SOME WRITERS CAN GIVE YOU TWO HEARTBEATS: AFTER DAMBUDZO MARECHERA - with Tinashe Mushakavanhu & Michael Vazquez

 

 

"I try to write in such a way that I short-circuit, like in electricity, people's traditions and morals. Because only then can they start having original thoughts of their own. I would like people to stop thinking in an institutionalised way ... that's why most of what I have written is always seen as being disruptive and destructive." (Dambudzo Marechera)

 

"Reading Marechera was like an initiation into a secret society. There was something wonderfully subversive about his writing; he said things that were too dangerous to say, things that we all knew but couldn't say." (Tinashe Mushakavanhu)

 

Zimbabwe-born writer Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987) once said of himself that he was "inclined to disagree with everybody and everything". His publisher described him as a "one-man civil war". He was expelled from Oxford after trying to set fire to his college. He won the Guardian Fiction Prize but was kicked out of the ceremony after throwing plates at the chandelier. He railed against Ian Smith's white-minority regime in Rhodesia - and also Robert Mugabe's subsequent presidency. Hailed as one of Africa's leading literary figures, he retorted: "Either you are a writer or you are not. If you are a writer for a specific nation then fuck you." His pathbreaking 1978 novella/ short story collection The House of Hunger was famously castigated by a Nigerian critic for being "sordid and shocking", an example of "avant-garde art that is characteristic of modern European culture. All this is alien to Africa - a continent of hope and realizable dreams."

 

In 1982 Marechera returned to Zimbabwe to help in the making of a film version of The House of Hunger but fell out with the director, became homeless, and died of an AIDS-related illness at the age of just 35. His prose and poetry, anarchist spirit and outsider trajectory still scorch the imaginations of younger writers.  

 

This evening, writer-editors Tinashe Mushakavanhu and Michael Vazquez will discuss the enduring importance of Marechera, not least in the light of the former's newly-published Some Writers Can Give You Two Heartbeats (Black Chalk & Co.), an experimental group meditation on the pasts and possibilities of Zimbabwean literature. There will also be a screening of Olley Maruma's After The Hunger and the Drought, a rarely-seen 1985 documentary featuring Marechera.

 

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TINASHE MUSHAKAVANHU is a writer and editor from Zimbabwe, currently a post-doctoral fellow at Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is co-founder with Nontsikelelo Mutiti of Black Chalk & Co, a fugitive creative agency which brings together writers, artists, designers, academics and technologists to engender a new culture and new forms of publishing and creative production. 

 

MICHAEL VAZQUEZ is Senior Editor at Bidoun, an award-winning journal of art, culture and ideas from the Middle East and elsewhere. Previously he edited the North American reincarnation of the 1960s East African journal Transition. He writes on food, art, music, and cultural diplomacy. In 2014 he was curator-in-residence for The Politics of Food at the Delfina Foundation in London. He is co-editor of the forthcoming monograph Reza Abdoh (Hatje Cantz), and is currently working on a book about the funding of Cold War culture and the emergence of 'world literature' and 'global art'.

 

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THE COLLOQUIUM FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE (est. 2007): falling and laughing...

 

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