticks out a mile in all the crowds around here. Every time I go out I feel it tensing up, hardening, torturing itself. It only relaxes when I am in shadow, when I am alone, when I wake up early in the morning, when I am doing mechanical actions, and, strangely enough, when I am angry. But it is coy and self-conscious when I draw in my chair and begin to write.

– Dambudzo Marechera, ‘Black Skin What Mask.’

O my body, make of me always a man who questions!

– Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.

Having encountered Dambudzo Marechera's work, readers may express broadly similar responses, even if those responses are immediately qualified or rejected. For example, the generic status of his works, so often apparently autobiographical, becomes a source of concern that leads various commentators to insist that his works are definitely not self-obsessed: David Pattison writes that, ‘I stress the personal and idiosyncratic nature of Marechera's writing but argue that such an approach was neither exclusive nor narcissistic.’ Then, of course, it is fairly suggested that his work is not only individualistic but is in fact unique. So, to take but one example, according to Brian Evenson, Marechera on his own constitutes ‘Zimbabwe's Beat Generation.’

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Reading Marechera , pp. 99 - 119
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2013

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