Portrait of a black artist in London

SHAMANISM AS RADICAL PERCEPTION; SHAMANISM AS SCANDAL

The shaman’s mastery over self is equivalent to radical non-conformity in terms of taking up a fixed and formal social role. The role of superego as agent of social conformity is radically subverted by the shaman’s very being. From an uninformed onlooker’s perspective, this mode of existence, shamanism, goes against the grain of conventional assumptions concerning the possible. The shaman, perversely enough, is no particular social subject, but may change his or her identity at will, according to whim and the imagination. The shaman’s very existence is definitively scandalous – it offends the sense of social norms, as something that ought not to be, as an offence against our socialised conceptions of the possible. Nonetheless Marechera was never more a shaman than, in his ordinary life,when he adorned himself with myriads of cameras to become, in turn, his own idea of a Fleet Street photographer, an old woman, and finally a hunter. (p 225). [“The sixth-century Welsh bard and shaman Taliesin spokeof his many transformations into different animal and life forms as a kind of death. He said, and we can concur,”I have been dea, I have been alive … There is nothing in which I have not been.” p 171, Tom Cowan, Shamanism as Spiritual Practice for Daily Life.]

The scandalous nature of the shaman attacks our formalised (and indeed often reified) visions of what society ought to be like. As observers of the practice we may too easily be led astray by our emotions and their powers of persuasion, to the point of denying the very possibility of shamanic being. Our cognitive dissonance in the face of superego pressure to conform overwhelms us. Consequently, we believe that there is either normative society or there is madness, but that there is no third category of shamanism – there is no mode of being that evades the necessity of social conformity without being driven completely mad. Yet, the mode of being that is shamanism is a state of having conquered the demands of superego through facing death. Viewed in Hegelian terms, the bondsman is unfree because he is afraid to face death. The shaman, however, is one whose very being is defined by having entered the realm of death. By facing death, he has made himself free of societal constraints – the primary one being the socialising force of superego. Thus the shaman’s identity is not held in place by societal expectations, but by the tranformative force of his own will. That the shamanistic mode of being can look like social death from a spectator’s point of view doesn’t add up to a practical negation of his being. The shaman’s relationship to death is ongoing and dialectical – the negation of his formalised social being fuels his imagination, which stands as a dialectial opposite to the nature and conditions of a fixed state of social being. The shaman’s relationship to normal, conventional society is in the relationship of scandal to a fixed standard of morality. Another point of approaching the world from the point of view of one already dead is that one maintains an ironic distance towards society. From this point of detachment one can ascertain the forces at work in one’s society and apply serious leverage (which doesn’t mean that the tongue is ever dislodged from its firm place in the cheek – dualisms of serious and joking are part of the normative realm of reality, not intrinsically part of shamanistic perspective.)

Shamans operate on the limens, or borders, of both society and consciousness, eluding structures and crossing established boundaries (Hansen, 2001, p. 27). As liminal practitioners, they often use deception and sleight-of-hand when they feel that such practices are needed. Thus, shamans can be both cultural heroes and hoaxsters, alternating between gallant support of those in distress and crass manipulation.—[Stanley C Krippner Counterpoints]

The joke in this particular piece of writing is that the author has lost his balls – his social power – and cannot find them on the chip on his shoulder. This choreodrama written in The Africa Centre, in London, is interesting psychologically but less politically and emotionally profound than the poem I will compare it to – “Throne of Bayonets”. The bid for freedom – even though rarely taken to such extreme measures – is still incomplete in this presumably earlier written text. Both texts are harsh political critiques of state regimes – the former is a critique of London as the seat of power of British society. The latter is a critique of the early days of the Mugabe regime of Zimbabwe. In the former, he is in the process of attaining the radical psychological freedom that would enable him to embrace his own peculiar fate as a person in his own rights and not a social fate as a type of person – specifically not that of a black man and Zimbabwean. ( p 252, etc). However, in “Throne of Bayonets” the radical freedom to become the victim of one’s own fate has clearly been obtained. It is that aspect of psychological freedom having been attained, of writing from a point of absolute independence from psycho-social determinations that makes the latter poem purer spiritually – that is, more haunted than human. Reality, although perceived as limited by whatever its current manifestations may be, is subject to pressures brought to bear from the realm of the imagination (or, in more traditional terms, the realm of “spirits”). This primary realm of the imagination is conceived as the antecedent and progenitor of the profane or limited world or ordinary reality.

