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Black Sunlight
"House of Hunger" not only won The Guardian fiction prize but stunned the imagination of readers with its view of the slums of colonial Salisbury. "Black Sunlight" gives a similar cockroach-eye view of London.
“I really tried to put terrorism into a historical perspective, neither applauding their acts nor condemning them. The photographer does not take sides; he just takes the press photographs.” In an unspecified setting the stream-of-consciousness narrative of this cult novel traces the fortunes of a group of anarchists in revolt against a military-fascist-capitalist opposition. The protagonist is photojournalist Chris, whose camera lens becomes the device through which the plot is cleverly unraveled. In Dambudzo Marechera’s second experimental novel, he parodies African nationalist and racial identifications as part of an argument that notions of an ‘essential African identity’ were often invoked to authorize a number of totalitarian regimes across Africa. Such irreverent, avant-garde literature was criticized upon publication in Zimbabwe in 1980, and Black Sunlight was banned on charges of ‘Euromodernism’ and as a challenge to the concept of nation-building in the newly independent country.
“I really tried to put terrorism into a historical perspective, neither applauding their acts nor condemning them. The photographer does not take sides; he just takes the press photographs.” In an unspecified setting the stream-of-consciousness narrative of this cult novel traces the fortunes of a group of anarchists in revolt against a military-fascist-capitalist opposition. The protagonist is photojournalist Chris, whose camera lens becomes the device through which the plot is cleverly unraveled. In Dambudzo Marechera’s second experimental novel, he parodies African nationalist and racial identifications as part of an argument that notions of an ‘essential African identity’ were often invoked to authorize a number of totalitarian regimes across Africa. Such irreverent, avant-garde literature was criticized upon publication in Zimbabwe in 1980, and Black Sunlight was banned on charges of ‘Euromodernism’ and as a challenge to the concept of nation-building in the newly independent country.
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
17 people are currently reading
1446 people want to read
About the author
Dambudzo Marechera
13 books182 followers "A black man who has suffered all the stupid brutalities of the white oppression in Rhodesia, his rage explodes, not in political rhetoric, but in a fusion of lyricism, wit, obscenity. Incredible that such a powerful indictment should also be so funny."
Doris Lessing in praise of The House of Hunger
Harare, 1986
At home in Harare, 1986.
© Ernst Schade.
Known as the "enfant terrible of African literature" and "Africa's response to Joyce", Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987) has been dismissed by some as mad and applauded by others as a genius. More than twenty years after his death, his work continues to inspire academic studies, biographies, films, and plays. Famous for his unconventional life as much as for his work, Marechera has become something of a cult figure in certain circles in Zimbabwe, a country whose political developments have fulfilled his prescient political vision. The annual "The House of Hunger Poetry Slam", which takes place in The Book Café in Harare every June, is a witness to the enormous influence Marechera continues to wield over Zimbabwean writers. Among his many followers and admirers are the Zimbabwean praise poet Albert Nyathi, the South African performance poets Lesego Rampolokeng and Kgafela oa Magogodi, or the Zimbabwean rapper Comrade Fatso.
Marechera belongs to the so-called second generation of Zimbabwean writers who published their major works in the 1960s and 1970s. They constitute a "lost generation" that grew up in a country ruled by a white minority government and shattered by a guerrilla war. As the Zimbabwean liberation war was gaining momentum, writers such as Marechera, Charles Mungoshi and Stanley Nyamfukudza already express disillusionment in its nationalist cause and pessimism about the future. The sense of futility sprang from the ethnic polarization of the liberation struggle as well the violence perpetrated by the guerrillas against civillians. Marechera stands out among the "lost generation" by his experimental, non-realist style, his deconstruction of both 'African' and 'Western' epistemologies as systems of power, his unceasing insistence on the role of the writer as intellectual anarchist, and his attack, even after independence, on the emergent Zimbabwean national identity.
