'Schizophrenic Textuality in Dumbuzo Marechera's House of Hunger: An Essay

 

“These fragments of everything descend upon us haphazardly. Only rarely do we see the imminence of wholes.” (Marechera) 

Derived from the Greek terms skizein ‘to spilt’ and phren ‘mind’, schizophrenia, in the general sense, refers to ‘a mentality or approach characterized by inconsistent or contradictory elements.’ Throughout the House of Hunger, Marechera employs his characteristic ‘literary shock treatment’ to force readers to inhabit these split schizophrenic realities and evasive identities. This is achieved through a literary stream of consciousness, which unearths a multiplicity of selves as the novel’s protagonist occupies a state of constant flux within an obscure existence, which allows Marechera to scrutinize the effects of psychic alienation on a colonized mind. This schizophrenic textuality is presented within the House of Hunger through splintered language that creates a dialogue of being in-between two minds, and the motif of mirroring, used to deconstruct the notion of identity as a static entity. Both this use of language and mirroring are utilised throughout to reflect a process of fragmentation, through which Marechera is able to ingress into a wider pursuit of universal principles. 

Marechera explores a schizophrenic sense of being in-between two minds through the internal conflict that presents itself within the multiple voices that inhabit the protagonist’s psyche as he struggles to mediate between the dichotomies of English and Shona. As Marechera’s anonymous narrator recalls being tormented by multiple voices that eventually ‘had also taken over the inner chords of [his] own voice’, he explains, ‘English is my second language, Shona my first. 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. I felt gagged by this absurd contest between Shona and English.’ When the protagonist describes himself as ‘indistinct but separate from both cultures’, it reflects what Bhabha identifies as an alienation within the self. Rather than a binary split between the Self and the Other, the incongruity instead becomes a matter of, ‘the “Other-ness” of the Self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity.’ Thus, the conflict that the protagonist experiences no longer reflects a conflict between the Self and the Other, but rather a conflict within the Self, as he is alienated from both cultures, despite Shona being his mother tongue. This psychic alienation denotes the protagonist’s mental fragmentation, as he remains distinct from both languages that inhabit and torment his thoughts, instead occupying a detached third space within his own mind. As Thiong’o notes, the language of the colonised was ‘taking us further and further from ourselves to other selves, from our world to other worlds.’ For Marechera’s protagonist, this other world becomes a detached, in-between space that Bhabha identifies as the, ‘in-between that constitutes the figure of colonial otherness’. This third in-between space that Bhabha attributes to the Colonial subject, transgresses binary distinctions between the Self and the Other, where ‘The white man is sealed in his whiteness. The black man his blackness’. Instead, this third space offers a higher level of complexity to a schizophrenic fragmentation of the Self. Marechera reflects this alienated in-between Self within the neurotic syntax of the text, as the protagonist occupies a multiplicity of selves that transcends the Self/Other divide, heightening this sense of fragmentation present throughout the text. 

The protagonist goes on to admit, ‘The conversation, the arguments and the pleas steadily asserted their own independence; and I wandered about…feeling literally robbed of words’, fearing that ‘I had been severed from my own voice.’  The dominance that the voices assert over the narrator’s own implies a complete loss of autonomy, as the colonised subject is no longer able to think in his native language without a conflict with English, and so loses the ability to identify thoughts as his own. As the conversations, ‘asserted their own independence’, the protagonist’s inner dialogue becomes something entirely detached from his sense of agency and control. Bhabha attributes this loss of agency to a ‘deep psychic uncertainty’ which creates further alienation; ‘a division which cuts across…individual and social authority.’ This inability to attribute one’s ‘own’ voice to the mother tongue nor to the language of colonial authority, Fanon states, ‘develops because he takes European culture as a means of detaching himself from his own race’. If we apply Fanon’s approach to Marechera’s colonised subject, it becomes apparent that he is caught between two cultural spaces. After assimilating unconscious associations of Shona with the uncivilized, the colonised subject no longer identifies his mother tongue as his own and thus detaches himself from it. Yet, as Fanon demonstrates, the colonisers’ language and culture which he is conditioned to aspire to, is essentially inaccessible to him in its entirety, only ever available to him as a white mask rather than an essence of his being. Thus, when the settler’s voice becomes embedded deep within the psyche, it is still a voice quite alien to the subject it inhabits, and acts as an interminable force, that ‘assert[s] [its] own independence’, and creates these schizophrenic contradictions within the internal dialogue. This leads to the creation of this third in-between space within the psyche that Bhabha identified. 

