Dambudzo Marachera
AN INTERVIEW WITH HIMSELF
Which writers influenced you?
I find the question oblique, not to the point. It assumes a writer has to be influenced by other writers, has to be influenced by what he reads. This may be so. In my own case I have been influenced to a point of desperation by the dogged though brutalised humanity of those among whom I grew up. Their actual lives, the way they flinched yet did not flinch from the blows dealt out to us day by day in the ghettos which were then called ‘locations’.
Who are these ‘They’?
They ranged from the few owners of grocery stores right through primary school teachers, priests, deranged leaders of fringe/esoteric religions, housewives, nannies, road-diggers, factory workers, shop assistants, caddies, builders, pickpockets, psychos, pimps, demoralised widows, professional con-men, whores, hungry but earnest schoolboys, hungry but soon to be pregnant schoolgirls and, of course, informers, the BSAP, the police reservists, the TMB ghetto police, the District Commissioner and his asserted pompous assistants and clerks, the haughty and rather banal Asian shopkeepers, the white schoolgirls in their exclusive schools, the white schoolboys who’d beat us too when we foraged among the dustbins of the white suburbs, the drowned bodies that occasionally turned up at Lesapi Dam, the madman who was thought harmless until a mutilated body was discovered in the grass east of the ghetto, the mothers of nine or more children and the dignified despair of the few missionaries who once or twice turned up to see under what conditions I was actually living. This is the ‘they’. The seething cesspit in which I grew, in which all these I am talking about went about making something of their lives. These are the ones who influenced me – through their pain, betrayals, hurts, joys.
You mean you observed but did not participate?
How can you ‘observe’ a stone that’s about to strike you? That was my relationship with the then Rusape ‘society’. I was the drunken brawls. I was my father one night coming home with a knife sticking out of his back. I was the family next door being callously evicted because the father had died – it was to happen to my own family too. I was my father when some sixteen year old twit, white twit, insulted him. I was all those who were being evicted from the surrounding white farms and being dumped and dumped anywhere. I was the fellow student dropping out because the school fees just could not be found. I was in the horrible dark nights (the street lights never worked), I was the ghostly lamentations and wails when someone died and you knew they would have to bury him in that rubbish dump they used to call the Native Cemetery. I was the young primary school teacher strutting everywhere with an important air. I was all my age group when we formed ourselves into gangs and gang warfare broke out into real fights with sticks, bricks, stones, knives. I was a cowboy, an Indian, a GI, a Second World War British commando officer – those dark days of succulent escape from our cheap and humiliating surroundings. But what terrified me most – it was the seed of Marie’s blindness in Black Sunlight – was the sight of blind parents being led around by their five year old little girl – they had nowhere to stay – sometimes they slept in the stadium, sometimes at the Railway Station – but the police were always after ‘vagrants’. It was so pitiful and pity was not easy to come by in the ghetto of those days. Then there were the disabled – no one cared – I didn’t care. To my eyes all this was our normal condition. The condition which later drove most of our fellows into Mozambique to become freedom fighters and I to become a writer.
Why a ‘Writer’? Not many Blacks were?
Hmm. The dull and brutish ghetto life was always there. Fights, weddings, arrests, church services, the school-bell summoning us to assembly, summary evictions, football, insults, athletics, grim poverty, netball, the line of convicts going to and from hard labour on some white bastard’s lawn or farm, playing golf behind the notorious women’s hostel – the hard physical facts of day to day ghetto life. There was this too much, this cruel externality – you could not escape it. But there was the rubbish dump where they dumped the garbage from the white sections of the town – a very small small-minded, very racist town. I scratched around in the rubbish with other kids, looking for comics, magazines, books, broken toys, anything that could help us kids pass the time in the ghetto. But for me it was the reading material that was important. You could say my very first books were the books which the rabidly racist Rusape whites were reading at the time. Ha-ha, my most prized possession was a tattered Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia – very British Empire orientated but nonetheless a treasure of curious facts about the universe and the earth. There were jingoistic British Second World War comics. Superman. Batman. Spiderman. Super this, super that. Mickey Spillane, James Hadley Chase, Peter Cheyney, Tarzan things and Tarzan thongs. I had these two friends, Washington and Wattington, twins. They had built ‘offices’ of mud and tin and cardboard, offices about two and a half feet high. They had a children’s typewriter. They were the Chairman and General Manager. I was the office boy. We had a library there – of books and comics salvaged from the dump. Every day it was the rubbish dump – and then the offices. Washington typed down meticulous records of each day’s acquisitions. See what I mean? There was the typewriter, there were these books. After school every day that was what we did.
That’s when you thought of writing?
Not exactly. But the connection was made. You see? I was very young – I am talking of the period when I was still in primary school, when I was six years to ten years old. At this time I did not think blacks could become writers. I did not see a book by a black author until I was in Form One, at boarding school – Ngugi’s Weep Not Child. And that was mind-blowing – that sealed and signed the earlier fumbling connection. I suddenly knew what I would do with my life – write stories, poems, plays. Write!
You started writing when you were eleven?