House of Hunger
"I don't hate being black. I'm just tired of saying it's beautiful", Marechera famously wrote, expressing his post-racial vision that made some see him as "the man who betrayed Africa". Born into ghetto poverty in colonial Rhodesia, Marechera was expelled from University of Rhodesia for his political involvement. A brilliant student, he received a scholarship to read English at New College, Oxford, to which he responded with extreme alienation and was to be sent down in his second year for a series of provocations, including threats to burn down New College. He wrote his first novella, The House of Hunger (Heinemann, 1978), while camping in Port Meadow near Oxford. This stream-of-consciousness account of the schizophrenia and brutality of the colonized condition went on to win the prestigious Guardian First Book Award in 1979, with Marechera being immediately recognized as an avant-garde minstrel whose search for new ways to communicate placed him in the tradition of modernists such as Joyce, Beckett and Soyinka. The book was said to set a new path in African writing and Marechera was hailed as a witness and a prophet.
Black Sunlight
Marechera's mistrust of the establishment and high valuation of individual freedom made him resist absorption into London's literary society. Living as a tramp-writer in London's squats and parks, he wrote Black Sunlight (Heinemann, 1980), and Black Insider (published posthumously in 1992), even more experimental works that irreverently parodied African nationalist, Marxist and racial identifications, because he recognized that notions of an essential African identity were being invoked to authorize many totalitarian regimes acros
Doris Lessing in praise of The House of Hunger
Harare, 1986
At home in Harare, 1986.
© Ernst Schade.
Known as the "enfant terrible of African literature" and "Africa's response to Joyce", Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987) has been dismissed by some as mad and applauded by others as a genius. More than twenty years after his death, his work continues to inspire academic studies, biographies, films, and plays. Famous for his unconventional life as much as for his work, Marechera has become something of a cult figure in certain circles in Zimbabwe, a country whose political developments have fulfilled his prescient political vision. The annual "The House of Hunger Poetry Slam", which takes place in The Book Café in Harare every June, is a witness to the enormous influence Marechera continues to wield over Zimbabwean writers. Among his many followers and admirers are the Zimbabwean praise poet Albert Nyathi, the South African performance poets Lesego Rampolokeng and Kgafela oa Magogodi, or the Zimbabwean rapper Comrade Fatso.
Marechera belongs to the so-called second generation of Zimbabwean writers who published their major works in the 1960s and 1970s. They constitute a "lost generation" that grew up in a country ruled by a white minority government and shattered by a guerrilla war. As the Zimbabwean liberation war was gaining momentum, writers such as Marechera, Charles Mungoshi and Stanley Nyamfukudza already express disillusionment in its nationalist cause and pessimism about the future. The sense of futility sprang from the ethnic polarization of the liberation struggle as well the violence perpetrated by the guerrillas against civillians. Marechera stands out among the "lost generation" by his experimental, non-realist style, his deconstruction of both 'African' and 'Western' epistemologies as systems of power, his unceasing insistence on the role of the writer as intellectual anarchist, and his attack, even after independence, on the emergent Zimbabwean national identity.
House of Hunger
"I don't hate being black. I'm just tired of saying it's beautiful", Marechera famously wrote, expressing his post-racial vision that made some see him as "the man who betrayed Africa". Born into ghetto poverty in colonial Rhodesia, Marechera was expelled from University of Rhodesia for his political involvement. A brilliant student, he received a scholarship to read English at New College, Oxford, to which he responded with extreme alienation and was to be sent down in his second year for a series of provocations, including threats to burn down New College. He wrote his first novella, The House of Hunger (Heinemann, 1978), while camping in Port Meadow near Oxford. This stream-of-consciousness account of the schizophrenia and brutality of the colonized condition went on to win the prestigious Guardian First Book Award in 1979, with Marechera being immediately recognized as an avant-garde minstrel whose search for new ways to communicate placed him in the tradition of modernists such as Joyce, Beckett and Soyinka. The book was said to set a new path in African writing and Marechera was hailed as a witness and a prophet.
Black Sunlight
Marechera's mistrust of the establishment and high valuation of individual freedom made him resist absorption into London's literary society. Living as a tramp-writer in London's squats and parks, he wrote Black Sunlight (Heinemann, 1980), and Black Insider (published posthumously in 1992), even more experimental works that irreverently parodied African nationalist, Marxist and racial identifications, because he recognized that notions of an essential African identity were being invoked to authorize many totalitarian regimes acros
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
January 28, 2018
Jesus. I thought I could escape Hegel and Whitman but Dambudzo somehow weaved them into this demonic chapter.
