Friday 31 July 2009

a realistic grounding

Speaking metaphorically (and also not necessarily so, but directly about the sport of boxing and what it teaches), it's a sphere of activity into which no "projections" are allowed to enter. Boxing teaches you about the nature of an emotionally-unmediated reality. Sure, you can try out your mental concepts for winning in the arena. But they'd better not be based on narcissistic ego-swellings of any sort. If your point of view is not realistic, you WILL end up wearing it. That is what is so sweet about it.

Boxing returns reality to its proper, central place in human relations. It makes each fighter thoroughly responsible for every choice they make (and the payback is split second by split second.)

If I decide that I'm going to be the big fighter on the day, and that my opponent is just a silly little wuss, to the degree that I have been erroneous in my judgement, I will be cut down to size. My failure in making the correct judgement will teach me a lesson not to do it again in the future.

Boxing also gives you a solid basis in reality (once you've learned this principle and begun to apply it.)

Whilst the rest of the world might be going to hell in an ideological handbasket, the boxer remains firmly grounded in reality.

Thursday 30 July 2009

SCRAPIRON BLUES

The setting of Scrapiron Blues is post-war Zimbabwe. It is the early to mid-eighties and echoes of Rhodesia at war find their images within the pages of this posthumously published book of works (Marechera returned to Zimbabwe in 1982.). Despite Marechera’s lighter mode of writing, and his corresponding deftness of touch, he does target some serious political and social issues pertaining to Zimbabwe straight after the war, and many of his pieces in this book employ a shamanic logic to get their points across.

There are several stories published in Scrapiron Blues that come from a manuscript entitled, “Killwatch or Tony Fights Tonight”. Also included in Scrapiron Blues is a prose narrative, “When Rainwords Spit Fire” (a novella written in 1984) and an unfinished novel-like piece called “The Concentration Camp” (depicting the end of the war from 1979-80.) . As well as these, we find some children’s stories, such as “Fuzzy Goo’s Guide to the Earth.” These read as entertaining snippets in their own right, but do not appear to be finished.

Although this writing in general does not, as compared to previous works, appear to go as strongly towards shamanistic motifs or employ shamanistic psychological dynamics to try to influence the readers’ thought processes, this book of collected works has not left behind the project that Marechera had begun with as a writer. In Scrapiron Blues, a key question in Marechera’s mind is the effect that the war had on both the perpetrators of it and the victims. Marechera took on a somewhat journalistic role in order to answer this question – he interviewed many of those who had lived through the war, and tried to get inside their minds. Although this approach seems to indicate that he had broken from his previous “inwards looking” methodology in writing, it is quite clear that the emphasis in his thought processes have not substantially changed, and that he is seeking to understand what the outcome of the war was in terms of how it affected people’s inner lives. What does the catastrophe of the war of liberation mean “shamanistically”? Can trauma be used as an experiential basis for redirecting the pathways of people’s lives, collectively and individually? In any case these questions cannot be answered so simply as with the rhetoric of political independence, for that caters merely to an exoteric way of seeing. In speaking of how he had planned to complete “The Concentration Camp”, Marechera stated:

My plan is not to end the manuscript with Independence. The second section will be from 1980 to 1982 or 1983; it will be about the survivors: what happened afterwards to all those people of the first section in the concentration camps or the guards or the soldiers.” ( xv -- Scrapiron Blues)


The key issue for the author, then, was to take the temperature of his society, both before and after independence, in order to establish its degree of health, and what can be done to facilitate a greater degree of communication between the author and his potential readers. Not to allow “Independence” to speak for itself in a superficially rhetorical way, but to attempt to dig further into its possible hidden meanings at a psychological level is profoundly shamanistic. But it is also profoundly anti-elitist, for political rhetoric generally turns towards serving a privileged few.

Shamanism, on the other hand, as I’ve described it, concerns itself directly with quality of life, and only indirectly with moral and political issues. Inevitably, however, a moral and political critique is drawn up and conveyed to readers, on the basic of primary shamanic insights. Moral and political issues are very important in shamanism; however they are not approached through conventional epistemological lenses.

One will approach questions of morality shamanistically, in terms of the possibility of “soul loss”, which is to say that capacity of any moral system or moral principle to either undermine or restore the quality of robust life that makes for, to use Nietzsche’s words, “the more complete [human] animal”. Whereas the processes of civilisation, as such, counsel psychological repression of one’s deeper animal nature, shamanistic insight draws the conclusion that such unconscious deference and submission to society’s pre-existing mores is most likely damaging to the soul (thus Nietzsche’s call for a revaluation of [moral] values.) But what is “the soul” in this shamanic sense? And more importantly, how can it be lost? In shamanistic terms, a robust soul is one that functions on the basis of action, rather than repression. One can lose one’s “soul” – that is one’s inner sense of self – by repressing parts of the contents of one’s psyche, due to fear that one would put oneself in danger by reacting to these “must be kept hidden” aspects of self identity.


In Scrapiron Blues, we encounter a number of Marechera’s shorter works – plays, part of several unfinished novels, some children’s stories and adult short stories. Whilst all make astute moral and political critiques of the Zimbabwe with which Marechera was contemporaneous, some of these works are more shamanistic than others – that is, their moral and political critiques of Zimbabwean society are hinged rather precisely upon the diagnosis of “soul loss”. We can see this idea as the unstated ontological principle that gives us the key to the meaning of “Black Damascus Road”, a short story about a returning war vet, who does everything right by serving his country, and then, just in the same cold and deterministic manner that he had always performed his duty, takes a live grenade and holds it to his chest, committing suicide.

The story asks us to consider this implicit question: “How long ago had the protagonist, who seemed so quietly accepting of everything, actually lost his soul?” “The Alley” is a short play that follows along the same lines, of using a shamanic critique of “soul loss” as the basis for its moral and political criticism. In this case, Rhodes and Robin are two war veterans, who had fought on the side of the Rhodesian regime and the guerrilla side, respectively. Post war, they are both tramps, although they had been lawyers and colleagues at one time. The layers of moral critique contained in “The Alley”, with regard to the post-war mentality of types like Rhodes and Robin are numerous, and complex. The shamanistic motif that carries these levels of critique is the memory loss that afflicts both characters, which renders them comical and profoundly inept, (like any of Beckett’s characters that are based along the lines of this formula of forgetfulness.) Dissociation of the self or “soul loss” is the cause of the characters’ inability to remain robustly aware of the present.

Rather, the souls of Rhodes and Robin are sequestered away from where the actual characters are sitting, in memories that lie behind a wall of consciousness, where war atrocities quietly loom (unless the wall is hit with a stick, in which case the otherwise repressed memories begin to shriek.)

What force causes this disturbing and nightmarish shrieking? My introductory paragraph seems to suggest that “war” could be an extremely shamanic enterprise, not least with regard to Nietzsche and his thoughts, since it prefers action and engagement to passive repression. However, Marechera’s analysis of the costs of the prolonged bush war is more thorough than this formulaic view permits. His acute shamanistic skills diagnose a core of macho ethics in a war which resided in an extremely cowardly misogyny, sacrificing women on the altar of war, as victims of the male desire to express libidinous desires through war. Robin and Rhodes have lost a daughter and a sister, respectively, to this enthusiasm for war.

Their lack of literal, “presence of mind” is expressed in their failure to recognise that it wasn’t the “other” that caused the gruesome deaths of these women, but rather, their own lusts for war. They are largely unconscious of the meaning of their choices, and are thus, in the shamanic sense (and indeed, in the Nietzschean sense), not whole or fully complete animals, since “presence of mind” has escaped them. [Footnote: the test represented by the idea of the eternal recurrence is fundamentally shamanic: Can you remain present to each moment of your life, without dissociating from many of them? If so, one is present to oneself in a way that justifies life (and, in the terms employed by this thesis, avoids “soul loss”).]

Other stories in Scrapiron Blues utilise the motif of dissociation in a way that is more sympathetic and suggestive that the form of dissociation may actually be creative and restorative of genuine human values (that is, in the holistic “animal” sense, implied by Nietzsche and other shamans). Dissociation from a life that offers little other than patriarchal mores and a job and a home in the suburbs would be a creative, rather than destructive act. This is to consider it in moral terms, on the basis of shamanic reasoning towards restoring the fullest range of consciousness possible, under any circumstances. So Jane (who is the female half of the TonyJane suburban unit) encounters a ghost (in the dissociated shamanic realm of her dreams), whilst her husband goes to work in an Orwellian sounding ministry and submits within a Kafkaesque nondescript bureaucracy, to The Man. The series where “Tony washes the walls” reveals Tony’s incomplete ability to repress his unconscious notion that the walls of suburbia, which hem him in, are made of blood (no doubt his own blood, sweat and tears -- and not least the sacrifice of his animal instinct, as indicated by the fact that his wife is having an affair with Marechera, and is leered at by the lascivious walls.)

Another shamanically-formulated mode of dissociation is also to be found in the short free verse poem “Tonderai’s father reflects”, which is part of the incomplete work, “The Concentration Camp”. The father’s refusal to speak, because he does not want to reveal the whereabouts of his guerrilla son to the Rhodesian forces, leads him to endure suffering with the aid of dissociation.

In this case, his burial ship becomes the words that he refuses to speak, carrying him off to distant shores. The suggestion here is that the father is engaging in history in a positive and effective way through shamanic (intentional) dissociation. The motif of the beating drums, used to assist Tonderai’s father’s departure from the everyday reality, is also a reference to part of traditional shamanic ritual. The father thus crosses the bridge to the other side of reality “as spirit” and his speculations of what life will be like, after he is gone, give him the eyes of a ghost looking at his wife surveying death notices in the paper.

