Everybody agrees that Dambudzo Marechera is a unique, and uniquely difficult, figure in African literature. There is possibly no writer whose fiction is more enmeshed with his life, no writer whose life seems more like a picaresque novel. Commentary on his work has been sometimes almost obsessed with the ways in which his life intervenes in his writing, no doubt helped by the dominance of the narrating ‘I.’ In passages on language, nation, literary identity, sexuality and many others, the writer seems to be speaking from his own life. In many places the narrator's commentary is directly autobiographical. Yet, as Flora Veit-Wild says, ‘Marechera was constantly re-inventing his biography,’ re-inventions that formed an apparently indispensable pre-text but no less fictional than his writing. Marechera's life was as rebellious as his work and this has inevitably acted as a magnet to commentary on the writing, ‘a unique expression of self and postcolonial identity in contemporary African literature.’ A true ex-centric individual, he eschewed nation, language, education, career. He turned his back on the life of an educated African writer, and while offering blistering attacks on the Rhodesian regime he offered equally scathing critique of the newly independent national administration of Zimbabwe.