The black insider

by Dambudzo Marechera

Outcasts inside a ruined and deserted faculty building tell of their experiences in the post-colonial disaster zone. The story reflects the writer's experience of migrancy, and his refusal of the security of belonging - either to an African identity or to the international literary elite.

Genres: Fiction, Zimbabwe, African Literature, Poetry, Africa

128 pages, Unknown Binding

First published September 19, 1990

About the author

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

Reviews

[Daniel Polansky]

A postmodern evening in an apocalyptic Zimbabwe destroyed by ethnic strife, as told by an authorial analog. Marechera was brilliant, and very much wants you to know it. There's a pretty constant stream of literary references in addition to the philosophical asides, linguistic deviations and switches in perspective usual to this genre. But, Marechera was brilliant, and there's a lot of very insightful stuff here. There's a sensitivity to Marechera which I think would come across even if you didn't know his tragic life story, a rawness to him, as of a burn wound. I've enjoyed my foray into his writing, for which, as it happens, I have Binyavanga Wainaina to thank, who recommends him in one of his short stories. Always enjoy following ladders of inspiration.

[Eoin Feeney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting way of writing, I loved the short stories at the very end.
The black insider itself had some ups and downs but overall I think it was pretty fantastic, and I particularly adored a few moments of repetition which book ended some reflections.

[jq · Rating 4 out of 5]

recommended by vita. a lot of this went over my head but not in a bad way. the density and the toxic anger and violence and lashing out comes from this need to punish and exact revenge and fling things back out at the elite institution and the way it uses intoxicating prestige to brainwash people into becoming the ideal bourgeois intellectual, the smug and self-satisfied enlightened scholar whose only battles take place in the marketplace of ideas. brain drain, extraction, exploitation; as long as we care about where we went to school we will never be free. so much to chew on and think through. this will stay with me a long time.

"There was only one other black person apart from myself, Stanley, with whom I had read English Literature; we had read each other’s poems and short stories and criticised each other’s efforts with that sincere insincerity of two people who know each other only deep enough to wound. There were lots of black people in the university but I had lost the capacity to recognise them in myself when their smiles for me became arid and harsh as soon as the news got about that I had been sent down in disgrace. It seemed I could not meet any one of them, including Stanley, without being given a lecture on the I-Told-You-So-Got-What-You-Deserve theme. Before Peter and Shelagh gave me a roof, they had all turned me away from their doors with the usual I’ve-Got-My-Own-Life-To-Lead blues. I slept three nights on the roof of the English Faculty Library, dazed somewhat by the unusual first time without a roof, polish of the stars shining down on my sleeping bag. I was just about to start a journey of discovery in the real United Kingdom."

[UlyssicBurial · Rating 2 out of 5]

Terminal and excellent. Drained me utterly. Reading it was a fucking nightmare, so short but so dense, molasses-paced but punctuated by something sensational every few pages. Marechera's self-aware self-awareness bleeding into the text, his relationship with identity, nationality, ethnicity, sex. I hated and loved this book and can't stop thinking about it. Will definitely reread.

[africawrites - The RAS' annual festival of African Literature · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published posthumously in 1987 The Black Insider in a collection of short stories and poems that reflect the Marechera's position and experiences as a Zimbabwean writer living Britain. Full of the avid individualism characteristic of his work the collection is a testimony to Marechera's efforts to establish himself as an author with a unique and often groundbreaking style.

F.E

[Tawanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard Read