I am adding this book to the poetry shelf. The latter part of this novel is straight up prose poetry.
Do I know what I just read? Not really. A poetic statement? An essay on the radical violent nature of the imagination and ideology? The separation of the individual from the unfolding of history? A look back over the liberation of Zimbabwe? A vicious attack on language? An attempt to undue the violence of language? An attempt to strike against the movement the dictatorship of blackness in Zimbabwe? I don't know. I don't think I really care to know either. There is something about this book that seems utterly broken yet unified. Something like a broken stain glass windows super glued together. I think?
I haven't read Joyce before but from what I hear this feeling is quite similar. This feeling of awe at the genius of the sentence construction but perplexed and unsure whether or not it's meaning is clear.
Isn't meaning blasé?
Isn't intuition
I am adding this book to the poetry shelf. The latter part of this novel is straight up prose poetry.
Do I know what I just read? Not really. A poetic statement? An essay on the radical violent nature of the imagination and ideology? The separation of the individual from the unfolding of history? A look back over the liberation of Zimbabwe? A vicious attack on language? An attempt to undue the violence of language? An attempt to strike against the movement the dictatorship of blackness in Zimbabwe? I don't know. I don't think I really care to know either. There is something about this book that seems utterly broken yet unified. Something like a broken stain glass windows super glued together. I think?
I haven't read Joyce before but from what I hear this feeling is quite similar. This feeling of awe at the genius of the sentence construction but perplexed and unsure whether or not it's meaning is clear.
Isn't meaning blasé?
Isn't intuition
October 28, 2016
Simply said: more people need to read this book. So energetic and stylized. I haven't read it in years, but simply reading the title makes me excited. Utterly original.
February 7, 2021
The black image bifurcated as it hit my retina. Eye, left with remnants glittering with black sunlight, not the negation of life but its more sordid promise. Revolution given literary form still taking a tour of the planets.
I want to read you everyday. The word tossed onto the castiron pan crackles incessantly. A carnival of anarcho-blackness, Junkanoo clowns leering at me, what meetings with Biko must have felt like. If Rimbaud had never gone to Africa, we would still have Marechera’s slimy birth. The sheer weight of the word, no, its opacity, bending my mind into an unfinished bridge. The reminder that literature is an erotic act; that sexual identity institutionalizes the verb.
As the night is the absence of the sun’s light, so is blackness the underbelly of imagination. What if we set fire to Manichean thinking and realize we are finding opposites when we should be seeing doppelgangers.
Reprint this!
I want to read you everyday. The word tossed onto the castiron pan crackles incessantly. A carnival of anarcho-blackness, Junkanoo clowns leering at me, what meetings with Biko must have felt like. If Rimbaud had never gone to Africa, we would still have Marechera’s slimy birth. The sheer weight of the word, no, its opacity, bending my mind into an unfinished bridge. The reminder that literature is an erotic act; that sexual identity institutionalizes the verb.
As the night is the absence of the sun’s light, so is blackness the underbelly of imagination. What if we set fire to Manichean thinking and realize we are finding opposites when we should be seeing doppelgangers.
Reprint this!
February 17, 2021
I guess this is one of those highly abstract books where you either get it or you don't. I appreciated the originality but it felt way too much like "brain on acid" for me to really get into at the time I read it - during free-time while taking Astronomy observations in Sutherland. Will give it another shot, one day.
February 24, 2025
Very strange and difficult to follow. A stream of consciousness novel told via poetic language
June 18, 2024
The follow-up to the classic The House of Hunger, this novel is more exploratory in form and style, immersing the reader in a menacing realm of a terrorist state and/or bizarre faction, then waterboarding them with showy, intermittently brilliant patches of surreal, poetic prose that borders on the nonsensical. As a showcase for Marechera’s talent for explosive, vivid images and divine phrasemaking for the sake of divine phrasemaking, Black Sunlight is a minor tour de force—in terms of a coherent theme, story, purpose, or tone, the novel is a complete catastrophe. This new edition was published in the UK by Head of Zeus imprint Apollo Africa, who have an exciting new slate of African fiction reprints.