The shamanistic approach to knowledge necessitates risk

I hadn't been able to articulate what I have sensed many years ago until now. It seems that not being socially conditioned to think a certain way means that it is harder to find the tools to express certain ideas. At such a time of development, one one must accept that one's perspectives lack the power of effective articulation. Until finally, through persistence over time, a change in paradigms, mirrored by a change from within, can allow furnish one with the means to speak. One finds one's voice, at last, concerning a particular subject matter.

As I am now able to speak, I will say that it now is so clear to me now why it is that those who risk themselves are more powerful, psychologically speaking (which is to say, "shamanistically speaking".)

For those who read Nietzsche: If you want to be an overman, risk thyself. Don't go beating your breast and vamping on women. Risk you. (Risking the women around you is hardly the same thing.)

Those who risk themselves will deal with life in a fluid way. (It almost gets to sound quite feminine at this point, but shamanic fluidity means in Nietzsche's terms, acting by instinct*). In terms of Nietzsche's hierarchy of human beings, the greatest are those whose instincts do not let them down.)

Those who want a formula for life -- and indeed, those who try to impose a formula for living on others -- would seem to be lacking in the secret of shamanism. Such types are without self-reliance and fall short of a Kingdom or two when it comes to psychological health.

___
*Not base instinct, but rather from out of one's character

Tuesday 28 July 2009

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/HOUSE%20OF%20HUNGER%20CHAPTER.htm

errors of attribution: shamanism versus the prophetic mode

That which shamanism does is put you in touch with what you already know, but have not had the capacity or power or desire to really KNOW FULLY up until the time of the shamanic initiation.

That is why Nietzsche speaks of the mode of (shamanic) inspiration as giving one light feet, and a feeling that everything one writes is automatically inclined to hit the nail on the head. He is speaking of the sensation (and to some degree, the quality) of shamanic inspiration. He is not speaking, by any means, of divine inspiration in the prophetic mode.

He is certainly NOT telling the truth about anything in that conventional religious sense -- but this is how he is most commonly misunderstood.

There are people who are attracted to his writings because the vitality of the shamanic (simultaneous) self-destruction and self-transcendence has a powerful magnetic pull on any human psyche that isn't already quite dead. Attraction doesn't imply understanding, though, and these who become Nietzsche's followers (and that despite the fact that he said he didn't want any followers and rebuffed them) are usually inclined to misread the basis of their attraction to Nietzsche (his shamanistic quality of burning like a shooting star). They think they were attracted to the "truth" of his insights. Rather, they were attracted to his mode of relating his insights in an extremely authentic -- which is to say, shamanic --way. They sense that Nietzsche's whole self is behind his perspectives in every way, and that it is above all a UNITED self (not one that is conventional and divided against itself) that thinks in this way. That kind of authenticity in honesty and honour is so very rare that it strikes one with the force of a thunderbolt (that is, if one is still alive at all). But then comes the subsequent misunderstanding, which is the overall fatal misreading of one's own reaction.

Instead of finding their own way to shamanistic self-transformation and to an authentic perspective all of their own, his followers latch onto some element of Nietzsche's own ideas, such as his misogyny (a feature that is quite conventional in the context of 19th Century historical terms). Being hostile to women, his readers conclude, is the way to cause their inner lights to burn more brightly. They believe that they must have initially been attracted to Nietzsche because of this kind of "truth". They attribute his misogyny as providing the source of his magnetism -- that is as the source of his capacity to speak shamanically. They mistake cause and effect, and overly identify with ideas that have no value in themselves, except for the capacity of the shaman-magician to breathe burning authenticity and life into his thoughts.

Such a misunderstanding is worse than death. It turns those who were attracted to a genuine expression of someone's authentic selfhood into bitter old men, whose self-misunderstandings have led them to lose their ways.

Is there redemption for such prematurely aging men?

Monday 27 July 2009

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/HOUSE%20OF%20HUNGER%20CHAPTER.htm

Reading shamanic texts

One of the main difficulties in reading texts that have a strong shamanic streak in them is that one may very easily mistake their tone. It's not the common one, today. Consider Nietzsche and Bataille, for instance. The most common tendency is to read them as if they were making statements from the point of view of the transcendental imperative: "Thou shalt". We are familiar with this tone from evangelical preachers, and so it seems to be the most natural way to read the characters of these philosophical writers.

Yet both Nietzsche and Bataille take pains to frame their ideas as being the product of their own insights and inspiration. They are honest enough in this, and this quality of their rigour sets them apart from all protestant preachers and their ilk.

The tone of their writing is that appropriate to shamanic inspiration. The writing is supposed to seduce, to hypnotise you into adopting a certain perspective, so that you see things in a different light. The safe-guard against the possibility of readers becoming robots/zombies for the new cause is the intellectual rigour of the writers, which reminds the reader that what they are dealing with is a perspective --one of among, quite possibly, many. Bataille is direct enough to use the term "seduction" to describe what his form of "mystical" initiation involves. Nietzsche, likewise, gives ample warnings about how perspectives tend to vary -- although Nietzsche also loads the die by claiming that his own perspectives are the most noble. Nietzsche, then, deliberately or inadvertently, is more of a direct manipulator of perspectives compared to Bataille. The latter is more rational.

Shamanic texts can be tricky as I've just suggested, and the best way to read them is on the level. That is, you should imagine someone whispering some new ideas into your ear. Do you agree with them or disagree? Accept them or refuse them? You will need to rely upon your own "inner experience" in order to decide. You'll need to make the right decision.

Reading Nietzsche's tone on the basis of granting the reader equality with the writer, what comes across in Nietzsche is a certain paternalistic reassuring quality in his mode of seduction. He wants to reassure his readers that even if they have to die for his ideas, everything will be okay in the end. By contrast, Bataille's tone is icier. (One feels in it the dampness of the French countryside.) He wants to create a deep uneasiness, which will be matched by the reassurance only you can generate for yourself. (Bataille will even tell you how to do it.) Bataille wants you to embrace the worst possibilites imaginable -- and accept them as probably likely.

At bottom, however, which means at the very foundations of their thinking, both Nietzsche and Bataille maintain their stance of intellectual rigour. It is on the basis of acknowledging that there are no transcendental values, that Nietzsche justifies to us his assertion of his own estimation of appropriate values. Bataille, in turn, embraces a thoroughly anti-positivistic version of knowledge. True knowledge is emptied of particularised content. It is Socrates' statement: "I know that I know nothing." Yet the simplicity of this statement betrays a hidden world of complexity -- this is not a positivistic statement by any means, and ought not to be taken as one. Rather, to know "nothing" is to refuse to be satisfied with little piece-meal supplies of information. No knowledge is enough: One's attitude to knowledge is insatiable.

This kind of skepticism at the bottom of both Nietzsche and Bataille's philosophies is thoroughly shamanic. It is key to shamanism to understand that knowledge is created, not discovered. It is known that a shaman with sufficient skill can transport his created values into the real world, and cause them to grow up there. Nietzsche and Bataille, both understanding this shamanic principle, left signs through their works that they knew they were working with experimental modes of knowledge.

Sunday 26 July 2009

Facing Death

Marechera's writing style has been viewed as "elitist", and perhaps the way in which the novella and the nine stories of The House of Hunger have been written would provide ample evidence for this point of view. That being said, the attribution of "elitist" to what is fundamentally a shamanistic style of writing -- (The House of Hunger is where the budding author discovers his style) -- misses its mark. For what we see in The House of Hunger , as in his later works, is the harnessing of intellectual ideas as well as well as mythopoetic ideas derived from the local Shona culture (as well as Marechera's own imaginative embroidery of his local time and place) in order to tell a story of shamanistic initiation and transformation. It is always this inner story that is primary, and essential to understanding in any of Marechera's works.

The intellectual ideas that he appropriates, in order to tell the story of how oppression led indirectly (and by no means inevitably) to the expansion of his mind, are always bent and honed to suit this particular purpose of story-telling. The ideas he uses -- whether Jungian or Freudian or pan-Africanist in their nature -- retain only some of their original theoretical consistency and become merged with notions derived from very different schools of thought, in Marechera's writing. His work is far less elitist, then, in terms of what is generally implied by this term: in terms of an approach being chosen so as to advocate for one's intellectual superiority. Rather, we see that various ideas and theories of thought are taken from the Western and African contexts in which they were originally generated, and used by Marechera to form a skin or exo-skeleton that will define the outline of his "inner experience".

This emphasis on "inner experience" is more than just hinted at by Marechera's seemingly eclectic approach to stylistic matters. It is based on shamanistic ways of making choices between different sources of material during the processes of writing. This tendency to differentiate between the "exoteric" (as in the types of material that Marechera uses in order to point to something about his state of mind) and the "esoteric" (the state of mind itself, which is revealed only by experiencing the work holistically, and not by any means just in terms of its parts)is also shamanistic. In fact, we see the inception of this type of thinking -- a mode of of thinking that Marechera was always to employ in his writing -- in terms of the differentiation between the inside of the "house of hunger" (the emblem representing Marechera's psyche)and the outside of it. The novella of The House of Hunger can be seen esoterically as involving the budding author's learning to distinguish between inner experience and experiences that are determined from the outside of one's mind, and caused by historical inevitability. It is the power of inner experience that is given value and precedence to determine quality of life, at the end of the novella. This is not to suggest a break from reality, or that the author descended into solipsism -- but rather, to the contrary, that a firm shamanistic dualism has been established to distinguish the knowledge that one has of "the inside" (that is, knowledge of the self) from that which one has concerning "the outside" (that is, the partly knowable external world, which is now seen to need the imaginative powers of a shaman-creator to supplement it.)

