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African Doppelganger: Hybridity and Identity in the Work of Dambudzo Marechera
The work of Dambudzo Marechera stands out as a unique expression of self and postcolonial identity in contemporary African literature. His fiction, though mostly autobiographical, consistently undermines any fixed notions of a unified and stable "self" or "history." Additionally, the poststructuralist and deconstructive elements within his work put pressure on the construction of meaning at the level of language and narrative. This approach critiques constructions of identity as well as nationalism, revealing them to be elaborate narrative fictions. The "fictionalizing" of Marechera's own life in his work, along with the performative character of his "public" life, raises questions about the "truthfulness" of the autobiographical form, as well as the authenticity of any construction of identity.
In this sense, Marechera, writing in the late 1970s, anticipated the theorizations of postcolonial identity as heralded by contemporary critics of postcoloniality. The scripting of the self in Marechera's work reveals the hybridity of postcolonial subjectivity, as experienced within the colonial setting as well as in exile. However, Marechera remains marginalized in current critical studies of African literature. This is in part due to his early death, as well as to his refusal to claim any specific "African" identity. Moreover, it is my contention that Marechera stands outside the conventional categorizations of African writing due largely to his class status. By not functioning within the international exchange of cultural production, Marechera remains doubly marginalized: invisible in the West and misunderstood at "home." Marechera's fascinating life and work present both a radical approach to the articulation of postcolonial identity and the authorial "self" as well as a unique expression of sociocultural hybridity as experienced in the margins of postcoloniality.
The history of the autobiographical form in African writing in many ways parallels the concurrent development of nationalism and narrative. Much of so-called "first generation" African literature modeled itself on nineteenth-century European realist modes of expression, thus providing the foundation for its "universalistic" claims to authority and authenticity. The nationalisms of the 1950s were constructed upon narrative lines, in order to create a "national (hi)story" around which to unify anti-colonial sentiment. Similarly, the classic autobiographical narratives of this period were micromodels of this same construct. Fictional and nonfictional works by Peter...