In honour of Dambudzo Marechera

BRITISH writer China Mieville has described They Called You Dambudzo: A Memoir by Flora Veit-Wild, a German literary academic and professor of African literatures and cultures at Humboldt University in Berlin, as “a moving, powerful, intense evocation of an extraordinary time, and the intersection of extraordinary lives”.

According to Veit-Wild, the book was born from a question raised by a member of the audience during a symposium in honour of the late Zimbabwean born author, Dambudzo Marechera. The question was: “So what was your real relationship to him?” Then she decides to tell her story, their story.

While the book highlights moments of their extraordinary lives together, I couldn’t ignore how unsettling a read this was in some parts. Written in six parts, the book details the author’s relationship with the Zimbabwean literary giant Marechera – a novelist who died in 1987 but remains a popular figure in Zimbabwe.This 279-page memoir positions itself as a memory.

Reading They Called You Dambudzo comes across as Veit-Wild saying: ‘This is who he was, I knew him well. And to honour him, I will let you in on my life with him. Believe me.’

This, of course, should be expected, because Veit-Wild’s memoir is a personal stamp of authority on her former lover and a revisitation of a time gone by. Memoirs are, after all, windows into lives and their design rests with their writers.

The early chapters reflect Veit-Wild as a politically active young woman, member of the Communist League of West Germany, and greatly concerned with “the effects of colonialism and imperialism in Africa”. Barred from civil service in Germany in the 1970s for their “intense political activism,” Veit-Wild and her husband Victor moved to Zimbabwe, where he could conduct research with the goal of

re-entering academia. Zimbabwe was an obvious choice, Veit-Wild writes, as the couple “had campaigned strongly” for its independence.

Despite her activism, Veit-Wild’s account of her time in Zimbabwe casts a shadow on her racial politics. The author is dismayed when she arrives in Harare. The city, she writes, “felt very European… Everything was clean and orderly”.

Reading that made me feel as though, cleanliness and order are not traits that she thought an African city could possess. Soon, the Wilds buy an “other-worldly property, which covers two acres”. Did Veit-Wild give a sense that she felt guilty for living in a mansion, “with domestic workers who called me ‘madam’ and my husband ‘baas’?” No, she candidly responds, “I felt exuberant”.

About her first date with Marechera, Veit-Wild writes: “I felt good with him, though not infatuated; his appearance was just too weird. At times, he reminded me of a lurking animal.” This statement is one of many unsettling descriptions of Marechera, whom Veit-Wild does not hesitate to call a “hunted animal”, “spoilt brat” and “galling scoundrel”.

At the centre of the book is the story of the author’s relationship with Marechera, whose award-winning book, The House of Hunger, marked him as a powerful, disruptive, perhaps prophetic voice in African literature.

In her prelude, Veit-Wild pays tribute to her lover through memories of their times together. Titled “I REMEMBER”, this list of 18 italicised “I remembers” starts with “I remember our first night…” and ends with “I remember waiting for the next gasp, each time thinking: Is this the last?” In this prelude, Veit-Wild summarises her relationship with Marechera through distinct scenes of connection, romantic intimacy and innuendos of sexual intercourse.

This is how she sets the scene of her memoir and then the window opens wide as the text paces through six sections titled “Trajectories”, “Harare in Heat”, “Eaglets of Desire”, “Heaven’s Terrible Ecstasy”, “Bastard Death” and “Entangled Legacies”.

Veit-Wild brings forth a contrast on the upbringing between herself and the Zimbabwean writer. One is born in extreme poverty and the other is born into privilege. She shows us how this contrast affected them in their relationship. While she lived as this character in this story, she comes across as naive as though she didn’t think this contrast in backgrounds between them mattered so much.

According to Veit-Wild, when she met him, she never felt like race mattered to her as he was the first Zimbabwean of African descent with whom she felt like skin didn't matter. While there were different backgrounds to their lives, she felt like there were also common backgrounds when Marechera lived in London in the 70s and she in Germany, and there were all these movements that took place around the time.

With this book, the reader will realise that in her writing, Veit-Wild deliberately shows us various parts of Marechera that reveal he was loving to her, and in contrast harsh and cold at times. The memoir explores 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 Veit-Wild went through once Marechera 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.

I didn’t expect that this would be a book laced with roses and a basic simplicity to it. It is a story of a white woman, who doesn’t necessarily confront her racial privilege and the inequality within her relationship with Marechera. It is a book laced with love in academia, mixed with racial nuance, with a tonality that brought discomfort to my reading experience and in some parts brought delight at my imagination of the literary giant Marechera was and continues to be.

♦ They Called You Dambudzo: A Memoir is published by Jacana Media and is available at all major bookstores countrywide.