Fanon states that, ‘the neurotic structure of an individual is precisely the elaboration, the formation, and the birth of conflicting knots in the ego’. If we adopt Fanon’s psychoanalytic approach towards Marechera’s narrator, his internal schizophrenic dialogue becomes a conscious battle within the ego between opposing Manichean delineations of light and dark, civilized and uncivilized. This Manichean contest is defined by, ‘moral standards [that] require the black, the dark, and the black man to be eliminated from this consciousness.’ Fanon explains, ‘If the psychic structure is fragile, we observe a collapse of the ego. The black man stops behaving as an actionable person. His actions are destined for “the Other”’. Here, Fanon’s account of the loss of agency that a collapse of the ego entails, suggests that when the language of the settler becomes the author of the colonised subject’s own thoughts, he loses any sense of himself as an autonomous agent acting upon his free will. Thus, Marechera’s protagonist represents this bleak inevitability for the colonised to internalise this Manichean inferiority complex, as the speaker remains ‘gagged’, defeated by a collapsed ego from the disembodied voices that torment him. 

This severing of the protagonist from his own voice echoes Dr Carothers’s description of the African as a ‘lobotomized European’, where the splitting of the brain severs the subject from the Self; a result of internalising the notion of blackness as the antithesis of white as pure. For Sadowsky, this inability to think or speak in one’s mother tongue becomes a pathology for the splitting of the mind. However, the fragmentation that inhabits Marechera’s protagonist is not entirely a binary splitting between language, and exceeds polarizing distinctions. Instead, the narrator’s fragmented identity assumes a fluid changeability to denote an individual characterised by an “in-between” space of identity, which further splinters the schizophrenic fragments of existence that Marechera employs. 

Marechera presents this further fragmentation that exceeds a static, binary split through the recurring motif of mirrors, which fragment and multiply, to disrupt realities and reflect a shift in character perspective. The Manichean split between dark and light fractures into far more complex fragments, as Marechera displays identity as a composite of many different essences. This reoccurring theme of splintering used throughout to disvalue the stability of identity reflects Bhabha’s notion of cultural hybridity, where cultural identity is something in a state of constant flux rather than a static entity.

In ‘Burning in the Rain’, as the mirror becomes, ‘splintered into a thousand tiny mirrors…he in the armchair had changed with it.’ Here, Marechera alludes to the mirror as something intensely bound to the character’s ego. Haunted by the ape in the reflection, Marechera ominously declares that, ‘the mirror settled deep in his mind.’ This notion of the reflection as a distortion of reality, yet central to governing the actions and thoughts of the subject, echoes what Lacan identified as the ‘Mirror Stage’. His belief that seeing ones-self in a mirror creates a splitting of the ID from the Ego and thus a loss of the authentic self is replaced by an illusionary and contrived identity, suggests that the torment from the ape in the mirror is a result of an identity formed on the basis of the socially constructed Other, the uncivilized, ‘the ape’. The idea of the mirror as something that fragments a unified subject, indefinable and whole, reflects the contrived nature of the character’s reflection. Thus, the breaking of the mirror serves as an attempt to shatter this illusionary whole, which symbolises a desire for an authentic Self beyond the reflection that unites innate desires with consciousness. 

The futility of a contrived reflection again presents itself in the The House of Hunger after Marechera’s protagonist acquires a head injury at school. He observes, ‘Something seemed to split my mind open… 

The floor was a mirror reflecting in reverse the parable of the ceiling…

There were thousands of windows out there and there were heads sticking out of them. Heads black like me.

