If you reject your allotted identity thus allows for the choosing of one’s new identity, and a sacred role of furthering society’s development. Thus the death of the author’s persona at the end of Black Sunlight prefigures his own spiritual rebirth, as he looks into the mirror and sees his physical self as subject to the vagaries of his historical time and place, but also as a whole self. The subject’s gaze into the mirror, life-satiated, death-satiated, in essence “wrecked out of his wounds,” indicates that he is ready to accept that it is the contingent nature of reality that turns it toward the Sacred for him. To accept this is not to acknowledge a diminished psyche, but rather to accept that the raw experiences of fate are to be worked with, as a process of bending them to one’s will. The mirror reflects a return, after shamanistic journeying, to a wholeness of being. It recalls the gaze of the mother that, in Lacanian theory, is said to instill in the subject his original sense of egoistic wholeness. The shamanistic nature of the voyage suggests this is an ego returned to a different kind of wholeness, however than the ordinary maturity of Lacanian theory would suggest: It is as if the temporary shadow of the moon’s ‘immanence’ has cast its impression upon the transcendent intellect. This succumbs to its lunar fecundity (its feminine density) and is thus reborn. Moreover, insight is born by shamanistic journeying, and along with that, a new capacity for action and creativity. For the journey backwards into one’s primeval past has caused the atom to be split within the psyche – such that the seeming necessity of certain power relations, as one had previously emotionally construed them, has been revealed to have a merely contingent in historical processes. Thus these power relations are capable of being dissolved in life as well – as where they have already undergone destruction – in the psyche itself. Various forms of power and the manifestations of personal identity most commonly associated with them lose their binding link, under the pressure of shamanistic regression or “soul journeying”. The perspective facilitated by this “stepping back” from fixed relations of power, in a mode of dissociation, enables one to see, from a subatomic perspective, how power and identities are conventionally congealed into atoms. This gives a shaman such as Marechera insight into the nature of power relations, much as the aesthetic “alienation” technique of Bertolt Brecht was designed to do.

1. Marechera's shamanism is very similar to those of Nietzsche and Bataille in that it is highly individualistic. The individual nature of experience is a key aspect of shamanism. However, Marechera's concerns are to be viewed within the context of a life that is already marginalised. So his concerns about "soul loss" (the loss of vitality) and how to remedy that are to be viewed in the psychodynamic context of defence of one's self concept against the authorities and their claims.

2 In terms of existing character, shamanism requires the opposite of timidity in order to participate in it -- that is, a pre-existing inclination to put one's inner self at stake. This is absolutely crucial because one does not strike a fire in one's own spirit unless one first puts something at stake. And if one has no fire to begin with, one does not strike a fire in that case, either. (This relates to Bataille's celebration of "excess" or the "limit experience" and Nietzsche's injunction to "live dangerously", both of which produce a heightened awareness of the INTRAPERSONAL -- that is, the inner self.) One lives close to the concept of death.


3. Shamanism involves strategic regression to trance states in order to enhance the quality of one's life. (This relates to Bataille more than it does to Nietzsche -- although both preferred feelings of "intoxication".) "Transgression" -- as per Bataille -- can destroy the currently existing social self and cause part of it to regress. Nietzsche adopted, by contrast, a regressive view of human nature, in order to enhance his feeling of power in reacting with it and ultimately transcending it.

4. Shamanism involves a certain amount of destruction of the existing self, in order to release pent up heat (causing pathologies) and to increase the capacity for inwards development and playful self transformations. This is its link to psychoanalysis, the talking cure.

5. There is an inherent shamanistic link between pre-Oedipal states (and the pre-Oedipal field in adult life) and the shamanistic -- since both recall a sense of Nature and one's primeval origins.  However these are not necessarily to be narrowly understood as psychoanalysis does, which is in terms solely defined by deprivation.

6. Self-creation through the release of pent up heat enables social playfulness and social masks. (Marechera dressed up as a photographer from Fleet Street.)

7. An archetypal form or idea may be used to help one to advance developmentally, using the pre-Oedipal field. This is the psychological purpose of the shaman's animal spirit guides.

8. The shaman deals with the inevitable sense of loss of wholeness that is part of normal development in the "depressive position" by engaging his or her creativity rather than more common/normal means of dealing with one's situation -- repression and resignation. This involves a definite risk -- that one has the energy and consistency to power one's own engine through life, rather than relying upon social organisations to assist one. The shaman is more aware than others that the nature of life is to be inherently "incomplete", and that deliberate and self-conscious efforts are required to heal this lack of wholeness, temporarily -- for the shaman's efforts can never signify more than a temporary festival of wholeness and completion. It is the shaman's hypersensitivity to the problem of the "depressive position" (that of alienation, aloneness and a lost sense of wholeness), that drives his creativity. It is his (or her) knowledge of how to provide temporary solutions against falling into typical resignation towards life ( in the depressive position), that becomes the shaman's secret fountain of youthfulness and exuberance.