The charge of elitism also seems misplaced when one considers that it is not a shaman's task to disperse intellectual knowledge, so much as to differentiate between social and cultural forces that enhance the experience of life and those that serve to dampen or kill "inner experience". This is what is what is meant by referring to a shaman's "ontological knowledge". An encounter with death imparts this knowledge. The death of ego is represented in The House of Hunger , when the protagonist is unable to distinguish between the inside of "the house" (his psyche) and its outside. His self is thus "dissociated", and yet to its advantage, is given ventilation and room to breathe. (It's a different metaphor that the writer uses at this point -- the all too tight "stitches" that hold together the author's head (symbolising his fraught character structure) no longer pull so tightly anymore. It's a holistic depiction of how temporary psychosis led to the expansion of his mind despite his original inner resistance to this process of expansion. This is a story of spontaneous "shamanic initiation". It is often viewed as a sickness that is brought about by "spirits" or a wounding of the mind and body. The author's way of writing about it has nothing to do with feigning an elite stance against the world. Rather, he incorporates intellectual and aesthetic material from the widest range of sources (African and Western), in order to convey the nature of his transformation. (His writing should be considered to be broadly culturally inclusive, rather than by any means "elitist".)

The value of shamanic initiation, as I have said, is that the one who undergoes it receives "ontological knowledge". The person who "faces death" through shamanic initiation understands implicitly the relationships that humans develop with the spectre of death (that is, death as symbolically constructed, death as a common means of psychological self-compromise that facilitates certain types of human social organisation, and death as existential threat or "limit".) Marechera's writing in The House of Hunger and beyond reveal a preoccupation with these concerns. Shamanic healing is involves using the techniques of dissociation and projecting of one's ego elsewhere, to cope with this now known enemy -- the spectre of death. The goal is to use one's knowledge of how the human psyche is constructed (knowledge gained during initiation) to outwit danger and death. Shamanic dualism (as previously described) enables one to escape the spectre of symbolic death by taking on different forms. Symbolic death is a human construct, and therefore, has conventionalistic predilections, which do not take into account the possibility of shamanic transformations. We see here a useful transformation in "The Writers' Grain" when the protagonist encounters "Barbara's father in the valley":

'I'll get you in the end, you rascal!' he screamed.
But I bit the silver button and turned myself into a crocodile and laughed my great sharp teeth at him. (p 33)


The use of shamanic knowledge is not just in terms of a folklorish context, however. The psychological knowledge of what can be achieved by dissociation, splitting, projection and magical thinking is real. One with shamanic knowledge understands how these psychological devices are commonly used in everyday human society, and how they may advantage or disadvantage those who use them. Access to this kind of knowledge marks the shaman as potentially a real political player:

While I was cursing [Barbara's father], a voice I did not recognise said:

"You thought it was all politics, didn't you?'

But there was no one there.

I sneered.

'Isn't it?'

And I sullenly turned myself back into human shape. (p 133.)



A shamanistic approach does have political advantage in that it takes a holistic approach to human affairs. It disregards the common human need for repression as well as forms of mind-body dualism that do not allow for an equal expression of both of these sides. Therefore it is capable of seeing more at once, and from a wider angle, than most more theoretical positions are capable of taking in at one time.

the Overman and shamanism VERSUS right wing ideology

To spell out the meaning of the Overman in a less esoteric fashion than I have attempted before, the power that belongs to the Overman is that of continuing to risk himself. Failing to risk himself, he loses his iridescence, his youth and his relevance.

So it is that the males of Rhodesia, despite their noxious ideology, were iridescent in their own ways, because they constantly risked themselves (in war and so on). So it is that when they fled the country and migrated, they put an end to risking themselves and became bitter, and lost relevance.

To risk oneself is to stay forever young, because the energy that forms you is never allowed to become crystalised, to become rigid. It is always subject to more heat, to becoming fluid and to reforming you again. If one gender risks itself and the other one doesn't, it is the latter that will become older quicker than the former -- hence may women aged very quickly within the Rhodesian regime.

That is the secret of the shaman (risk of self) and it is the secret of the 'Overman'. It is the whole secret, and it is in a nutshell: Risk yourself if you want to go beyond what humans have been; are insistent upon being today. Risk yourself if you want to retain your youth. Risk, if you want to remain relevant.

Now to the practice of trying to dominate women: 1--What's so interesting about you that any woman would simply let you? 2--Why this obsession with this one thing?

If it's your constant sameness that you think is attractive, then think again.

Here is a parable. It's the story of "left hook" Jack.

Once upon a time, Jack entered the boxing ring. Nobody thought he had it in him, because he was a reedy looking, boy, not yet 17, who had one thing going for him: his inner determination.

His opponent was at least twice his size, a hardened fighter in his prime. Yet, in the second round, Jack, who was a southpaw, managed to manouever himself into a position where he delivered the knockout punch to his opponent. Nobody had thought he could do it. It was a left hook.

Henceforth he acquired a number of followers, who were very excited about their own perspectives concerning Jack's achievements. "It's the left hook that has all the power!" they proclaimed.

Some of these followers wanted more than to follow, so they set themselves up as Jack's advisors. Notably, they wouldn't have to risk anything themselves, but would be up for sharing some of the glory when Jack demolished more of his opponents with his magnificent left hook. This was the logic of their thinking, and as logic goes, you couldn't fault it.

His followers, however, were not boxers themselves, and had never risked themselves. They only knew what they had seen, and they kept repeating it amongst themselves "One knocks another out using a magnificent left hook."

Jack was gratified that so many people wanted to advise him. He listened carefully to all they said:

"Keep a stiff left hook position at all times!"

"You know what works now, so don't risk trying something new."

"Plant yourself in the ground, and don't move. Rely heavily on your one definite skill -- your capacity to use your left hook."

When Jack heard all of this well-meaning advice, he smiled to himself, for it was clear that his advisors knew absolutely nothing about boxing. He had to remain unpredictable, not "adopt a position" and stick to it, in order to win another fight.

He turned and shook his head ironically at all his followers. "You don't understand the game of boxing at all!" he said.

His followers and would-be advisors were outraged, however. "We BELIEVED in you!" they shouted. "We had all our hope and expectation that you would adopt -- and stick to -- the required form!"


Saturday 25 July 2009

on being an ape

Science itself teaches the male his destiny. But why does the male refuse to conform to it? The sperm that succeeds is broken down by the ova -- broken down and reformulated. This is the quintessential example of shamanisation (or what Hegel, in his wisdom, calls "sublation"). In a shamanic sense, we can say that the winner sperm becomes "dissociated" and that its materials are reappropriated for something other than it, for something beyond what it had been.

This, by the way is the same principle by which the "Overman" (in Nietzschean terminology) is constructed -- not by being what he is, but by going BEYOND himself, by becoming something more than what he was. This, by the way, does not mean chimping around and pretending to be the social darwinistic "winner" -- the ape at the top of the castle! (a horrible miscarriage of interpretation, if ever there was one):

All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man?

What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.


Here is more about the shamanic destruction of "what is" that is supposed to lead to something beyond the currently favoured monkey identification of Western humanity:

I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive.

I love him who liveth in order to know, and seeketh to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeketh he his own down-going.

I love him who laboureth and inventeth, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeketh he his own down-going.


It's sort of hard to get across, though, that Neechy doesn't want us to play at being monkeys. He wants us to 'shamanise'.

It's a hard message to take, since the male would rather be a monkey than create beyond himself.

Unpredictability

The capacity to do something new -- it is key to Modernism, but it is not so easily achieved as one might suppose. The human mind moves in grooves, and according to habit, in its normal state.

Jazz (the production of which would not be possible without "inner experience" in Bataille's sense), boxing, ongoing guerilla warfare (including that of the psychological sort) all require the capacity for unpredictability.

But the human mind naturally goes within habitual grooves...

Thursday 23 July 2009

INTRODUCTION TO BLACK SUNLIGHT /2

In his 1986 interview with Alle Lansu, Marechera, speaking on Black Sunlight and Mindblast, relates concerning his “unconscious” desire to write in a way that is destructive or disruptive in order to save people from the “slow brain death” of thinking in an institutionalised way. (40-41). “I try to write in such a way that I short-circuit, like electricity, people’s traditions and morals. Because only then can they start having original thoughts of their own.” ( p 40).

He considers that once they have stopped thinking in an institutionalised way, they might “look in a mirror [and] they will see how beautiful they are and see those possibilities within themselves, emotionally and intellectually.” ( p 41) The illness he wants to save them from is “slow brain death” ( p 42) due to “being fed with irrelevant facts, fed with things that have nothing to do with the individual who carries that brain”. (p 40) He questions, in the same refrain, whether an anarchistic uprising might be the answer to being fed the kinds of data that produce brain death.

As I have asserted already, it is the focus of this thesis to take an interest in Marechera’s “unconscious” determinations and their inner logic, since it is in these that one finds his total shamanistic sensibilities -- the aim to cure various social diseases, via certain practices and techniques of recovery from “brain death” that are based upon Marechera’s own experience with, to use a different term for the same thing, “soul loss” and subsequent “soul recovery”. While Marechera doesn’t use the term, “shamanism” to describe his agenda in this regard, the inner logic of his ideas above testifies to the fact that the key component to his thinking was shamanistic. One doesn’t need to have the available term at hand, in order to understand the principles involved, since a shamanic practitioner works from inner experience.