In both texts, the shaman who stands behind the public versions of the self, in the amorphous spirit world – that is, in the position of not having an identity that is fixed – observes the fate of his public self from an ironic distance. Just because the distance is ironic doesn’t mean it isn’t painful – although in the instance of A Portrait is is much more actively if not acutely so than in “Throne of Bayonets”, where depression mainly predominates to create a sense of the detachment of his will from engaging with or directly directing his public selves, as the writer’s mind stands still and invites them to reveal themselves as if they were so many alien spirits. It is as if the writer is saying, “These socially concocted manifestations of my self – these interpellations of my being against my conscious will – are not me, but merely shifting manifestations of possibility upon the cave wall of my imagination. They can depart just as surely as they have arrived – but meanwhile I will document them.” [Like du Bois, Marechera was convinced that his real self could not be seen – thus he was born with a veil, as well as with an understanding of political dynamics – thus, a caul.] He depicts the way that he experiences himself as a product of social meaning, within a cultural framework that he imagines is temporary (or rather, enduring but painfully contingent).

Shamanic soul journeys away from the painfully contingent ordinary world may sound like pure escapism from what I have described here. One stands in skeptical distance from the way that one’s culture and the state political machine interpellates one – which is to say, gives one a narrow and specific role to play within a predetermined system of social hierarchy. Yet the shaman’s journey has a purpose – to get to the roots of the system that so arbitrarily –and narrowly -- determines one’s identity. From “Portrait”:

You say I’ve got it this authentic ethnic balls but you don’t give
much room you define it so
small I can’t get in ( p 253)


The ideas in the meanderings of both texts are largely diagnostic of a particular society’s ills – that of London in the first case, and of a post-independence Zimbabwe in the second case. The shaman diagnoses, through his own symptoms of emotional distress, the nature of the social and political imbalances that persist within the political system as a whole. The world, in terms of shamanic cosmology, is not atomised and individualised, but involves everything being intricately interconnected, such that psychological insight into myself will give me psychological insight into others. [find quote]. Of course there is more to the investigation that simple, preliminory diagnoses. The information that the shaman gleens from his soul journeys can (and does) have political value and potential. Shamanistic insights grasp the myths and values that keep societies functioning effectively or otherwise. Insights into the underlying psychic structure of society can be used either to destroy or to enhance currently existing reality. In the first text, the intent is to shatter (and the black subject, too, is shattered in this text). In “Throne of Bayonets” the intent is to soothe, apply balm, and use creative criticism to revive a flailing State that is Zimbabwe.

“Portrait of a Black Artist in London” positions the writer in an extremely nefarious condition and pose. The call to condemn him from the point of view of bourgeois moral supremacy could hardly be less subtle. Above all, the central theme of the writing involves his sexual liaison and (due to her being underage, this will be read as the sexual exploitation) of a white, British school girl. The text opens with a lament that this relationship has been rendered unviable by the prevalent social dynamics of race and power. Thus he is left to the resort of masturbation (in terms of its range of literal and metaphoric meanings).

Tonight I am on my own
I guess its masturbation
Wish I was never born
It had to be contraception
And it burst raced to the egg
Yeah it’s master race masturbation

The invitation is to consider the artist, throughout this writing, overtly in terms of his exaggerated sexuality. This is the projected identity that he has taken on throughout the piece of writing. (It is a double edged sword, as I’ve suggested.) “Yeah it’s a master race masturbation” ( p251) has the double meaning that in concrete terms he has been left to his own devices (forced to masturbate rather than experience a proper relationship due to white laws and racial value judgements). The other knife edge (and its meaning) is that the images he is presenting of himself and his own behaviour as a black artist in London is a result of projective identification, a product of the whites in power in Westminster masturbating with their minds. It is with the latter dynamic in mind that he wants to load the tank of oppression with extra ammunition, and send it charging back into the psychological bases of the oppressors in the politically explosive form of manifest scandal.