June 2, 2014
Genius in Full Flower
Dambudzo Marechera could transform everyday language into a tortured scream for sanity or mold it into a seductive poetry of passionate need and joyful determination. The extremes of political chaos and spiritual urgency that characterized 1970s Zimbabwe illuminate the pages of Black Sunlight with unblinking honesty and desperately clinging hope.
This small masterpiece, along with his Guardian-prize winning House of Hunger, is one of the most powerful books ever penned by a Zimbabwean writer and gives testimony to why so many readers worldwide are "discovering" marcher's prose and poetry during this 21st-century resurgence of interest in his work. Black Sunlight is a book for lovers of serious accomplished literature, and although Marechera's style has drawn comparison to such authors as Wole Soyinka, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, his genius is really singular and deserves to be recognized as such.
One can only imagine what masterworks were lost to the world after he died of aids, when his genius was in full flower, at the age of 35 in 1987.
by Aberjhani
I Made My Boy Out of Poetry
and Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Dambudzo Marechera could transform everyday language into a tortured scream for sanity or mold it into a seductive poetry of passionate need and joyful determination. The extremes of political chaos and spiritual urgency that characterized 1970s Zimbabwe illuminate the pages of Black Sunlight with unblinking honesty and desperately clinging hope.
This small masterpiece, along with his Guardian-prize winning House of Hunger, is one of the most powerful books ever penned by a Zimbabwean writer and gives testimony to why so many readers worldwide are "discovering" marcher's prose and poetry during this 21st-century resurgence of interest in his work. Black Sunlight is a book for lovers of serious accomplished literature, and although Marechera's style has drawn comparison to such authors as Wole Soyinka, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, his genius is really singular and deserves to be recognized as such.
One can only imagine what masterworks were lost to the world after he died of aids, when his genius was in full flower, at the age of 35 in 1987.
by Aberjhani
I Made My Boy Out of Poetry
and Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
September 20, 2014
A very strange little book, about a Black Sunlight, a terrorist organization or a group of freedom fighters, I'm not ever sure... The narrator is named Christian, a photographer, who 's there to document the violence and to have sex with just about every member of the group, while his blind wife "watches". To be clear, for most of this slim (but heavy) volume I had no idea what was happening. At one point Christian meets his double and has a philosophical conversation about the nature of violence, but mostly it is just unedited stream of consciousness (with a dubious use of the "I" instead of "me"; as in: "for Susan and I."), which reminded me of Henry Miller's writing. But then again, I never read Joyce.
November 13, 2012
Marechera was the kind of off-beat Zimbabwean writer that did himself no favours, one who ended his life sleeping on Harare’s park benches refusing to talk to his family. He was either mad or blessed with, as some believed, a taint of genius, and his small output of work continues to attract attention with the reissue of his second novel in Penguin’s newly launched African Writers Series. A photojournalist whose name may or may not be Christian becomes connected to a violent rebel organisation that may or may not be called Black Sunlight, in a country that may or may not be Zimbabwe. What Marechera is doing in this odd and, yes, awkward book is explore anarchism as an intellectual position. Written when he was in his mid-twenties, the story bounces between Christian’s marriage to his blind wife Marie, to liaisons with several women (all of whom are necessarily spectacular in bed), to his work covering student riots and the shadowy world of Black Sunlight. There’s an interesting passage in which he meets a doppelgänger of himself and discusses violence, plus there are several sections in the latter parts of the book that indulge in philosophy-fuelled rants of the sixth-form variety (Marechera also studied at Oxford, before being kicked out). One surprise was that he name-checked John Wyndham and Clark Ashton Smith, although not in a particularly complimentary way. I didn’t particularly like this book at all; it’s vain, inconsistent and weakly plotted (if there is much of a plot at all), and gives the strong impression of a talented young writer who didn’t yet know how to say with clarity what he needed to say.