This key point concerning the exact nature of Marechera’s unconscious drives – that is, to heal and revitalise others on the basis of his shamanic self knowledge – explains the otherwise odd and in some ways chaotic formal structure of the book. The author’s investigation of anarchism as a means to solve the problem of a societal origin for inner soul death is undertaken on the basis of the author’s already accumulated shamanic knowledge, which he had acquired earlier in life (as described in terms of the madness and recovery he experienced in The House of Hunger’s novella section.)

Despite the author’s view that Black Sunlight was about exploring anarchism as a formal position, the broader emotional and intellectual context of the protagonist’s entry into the world of anarchism is shamanic – as are the methods (of being seduced into a transgressive mode of thinking and swallowing drugs); as is the middle section that follows the pattern of an initiation, as when the author looks at the sky that is cracked [footnote: joy before death, Bataille]; as is the renunciation of the solution of anarchism for shamanic healing; as is the final looking into the mirror (in a state of exhausted, and apparently suicidal bliss/renunciation— two of the extreme sides of human organic experience are united in confrontation with death. A sense of “ecstasy in loss”, in confronting death, is a keystone for a shamanic experience. [Bataille]) The broader scope of Black Sunlight, then, as guided by the author’s unconscious agenda, is that it is a shamanistic novel, designed to initiate others into a shamanistic mindset, whereby they may lose their institutionalised ways of thinking and recover from their ongoing affliction of “slow brain death”. The difficulty in writing in this way with any success is recognised by Georges Bataille, who states regarding “the practice of joy before death” that “oral initiation is […] difficult”. ( p 236 Visions of Excess).

Clearly Marechera wants to attempt to initiate us into shamanic alertness and aliveness by the sheer shock value and intensity of his writing. Admittedly, his writing is incredibly shocking and exciting, however my experience as a reader suggests that it is very difficult to take all of the dazzling complexities of language (and the sense of the ground of Being giving away beneath you more than once), without exercising the most common ego defence of repression. Thus one may come away from the text with a nauseating and bored feeling – as did one professional reader – without really having experienced the full clout of the text. To be able to experience its full impact, one has to be able to wear down the resistance of one’s own repressive devices, if need be, by repetitive reading (which finally ‘worked’ for me).

Once one is actually able to read the text from beginning to end, without pausing, and without switching off, the remarkable nature of its inner coherence will astound any reader. Yet, as stated, it is difficult to get to this point. The text is loaded with precisely the kinds of elements that are psychologically and socially disruptive, according to the philosophy of Georges Bataille. Yet, the degree to which the text is loaded with these elements of what Bataille would call “heterology” (in other words, with laughter, tears, sexual excitement, poetic emotion, the sentiment of the sacred and ecstasy [footnote: Shannon Winnubst, Reading Bataille Now—ref 2001a, 159-60.] ) in fact leads away from experiencing the impact of “electric shock treatment”. Rather, the normalizing part of the mind, that is, the part of the mind that is prone to accepting and reinforcing institutionalised thinking, blows its fuse whenever it senses an encroaching danger of electricity overload. This is as much as needs to be said about the difficulty of initiating anybody orally. So, it is extremely difficult – although not impossible – to get the kind of reaction that Marechera hoped his work would solicit.

Just as the intended impact of the work was shamanic, so is the actual structure and storyline of his work, as I’ve suggested. .] The first part of the book is set in real life Rhodesia, with student riots, trucks of dead bodies from the war, and University life as a backdrop. Then follows the “seduction” into the occult or “shamanic initiation”. Marechera’s work traces the events that lead to the shamanic initiation of the main protagonist – a photographer, Chris – who becomes “Christian” upon encountering the dark, transgressive underworld of the primeval caves at “Devil’s End”.

Devil’s End describes, suggestively, the buttocks of Being, which eventually swallow and then excrete the protagonist, in a way that suggests that he is born anew -- only not now from his mother or his father, but out of the horror and ecstasy of his experience. The shaman who offers the seduction (A Bataillesque term for mystical initiation) is “Susan”, who represents the horror and ecstasy available from Nature (in the raw) by having a consensual sexual relationship with her father. This positions her outside of Civilisation, in theory [See Freud], but she is in and of the realm of Nature, which lends her an occult force.) Christian eventually recovers from his ordeal, but not before he and a group of anarchists have run amok over the city, destroying cathedrals and blowing things up.

These anarchists are all, in some cryptic sense, shamanic initiates, since they are all “changelings”, having dropped out of society due to their inability to conform to its expectations (such as gender roles) or having fallen from society’s grace. [Footnote: In a material, rather than mystical sense, the anarchists of the Black Sunlight Organisation are, in Bataille’s terms, “heterogeneous” characters, which is to say, those who have some kind of antisocial irregularity about them, so that they don’t reinforce or reproduce society’s mores. Such people could end up being co-opted to work for the Nazis, but they could just as easily become anarchistic revolutionaries, since they are inherently not attached to any ideology. See: “On the Psychology of Fascism.”] Yet, to the degree that they have all been changed inwardly by their heterological experiences, they are also practitioners of ‘hidden knowledge’, which is, since it has to do with the whole body, with dissociation and with an encounter with Nature, broadly shamanic. The final parts of the book are a kind of winding down from the experience of shamanic ecstasy and horror. The protagonist of the book, now truly himself, and no longer “Christian” renounces the value of the Black Sunlight Organisation, declaiming it as “shit” [Footnote: “shit” is another feature of heterology, so this form of speech is ironically consistent with Bataille’s mysticism, at least.] The fictional nature of the earlier protagonist/s (in terms of the double/s who took the shamanic soul journeys) begins to reside, and we see the author more starkly, as he really is in everyday reality. Does the author see “the beautiful person” he is, at this moment? It seems that rather, he is imbued with the knowledge that his is a sacrificial animal, in relation to the vagaries of everyday reality, which extract a toll on him, the final one being actual mortal death – of which he confronts the image, staring back at him, wrists pouring blood, from the reflection in the mirror.

It is shamanic death -- that is a ritualised encounter with death – preoccupies the author in the last and post-climactic sections of the novel. He sees that life and words flow through him with energy of their own, and that there is nothing he can do about it to stem their flow. The mood of the final passages has everything in common with Bataille’s meditation on “the practice of joy before death”:

Everything that exists destroying itself, consuming itself and dying, each instant producing itself only in the annihilation of the preceding one, and itself existing only as mortally wounded. (p 238)


The author is reborn at the moment of his death, gazing into the mirror “as the gashes in my wrists leak faster and faster with meaning” and attending to the soft shamanic beat of the drums (to promote trance), which is actually the rain of words as expression of inspiration (seeming to come as if from the roof of his mind, or from the ‘above’). He is:

Beginning to live over again, having more provisions for the road than the road left. Like Cato the Censor, learning Greek in his old age, I am learning to speak just when I need to learn to be silent forever. (p 117)


He is psychologically restored, no longer “brain dead” but distrustful of words and their relative emptiness (in comparison to the immediacy of the knowledge conveyed via direct shamanic experience). (“Words are an empty bag. – p 117). There is also a political overtone in terms of his need to learn to keep silent forever. The book was initially banned in Zimbabwe, ostensibly for its obscenity, yet more likely because there are parts of the book where the protagonist takes on the role of “court jester” and mocks the “black chief” for his lust for power, which is depicted visually as an enormous erection.

Bataille: The fall (from grace?) is endless

I am contemplating Bataille, and whether his corrective of Neechy's idea of a kind of partial shamanisation is appropriate.

Bataille, of course, brings his Catholicism to bear on the issue, at least in the mythological reframing that he sometimes uses, if not actually so much in terms of what is being got at concerning the nature of inner experience and the disruptive effect that this can have (ie. ought to have) on one's social relations.

The appropriation by Neechy of shamanic experience ("inner experience" in Bataille's terms) for a philosophy that, in its final stages, is quite patriarchal, produces at very least "a tension" between two opposing trends of emotion and thought that govern inwardness.

Neechy's most shamanistic book, Thus Spake Zarathustra, points the way to shamanistic self-destruction and regeneration of selfhood in a way that bebefits originality of one's emotional life and thought. In the sense that the book counsels a movement away from socially conditioned thoughts and ideas, it does in fact also counsel the means and method for a "fall from grace" -- for where is moral value upheld and reinforced if not WITHIN society, as opposed from apart from it? (The individual has no independent moral status apart from society, which is to say purely within herself.)

Yet, as we approach a later work, Beyond Good and Evil, patriarchal values pertaining to marriage and to women sprout forth quite vociferously. The generalisations that Neechy brings to the fore may or may not have been true -- in general -- about 19th Century women. The recipe for "severity" with women is of course (severely) patriarchal, and could at easily have sprung from Moses' mouth, or form that of some other religious masturbator, rather than from someone living in a time beyond the age of Jesus. There is rigidity here -- a stiffness that is "thanatos" from a shamanic, which is to say, inwards perspective. Could it be true that one has encountered a severe and finalising truth here? If most of the run of the mill and garden variety -- which is to say, highly social -- Neechians are any indication to go by, their death-embrace with misogynistic emotions (which, by the way, automatically inhibit the development of "inward experience") is justified by Neechy himself!

