Reading Marechera

Grant Hamilton

 

Synopsis

Considered one of Africa's most innovative and subversive writers, the Zimbabwean novelist, poet, playwright and essayist Dambudzo Marechera is read today as a significant voice in contemporary world literature. Marechera wrote ceaselessly against the status quo, against unqualified ideas, against expectation. He was an intellectual outsider who found comfort only in the company of other free-thinking writers - Shelley, Bakhtin, Apuleius, Fanon, Dostoyevsky, Tutuola. It is this universe of literary thought that one can see written into the fiction of Marechera that this collection of essays sets out to interrogate.

Review

These essays accentuate the egalitarian verve, the scepticism of orthodoxies and the resourceful dissent that distinguish Marechera's writing. The comprehensive footnotes and bibliography can only be a huge bonus to students of Marechera and modern African writing. - Lucas Bulletin

Author

Grant Hamilton is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.