Scrapiron Blues

by Dambudzo Marechera

English

Genres: Fiction, African Literature, Poetry

Paperback

First published April 1, 1999

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

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few short passages from Scrapiron Blues:


So much time to kill. So little time in which to kill it.


I have a lot of time to kill. And I don’t want to kill it. I want to drag it all into full consciousness. Make it live. Maybe that’s what makes me, forces me to write. Can’t just sit around listening to the little sounds of my hair going grey.


Money, the way it comes and goes, at once terrifying and pitifully elusive.


It’s nice to hate everything and enjoy the details.


…O a sorrow of flowers stench pit of yesterday’s aerosol silence of bullets straight ahead do I remain when character is clawed out by chance circumstance by sleep or perpetual pleasure cruise on winelake cheescape lamb’s heart rainwords flapping maddened sailing ship into simpler lethal direction to know is not enough more is demanded than I ever borrowed each finger is king holding down a string of thought stroking ear and lip and life and delight this bracelet of firewords and my knuckleduster for night’s bright innuendoes…thinking thoughts that hurt.


Did it all come down to luck? To chance? To happenstance? If that is so then why, O Lord, WHY? Thinking of Huysman’s Against Nature and the futile attempt to shut out the ghastly realities of physical distress; descendant of Goncharov’s Oblomov, cousin of Dostoevsky’s fatal ennui. Himself worrying burnt-out thighs through the murky air of hope that there lurked some meaning beyond the shadowline of impossible intent.

[elderfoil...the whatever champion · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fear is the flesh, the gorgeous dress my skeleton wears.

Scrapiron Blues is the final book of Marechera's posthumous pieces/writings/segments put together by Flora Veit-Wild.

The first two sections were average: Tony Fights Tonight-Pub Stories and Scrapiron Blues-City Plays.

First Street Tumult-More City Stories improved, the best entry being "First Street Tumult."

When Rainwords Spit Fire-A Township Novella is fantastic.

The Concentration Camp mostly fantastic, especially Part V: The Intellectual's Revolt.

Perhaps his last writing, "Fuzzy Goo's Guide to the Earth" also wild and wonderful in the otherwise not so interesting Fuzzy Goo's Stories for Children section ("children's stories" with drawings from Veit-Wild's child).

The book ends with a very good poem, "Thoughts of a Rusty Nail," which ends with the line at the top: Fear is the flesh, the gorgeous dress my skeleton wears.

[Daniel Polansky]

Posthumous work of several genres by Zimbabwe's mid-century enfant terrible. Marechera's mental health issues saw him spend the waning years of his short life on the streets of Harare, and this is certainly evidence of diseased mind's take on a diseased world. At all searing, sometimes quite funny, not quite universally bleak (though close), all in all a fascinating way to spend a few hundred pages.

[Kelvin hopkins]

Marechera was the best African writer a young aspiring, intelligencia of his time with vision.This book really say the truth about the situation in zimbabwe without leaving any stone unattended we like more analitic writers like Marechera in our African society. Sometimes i cry we when i read his literature coz i will be imaging if he still survive up to this days maybe the African continent will change coz his writtings had more power socially, politically and economically. Rest in peace Dambudzo your literature will live forever