The house of hunger (1978)

Subtitled “Short Stories”, this work is actually a collection of one novella of 80-odd pages (“House of Hunger”) and nine sketches / stories. The small group of texts in its entirety reflects the author’s vision of (mainly township) life in Rhodesia (specifically, the period of Ian Smith’s rule of the country which at independence became Zimbabwe) — with a minority of the shorter pieces in the book depicting an African exile’s experience of life in Britain (mainly at Oxford University, where Marechera had studied). The autobiographical origin of all these pieces is evident enough, but it takes a very gifted writer to offer his readers this powerfully imaginative vision of (in general) such unpromising material. Perhaps Marechera is above all an intellectual writer, an early African post-modernist, but the “avant-garde” qualities of his texts are inextricably rooted in the vividly recognisable circumstances of the battle for survival of the urban poor. The complex effect of his writing can be roughly indicated by listing the wide range of perspectives it so convincingly and brilliantly manages to combine: there is in his work a delicate morality; a wildly anarchic humour; eruptions of surrealist imagery; a sociological astuteness which spares neither black nor white; a profound yet empathetic melancholy, disguised by a shocking harshness and by abundant accounts of bloody fights and of demeaning, mundane circumstances.

When it appeared, The house of hunger was co-awarded the 1979 prize for fiction by the well-known British newspaper The Guardian. Marechera notoriously wrecked expensive crockery at the prestigious reception held for the winners. But this work (Marechera’s most famous text) is larger than this ambience of gossip, a wiser and more moving work than this association may make it seem — indeed, it is one of the great achievements of African literature. Fragmentation may be thought of as its major theme — the disruption of human potential characteristic of so many African societies (like this text’s Rhodesian world) in the latter part of the millennium and beyond. With this fragmentation is contrasted the glimmerings and glimpses of a more whole (and wholesome) world, by whose light the brokenness of the present is discerned. One character in “House of Hunger” refers to the “imminence of wholes” as “the beginning of art” (60), and this notion helps to explain why a text that exhibits so much that is woeful and sordid is not ultimately depressing in its effect. Underlying everything, there is a fierce anger in this writer’s work, a silent cry that says people ought not to have to live so direly. Marechera is one of the most uncompromising writers I know.

The overt insistence in the text is on “the cruel sarcasm [that] rules ... lives” (45) in the African township and on its consequences of “soul-hunger” (1) and “gut-rot” (7 ff. — a recurrent expression). The main story engages especially with the theme of the free mind entrapped in the colonised condition. This idea is relatable (like Marechera’s compatriot Dangarembga’s later novel) to J.-P. Sartre’s summary of Fanon’s notion, that the condition of the native is a “nervous condition”. Yet this short work is large- spirited and immensely sophisticated in its exploration of that state. The “cruel yearning” of which the narrator tells us describes a universal, young adult, aspiration, but one which occurs here imprisoned within a particular squalor and subjugation — “the panorama of barbed wire, whitewashed houses, drunks, prostitutes, the angelic choirs of god-created flies, and the dust ... “ (11). If a quotation like this indicates a sense of people out-manoeuvred by their circumstances before they have even started, it simultaneously indicates a sarcastic and wry intelligence which is never bluffed into naive idealism — even as it registers that irresistible, burgeoning (and here thwarted) vitality of the young:

We knew that before us lay another vast emptiness that’s appetite for things living was at best wolfish. Life stretched out like a series of hunger-scoured hovels stretching endlessly towards the horizon. (3)

The medium which registers this awareness is that of a particularly clever young man, whose strivings and urges connect him with a wide range of (mainly young) people, like his brother’s abused ‘wife’ (the tender and courageous Immaculate); the tough activist Julia; the prostitute Nestar; the intellectual Philip; the weakling Edmund who turns out to be the “Sole survivor” (61) of a group of freedom fighters; the narrator’s white ‘girl friend’ Patricia (an artist and a brave spirit) and the police spy and township show- off, Harry. The narrator, we gather, has suffered a ‘nervous breakdown’ because of the intensity of his engagement with the dilemmas of his time as well as his baffled questioning of his own role in it. A recurrent notion of absent yet haunting “black heroes” (22; 39; 58 ff.) expresses, it seems, the desire (a mirage?) to oppose — forcibly and effectively — the humiliating encapsulations of black existence within the Rhodesian state. “Where are the bloody heroes?” (43)

We do, indeed, see examples of black heroes in the novel, in Edmund (above) and sometimes in the narrator’s and some of his friends’ conduct, although the mental colonisation of most of his people is the narrator’s overwhelming impression:

... they seemed to know that the upraised black fist of power would fill up more lunatic asylums than it would swell the numbers of our political martyrs. (50)

The narrator’s friend Philip declares:

There’s white shit in our leaders and white shit in our dreams and white shit in our history and white shit on our hands in anything we build or pray for. (59)

The gloom of this vision is probably what is lightly mocked in the wise words of the “old man” whose conversation with the narrator brings ‘House of Hunger” to a close. The old man warns: “Don’t take these things too seriously” (81). He might be referring to Philip’s fury (see above) and cautioning the narrator when he tells mockingly of the “angry mind” of an “angry youth” whose fury consumes him while, “underneath, the Earth moved as it has always moved” (81; 82). The old man “told stories that were oblique, rambling, and fragmentary”, but in his case, everything about him “gave body to the fragments of things” (79), suggesting a finally healing vision or “the imminence of wholes” (60) referred to earlier.

“House of Hunger” ends on the old man’s warning to the narrator: “I think Trouble is knocking impatiently on our door” (82). The attitude of resistant alertness which this advocates seems the only antidote offered to the range of troubles (and their deep psychic and political roots) depicted in this piece.

The other, shorter pieces which follow the long title story are equally fascinating — intense, wide-ranging, startling stories — but this brief review does not offer the scope to examine them now.

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