Despite this commitment to a determined social climbing on the backs, shoulders and torsos of women -- the commitment that defines Patriarchy Itself -- Neechy's caution about rigidity in the embrace of truth was sounded (to deaf ears and already castrated eyes) in the introductory paragraph, where his Lordship speaks of how: "the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which [truth seekers] have paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman". Also, from Zarathustra: “Do not be jealous, lover of truth, because of these inflexible and oppressive men! Truth has never yet clung to the arm of an inflexible man." Here -- at least -- Neechy is shamanic.

Despite this caution, there is an intense need to adopt the posture of a social climber in order to embrace misogynistic and patriarchal mores (actually, either the latter or the former term is a redundancy). The rule of males is a must, and it has to be along the lines of social values established since the beginning of civilisation (or at least, the agricultural turn of human social organisation). Women have to be dominated -- and it must be by some patriarchal breast-beater (some gesticulating ape)!

Shamanic values take us in the opposite direction. The fall from "civilisation", from society and its established mores, is endless and final, says Bataille. Inner experience has its own determinations and trajectory, and they always take us away from the mores established within society in order to safeguard it from chaos and uncertainty.

Shamanic values ARE, however, the introduction of chaos and uncertainty into the psychological sphere, and ultimately into the sphere of social relations.

One who has received the dubious honour and curse of shamanic initiation (as was the case with Nietzsche, and as was the case with Bataille) does not have the choice to suspend his fall from grace. It will happen whether he wants it to or not. And the little patriarchal ledge or stone he holds on in order to secure himself will not help one iota in the long term.

Wednesday 22 July 2009

reading marechera shamanically

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/literature%20review2.htm

MINDBLAST

Marechera has notably stated that his purpose in his writing is to ‘short-circuit” the ways in which people think, to get them to see themselves in their full human potentiality when they look at themselves in the mirror. “Mindblast” as a concept captures the full essence of this strategy. The nature of the destination sought is immensely positive. To be able to see the potential that one has as a human being, simply by being alive, is not something that always comes easily. The 2008 movie, Revolutionary Road, illustrates how it is possible to lose one’s way by playing the game of life too safely.

Something is destroyed inwardly in the process of submitting to social expectations and economic necessity. The results are more far-reaching than the modest choices made by the protagonists in Revolutionary Road would have led anyone to anticipate. A last minute, desperate grab for freedom leads to a disastrous attempt to contract a miscarriage, leading to the female character’s tragic death. The superficiality of the suburban life that Frank and April had embraced, against the counsel of their more lively instincts, is shown in stark relief, in the face of how much potential was sacrificed in order to conform to the social expectations of the 1950s
Mindblast takes up effectively where Revolutionary Road leaves off.

The Zimbabwe of the early to mid-1980s is the American suburbia of the 1950s. The African writer has already taken into account the question of freedom versus conformity that April and Frank spent the most part of the movie trying to come to intuitive terms with, like a couple of trapped birds feeling their way to a cage exit. Marechera’s life has already taught him that a cage is often waiting for him, and that he must be as wily as a cat to escape it. In the opening section of the book, he depicts his character, as one who would try to escape the cage of authoritarian social control, as a “juvenile delinquent”. The sophistical authoritarian that wants to re-educate the boy to bring him in line with conformity to society’s expectations is Rix the Cat. His method of entrapment is something patently obvious – the use of logic. The identity of these characters will need only a small amount of decoding.

A “juvenile delinquent”, after all, is the stereotype bestowed by conservative regimes on those who will not follow in the paths allotted for them – that is, by taking up a 9- 5 job, and opting for a home in the suburbs, [this, and the characteristic of attempting to be upwardly mobile by appeasing a powerful father figure (this last point was the final nail in the coffin for April and Frank and their dream of a more satisfying life in Paris) is dealt with more thoroughly in Scrapiron Blues. The cat represents authoritarianism and the game of “cat and mouse” that various authorities (including the authority of the state and its secretive keepers of ideological order, the CIO) were playing with the writer during his time in Zimbabwe. (The writer had earlier attempted to leave the country by plane, but had been prevented from doing so by government advised airport authorities.)
Marechera, in Mindblast, is on the real revolutionary road – the one that his fictional predecessors had missed.

He is living in post-independence Zimbabwe, where nothing is guaranteed, not even a bed to sleep on at night. This kind of revolution, the one that the writer opted for, guarantees absolutely nothing -- except the reality of being true to oneself. With such a hardline attitude, one doesn’t submit to authority, but takes a position of independence, ‘come what may’, and no matter what hardships may intervene to make life difficult. Living on the streets was the least of Marechera’s worries. He managed, despite his economic hardships (which were obviously substantial) to set up an advisory centre for Zimbabwean writers. However, this establishment was closed after five days by nameless goons. He shared park benches with people who may or may not have been armed, and he often coughed up blood. Despite this, he managed to have a sporadic affair with a scholarly woman from Europe, who often put him up in a hotel for a couple of nights at a time.

Marechera’s writing in Mindblast expresses the quintessential outsider’s perspective. It is the perspective advanced by Georges Bataille, particularly when he said that “human striving is no longer directed at powerful and majestic limits; it now aspires, on the contrary, to anything that can deliver it from established tranquillity.” [ p 217, Visions of Excess]. There is wilfulness in exploring the possibilities of living life on the streets, especially in terms of the possibilities of producing writerly material.

This side of Marechera’s way of thinking should not be overlooked. Yet how is his work shamanic? It’s in the link between having been “marked for suffering” in a deep way and being in a position to convey something important to others. The shamanistic motif is clear in the story sequences about “Buddy” who is another persona for Marechera, living and surviving on the streets. This particular Marechera persona is stabbed in the side one day.

Marechera’s writing is never without autobiographical significance – and it appears that this stabbing is shamanic, pointing to the author’s psyche as having been wounded, and the author’s status as that of a “wounded healer”. It seems that unconsciously, Marechera’s two years [check this] of life on the streets was lived out in an attempt to find a remedy to heal a sick Zimbabwe. It is through one’s own existential crises that one can find remedies for healing others. In archaic terms, making oneself sick is a means to encounter spirits that may be of assistance. Thus, part of Bataille’s shamanic meditation is: “The depth of the sky, lost space is joy before death: everything is profoundly cracked.” [ p238 ibid].
It’s a risk, of course to take this less known path, and the risk is the same one that Yates’ April and Frank experienced, which is that of “soul loss” or the diminishment of the fundamental sense of being alive.

It is the process of arriving at this outcome which is very different, depending on whether one takes the shamanic path or the path of compliance to existing social expectations. In the latter case, one never knows what it means to “look in the mirror and see the beautiful person that is there”. In the former case, one has simply ridden the wave of life and its contingencies to its final conclusion. It’s at this point that the pressure on one’s energies mean that one cannot sustain a strong enough sustaining link between mind and body anymore. One’s fundamental psychological focus becomes shattered.

There are signs of this “soul loss” in the final story published about Buddy, who cannot sustain the pain of responsibility of the shamanic wound, and loses his ability to distinguish between his own writing and that of a young woman with poetical aspirations but no talent. The writer sees his task as how “to spit the atom of the story and in the mindblast survive the theme [that is] psychological holocaust.” ( p 144). The question could be simply restructured: “How might one manage to get through to others without entirely destroying one’s self?”

Sunday 19 July 2009

Back to train again after a weekend's break.

I'm thinking very much about the dialectic of inner versus outer, and how both the esoteric and the esoteric are necessary, and ought to be in balance for a successfully lived life.

Friday 17 July 2009

Poems, etc, intro

‘THRONE OF BAYONETS’ AND ‘PORTRAIT OF A BLACK ARTIST IN LONDON’


The two works could be easily dismissed as stylistic embodiments of movements already passé, were it not for a deeper level of discourse in both works patterned upon the author’s psychological acuity in knowing exactly what was going on in Zimbabwean and British politics respectively – the Zimbabwe that came into being after the minority regime that had run Rhodesia, as the country was then termed, was overthrown. ‘Throne of Bayonets’ is an elegy for the newly born -- and yet already failed -- nominally socialist state. It is written in way that has much in common with the Modernist style of TS Eliot, with segues of lamentations in the form of song (which has a rap like beat, tone and reflects the language of the homeless on the streets of Harare), high modernist poetic refrain concerning the demise of Western civilisation, the betrayal of the authentic impulses for freedom of the guerrilla fighters of the Chimurenga war, and then the ghostly echoes of the Stalinist slogans uttered through the state media. The other poetic work, which Marechera has termed a “choreodrama”, was written no doubt a couple of years earlier than the former, when Marechera was still a homeless Zimbabwean in exile in London. He was also unemployed and having overstayed his student visa, he was effectively an illegal immigrant.


Around the time he wrote the choreodrama, he had been staying in a ‘squat’ at Tolmer’s Square (p 7 TBI, p 263 Sourcebook), until it was “pulldown into rubble”. The tone and style of the writing is quite fractured, with its bursts of poetic rage, its caricaturising masks that represent the British image of the oversexed black vagrant and the idea of the primitive consciousness of the “Third Worlder”. These stereotypical elements of the British perception of class identity are amplified and thus are given a very hysterical dimension, in terms of both the poem’s structure and its overall content. In structure, the poem is a fragmented collection of grievances, intoned in the language of an angry black “negro” who has become accustomed to living on the streets. In content, it traces the logic of the political psychology of that time, which, in accordance with Marechera’s reading of it, deemed that black males represented an extreme danger to the virtue of young white females.

