Call no man happy
Insidethe black insider,Marechera's journey to become a writer
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4603133 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Pattison, David G Pattison (University of Guelph-Humber, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1994 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 221-239 |
| Publication date | 1994-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Southern African Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0305-7070 • E-ISSN: 1465-3893 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/03057079408708397 |
| OpenAlex | W2146789823 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
Over the last two decades or so an industry has burgeoned in universities and other educational institutions extolling the virtues of black African writers and their struggle to create a black historicity and to expose the evils of colonialism and neo‐colonialism. Authors such as Chinua Achebe and Wolé Soyinka figure high on the curricula. If the name of Dambudzo Marechera features at all, it is as the critics’ stereotype of the ‘tortured artist’ or the ‘flawed genius’. The activities of the Dambudzo Marechera Trust led to the posthumous publication of possibly his best work, The Black Insider (1990), a collection of poetry, The Cemetery of Mind (1992), with a further volume of prose due out in 1994. These indications of a sustained and growing interest in the work of a writer who died in 1987 at the age of 35, may well encourage a reassessment of Marechera's body of work. In turn, this may lead to a recognition that the high and enduring quality of his writing, together with his refusal to be labelled a ‘black writer’, his fascination for the individual mind rather than the collective body, and his demand for intellectual freedom from the restrictions of race, class and nationalism, deserves to place him among the leading writers of his generation. This article examines, inter alia, how The Black Insider may contribute to that debate
Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Genius · Insider · Literature · Nationalism · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
| Highly cited | No |
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