9. The shaman's unusual perceptive abilities stem not only from his or her great sensitivity to the way that energy flows between different parts of his (or her) mind but also derive from the fact that the shaman is inclined to repress less of reality (for instance, out of fear of it), and is rather more inclined to work directly with the positive and negative aspects of reality as they are felt. This often involves a strategic attempt to control and redirect psychological forces, within the broader society at large.

Insatiably striveth your soul for treasures and jewels, because your virtue is insatiable in desiring to bestow.

Let us suppose that I am a naturally born ironist. If it is possible that I was not actually born that way, it is surely the direct result of bringing myself up in this mode, rather than having had it inculcated into my life by my parents. My idea as to what concerns the pinnacle of education – that is, what expresses the condition of having been well-educated – is that one has learned to doubt what one thinks one sees on the basis of the first appearance.

I don’t think that one can be brought up during the Rhodesian war (the second Chimurenga) and not have had to revise all of one’s opinions – one’s “first take” of life and its meanings. Perhaps after the second take, a third take and a fourth take are not even enough to satisfy one as the take that is finally the “right take”. Not to be completely sure of one’s perspectives, but to approach them with a relatively measured certainty is the mark of an educated person’s mind. I say it again.

So I want to introduce you to my application of the grotesque. It’s not the grotesqueness of a Marechera that you will find in my poems. He wants to reveal something with his use of the grotesque – some dimension of the way that torture is generally a hidden mode of societal control. My use of the grotesque has a different purpose. Perhaps you think you see all too clearly what I’m getting at in my poetry? I use the term, “race”, so perhaps I am a racist – someone who discriminates between people on the basis of colour? Perhaps I have “issues” concerning gender, and see that there are two genders with one gender distinctly differentiating from the other – since I use language that seems to point things out in this way? Perhaps what I’m saying is all too clear in many ways. I want you to think again.

The language I am using – these ideas – are they really my own? I would like people to consider whether a white girl, a white woman, sits down on any Sunday afternoon and generates out of her imagination, out of the ether that is nothingness, the notion of “race”? Okay! I confess that I didn’t do this. I used the word, “race”, in my poetry, but there’s no way that I generated different races. And, hey, wait a second! I don’t even believe in races! I believe in such a thing as “humanity” – the human race. So I am referring to races, in my poetry. I get in the act  -- except that I don’t actually believe in race. This, then, has now become your puzzle.

It’s the puzzle that all of my poetry presents. In actual fact, it is ironic dealing. The subject matter of my writing is not mine, in the sense that it was entirely produced by me. I am just working with the subject matter that was produced by my history -- and your history, too, if I am not mistaken. This is the black and white history of Zimbabwe (and Rhodesia), which has given us the remarkable and highly dubious gifts of race and gender. I’m not sure about you, but my perspective on these is a revelation of the grotesque!

I’m like Marechera, in that I want to do something to reorganise your vision, using poetry. Unlike our friend Dambudzo, I’m not keen so much to reveal to you the hidden dimensions of everyday existence and what you fail to see. Dambudzo had the sensitivity of a shaman who sees things that few other people do see – as if he looked into the spirit world and saw the dark and estranged aspects of our souls that pulled the mechanisms and pulleys, determining all our fates. His vision was anti-Oedipal and reveals us to ourselves in a way that would allow us to make amends with the past and its historical wrongs. By “anti-Oedipal” I mean that Marechera does not want to bring us under the sway of any new authority or system – whether governed by those of the left or right, white or black.

Marechera’s approach reveals, through gently winding narratives, the complex structures of the mind conditioned by a form of society that make us, Zimbabweans, what we are today. My approach is by contrast a throwing down of the metaphorical gauntlet – a challenge to alter one’s vision by keeping the eyes open as to the way in which we manufacture social and historical grotesques. Can we still face ourselves – albeit ironically – knowing that we tend to manufacture such grotesques? Can we rise above a naturalistic vision, which sees the development of such creations as natural and nothing to balk at, to the point where we rise above this terror that’s entailed in a realistic encounter with ourselves? At that point, we naturally lose our cool.

And really it is no different from the terror that one feels when one first learns to skydive. You manage the terror then, too, by holding the freezing blade close to your breast: in the desperate pleasure of your own icy resolution.