#33 The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera

The House of Hunger was originally published in by Heinemann in 1978.   The book is a collection of harrowing, autobiographical short stories in which Marechera’s experiences both in his native Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and as a university student at Oxford, are channeled into a psychedelic cascade of blistering imagery and broken stream-of-consciousness narratives.  In his own words, writing in English - his second language - rather than the Shona he grew up speaking, meant confronting the inherent racism of the language, “discarding grammar, throwing syntax out, subverting images within […] developing torture chambers of irony and sarcasm, gas ovens of limitless black resonance”.

Over the course of the episode, we discuss the violence and vibrancy of Marechera’s prose, consider his attitude to the newly independent Zimbabwe, and his torturous love affair with the English language.

Bibliography:

'African Doppelganger: Hybridity and Identity in the Work of Dambudzo Marechera' by David Buuck in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 28, No. 2, Autobiography and African Literature (Summer, 1997), pp. 118-131

'On Dambudzo Marechera: The Life and Times of an African Writer' by Helon Habila in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 82, No. 1, A Special Report: Aids in Africa (Winter 2006), pp. 251-260

‘Reveling in Genre: An Interview with China Miéville’ in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3, The British SF Boom (Nov., 2003), pp. 355-373