This next bit is excerpted from thoughts recently posted @ UNSANE AND SAFE, where Jennifer Cascadia shared some of her reflections on Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera. I'm reprinting a portion of her observations here, because part of the focus of this blog is not only writing, but attempting to understand how, and why, we choose to express ourselves through our writing, and what we might hope to accomplish by doing this. How better to engage that topic, than to study other writers?
The thrill of rebellion is the writer's true animus. One lets go of this only at the expense of being a writer. Marechera knew this implicitly. The more he felt that his position in society was that of a necessary outsider, the more he felt justified in giving free rein to his animus, in order to write more thrilling and daring stories about reality and its interface with the imagination. The denial of the persona means the rise of the animus, by matter of both necessity and calculation, for the one disposed to being a serious writer.
The thrill of rebellion was Marechera's true driving force. It was this that drove him to comment that "one must become sicker" (at the end of Black Sunlight). One must, in a practical sense, lose one's public persona, in order to remove the encrustment of one's social outer shell that circumscribes ones actions as well as one's perceptions. The writer knows that one is either a philosopher-observer of life OR one is a social persona. Nietzsche (of whom it is noted in terms of the author's use of books Marechera had at least a cursory familiarity with), observed that the more a philosopher's "sun sets" the more he comes into his own. From Nietzsche:
[H]e shies away from his time and its "day." In that he's like a shadow: the lower the sun sinks, the bigger he becomes. So far as his humility is concerned, he endures a certain dependence and obscurity, as he endures the darkness
Does this strike a chord with any of you? Do you agree/disagree?