April 24, 2016
I hated this. It read, to me, like any 1970s would-be revolutionary with no prose-writing talent but a whole head full of diatribe and spleen. Also, I sensed it had been edited into near-submission by an Anglo who hated it as much as I did and wanted only to blandify it for the masses. Now sure, it’s been three or four years since I read it, and I notice as I write this it has strangely vacated my bookshelf, so I’m light on details as to why or how it so vexed me, but one thing I’m sure of: to call Marechera “the African Joyce” is 100% spin. Absolute zero prose innovation here, just another angry polemic.
December 1, 2009
This book is bloody fantastic, with an edginess to the narrative that makes it raw, titillating and impossible to put down. Sometimes, though, it veers into reference-strewn stream-of-consciousness which I found forgivable but tiring. This is the best book of African fiction I've read by far, and I plan on tracking down everything this man wrote.
February 24, 2019
"Black Sunlight" is a short but multi-layered novel. It is thought to be less complete than "The House of Hunger" and often viewed as something of a failed experiment. This is not the case, however, and "Black Sunlight" deserves serious consideration as an original, modern masterpiece. The novel--taking something from Milton's phrase, "darkness visible"--is a study of modern melancholy and the darker side of the human psyche.
February 3, 2025
one of the darkest novels i’ve had the pleasure of reading. nonlinear plot, pretty experimental with a lot of greek references (that i enjoyed heh). such riveting gorgeous prose interweaving with some of the most horrific gruesome and feverish writing i’ve ever read. sometimes you don’t need to understand everything in a book to know that a book is good, if not spectacular.
March 25, 2022
I'm not sure what I just read, but I know I'll want to reread it in a couple years. If you are into a naked lunch stream of consciousness delirium, but want something that feels a little more composed and deals with colonial politics and psychosis, you should read Marechera. Crazy interesting.
November 28, 2021
it's a lot like the title novella from house on hunger in that it's angry and violent and sexual but this also feels more developed and mature than that book did. it's ostensibly about some sort of radical terrorist cell of vaguely anarchist persuasion but the structure is loose and nonlinear, jumping around from place to place and scene to scene in such a way that you never quite get the complete picture of what's going on. some of the more image heavy sections read as basically prose poetry, and there's also a very interesting part where the main character, who seems to be modelled on marechera himself, engages in conversation with his double, and a lot of their conversation seems to be drawing on marechera's own career as a writer and the reaction that his work provoked. it's a pity that it's such a short book because i would love to have read more of this, and it's also a pity that it's out of print and very difficult to find. someone reprint it stat!
some quotes:
"Through the open window. The fucking window, a slashing wind blows. Through the open window. Within this pale womb with its beard, a brutal story writhes. Night imprisoned in the room stayed with me all day long. Laughter's broken glass, through the fucking window. Is the view. The endless glittering view of gigantic humid trees shutting out the sun. A think mould of history covers the walls. Covers the blood, flesh and bones. A black skin, think and minute. Covers the darkness in the room. Through the open window, blows the slashing winds."
"That is the whole point of these many words. I am as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh. A man may be humble through vainglory. Fingernails engrained with the dirt of self-abasement. Cut the milk teeth on humiliation. There is nothing but a hideous dark ahead, a moonless sunless starless world. With its Armoured Insect whose power it is to cast the shadows that dog our steps from the delirium of the womb to the shattered mask of the tomb. The eyes of that holy cockroach in bright black sunlight have mosaic vision, each chink receiving an image which is the fraction of the whole object - man - in view. The sum of these fractions gives a whole image of our thinking and horror. And when this God Insect has had its fill, Malpighian tubules attached to the beginning of the hindgut extract us from the blood and pour us into the gut where the water is reabsorbed through the walls to excrete us solid and whole but in spirit broken utterly."
some quotes:
"Through the open window. The fucking window, a slashing wind blows. Through the open window. Within this pale womb with its beard, a brutal story writhes. Night imprisoned in the room stayed with me all day long. Laughter's broken glass, through the fucking window. Is the view. The endless glittering view of gigantic humid trees shutting out the sun. A think mould of history covers the walls. Covers the blood, flesh and bones. A black skin, think and minute. Covers the darkness in the room. Through the open window, blows the slashing winds."
