In particular, what seems top be set in stone with regard to identity really isn’t.

I read this book when I began doing my PhD, thinking I could focus on something relating to Africa, as it might be a logical area for me to specialize in, having come from thereabouts. Dambudzo Marechera’s work immediately stood out to me as sharp and penetrating. His short words, in a book commemorating his life seemed so extremely miles ahead of all the other African writers, who were Earth-bound. Dambudzo was up in the sky.

Ultimately the impact of his longer writing on me was even stranger. This was because of politics, and because of my own peculiar history.

My history is covered in shame. In contemporary Western culture, I was something akin to a Nazi — or if the SJW network were to be believed, my white African origins made me exactly a Nazi, despite anything that I may do or so to contradict that pronouncement. Also, my parents and others had indicated to me that once we had left Africa, there could be no return, or else, something akin to Lot’s wife, we would be turned into pillars of salt. Thus, I was twice barred from re-entering the Southern African scope of things, on pain of severe condemnation from both the left and the right.

And that was why this book had such a thorough, even devastating, impact on me. Because it reduced to rubble the mountain that had been long standing in my way.

“Identity? What sort of thing is identity, that it should have any meaning for you?” Marechera appeared to say. “When we break it all down, including ourselves and everything else that assaults us, identity is just a feature of the genetic code written in our bodies that supports political oppressors.”

Despite the fact that it is only maybe right now that I have been able to articulate the thesis underlying the book, it still had a very strong effect on me at a subconscious level. I began to realize that there is NO “never go home again”, that going home again is always possible, so long as one pays no mind to the political oppressors that would harp on and on about “identity”.