Here are other ways in which the author invites us to view him:

“Look – Look at me, do I look like I fucked the pure white race?” ( p 255)

“Once a week reach down the street to masturbate the local job centre” ( p 265)

“Me I’m up my girl’s arse wringing out spasms of release
I’m in evening class reading up the pass laws in Soweto
I’m in your mind an immigrant in your oysters
I’m in your heart performing abortions in Westminster toilets
I’m in your kind a liberal education and cauliflower’s aristocracy” ( p 266) [footnote: a caulifower is a cabbage with a college education – Mark Twain]


He is also an illegal immigrant to boot – his student visa no longer in application, after he had left the University.


The shaman’s soul journeys (which, as I’ve suggested, are rather different diagnostic soul journeys take place within each of the texts) involve the shaman standing apart from his own ego – his own “interpellated” or politically defined social self – in order to attend to deeper messages of wisdom that emerge from the “self”:

Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage--it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body.
There is more sagacity in thy body than in thy best wisdom. And who then knoweth why thy body requireth just thy best wisdom?
Thy Self laugheth at thine ego, and its proud prancings. "What are these prancings and flights of thought unto me?" it saith to itself. "A by-way to my purpose. I am the leading-string of the ego, and the prompter of its notions." [Thus Spoke Zarathustra]

Due to this implicit separation of self and ego, with the former taking the position of objective observer and real anchor of identity, the shaman’s insights into how he has been interpellated (socially and politically) as a black man, within society’s larger system of meaning, come from a standpoint of objective distance, which will not always show him in a light that is very flattering. This he acknowledges, in painting himself as one guilty of statutory rape, among other things. As a passing reflection of a cultural point of reference, he can be seen as Falstaff (as in the end passages of “Portrait”):

Possibly his openness in his crimes, his lack of loyalty being so apparent — essentially his frankness (not so much honesty) in life, and his grinning self-determination, self observance.
At best, it can be said that Shakespeare’s Falstaff reaches beyond merely making the audience laugh. “He is aware that life is a charade” and is markedly responsible for his situation. He besets our hearts, yea deeper still, to our diaphragms. We are his. He has been too great a humoristic character to forfeit all good impressions within the length of one play." (MacLeish, Kenneth, Longman Guide to Shakespeare’s Characters, Harlow, England: Longman, 1986. pp87-88 – Wikipedia]

Yet this is a passing point of reference, subject to change, like so many of the writer’s disguises. This kind of self representation highlights the manner in which a gap exists between what is known by the unconscious and what is known by the ego alone. The shaman’s excruciating search for honesty is a search for what is known by the unconscious (a desire for the kind of knowledge that transcends a merely egoistic perspective). The aspects that the shaman brings to light may seem to represent “self-hating” but are more appropriately understood as pointing to aspects of violence within the social systems he is questioning. This point is key, for the ability to actually engage with the aspects of life that one would rather eschew is the very source of the enhanced (and sometimes prophetic seeming) insights of the shaman. As Melanie Klein’s work shows, it is natural to accept only the positive aspects of ourselves and project that which we dislike on to others – a process called projective identification. However, shamanism faces the deadly seeming aspects of these negatives in the search of cures for the sick soul. The shaman is the quintessential enemy of projective identification – seeking for a cure within the vile and repulsive elements of the unconscious self.

