Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 A Brotherhood of Misfits
- 2 Blowing People's Minds
- 3 Grotesque Intimacies
- 4 Tracing the Stain in Marechera's ‘House of Hunger’
- 5 Menippean Marechera
- 6 Black, But Not Fanon
- 7 The Avant-Garde Power of Black Sunlight
- 8 Classical Allusion in Marechera's Prose Works
- 9 Revisiting ‘The Servants' Ball’
- 10 Marechera, the Tree-Poem-Artifact
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Black, But Not Fanon
Reading The Black Insider
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 A Brotherhood of Misfits
- 2 Blowing People's Minds
- 3 Grotesque Intimacies
- 4 Tracing the Stain in Marechera's ‘House of Hunger’
- 5 Menippean Marechera
- 6 Black, But Not Fanon
- 7 The Avant-Garde Power of Black Sunlight
- 8 Classical Allusion in Marechera's Prose Works
- 9 Revisiting ‘The Servants' Ball’
- 10 Marechera, the Tree-Poem-Artifact
- Bibliography
- Index
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.’
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reading Marechera , pp. 99 - 119Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013