Dambudzo Marechera’s Black Sunlight: Carnivalesque and the Subversion of Nationalist Discourse of Resistance in Zimbabwean Literature

Abstract

This paper examines Black Sunlight (1980), a novel by Dambudzo Marechera, in the light of critical reappraisal of narratives of national resistance in the 1990s in Zimbabwe. Black Sunlight was published in 1980, the year of Zimbabwe’s independence when most black Zimbabweans viewed the coming of that independence as the vindication of Nehanda’s prophecy that her “bones” shall rise and Africans will rule themselves. Novelists such as Edmund Chipamaunga in A Fighter For Freedom (1983) and Garikai Mutasa in The Contact (1985), were to use their fiction to fabricate, justify and present nationalist resistance as the “natural”, and uncontestable ideology of decolonisation in Zimbabwe. In contrast, in Black Sunlight, Marechera is radically singular in his use of the carnivalesque in order to resist ideologies of Zimbabwean cultural nationalism based on single notions of the “African image”. This paper argues that the subversion of nationalist discourse of resistance in Zimbabwean literature that Marechera authorises in Black Sunlight stems from the author’s desire to generate narratives of postcolonial resistance which encourage literary open-endedness, and incompleteness as a strategy to anticipate cultural change. This project enables the author to construct an idiom of resistance that is aware of the provisionality of the values it underlies.

Opsomming

Hierdie artikel ondersoek Dambudzo Marechera se Black Sunlight (1980) in die lig van ‘n kritiese herbetragting van narratiewe van nasionale weerstand in Zimbabwe gedurende die 1990's. Black Sunlight is gepubliseer in 1980, die jaar van die onafhanklikheid van Zimbabwe, toe die meeste swart Zimbabwiërs die koms van hierdie onafhanklikheid bejeën het as die vindikasie van Nehanda se profesie dat haar beendere (“bones”) sal verrys en dat Afrikane hulleself sal regeer. Romanskrywers soos Edmund Chipamaunga in A Fighter for Freedom (1993) en Garikai Mutasa in The Contact (1985) sou hulle fiksie aanwend om nasionale weerstand te fabriseer, te regverdig en voor te stel as die natuurlike en onbetwisbare ideologie van dekolonisasie in Zimbabwe. In teenstelling is Marechera in Black Sunlight radikaal sonderling in sy gebruik van die carnivalesque om ideologieë van Zimbabwiese kulturele nasionalisme gebaseer op afsonderlike nosies van die “African image” teen te staan. Hierdie artikel voer aan dat die omverwerping van nasionalistiese diskoers van weerstand in Zimbabwiese literatuur wat Marechera in Black Sunlight outoriseer spruit uit die outeur se begeerte om narratiewe van postkoloniale weerstand te genereer wat literêre groei en onvoltooidheid aanmoedig as ‘n strategie om kulturele verandering te antisipeer. Hierdie projek stel die outeur in staat om ‘n idioom van weerstand te konstrueer wat bewus is van die voorwaardelikheid van die waardes wat daaraan onderliggend is.