In the choreodrama, “Portrait of a Black Artist in London,” (written in the Africa Centre in 1980) Marechera invites us to view him in terms of scandal. The choreodrama opposes, with great psychological violence, the formal identity of the black man; the “negro”. It counterposes to this state of being an opposite force, which has as its principle the destruction of the aforementioned public state of identity:

I said take a walk through the mind of negro
Like everything human it’s not a pleasant sight
I cannot meet you there only in the grey area of the mindless
The one they quaintly call the anarchist cookbook ( p 267)

He wants to blast this limited public identity to smithereens, even inviting it to be bombed. Here is the scandalous ambush (that would bring to light, through the author’s powers of rhetoric an even greater scandal – that of a British political policy of genocide):

My body is the map on the wall seas rivers mountains islands
My body is the B52’s bombing strategy the dead reckoning
From the deep of the sea the highest of granite peaks
And the air in between are the split infinitives of my speech

The carefully constructed political rhetoric of the text, together with all of its deliberate grammatical mistakes (including Pidgin English) is designed to form a landcape that will invite the enemy’s bombing. The landscape is the writer’s “body” – emphasised throughout the text by his directing attention to his sexuality and blackness. Yet the invitation to see scandal in these things is a trap – especially enhanced by the obviously scandalous story of having sex with an underage stranger across the barriers of race. The point is to invite the attack, in order to be able to speak publically about the rivers of blood and the propensity of the British state machine for committing genocide – “Clouds of fire loose my millions of blood onto the ebbing tide.” ( p 268) The tone here is a critique of Britisch genocidal tendencies suggested earlier in the text:

Rivers of blood begin at Heathrow’s detention centre

I said come early, early to Asia’s council house

Windows minds limbs broken smashed by Hitler’s
English

Descendants

I was a Jew
I was a Pole
I was a Czech
Now it’s NIGGER
NIGGER from Jew
Pole and Czech too


Freeing oneself from a negative cultural image would be freedom to embrace life on one’s own terms, free from the inducements to conformity which are poverty and harrassment (the personal aspects of this, in relation to the author’s life, are documented well within this work). But first there is destruction (and on another level is a trap, beckoning others – audience and readers -- to their psychological destruction via a confrontation with incest and the superego) – the image of incest with the phallus of the State (no longer sublimated, as is the norm) in terms of a benign father). It is blue and white (like the flag) but not red. (p 251)

What’s your big
Daddy like?


He Hurts
Say it so we can actually seem in you voice
He hurt that too


Much of the point of this choreodrama is an encounter with the aspects of oneself that one wants to escape the hold of. He desires to escape the internalisation (-- and externalisation, through public decree and cultural imposition) of his London identity as an oversexed, criminalised, third world black male stereotype. [See Nietzsche:] So the encounter with his image is an encounter with a false self that he wants to do battle with.

But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you ambush yourself in caverns and forests.

You solitary one, you go the way to yourself! And your way leads you past yourself and your seven devils!

You will be a heretic to yourself, and a sorcerer and a soothsayer, and a fool, and a doubter, and a reprobate, and a villain.

You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes!


The point is the destruction of psychic (internalised political) subjectivities and psychological interconnections that deliver one over to be the subject of power relations. The writer as shaman wants to free us – his audience or readers – from our feelings of benign subservience to the State’s power. However, he also wants to use an immersion into death as a psychological experience, to free his black identity from its servitude to the ideology of the State. Thus he is hostile towards his ego’s public identity: “Wish I was never born” (p 268) and seeks death for that self image as a way of releasing it. His position in ordinary reality, however, is one of shame:

Wish it was easy for a blackman to lose his shame and win his
fighting fame ( p 258)


The choreodrama therefore, one might argue, has a booby-trap set within it. It’s a political device, intended to be detonated by those whose mode of operation is exploitation of scandal as a source of media interest – should the drama ever be performed. The artist reveals his avid knowledge and interest in scandal as a potent source of political currency within London’s social context. For the unwary, the black artist lays out his own overly sexualised and transgressive body as a trap – a landscape for the B52 to bomb. The psychological knowledge that underlies the construction of this booby trap is highly specialised and shrewd. The shaman, in this case, not only heals but destroys in his role as black magician. [Eliade quote]