I would have done, but something happened. My father was killed. Our family was evicted from the ghetto house. It may have been a ghetto house but it had been our centre. And there was no father any more. Mother was a nanny. There we were – nine kids for her to look after. She was sacked. I was in Form One. Where would the fees come from? What did it mean that father was dead? What did it mean to not have a home? It was the beginning of my physical and mental insecurity – I began to stammer horribly. It was terrible. Even speech, language, was deserting me. I stammered hideously for three years. Agony. You know in class the teacher asks something, my hand shoots up, I stand, everyone is looking, I just stammer away, stuttering, nobody understands, the answer is locked inside me. Finally the teacher in pity asks me to please sit down. I was learning to distrust language, a distrust necessary for a writer, especially one writing in a foreign language.
Did you ever think of writing in Shona?
It never occurred to me. Shona was part of the ghetto daemon I was trying to escape. Shona had been placed within the context of a degraded, mind-wrenching experience from which apparently the only escape was into the English language and education. The English language was automatically connected with the plush and seeming splendour of the white side of town. As far as expressing the creative turmoil within my head was concerned, I took to the English language as a duck takes to water. I was therefore a keen accomplice and student in my own mental colonisation. At the same time of course there was the unease, the shock of being suddenly struck by stuttering, of being deserted by the very medium I was to use in all my art. This perhaps is in the undergrowth of my experimental use of English, standing it on its head, brutalising it into a more malleable shape for my own purposes. For a black writer the language is very racist; you have to have harrowing fights and hair-raising panga duels with the language before you can make it do all that you want it to do. It is so for the feminists. English is very male. Hence feminist writers also adopt the same tactics. This may mean discarding grammar, throwing syntax out, subverting images from within, beating the drum and cymbals of rhythm, developing torture chambers of irony and sarcasm, gas ovens of limitless black resonance. For me this is the impossible, the exciting, the voluptuous blackening image that commits me totally to writing.
Struggle with language – that’s your purpose?
Yes and no. Language is indissolubly connected with what it is that constitutes humanity in human beings and also, of course, with inhumanity. Everything about language, the obscene, the sublime, the gibberish, the pontificatory, the purely narrative, the verbally threatening, the adjectivally nauseating – they are all part of the chiselling art at the heart of my art, the still sad music ...
What was the cultural milieu in the ghetto?
This was the sixties. Upheavals in politics, the surge of black nationalism, the banning of ZAPU, the early attempts at armed struggle. I was too young to know. Even when Nkomo arrived to hold a meeting and my sister took me with her; and there were all these police and reservists firing teargas shells and I was choking, dying, not knowing what was happening, why I was running, everybody running, the police dogs coming, running, my sister screaming for me to get up and run! The Beatles. The Rolling Stones. Cliff Richard, Elvis Presley. The Shadows. Every transistor radio seemed turned up full blast. There was this small ‘township’ hall where we had bands playing smanje-manje, jazz, rock ’n’ roll – one of them was called The Rocking Kids, all ghetto youths who had taught themselves to play guitars and drums and the saxophone. And every Friday there was a film show. Hoppalong Cassidy. Gene Autry. Tarzan. James Bond, Ronald Reagan. Fuzzy. Woody Woodpecker. And Wow – Charlie Chaplin. There were the weddings, the rousing singing of heart-crushing breakteeth Shona songs and games about love and courting. Kids playing ‘House’, playing at being engaged. Improvising games that revolved around the duties of marriage, the conflicts of growing up. There we were, learning cigarettes, beer, sex and of course the use and abuse of violence. You could say the beer hall was the cultural centre. Itinerant guitarist/singers would play in there. People like Safirio Madzikatire, who is now one of our top national singers and is also a more than competent actor for both radio and television. People like Kilimanjaro. The kids who were to become guerrillas. Kids who were to become mujibas in the struggle. Kids who were to sacrifice their All for freedom – all growing up here.
- DM, (1983)
1984 POSTSCRIPT
I am afraid of one-party states, especially where you have more slogans than content in terms of policy and its implementation. I have never lived under a one-party state, except pre-independent Zimbabwe, Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, which was virtually a one-party state. And what I read about one-party states makes me, frankly, terrified. I think writers are usually recruited into a revolutionary movement before that revolution gains whatever it’s seeking. Once it has achieved that, writers are simply discarded, either as a nuisance or as totally irrelevant. I don’t know that the writer can offer the emerging nation anything. But I think there must always be a healthy tension between a writer and his nation. Writing can always turn into cheap propaganda. As long as he is serious, the writer must be free to criticise or write about anything in society which he feels is going against the grain of the nation’s aspirations. When Smith was ruling us here, we had to oppose him all the time as writers – so, even more, should we now that we have a majority government. We should be even more vigilant about our own mistakes. As soon as one talks about a writer’s role in society, before you know where you are, you are already into censorship. Most writers in Africa, I suppose in most Third World countries, are usually seen to be in conflict with governments. So much so that governments in Africa tend to automatically suspect a writer of not being loyal. The idea that a writer should always be positive, that’s always being crammed down one’s throat. A writer is part of society; a writer notices what is going on around him, sees the poverty every day. How can you whitewash poverty?
- Dambudzo Marachera
Thanks! :)
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