Dambudzo Marechera
"House of Hunger" not only won The Guardian fiction prize but stunned the imagination of readers with its view of the slums of colonial Salisbury. "Black Sunlight" gives a similar cockroach-eye view of London.,â€œI really tried to put terrorism into a historical perspective, neither applauding their acts nor condemning them. The photographer does not take sides; he just takes the press photographs.â€ In an unspecified setting the stream-of-consciousness narrative of this cult novel traces the fortunes of a group of anarchists in revolt against a military-fascist-capitalist opposition. The protagonist is photojournalist Chris, whose camera lens becomes the device through which the plot is cleverly unraveled. In Dambudzo Marecheraâ€™s second experimental novel, he parodies African nationalist and racial identifications as part of an argument that notions of an â€˜essential African identityâ€™ were often invoked to authorize a number of totalitarian regimes across Africa. Such irreverent, avant-garde literature was criticized upon publication in Zimbabwe in 1980, and Black Sunlight was banned on charges of â€˜Euromodernismâ€™ and as a challenge to the concept of nation-building in the newly independent country.
Fiction,Cultural,Africa,Literature,African Literature,Literary Fiction,Novels
Black Sunlight