African Literature Book Club: Review of Black Sunlight by Dambudzo Marechera
For our last discussion of the African Literature Book Club, we read and discussing Black Sunlight, a challenging piece
of work by Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera.
Present: Alice, Aminata, Angela, Elizabeth, Sasha.
What on earth is going on?
Sasha: This book was so weird. It starts off quite violently and I assumed the action was in Africa but then there were all these Western influences. So you aren’t always sure where it is set. I started to get into it around Chapter 4 and I know they were activists…
Alice: They were terrorists weren’t they…
Elizabeth: and he [the protagonist known as Christian] is a photographer for their subversive magazine Precision.
Alice: I could follow it in the beginning; I can follow his life which is quite straightforward up until he enters the cavern. Then it just gets weird…
Elizabeth: It just gets weirder and weirder from there, very trance like, he talks to someone who looks like himself.
Sasha: …and then he starts seeing people who I thought were people in authority who they had captured and tortured, and then they disappear. At that point he doesn’t know his own mind anymore and I stopped reading
Why couldn’t we finish it?
Elizabeth: It’s just too hard! I would need a whole academic year to dissect what’s going on in this book. I simply couldn’t follow this when reading it on the train and I started to fall asleep with the effort.
Ami: I agree it’s simply too hard to read. You can’t follow the story because you’re translating it and trying to find out his meaning.
Alice: After the protagonist enters the cavern, the book gets highly philosophical.
Sasha: It’s such a shame because I felt there was a lot of profound things being said but I was missing them simply because people don’t speak like that and you feel like you have to excavate the message that he was trying to communicate.
Ami: Sibusiso was telling us last month about the author, Dambudzo Marechera; that you either get it and love it or you think he is crazy.
Elizabeth: I don’t think he is crazy. This reminded me of the Beat Poets – and I don’t particularly like the Beats…
Alice: *gasp*
Elizabeth: Sorry. But this kind of stream-of consciousness was different from the Beats style and I liked it.
Alice: This book seems to have a lot of Marechera’s story and influences in it. He attended Oxford university but he was completely insubordinate and tried to set his college on fire so they gave him a choice to either leave, or stay and get psychiatric treatment. So he left the university but stayed around Oxford with friends and wrote his novels. His first one House of Hunger was published by Heinemann and did very well and they had similar expectations for Black Sunlight but when they got it they refused to publish at first and then relented, so maybe his first book is less chaotic.
Angela: That happens a lot though with publishers and authors, they do second third and fourth revisions of books before they decide to publish. When I read this I immediately thought “this is like James Joyce Ulysses”
Elizabeth: Yeah there’s a lot of comparison between him and Joyce. I don’t think Ulysses gets nearly as psychological as this and thank god this isn’t as long as Ulysses. I would like to read Marechera’s poetry though.
Ami: He is so good with language and imagery, which would be fine for poetry but not in a novel it’s just too much. Did he ever go back to Zimbabwe?
Alice: Channel 4 was going to make a film of his book and they flew him out to Zimbabwe and housed him – but then he started arguing with them so they left and he stayed there. He died penniless aged 35.
Sasha: Well they do say there is a fine line between genius and madness but I agree I would like to read his poetry. There is a line in here that I underlined “The silence slammed the door after him, as he ravenously left.” (?!) I mean what is that?!
Elizabeth: How can Silence slam doors?
Alice: How do you ravenously leave?
Sasha: Then there are the references to a Jonah Complex [which is fear of one’s greatness]. Clearly you have an author here who is incredibly smart and to truly understand him you have to find out all that he is alluding to.
Is it African?
Alice: Well it’s definitely more substantial than the Tadjo book. Even when you can’t follow it you have a strong sense of the protagonis’s background, his friends, his origins, his duty to take photos and change the country.
Elizabeth: I couldn’t always tell the races of the people in the novel because I didn’t want to assume. The only one I could identify as white was Blanche.
Sasha: I had the same problem I wasn’t always sure who we were with and where we were because the characters are just dropped in and then we lose track of them.
Angela: Does it matter whether the characters are black or white?
Elizabeth: It does help me situate myself when he has flashbacks to being in Oxford and then being on a University campus in Zimbabwe.
Alice: I definitely think it has all of the hallmarks of an African novel in the beginning…
Verdict
We see you smirking – all these educated black women can’t get through this 137 page book. We challenge you to read and understand this novel in one month with all the other stuff going on in your busy lives…yeah we didn’t think so!