Marechera’s response to being held under siege by this political ideology is not just to fling the amplified and hystericised imagery of being “a political threat” back into the faces of the regime – ostensibly he would do this by publishing his “crimes” (including seduction of an underage white teenager) along with his anarchistic threats, as the psychological structure of the text suggests more than this relatively surface form of revenge. Rather, it would seem, the author intends to use the already existing levels of anxiety regarding the status and motivations of the blacks inside the British system as a political weapon of his own. Since the author was familiar with Jung, and understood that fears such as these lurk in the “shadow side” or unconscious part of the psyche, he recognised his political enemy’s weak point.

It was a psychological strategy established by the Surrealists to create paranoia in order to change society by getting people to question the accuracy of their conventional perceptions. This is the deeper level of Marechera’s strategic intent. So the first poem could be seen as High Modernist in a socially conservative sense, and the second work, the choreodrama, could be seen to exist within the literary genre of Surrealism. Such ways of categorising these works would be accurate an logical – except for the aspects that such facile categorising would overlook, which are the components of shamanism in each of these texts.
Both of these texts are quite simply haunted. “Throne of Bayonets” is haunted by the indelible nature of truth itself, which gives a surface appearance to reality, so that the historical sense of concrete change doesn’t seem to change anything at all. “Learn Mortality early and you are doomed To forever walk alone.” ( p 36). To confront death is to become shamanised, separated forever from simple faith in the norms of the community, in order to be of service to the Sacred. Marechera’s writing is profoundly shamanic in his profound understanding that “terror” and “truth” are fundamentally linked – since one must face terror if one is to have the courage to look into the unconscious (either one’s own or that of another).

Marechera speaks the truth about Zimbabwe, shamanically, through his wounds. He channels, via the telephone, his “poet self”, which he requires to assist him in giving him an accurate reading of Zimbabwe as it was during the early 80s. In the case of “Portrait”, however, it is less his wounds that he speaks through, but his whole body. The body of the hammered down migrant becomes the ghoul that at the end of the choreodrama gives testimony as to the reasons for his death. This poem suggests a threat of haunting his enemies from beyond the grave.


When viewed in this shamanic light, the difference between the two poems is palpable – it is a difference of intent. In the first instance (Throne of Bayonets), Marechera wants to employ his mediating shamanic skills in order to heal the new Zimbabwe. This is shown by the sustenance he bestows on the dead freedom fighters, as he interacts with their spirits. In the second instance (Portrait), Marechera is acting as a black shaman, who actually endeavours to employ destructive magic against his political foes by exploiting his psychological knowledge of their weak points.

Thursday 16 July 2009

black sunlight intro

Black Sunlight is a distinctly Zimbabwean book. Since a large part of it appears to have been set in war-torn Rhodesia, it is also a distinctly Rhodesian book. Ideologically, which is to say genealogically, the residents of Black Sunlight, and indeed the seditious members of the anarchistic Black Sunlight Organisation represented in this book, are neither specifically black nor white. Marechera has on a number of occasions, made it clear that it was a deliberate choice on his part not to define his handful of outlaw characters in terms of a racial identity. Like The Black Insider, which can be considered in some senses as a warm-up manuscript, or more objectively, a step in the process of writing Black Sunlight (although is has value in its own right), Black Sunlight is designed to break down the structures of the mind and ways of thinking that have developed under the pressures and constraints of growing up in a class (and racially-segregated) society.


When I first read Black Sunlight, the information in it and multiple shifts in direction were too much for me to take in. As stories of dogged persistence often go, something about the text, something uncanny in it, kept bringing me back to the story. What was it I was searching for, and what did I expect or hope to find? In essence, I was looking for a trace of my self, perhaps to be found cowering in the labyrinths of the past. My sudden – and effectively forced – emigration from Zimbabwe in 1984, at the age of fifteen, when my parents decided to pull up roots, and head for Australia, had effectively uprooted a core part of my mind. In the parlance of certain stream of neo-shamanism – and I use this term advisedly, for lack of any term that more accurately captures my predicament – I was suffering from “soul loss”. I was in a state of being that -- had it been caused by actual mental trauma, rather than by the violent shifting of the tectonic plates of existing reality – would have made more sense. I had been born into a culture that had inherited many of the old Victorian ideas about children, and particularly those of the female sort-- to wit, that they should be kept in the dark as much as possible, concerning politics and all the other aspects of reality that were considered too much for our sort to bear. Consequently, I had been psychologically shaped by a very decisive and important period of history, which I knew nearly nothing about, concretely.

Marechera’s Black Sunlight gradually suffused into my consciousness, as I read it through, four, five and six times. It’s a very visceral kind of work, as Gerald Gaylard, pointed out. Each time I read it, my mind would reach a certain point where it would announce to me, through a feeling of satiation, of my having had sufficient to digest for now. It took several returns until I could read the book from start to finish, as a whole, in order to develop my aesthetic impression of it, which was my goal at that time. The extremely visceral nature and intensity of the writing had made it too hard for me to proceed to this point, before.

Upon reaching this point, I discovered that I was in the midst of the Rhodesian bush war or Chimurenga, seeing everything from the perspective of those who were being persecuted as “reds”. As I had worn down my initial resistance to experiencing the scenes within the novel, I was able to experience everything in the novel in a powerful and profound way, as I followed the protagonist through his experiences and troubles. The structure of the text (which I will explain, shortly, is patterned after the early developmental structures of an infant’s mind) enabled me to experience the events in the text through a diffused ego – as if whatever was happening to anybody in the writing was also happening to me. So, it was that I was able to effectively journey with Marechera to a time in the past, and to re-experience it in a way that was not hindered or distorted by the censoring adult mind and its emotionally conditioned suppositions.

By means of this psychological regression, I was able to experience something of the bush war first-hand, seeing it through Marechera’s reconstruction of events. I recovered a sense of visceral and experiential knowledge that enabled me to make sense of who I am. By undergoing partial psychological regression with Marechera, I’d rediscovered part of the lost history of “my soul”.

It was this experience with the text that confirmed my already existing hypothesis – that Marechera’s texts are, in general, shamanic. Further research affirms that a temporary and partial regression to an infantile state is the key to shamanic interventions that restore lost psychological or physical health. It is the shamanic juxtaposition of the state of an infant’s mental flexibility with the state of an adult’s store of wisdom and knowledge, which enables the damaged psyche to repair itself – and, Marechera wrote for a generation of damaged psyches; for those who were suffering from what had happened during the prolonged bush war (1966-1980). This book – which reacquaints people with the damage and desperation that relates to Zimbabwe’s still recent history -- is intended to bring healing, and a sense of a transcendence of categories of “race”, to this society.

Wednesday 15 July 2009

intro black insider

Much has been said critically about the complexity and intrigue of The Black Insider. Yet few have considered the work actually beyond its literary merits, and in terms of the calculated effect it is capable of having upon its readers. I say that this effect has been “calculated” in the sense of having been intended by its author, since the structure of The Black Insider is psychologically designed to produce, in a reader who is committed in following the writing all the way to the end, an emotional and more broadly psychological sense of what it is like to have to fight a defensive war against an encroaching aggressor, when one would much rather be doing something else. The final scene – a war scene – in the final passages of The Black Insider is anything but gratuitous, but is faithfully rendered in terms of the logic of necessity built up within the extremely long and convoluted (in a literary sense) text, that leads up to this final, devastating outcome.

I have said already that the writer writes shamanically, and that means he intends to exert a direct and life-altering impression upon the readers’ minds. It is not intended that Marechera’s writing should filter into the reader’s intellectual consciousness slowly. Rather, Marechera’s writing functions in a way that is designed to give the reader no place to hide -- neither, that is to say, directly in the realm of the mind “or spirit” as this text would just as easily have it – or in the comfort of the body’s placid existence as it is. Picture the ease at which it would be possible to renounce the rights to either dimension of existence, if only one would be assured of being left alone. This is precisely what the structure of Marechera’s text assures will not happen. Instead the text compels the readers to mentally vacillate between the possibilities of resting comfortably in the life of the mind so as to transcend the most menacing aspects of reality, or the acceptance of reality as it is. These are the catches: To live the life of the mind involves living under siege by the rest of warlike humanity. Alternatively, one can struggle more directly, in terms of the principle of “survival of the fittest”, to the death, by being on the side of the aggressors.

Neither option is salutary, as both are costly in human terms. Marechera’s way of making us experience this is by building psychological tension by denying the reader the option of a way out of the conceptual and thoroughly existential maze that his text sets about building.


The Faculty itself is small when seen from the outside; but inside it is stupendously labyrinthine with its infinite ramifications or little nooks of rooms, some of which are bricked up to isolate forever the rotten corpses within. [...]

The people in the house are all refugees in one way or another; exiles from the war out there. Wanderers from some unknown trouble. All pilgrims at the shrine of the plague. The place stinks of psychological wounds, which gives it a human fragrance. (p 25)



In this text, dualisms collapse, and if one looks to find safety by preferring the side of a dichotomy that seems relatively safe for the moment, one will not find it – mind versus body, inside versus outside, warlike versus peaceable, are all eminently collapsible dichotomies, in The Black Insider. Moreover, they lead to existential dead-ends. The structure of the book does not permit a reader’s recourse to any of these conceptual dichotomies as a way to find enduring stable ground. Rather, the words delivered in the text are fluid elements of destructiveness, undermining faith in hierarchical systems of power – which are, after all, built on conceptual dichotomies that create, in turn, identities. The fluid psychological motion of this book is therefore not in terms of valuing or enhancing the culturally normative dichotomies of values we are used to – such dichotomies including those of race and moral standing, whether high or low. Rather, the psychological pattern that is reinforced by this book is in terms of the Tao – with one sort of state of being flowing into its opposite (and, as mentioned, always under pressure from each end): "Inside-out is outside-in, but there is always bleeding. And hidden persuaders." P 103.