"That is the whole point of these many words. I am as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh. A man may be humble through vainglory. Fingernails engrained with the dirt of self-abasement. Cut the milk teeth on humiliation. There is nothing but a hideous dark ahead, a moonless sunless starless world. With its Armoured Insect whose power it is to cast the shadows that dog our steps from the delirium of the womb to the shattered mask of the tomb. The eyes of that holy cockroach in bright black sunlight have mosaic vision, each chink receiving an image which is the fraction of the whole object - man - in view. The sum of these fractions gives a whole image of our thinking and horror. And when this God Insect has had its fill, Malpighian tubules attached to the beginning of the hindgut extract us from the blood and pour us into the gut where the water is reabsorbed through the walls to excrete us solid and whole but in spirit broken utterly."
November 6, 2011
this truly is the most depressing book I've read in a long time; reading it made me feel way older than I am. it's the way Dambudzo Marechera captures the voidness of life, the unknowing cause of it, so perfectly. his characters function as a means to an end; Dambudzo tries to convey a bleak and dark view of life itself by excessively using the stream-of-consciousness narrative at times, and referencing and/or quoting a vast number of known. this is my problem with the book. I bought it expecting a novel, but actually got a highly philosophical poem with the opening chapters only resembling a novel. Black Sunlight is too much at once. in the end its best description is probably a row of sentences from page 127:"There was no beauty apart from conflict. There were no masterpieces without aggression. Syntax, the adverb, and punctuation marks were to be abolished. Poetry had to be a continuous succession of images. New images. There were no such things as elegant and vulgar images. Intuition, which assimilates images, knew no privilege, or distinction. The principle of maximum disorder was the sole function of order in a poem."
October 28, 2008
"Black Sunlight" is a short but multi-layered novel. It is thought to be less complete than "The House of Hunger" and often viewed as something of a failed experiment. This is not the case, however, and "Black Sunlight" deserves serious consideration as an original, modern masterpiece. The novel--taking something from Milton's phrase, "darkness visible"--is a study of modern melancholy and the darker side of the human psyche.
potential-to-read
December 30, 2008Zimbabwe
May 4, 2013
Brilliant writing. Not easy to follow though...when you read your mind should be focused on Dambudzo, he is witty, crazy at times but very challenging to understand.
June 26, 2014
This book is awesome!!! It's narrated from the p.o.v. of a camera; it's evocative of a mind warped by war.
September 9, 2015
Both brutal and beautiful at times. Forceful always.
December 10, 2018
Honestly, not an easy book if you in hurry...Really enjoyed it.
November 29, 2021
i would give this 5 stars again if i could
visceral, torrid, unflinching unraveling, pure of vision, if a fractured vision can be said to be pure
visceral, torrid, unflinching unraveling, pure of vision, if a fractured vision can be said to be pure
April 27, 2023
Black Sunlight is a book about Christian, a press photographer from an unnamed African country, who returns after studying at Oxford and finds upon his return a nation in utter chaos.
If you swap the name and vocation out with 'Dambudzo' and 'writer', and the nation with Zimbabwe, it fits the author's own experience. And while Dambudzo Marechera does write in a semi-autobiographical mode at times, the literary stylings of this book propels it into different territory.
Traditional foundations of novels are not really to be found here. There is no story or actual characters (they are clearly just writers' sticks) and the setting is only vaguely inferred even though a lot of time is spent musing on it (a state in a period of anarchic violence, resembling the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe in the late 70's).
Dambudzo is much more of a sentence writer than a novelist. His writing talent is quite obvious; he writes with a real verve and poetic flair on a sentence level. It is tempting to call him a kind of African Rimbaud (Dambudzo was also reckless, anti-authoritarian, and died much too young).
Unfortunately, as good as the language can be, for me, it did not end up amounting to much. That is to say, the book dissolves into a state of just language. James Joyce-style streams of associate language, vaguely connected to some idea or thought that I often could not find or follow.
Much of the book is - depending on your tastes - either impenetrable quasi-philosophical speculation or Modernist consciousness-writing of the highest order. It can probably be both at the same time, but for me, it was more of the former.
It is a pity because the talent is obviously there, but as a reader, I need a bit more structure too endure this type of writing, even though the book is a very short one.
