“Dambudzo Marechera is an outsider”, wrote a critic in 1987, shortly after the Zimbabwean writer’s death at 35, and many of his readers would agree. In the 1970s, in the context of his native Rhodesia, his writing – poems, a novella (
The House of Hunger) and some short stories – was in stark contrast to all the literary traditions the country had produced in the previous decades. Their opposition to the texts written in English by white settler writers (with their curious mixture of entertainment and white nationalist propaganda) and to the moralistic texts in indigenous languages whose thematic range was strictly controlled, may have been deemed “natural”. But Marechera’s texts were also, uniquely, in opposition to those of his “peers”, black writers who wrote in…
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Citation: Primorac, Ranka. "Dambudzo Marachera". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 January 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2928, accessed 21 November 2024.]
