Enlightening journey into authors’ minds-(15-02-07)

Marechera. Veit-Wild manages to explore Marechera’s works together with those of Lesego Rampolokeng of South Africa and Sony Labou Tansi from Congo-Brazzaville, narrowing her scope on the violence of colonial and postcolonial oppression, gender oppression and the female body as a literary trope.
The book dwells on the aforementioned writers’ use of obscene speech of the grotesque body and carnivalesque distortion of reality, making their texts, according to Veit-Wild ‚particularly polluting’. Another central dimension, particularly in Marechera and Sony, is the question of gender oppression. While Marechera equates the political manipulation of the masses with sexual rape, in Sony’s novels the female body becomes the battlefield for male power play.
The author herself personally knew Marechera, compiling and editing some of his manuscripts after he died in 1987. She says Marechera’s personality as a ‚mad genius’ has „invited reflection on the issue of whether it is possible to draw parallels between the receptive powers of the poet/writer and the symptoms of ritual possession.”
Machera’s teachers at school and universities testified to the combination of his extreme brilliance of mind and uncontrollable behaviour. After he had been expelled from the Rhodesian University with more than 150 other students after demonstrations against the racist Rhodesian regime, he won a scholarship for an English Honours in Oxford. However, he quit Oxford after the warden of the college sent him to psychiatrists at Warneford Metal Hospital because of his persistently disruptive behaviour.
After he left Oxford, he launched his career as a writer and in 1977 he submitted his manuscript The House of Hunger which was published by Heinemann in 1978 and won him the prestigious Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979.
Veit-Wild says the theme of ‚writing madness’ reflects her own infatuation with „those writers and topics that touch the extreme, on the thin line between sanity and insanity”. While the term ‚madness’ has a variety of significations – an agitated state of mind such as frenzy, rage, rapture or recklessness – it can also be used as a synonym for insanity. In writing about madness in Africa Veit-Wild uses both significations, which she says are pertinent and interrelate with each other.
More interesting though is the author’s argument that the greatest worry for Europeans dealing with forms of insanity in Africans arose from those patients whose disturbances were caused by ‚detribalisation’ through contact with the European world.
She traces how „the European conquerors and settlers projected their own horror of the ‚heart of darkness’, into which they intruded, onto the African body and mind.” The early chapters delineate how colonial psychiatry served to prove racial superiority of the white man and to control the threatening black people. The biggest problem was the definition of madness, depending on the understanding of a given culture – the European and the African methods of dealing with mental illness.
A well-reaserched book, Writing Madness -Borderlines Of The Body In African Literature also explores several strands of the poetic movement of surrealism, a device the author says is at the core of writing madness. Veit-Wild believes through poems the black voice makes itself audible and engages with racialised imagery of colonialism.
Her readings, which revolve around the motif of ‚bad blood’ in the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, Aime Cesaire, and Tchicaya U Tam’si demonstarte „how negrophobic images have been reversed and used to counteract the exoticism of European art and literature.”
The book also focuses on the dimensions of mental illness among African women, drawing a line from historical cases of women in Southern Africa, who were suspected by colonial and African authorities to be mentally insane and examples abound in books by contemporary women writers Tsitsi Dangarembga from Zimbabwe, Bessie Head from South Africa and Rebeka Njau from Kenya.
The author of this book, Veit-Wild is a published writer and Professor of African Lietrature at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.
The 174-page book is published through James Currey (Oxford), Weaver Press (Harare), Jacana Media (Johannesburg) and African Academic Press a Tsehai Publishers imprint (Hollywood, CA).