They Called You Dambudzo

Flora Veit-Wild

 

Synopsis

This book is a memoir with a ‘double heartbeat’. At its centre is the author’s relationship with the late Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera, whose award-winning book The House of Hunger marked him as a powerful, disruptive, perhaps prophetic voice in African literature. Flora Veit-Wild is internationally recognised for her significant contribution to preserving Marechera’s legacy. What is less known about Marechera and Veit-Wild, is that they had an intense, personal and sexual relationship. This memoir explores this: the couple’s first encounter in 1983, amidst the euphoria of the newly independent Zimbabwe; the tumultuous months when the homeless writer moved in with his lover and her family; the bouts of creativity once he had his own flat followed by feelings of abandonment; the increasing despair about a love affair that could not stand up against reality and the illness of the writer and his death of HIV related pneumonia in August 1987. What follows are the struggles Flora went through once Dambudzo had died. On the one hand she became the custodian of his life and work, on the other she had to live with her own HIV infection and the ensuing threats to her health.

Review

They Called You Dambudzo is [a] deeply courageous and compelling memoir… Veit-Wild interlaces dialogue, poetry, anecdote and vivid portraiture to achieve something truly extraordinary… This book deserves its place among the classics of Zimbabwean literature. - Elleke Boehmer

Author

Flora Veit-Wild is Professor of African Literatures and Cultures at Humboldt University, Berlin.