The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera

– Book review by Takura Matswetu

Dambudzo Marechera is one of Zimbabwe’s most brilliant and potent literary voices. This internationally celebrated author managed to, in his short career, publish a body of work that included novels, plays and poetry -and his unorthodox, abrasive and often crude style of writing broke a new frontier in African literature.

To visualize Marechera’s writings would be an attempt in neo-expressionist art, something in the style of Basquiat. His first book, The House of Hunger, was written after his expulsion from New College, Oxford for allegedly attempting to burn down its library. Marechera had been expelled from the University of Rhodesia in 1973 for his activism against the then apartheid colonial government in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, before moving to Oxford.

According to his publisher James Currey – House of Hunger was written by a homeless Marechera living in a tent on the edge of the river Thames. The book was awarded the 1979 Guardian Fiction Prize, making Marechera the first and only African to have won the award. The book contains nine stories, flowing between fantasy and reality. The house of hunger is postmodern literature written in a provocative and sometimes confusing fashion about being black in Rhodesia. He touches on subjects such as colonialism, relationships, race, poverty and belonging- sometimes presenting these dishes with decayed carcass as a side relish but still managing to navigate through these subjects with a brilliance and depth that makes the reader sometimes question his own and/or the writer’s sanity. Marechera’s style of writing is meant to rattle the readers ontological security, and the book is coupled with a documentary that is available on YouTube and opens with the words “I don’t like what I think I have become. Even the success of my own books has made me part of the very system which is an intellectual rape of the Black peoples…” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbW0SjamJh4

Takura also shares with us some of his favourite reads.