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Mesochronous Marechera: African Aesthetics, Violence, and Temporality in The House of Hunger
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Mesochronous Marechera: African Aesthetics, Violence, and Temporality in The House of Hunger
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Journal Article
Mesochronous Marechera: African Aesthetics, Violence, and Temporality in The House of Hunger
2020
Overview
Within postcolonial literary studies, questions of political commitment or individual identity often accompany aesthetic categorization: for instance, to what extent do an author’s stylistic choices reflect an individual or collective narrative of national struggle? Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera’s fiction and essays disallow easy assignation as local or universal, African or Western. The vulgar, irreverent aesthetic of Marechera’s debut novella, The House of Hunger (1978), expanded the definition of postcolonial African writing and at times prompted his categorization as a cosmopolitan or global modernist author. Rather than considering his work as reflective of a hybrid identity, I argue that it proposes a coeval relationship between Western and African aesthetic and material worlds in the post-World War II era. Marechera enacts this historico-aesthetic relationship by representing 1970–80s Zimbabwe with violence and vulgarity. In turn, this representation confronts and subverts the colonial fashioning of Africa as outside history, modernity, and the universal. I read The House of Hunger as a theorization of this mesochronous relationship between Africa and the West.