If the work is designed to make us feel tense and even irritable, it is because of its political realism. Marechera spoke, a year before his death, of his Cassandra complex -- how could tell that certain things would happen before they took place. “Writers know more things than others do,” Marechera seemed to say. The capacity to see more, and to know more, might well pertain to one who keeps his ears open for new language and ideas to write down, for use in a novel. Yet Cassandra was a political figure, who knew more politically, about the future than others at her time did. In equating writers with “seers”, it is as if Marechera was saying that writers automatically fulfil a shamanic role for their societies. In speaking of Cassandra, and her failed attempt to save Troy from invasion, Marechera suggests that this shamanic role of the writer is actually political.

The knowledge that Marechera had, about the “Arts Faculty” at the University of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, and what was destined to be in store for the residue of guerrilla fighters there, was not, however given to him by “spirits” – at least, not entirely. Marechera’s voice on the CD in an interview session confirms that he already knew, through the political grapevine, presumably, that there were dissidents within the University, who were being assisted by certain sympathetic professors and lecturers. State military intelligence – which was still largely white dominated – knew this, too. They had developed a contingency plan to storm the Fine Arts building, with heavy artillery, should the now incumbent president, Robert Mugabe be voted in. You see, the Zimbabwe-Rhodesian regime had been declared illegal, and so a new vote was necessary in 1980, so that a new (and likely Marxist) government was in the offing. Operation Quartz was never given the secret signal to go ahead within hours of Robert Mugabe being declared the winner of the State election, and so the description of the Arts Faculty taking heavy shelling and being thoroughly destroyed, (as is depicted in the end passage of The Black Insider) did not take place in actual reality. Yet it could just as easily have happened, and President Mugabe’s more recent rorting of an election upon failing to win sufficient votes only confirms that the mode of thinking behind planning Operation Quartz is hardly removed from the Zimbabwe of today. The contents of The Black Insider are significantly prophetic, in the sense that Marechera understood very well the political psychology of this time and, as it turns out, the political psychology that remained in place more than twenty years later.

Tuesday 14 July 2009

more words on the black insider

The use of language as refreshment (from Zarathustra). Intellectuals are inward, the world is “outwards” and survival of the fittest oriented. (dualism seems Platonic) Also the naked body as inviting disgust is Platonic (Platonism is used against the mode of being of the powerful -- clothing being hypocritical.)
Exploring the possibility of bridging/sewing up the raw and bleeding existing reality through literacy.
" Inside-out is outside-in, but there is always bleeding. And hidden persuaders." P 103 The question of how to give birth to oneself – always involves suffering and submission to some ideological system or other.
" Inside" is the womb is the african identity in a global context. Not yet born. One is born through the anus of society (not in the normal way, since shamanic).
Suffering is connected to knowledge.

Impiety is part of Zimbabwean sense of humour. Earthiness. Groundedness ?
The grave is also the womb which gives birth to other selves – p 107—a reference to the spirit realm and to ego death. One gives birth to oneself through speaking – this is direct shamanic channelling.
The Divine Comedy as shamanic: Decameron as the structural basis for the story as a womb in which one may recover the black identity through literacy. Thus the outsider facilitates the birth of the insider, through water/spirit.
Faculty in the mind and compartments of the mind 25
One good scratch and the sky bleeds visions. 36 surrealism.
Womb 66

Soul dualism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Soul dualism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Monday 13 July 2009

the shamanic logic of "burning in the rain"

That which is shamanic about the short story, Burning in the Rain is, first and foremost, the way that identity is understood. As I have taken pains to mention in the introductory chapter, shamanic knowledge is not strictly speaking “epistemological” (paradoxically, of course).

That is, it is not knowledge in the conventional sense that we understand knowledge. Rather, shamanic knowledge is ontological. This means that when it comes to understanding identity from a shamanic point of view, one will not understand it according to conventional systems of knowledge, not even according to according to one that is as informative and politically and historically aware as that provided by the archaeological approach to knowledge about social identities furnished by Michel Foucault. Marechera’s writing is not postmodernist, but rather deeply psychological. His understanding of how the black identity comes into being is based – shamanically – on personal experience, and is related, also shamanically, by means of a doubling of the self.

The literary doubling – and even tripling – of the self, as per the literary aesthetics of Edgar Allen Poe, is not quite what I am referring to here. Rather, I am intent upon conveying my recognition as a reader of the intense self-knowledge that the author expresses concerning the way that social and political forces interpellate an as yet unformed psyche, so that the self becomes party to the needs of various Ideological State Apparati, by adopting an identity that fits in with politically determined values and systems put in place before the individual being affected by them was free to make choices.

Thus it is the unusual self-awareness of the writer than enables him to describe the ontological deformations of selfhood that were the only ones available to him as a young man growing up in colonial Rhodesia, in the process of “coming of age”. The ontological aspects of the story reveal themselves to us in the way the young man’s path of development is sabotaged rather than facilitated by the options available to him within colonial Rhodesia. The psychical wholeness that he had previously experienced in synchronisation with nature is confronted by a treacherous two-pronged fork in his path, which could lead to acceptance of the status of being an ape, or a false white aristocratic demeanour and consciousness. Alternatively to these paths, however, is the shamanic path, the way of which is woven throughout the storyline as contradictory to the troubles described in the”realist” version of the story and as a redemptive narrative.

The shamanic narrative involves the idea of a “manfish” who can dive deeply into the subconscious, as a result of facing his fears (and in this significant sense, facing death, as well). Another of Marechera’s short stories tells us that a “manfish” is a drowned man, whose spirit has turned into a fish, and is a danger to children who want to swim at the place of drowning. A shaman is likewise someone’s whose continuity life has been interrupted by an encounter with death. In a sense, their old life has “drowned” and they are now living on borrowed time. Yet, for all this, the access that such a shamanic individual has to this borrowed time is redemptive – for it implies a continuity of life beyond a point that life should logically be considered to continue: A drowned man does not, conventionally, live on, not even as a “manfish”. So the “manfish” – or rather, imaginative power – redeems the situation that the author finds himself in, which is dire.

One looks to Lacan as well as to the post-Kleinians, to understand how a mirror may “interpellate” a person into having an identity that they have not chosen. “The mirror, I suppose, was at the heart of it.” That is how the story begins. The “mirror stage” implies seeing oneself as a whole person for the first time, rather than as experiential chaos and multiplicity. One can see it as implying the beginning of self-consciousness, a point of transcending political unconsciousness and a dependency on a state of nature (represented in Kleinian theory as “the mother”), towards arriving at an awareness of one’s separate personhood. (The question of identity cannot be far behind.) In some parts of Africa, one may arrive at this crisis point of identity particularly late, due to a lack of efficiency in systems that would integrate one into the processes of conforming to the Ideological State Apparati much earlier. (A lack of industrial technology may be to blame.)

Marechera’s shamanic awareness is implicitly postcolonial -- since his understanding reveals that he is aware that what has the power to interpellate him into the state of having an adult identity is an alien power. To put it plainly: the options available to him, if he wants to take up a role in adulthood, are all predefined by colonial power structures. This is why it seems to him that a natural life, in which he “had been happy, unbearably happy, as a child” (p 85) is experienced as suddenly being subjected to alien spiritual powers. The author, in his profound awareness of what was at stake at that period of his life, can take a certain distance from his earlier experiences, since the shamanic endowment of “borrowed time” has earned this for him. “But time had rubbed pepper into his eyes and the stinging of it had maddened it out of him. The mirror said it all and in it he knew his kinsman; the ape, lumbering awkwardly into his intimacy.” ( p85.) The tone is tragi-comic.

The “ape” is the colonial concept of the black man. The writer is describing his dawning of consciousness as to what it means to come of age in a political system that has reserved a particularly lowly place for you because of your colour. The alien nature of this consciousness – alien because it is colonial – is represented by the author’s representation of this consciousness as interrupting his otherwise normative and happy life in an occult (unnatural) fashion, which is represented by the mirror because of its capacity to double and even possibly even distort existing reality (as per the term, “smoke and mirrors”). The mirror reveals one to oneself objectively, but not if “objective reality”—that is, the formal ideology of the dominant political order – is already invested in distortions.

Finally it should be said that Marechera’s short story involves a redemptive narrative: Although the intervention of the “ape in the mirror” (representing the intervention of madness due to the need to make an impossible choice) leads to disruption and a sense of violence in the relationship between the girl, Margaret, and the man who wants to impress her with his adult identity, in a parallel shamanic sense, all is already redeemed. “At the head of the stream; that’s where they had, with great violence, fused into one.” ( p 84). So, even before the story descends into the inevitable chaos, in recognition of the protagonist’s inevitable madness, the form and structure of the narrative has already been redeemed by the actions of the “manfish” and the concomitant powers of his imagination.

Saturday 11 July 2009

shamanic realism

If it wasn’t clear from the offset, a shamanic initiate does not choose their profession – at least not in normal circumstances. There may be some instances in which shamanic initiation does seem like a choice, but these are instances of “shamanic initiation lite”. The subculture of the 60s and Leary’s experiments with taking accident could be considered in the latter sense, as leading to explorations within the mind that do not come first at a great cost to one’s person.