I drew back staring at the window itself.

It was a mirror. 

I stuck my head out through it again. 

Thousands of black heads were sticking out of thousands of windows…

something floated down…I saw that it was a black man and a white man locked in the embraces of struggle.’ 

Again, the concept of splitting accompanies the discovery of multiple identities. As the multiplying of his reflection reveals thousands of ‘Heads black like me’, Marechera presents this distortion of reality that accompanies reflection through identity. The mirror becomes a contrived form of a Self, which continually multiplies itself to present the multiple identities that the protagonist has at his dispense. 

This multiplicity of selves reflects a fragmentation of identity that goes far beyond a binary divide, and reflects this third-space of constant flux that the colonial subject occupies, detached from the compartmentalized distinctions that aim to categorize him within social constructs. The mirror becomes a means for establishing the protagonist’s identity, and this identity then becomes his reality. It is interesting to note, then, how Marechera choses to continually fragment and distort these mirrors that act as a fundamental basis for a surface-level reality. Thus, a continual doubling of these mirrors suggests that these identities, like cultures, are in a state of constant flux and displacement, and thus one must look beyond reflections as identity for a true sense of the unified whole of the Self, before the ID became severed from the Ego. Mbembe emphasises, ‘The autonomous power of the reflection’, as having the ability to, ‘escape the constraints that structure sensed reality’. In this sense, reflection has the potential to acquire an agency that can take on a life of its own and create its own reality, just like the ape in the mirror. Possessing the ability to look past the reflection and see beyond the illusion of identity as a static and whole entity, enables a subject to transcend binary classifications that act as the basis for nationalist logic. 

Applying Bhabha’s notion of hybridity to the protagonist’s mention of ‘a black man and a white man locked in the embraces of struggle’, highlights the futility of the colonial project as a civilizing mission between two diametrically opposed cultures, when culture is not a pure essence but fluid in nature, occupying ‘in-between forms… that may be asymmetrical, disjunctive and contradictory.’ Like Bhabha, access to a stable identity for Marechera’s protagonist becomes ‘only ever the problematic process of access to an image of totality’, as this image becomes something fragmented and incomplete within itself, reflecting Lacan’s philosophy of the mirror as that which fractures rather that creates an authentic self . Mushakavanhu notes that, ‘Discrepant experiences open up opportunities for genuine dialogue and constructive interaction beyond the limits of binary or Manichean opposition in which usually the western worldview is dominant.’ Thus, Marechera’s decision to fashion his protagonist as an anonymous drifter allows him to remain fluidly move between different realities and perspectives, never tied to one static identity, as identity to the unnamed character becomes something that is rootless. 

To conclude, the schizophrenic fragmentation that guides both the protagonist’s internal dialogue and experience of the world denies him a stable identity, as the heterogeneity of these realities creates a neurotic situation within. Fanon believes that the only way to put an end to this neurotic situation is to ‘reach out for the universal’, or in other words, the inherently human. Within the House of Hunger, Mushkavanu notes that there is in fact a desire for ‘an existential freedom that goes beyond the desire for the overthrow of colonial rule’. He believes that ‘It is a freedom lying deep within the soul…a utopianism common to all human life.’ This perception of the work as one in search of universal principles through a refusal to adopt a singular identity reflects the writer’s own inability to ‘enter into the literature of commitment because there was no single self to commit.’ In this sense, the work suggests that this ability to occupy a multiplicity of selves serves as an artistic struggle, through which the universal can be reached. Mushkavanu believes that, ‘For Marechera, to be African is to embrace the contradictions crated by colonialism.’ Read this way, a schizophrenic composite sense of Self is utilised within Marechera’s work for its literary merit. Thus, the schizophrenic textuality that Marechera employs within the House of Hunger is suggestive of a mental struggle, yet one that is not without salvation, as literary ingenuity that transgresses the bounds of stable identities may be retrieved from a fractured mind.