The House of Hunger

Dambudzo Marechera was born in 1952 in the then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where as a young man, he endured the indignity and hardships of growing up under colonial oppressive rule. He attended the University of Rhodesia where he was expelled for his activism against colonial rule. He ended up at Oxford University where again he was expelled for his unruly behaviour. What is clear from his life is his restlessness and energy. Marechera is among those that put Zimbabwe on the literal map. Before his death in 1987 (at age 35) he had published a book of stories, two novels (one posthumously), a collection of poetry (also posthumous), a book of plays, prose and poetry. House of Hunger was his first book, published in 1978. The book has nine short stories. The stories are largely his autobiography where he expresses the hardships and challenges that he went through, from his troubled childhood to the time he was growing up in colonial Rhodesia. His command of the English language is excellent and he expresses himself in a piercing and compelling manner. No wonder the book won the Gaurdian Fiction Prize in 1979.

Marechera in his short story "The House of Hunger" writes in a stream of consciousness and in what some have called a carnivalesque "the world is upside down" approach. His writing is both difficult to comprehend and repulsive to digest. Scatology is dominant. I quote one tame image. The toilet bowl did not flinch when I sat on him. The paper protested crisply but I did not show mercy. When I shook his arm gratefully he flushed, roaring immovably as I pulled up my sullen trousers. (40) His creation of images and manipulation of diction are striking. There's hungry people out there. There's homeless people out there. There's many going about in the rags of their birthday suits. And they're all mad. They's all got designs....There's clouds of flies everywhere you go. There's armies of worms slithering in our history. And there's squadrons of mosquitoes homing down the cradle of our future. What do we do? Clutch and drown each other, that's what, and if we can't do ourselves in properly there's congregations of missionaries and shrinks to do it, and they have on their side cops and soldiers and Australia and New Zealand and China and the USA and France and the bloody Germans. The poor are not the only ones who've got designs! (59-60) His irony is forceful. Actually class-consciousness and the conservative snobbery that goes with it are deeply rooted in the African elite, who are in the same breath able to shout LIBERATION, POLYGAMY without feeling that something is unhinged. (44) As he wrote, so he lived. He was expelled from mission school for challenging the colonialist teaching, from the University of Rhodesia for protesting racial discrimination, from Oxford for allegedly attempting to burn down part of the school. Once he had a solo protest march against the white government of Ian Smith in Rhodesia (Zimbawbe) and had to flee the nation. When his nation became independent, in London at the celebration at the African Centre in London where exiles had come in their patriotic ethnic dress, he came in English horse-riding gear as if he were an English lord ready for a fox hunt , a parody of both the English elite and the African nationalists. His life raged for a brief 35 years.

Apartheid reigning over mind and body, infecting the world even through it's most wronged victims. Dambudzo Marechera's head cracks open, spills molten bile over all the African slums. Now dead, completely unknown in America, he was as angry as Louis-Ferdinand Celine (a true accomplishment) and every bit as talented. This book is a shiv. In dangerous situations such things are necessary.