Similar things could be said about New Age shamanism. Yet such lighter versions of shamanism, which are suited to more developed countries in which lifestyles have already become finessed do not invite a deeper sense of the logic of shamanism – that one becomes a shaman, traditionally, because of inherent pathologies within one’s community. It is these that give rise to the shamanic initiation, which is via profound wounding of some sort. Shamanism, although originating in cultures of hunter-gatherers, is also most ideally suited to the needs of oppressed communities of all sorts. It is their members who are most likely to be inducted – unwillingly, as I have suggested shamanic initiation in its truest sense must be – into shamanic knowledge. For, if the shaman is the manifestation of the disease of his community, he is also the counterpoint and its cure. Thus the logic of genuine shamanism is that it has a side of initiation into knowledge of the “other realm” and how things really work (as opposed to how they merely seem to work to blinkered and as yet unprobing eyes).

A shamanic initiate has eyes newly opened to the meaning and the cost of power, which has been in inscribed upon his body, like one of Kafka’s torture victims. It is in this profound sense of shamanism that Marechera’s book, The House of Hunger, finds its meaning and its raison d'être. [Footnote: This is not to underestimate the effect that the international youth subculture had on the author, or indeed the degree to which his use of cannabis –an entheogen—had the result of producing his “shamanic initiation”. However, it was the oppression of hunger and the poverty of opportunity that ultimately produced Marechera’s induction into the world of shamanic sensibilities.]
Marechera’s writing, righ

t from its first inception and presentation in The House of Hunger, has been shamanic. Yet, it is The House of Hunger that most closely embraces the conception of “shamanic realism” as presented by James Alexander Guerra Overton in Shamanic Realism: Latin American Literature and the Shamanic Perspective. Whereas some of his later works, such as (I have argued) Black Sunlight, is more wholly shamanic, The House of Hunger approximates, rather, that which Overton refers to as “Shamanic realism”, which is “a new classification or genre of literature - which [is] based on the coordinated juxtaposition in resolved antinomy of two antithetical worldviews, one shamanic and the other Western. [ p 63]. Overton speaks in this regard of texts relating to Latin America, however he also states that, “the roots of this [Latin American tradition of] esoteria were already well established in the weltanschauung of the three principal cultures which constitute the social and racial make-up of the Latin American continent: the Native American, the African, and the Iberian.[-- p 3]. It is perhaps for the reason that The House of Hunger contains so much Western “realism” that is has been generally better acclaimed internationally than some of his later produced works.


In the novella section of The House of Hunger, Marechera’s hunger for spiritual and intellectual sustenance – and not just food – takes place semi-autobiographically, in the black ghettoised ‘township’ of Vengere of white-ruled Rhodesia. The young man struggles with the rights and wrongs of gaining an education in English, at the expense of his parents and their suffering. He develops a crush on a local girl, Immaculate, and expresses certain traditional misogynistic attitudes towards her, despite his pity for her situation – which is worse than his. In due course, the inward hunger for a life that offered some dignity and sophistication, along with the pressure to complete his destiny through study and leave the ghetto at last, causes the protagonist’s mental breakdown. He starts to see hallucinations, which are banished only with a huge emotional release of tension in the community, which comes to pass with a sudden crash storm, which destroys much of the school and the local environment.

The spiritual hunger for life outside of the community remains, however, and the author takes us for a trip inside and outside of his head, as he draws inwards, to the point that inside and outside of this “house of hunger” – his head – can not be differentiated, (at least by the protagonist and perhaps by the reader, who is often left wondering if what is happening is actually real or is occurring symbolically and inwardly). The final passages of the book are in an entirely different tone and of a different quality from some of these tormented passages of tormented realism. It is in these last few passages that the “shamanic” elements are introduced into this otherwise excruciating but otherwise fairly “realistic” depiction of somebody’s descent into madness. These last elements are “shamanic” because they do not follow the normal pattern of human psychology, where there are only two polarities of being – madness and sanity (and the gradations in between). An unpredictable third element appears in the figure of the “wise old man” who appears at the young Marechera’s door, and nurtures him with his story-telling.

The fragility of this old man and the serendipity of his appearance and his story-telling (which is somehow intrinsically nourishing) lead one to believe that this is somehow Marechera who has affected a shamanic transformation, (after a difficult “initiation” and madness), in order to provide for himself, through his imaginative powers, that which he found to be lacking. Shamanic transformation and regeneration is the third element of the pendulum – one that doesn’t rightfully exist either logically or according to most Western psychology. Yet it is the introduction of this element of restorative freedom that gives Marechera’s work the appellation “shamanic realism”.


The rest of the short stories in the book are black humorous stories about the author’s experiences, as a writer, in exile, growing up in Lesapi, and in relation to the question of having a “black identity”. These stories are shamanic in that they involve a doubling of the persona of the author (much as we saw the beginnings of in the last section of the novella. In the story concerning his childhood in Lesapi, the narrative elements are animistic and broadly Romantic in its deep and evocative sense of connection with the capricious spirit of nature governing his village. The short stories of The House of Hunger portray women as manifestly strong, in terms of how they are represented according to the author’s own metaphysics. The writer represents his shamanic view of the world – with magic and reality supervening on each other.

these things grow in the garden.

Ultimately all ideologically tainted and false perspectives work to handicap the viewer.

It is one thing to define your opponent in a stereotyped and negative light, however, any subsequent engagement with her had better be based on a more realistic estimation, otherwise the viewer handicaps himself.

The garden variety sexist has so many blindspots that I can effectively: step to the right and hook there; step to the left and uppercut there; lay in heavy and repetitive body blows there and there.

I don't expect the garden variety sexist to know what hit him. Maybe, like Polyphemus he calls out to his fellows: "Nobody! Nobody is hitting me. Nobody."

strength of mine

A shaman doesn't regress because he or she is intrinsically "sick". They are more likely to be those of intrinsically strong minds if they do turn out to be shamans after all (ie. if they recover).

It is the element of social or political oppression that causes their regression. It can also be the result of an accident that causes the wounding (as per Frieda Kahlo), but generally shamanism is associated with the lower classes of society who may be subject to systematic oppression (see Michael Taussig and the situation of the Colombian indians). It must be an inbuilt mechanism of the human mind that when put under a state of extreme stress it aims to return to the safety of the womb. (The post-Kleinians make much of this, although not in terms of shamanism).

Forces of oppression can be seen to be responsible for keeping some members of society in a state of immaturity in relation to the dominant classes (and gender). This would give them automatic closer access to the magical pre-oedipal level of consciousness. But the intrinsic strength of the minds of some of the oppressed classes would result in the strange occurrence that these individuals do not descend into madness never to return, but do return after this baptism, with all sorts of things like an insightful social critique, an enhanced imagination, and enhanced survival skills. That is because their "madness" was never intrinsic to them, but was caused by direct pressures from the outside. Such pressures turn the otherwise healthy and vibrant mind inwards for a while, so as to get to know itself in all of its imaginative complexity, thus releasing blockages and repressions that would otherwise cause neurosis. That is why the shaman's "wounding" is often so beneficial to himself as well as to his community. Insight into the nature of oppression seems intrinsically linked to shamanic insight in general.

Thursday 9 July 2009

pathology or power?

Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2006, 51, 125–144
0021–8774/2006/5101/125 © 2006, The Society of Analytical Psychology
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
The developmental/emergent model of
archetype, its implications and its
application to shamanism
John Merchant, Sydney


This is an article that says that siberian shamanism is, in fact, pathological, on the basis of pre-oedipal dynamics.

The link I am constantly finding is between shamanism and early childhood -- even in Aboriginal culture, there is the conceptualisation of returning to infancy and then back to adulthood in shamanic ritual.

What this article doesn't depict (because it is just empirical, not broadly theoretical) is the regression followed by the return to a mature disposition and associated healing.

The whole issue of how this three-part process occurs and to what degree is probably not empirically verifiable. It is only mythically suggested in various texts that this is the nature of the process.

Also, I have the problem of answering the question: To what degree does the kind of ontological knowledge of how selfhood is constructed become redeemed of a pathological residue and useful for appropriating in a health-giving manner, for example in an expert dissection of the function of the pre-oedipal FIELD (NOT "stage" -- but some infantile residue that also pertains quite necessarily, and only in some cases pathologically, to a fully attained adult life)?

In other words, it is really hard to know about the degree of recovery that Marechera managed to attain, from his earlier illness. What IS clear to me is that he writes with a deep knowledge of the structures of pre-oedipal psychological mechanisms, and that he employs a lot of insights into how the pre-oedipal FIELD (in the sense that it affects adult social organisation) produces selective repression and the exclusion of some people, but not others, from power.

So, this is indicative of his turning his knowledge (and personal misfortune) towards healing others in society, especially the downtrodden.

And it is THAT pattern of sickness and recovery that IS shamanic. (But once again, to what degree are some of his earlier works? I don't know. Also why did he fear so much the "participation mystique" (in terms of the dynamics I have found in some of his works and in his life?) Perhaps -- and very likely so -- this has much to do with the way that blacks were infantised in colonial society (as often white women were, too, as I have pointed out). So there is a tendency to relate from the position of immaturity into which he had been interpellated. Also, the motif of the black identity as being "unborn" is very evocative of the power of political repression to create a forced immaturity.

Cultural barriers to objectivity