The House of Hunger (Heinemann African Writers Series) [Paperback]

This was Marechera's first book. It was published in 1978 and contains an 80-page novella comprising half the collection, eight shorter stories and a brief comic poem. The pieces describe what it's like to live in the House of Hunger: the state of "soul-hunger" and gut-rot the title story's narrator sees all around him in his homeland and in himself. Where underlying spiritual and social traditions are felt to be lost, and where the overwhelming influence by Western culture, which has so deeply shaped the writer's outlook and others, is felt to be alien. Where people are depicted as lacking natural connections with each other and seeking endlessly to satisfy material desires. The alienation is compounded when the narrators in some of the other stories travel to the West and struggle to put down roots.

Marechera (1952-87) expressed cultural and mental dislocation with visceral imagery and rapidly shifting, restless prose. In doing so, it's been claimed, he expanded the boundaries of postcolonial African writing. The sensibility in his writing that came through to me -- restless, sensitive, mocking, tortured -- felt very contemporary.

Nearly all the stories are narrated in the first person. In one of the few exceptions, the narrator discusses another man who's perhaps the narrator, since he's known so intimately. Some of the works take place in Rhodesia when the narrator's a boy, then a student and young man. Three pieces are set in England, two of them specifically at Oxford University, where the author had gone in 1974 to study. The poem that ends the collection, "Characters from the Bergfrith," describes the secondary school in Rhodesia that the author attended as a youth. The edition of this book that I read could've used an introduction putting the author's work in context and discussing his intentions.

The writing contained powerful fragments. Often these were embedded in stories that for me were uneven. At their best, the pieces sensitively combined feelings, dream visions and melancholy -- as in "The Slow Sound of His Feet," a story about loss and death that managed to suggest a world in three pages -- or succeeded in matching violent thought and action to a suitably vigorous style.

At other times, there was continual digression, flashback and forth, formlessness, and lack of clarity as to direction and point, as in "The Writer's Grain," which was virtually unreadable. Or the title story, which was dominated by seemingly aimless shifting between restless conversations and sudden confrontations, the narrator's thoughts, physical injuries and other sensations, feverish straining for effect, and termination without resolution. Maybe the style was suited intentionally to the subject matter.

In some of the stories, the narrator seemed only a few steps away from the disintegration of personality, described vividly. In one, the narrator was bullied by local whites, then suffered the death of those close to him. Later, in the middle of a sensation that was half-brotherly and half-erotic, he had a vision that the dead had returned from their graves. In another, the hallucinating narrator saw himself as an ape in a mirror, a demented Santa Claus, and later a European man painted white. In another, he turned into an inanimate object.

Sometimes the author's sense of humor came to the fore in his style and situations, as when the narrator poked fun at his own dissipation as a student at Oxford, or his hesitation about a traditional rite he had to carry out while visiting his family in Rhodesia, or when he mocked a magazine that had commissioned an article on the "modern African family," which was expected to consume the products of "white civilization." Or when one story's narrator portrayed a situation that led to a violent but hilarious encounter between himself, his wife, his twin brother, a student and a talking dog.

In subsequent books written during the remainder of his short life, the author intensified the portrayal of his own psychology and the social pressures he saw around him. Amid great personal hardship, much of it self-inflicted, his path led to anarchism, an increasingly impenetrable, stream-of-consciousness style, and an insistence above all on his integrity as a writer.

Some excerpts from the book:

"And there we all were; in an uncertain country, ourselves uncertain. A land with a sly heart; and ourselves ready to be deceived. A morally corrosive atmosphere, and ourselves base metals ready for the acids of maturity."

"Life stretched out like a series of hunger-scoured hovels stretching endlessly towards the horizon. One's mind became the grimy rooms . . . Gut-rot, that was what one steadily became. And whatever insects of thought buzzed about inside the tin can of one's head as one squatted astride the pit-latrine of it, the sun still climbed as swiftly as ever and darkness fell upon the land as quickly as in the years that had gone."

"It seemed to me something was taking over my body; the images and symbols I had for so long taken for granted had taken upon themselves a strange hue; and I was losing my grasp of simple speech. . . . I was being severed from my own voice . . . . When I talked it was in the form of an interminable argument, one side of which was always expressed in English and the other side always in Shona. At the same time I would be aware of myself as something indistinct but separate from both cultures."

"The underwear of our souls was full of holes and the crotch it hid was infested with lice. We were who--s; eaten to the core by the syphilis of the white man's coming."

"'You're full of filth, do you know that?' 'I have long suspected it,' I said, losing interest."

"Soon there were tremendous groans and grunts erupting from that bed and the energy of it was like god's fist shaking satan's shirtfront."

"I smacked them right back, buffeted them down, thumped them back, whacked them down, as they pummelled and pounded and battered into me. I kicked, booted, kneed, and cudgelled into them as they bulldozed into me and pile-drove me into one lump of pain. I clubbed, coshed, slugged, whipped, flogged and bashed into them as they sledge-hammered into me."

"He dreamed he was sleeping on a bed of creaking human skulls and that the quilt which covered him was in fact made of human bones and human ribs. The ribs had fastened closely round his small body and each time he so much as moved a finger the bed of skulls and the quilt of ribs creaked and grinned and cackled and creaked merrily as though immensely amused by something."

"The sun was screaming soundlessly when I buried her. There were hot and cold rings around its wet brightness."

"Her fleshless hand lay still in his fleshless fingers."

"He had -- at long last! -- broken the surface and emerged sucking in great armfuls of breath, laughing and beating the silver shimmering lattices around him. At the head of the stream, that's where they had, with great violence, fused into one and it was among the petunias so unbearably sweet that they had become afraid and listened to the staring motionless thing which made the rivers flow. The rushing rapids of them had crashed onwards into the Indian Ocean. If only life was like that always and, yes, one did not have to see the reflections of one's own thoughts. If one was rock."

The power of Marechera's short stories is quite something. The House of Hunger in particular is knee-deep in imagery, meaning that the reader often finds it a little too much to take in. This is all intentional, of course; one senses that Marechera is trying to reconcile the violence and bloodshed of this period through a written style that is just as impulsive and forceful.

Rarely does a writer manage to make a political or social statement in a way that is so artistically striking. These stories show not only that dark episodes of history are far from history, but also that the desire to express opposition, to exorcise the influence of tyrannical regimes through art and literature remains very strong.

House of Hunger is an excellent book written with an energy and humour that belies its occasional explicit content.

The book is made of a novella (the House of Hunger) and nine short stories. They are all set in Zimbabwe. Marechera is often critical of his homeland both in terms of the white settlers and the blacks. House of Hunger the opening story sets the tone painting the picture of a young disillusioned black man who has been well educated in Oxford. Although it at times difficult to follow, the book switching from present to past with little warning, the graphic detail of fighting for a sense of individuality both against the whites and his own people keeps the readers attention. The raw prose provides a real sense how the regime of Zimbabwe must of been at the time.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested who are affraid give an honest opinion.