These politically charged notions of outsider status are calculated to draw the wrath of the authories, and thus make use of a mechanism of conveyance of special status that is already fundamental to the practices of politics within the British context. Marechera has acknowledged the force of scandal in the following earlier extract:

Christ is an illegal immigrant in my soup
Him and his Golgotha just crashed on top of me from the very top
of Nelson’s Column

The blood that spurted out of me spattered the square white
going out to lunch

In the Upper Room
At Ten Downing Street

Flogging nigger pussy
Back to the third world

All because I’ve his nakedness sprawled drunk with Powell in the
Westminster Knacker’s yard

The subject of the may be scandal may be James Callaghan 1976-9. He is imputed as part of a lurid scandal (concocted by the author in a Fleet Street tone). The specific reference, although implicit, is to Enoch Powell’s anti-immigration “Rivers of Blood” speech (1968):
“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood."
Ex Prime Minister Callaghan is, presumably, the Judas who betrays the blacks living in Britain (as Christ on the way to Golgotha) when the PM is “out to lunch” in the sanctity of the Upper Room (of the Last Supper). On a personal level, the writer feels that he has been betrayed. In any case (since we don’t know if he was betrayed or by whom), he is doomed in Britain, his student status nullified -- thus making of him an illegal immigrant, homeless, poor and unemployed:

I have spoken to him on the phone
Sent down from Oxford
Into the inferno’s bed and board ( p 263)


The underlying theme of the work is of a river of blood – the “dirty Thames” which drives one towards suicide (as a metaphor for British society) but is too dirty to commit actual suicide in it according to the author [see the handbook/Pattison] (once again, apparently a reference to the racialistic contamination of British society).

Since physical suicide is not his goal, that which the artist intends to destroy, thorughhis text, must be the process and outcome of projective identification [Klein’s defonition] within the political or ideological systems of London life. The writer is acting out his role as a black villain in the choreodrama. Yet to read the choreodrama only in this way renders a superficial interpretation of what the writer is about. He is not protesting his interpellation in this negative guise so much as maximising the potential of such negativity for political purposes. He wants to reroute the fuse back to its political source of origin (and away from himself, as a political agent). “In my desk are poisonous mushrooms grown from seeds of wrong.” ( p 263) This is the destructive or shrewd aspect of his shamanistic work.

On a psychological level, however, something different occurs. He is inviting mutual destruction for both his black self and his oppressors: Freedom for his own superego’s condemnation, related to the shame of being black in London; freedom for his oppressors in terms of destruction by their superegos, through having insight into their incestuous relations with the State and renouncing their complicity. In this way, both parties be freed from their roles of public identity that make them oppressor and their oppressed, betrayers and the ones whom they betray.

But now the author invites the other party to meet him in death. The suicide is not of one person but of “millions” – and is therefore, conclusively, the invisible genocide of those driven to their deaths by British racism. It is this explosive scandal that the black author wants to bring home to “Westminster” once the scandal of his particular existence has been noticed:

Ripple softly, dirty Thames, reflect softly our suicide’s rain
Clouds of fire loose my millions of blood onto the ebbing tide
I can use the fable when Pilate and Falstaff mingle their brains
In the sink ( p 268)

The instigator of this inter-psychological warfare is the writer as shaman. As shaman made manifest, the writer is Falstaff – easy-going despite his mishaps in life – someone for whom life is both black comedy and tragedy, but hardly limited to a particular genre that would polarise or categorise perception. Pilate is representative of those in power in Britain who betray their black populace. The shaman seeks to bring about healing potencies by inviting “Pilate” to destroy him (as Jesus, or a political martyr) politically and psychologically – an act which he willingly goes along, as Falstaff. (He expects to win politically, and furthermore, to rid himself of superego and his inner identification with his narrowly defined black self, psychologically.) The “death” he seeks is that of psychological detachment – the bridge that leads away from the ego and back to the self determining wisdom of the Self.