I should have probably started with House of Hunger, which I am still ready to give a chance.
If you swap the name and vocation out with 'Dambudzo' and 'writer', and the nation with Zimbabwe, it fits the author's own experience. And while Dambudzo Marechera does write in a semi-autobiographical mode at times, the literary stylings of this book propels it into different territory.
Traditional foundations of novels are not really to be found here. There is no story or actual characters (they are clearly just writers' sticks) and the setting is only vaguely inferred even though a lot of time is spent musing on it (a state in a period of anarchic violence, resembling the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe in the late 70's).
Dambudzo is much more of a sentence writer than a novelist. His writing talent is quite obvious; he writes with a real verve and poetic flair on a sentence level. It is tempting to call him a kind of African Rimbaud (Dambudzo was also reckless, anti-authoritarian, and died much too young).
Unfortunately, as good as the language can be, for me, it did not end up amounting to much. That is to say, the book dissolves into a state of just language. James Joyce-style streams of associate language, vaguely connected to some idea or thought that I often could not find or follow.
Much of the book is - depending on your tastes - either impenetrable quasi-philosophical speculation or Modernist consciousness-writing of the highest order. It can probably be both at the same time, but for me, it was more of the former.
It is a pity because the talent is obviously there, but as a reader, I need a bit more structure too endure this type of writing, even though the book is a very short one.
I should have probably started with House of Hunger, which I am still ready to give a chance.
Read
October 9, 2024Many thanks to Jonathan Ball Publishers for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Part of The Heinemann African Writers Series.
I was looking forward to a "visceral account of a photojournalist's entanglement with a terrorist organisation" but what I got instead was a lot of confusion and a sore head.
At first, I wasn't sure if this was supposed to be, like, a blend of prose and poetry or if the author was trying something new, but I just couldn't determine when the author was internalising or continuing the story; after having used the term "black sunlight" three times in different contexts, it still wasn't clear that this was the name The Resistance.
After reading about a lot of sex, chapter seven starts off with a discussion with a man who is obsessed with defecating and being able to read the future in it - this is where I gave up.
Not every book is for every reader; this one certainly wasn't for me.
DNF
Part of The Heinemann African Writers Series.
I was looking forward to a "visceral account of a photojournalist's entanglement with a terrorist organisation" but what I got instead was a lot of confusion and a sore head.
At first, I wasn't sure if this was supposed to be, like, a blend of prose and poetry or if the author was trying something new, but I just couldn't determine when the author was internalising or continuing the story; after having used the term "black sunlight" three times in different contexts, it still wasn't clear that this was the name The Resistance.
After reading about a lot of sex, chapter seven starts off with a discussion with a man who is obsessed with defecating and being able to read the future in it - this is where I gave up.
Not every book is for every reader; this one certainly wasn't for me.
DNF
March 21, 2025
(2.5) not as compelling or sustained as the black insider and marechera's misogyny really comes through here, and it's so boring! like yeah the body of the woman as the locus of modernity, to him the conquest of the white woman's body seems like some form of revenge for "the rape of africa" and a coming(!) into agency for the black man, and of course in this schema the black woman doesn't even figure, she's only for discarding and cannibalisation, her dignity and personhood and the violations of her body are only ever for allegory. it's so predictable and unoriginal. anyways: "'You could say vandalism is a mature course in assertiveness. A fist through the window of the void.'" (142)
July 17, 2025
I’m glad I forced myself to finish, bc The beginning and end were full of beautiful, striking prose— but the middle was a wildly chaotic fever dream that I could barely get through.
I get that it’s a metaphor for the destabilizing absurdity of authoritarian domination, or something, but it was intensely difficult to follow.
Worth a read if you want your brain scrambled.
I get that it’s a metaphor for the destabilizing absurdity of authoritarian domination, or something, but it was intensely difficult to follow.
Worth a read if you want your brain scrambled.
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November 9, 2025The history of a leftist group fighting against an abstract totalitarian regime would be far too coherent a way to describe this riff on Beckett and Burroughs. Frankly, a lot of it is just vivid descriptions of horrifying acts, but the stuff that isn't is edgewise and clever. Marechera was a rare mind.
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