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Black Sunlight

4.0 of 5 stars 4.00 · rating details · 38 ratings · 7 reviews

"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.

Paperback, 128 pages

Published January 1st 1988 by Heinemann Educational Books (first published 1980)

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Nov 12, 2012 Pete Young rated it 3 of 5 stars

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 t...more

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Nov 05, 2011 jean lice rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: studies, zimbabwean

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 expectin...more

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Jul 26, 2007 Aberjhani rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: african, writers, series, guardian, fiction, prize, author, authors, literary

genius in full flower[return][return]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. [return][return]this small masterpiece, along with his guardian-prize winning house of hunger, is one of the most...more

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Oct 28, 2008 AH rated it 5 of 5 stars

"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.

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Dec 01, 2009 Elie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: africa, fiction

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.

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May 04, 2013 Mpumi Sithole rated it 4 of 5 stars

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.

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Dec 25, 2009 xiexie feizhou rated it 3 of 5 stars

The astonishing fluency of Marachera! Here's a writer whose words drop mental and violent on the page. You hear the words so vividly and feel all over again, the ringing of your own madness.

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May 04, 2013 James Humphrey marked it as to-read

Apr 30, 2013 Tarisai Jaraga rated it 1 of 5 stars

Apr 23, 2013 Odhumanity marked it as to-read

Apr 18, 2013 africawrites - The RAS' annual festival of African Literature marked it as to-read

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Mar 27, 2013 Mon7y81 marked it as to-read

Shelves: africa

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Mar 10, 2013 Nicole Gervasio rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: african-fiction, orals_postcolonial-literature

Mar 08, 2013 Danford Chinyasa marked it as to-read

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Feb 28, 2013 Simbarashe Gerald marked it as to-read

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Jan 24, 2013 Cecilia rated it 2 of 5 stars

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Shelves: books-i-didn-t-finish

Dec 09, 2012 Britt marked it as to-read

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Nov 18, 2012 Q rated it 4 of 5 stars

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About Dambudzo Marechera

"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 literat...more "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(less)

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