The shaman is one whose life has been ‘shipwrecked’ at some point. The victim cast to sea, only to sink to the depths and find hidden treasure. Who would believe in this treasure, or that the meaning of the shipwreck could have turned out to be something positive? It is this kind of a paradox that we are dealing with, for instance in terms of the productivity of Zimbabwean author, Dambudzo Marechera, who was a contemporary shaman, by necessity, rather than by conscious choice.
There results a self that is somewhat of a tragederian, which laments the original sense of self and its feelings of security aboard a boat with definite direction and an already furnished life-purpose, but alongside that self is another "self" that has somehow triumphed, not despite of – but because of – the chaos. This is the doubling of the self that we constantly encounter within Marechera’s work. The fact that the ‘tragedy’ of one’s life produced unexpected benefits is harder to speak of in direct, everyday language, since it goes against the grain of rational expectations. This knowledge pertains to the ‘shamanic” aspect of the self, which gives the subject access to a level of reality that is generally denied by those who are uncomfortable with the notion of being "wrecked" out of one's wounds.
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