Abjection in Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger
- Wayne, Christopher, Grogan, Bridget
- Authors: Wayne, Christopher , Grogan, Bridget
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: Abjection , African literature , Corporeality
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/277138 , uj:29682 , Citation: Wayne, C. & Grogan, B. 2018. Abjection in Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger. Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde, 55(2):104-119. DOI: dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.55i2.1884
- Description: Abstract: In a description of nationalist poems about “a golden age of black heroes; of myths and legends and sprites” (Marechera 74), the narrator of The House of Hunger (1978) observes that these themes are the “exposed veins dripping through the body of the poems.” In this article we extend this observation to argue that, metaphorically on display in Marechera’s novella itself, are the “exposed veins dripping through the body of the [text]” (74). The novella’s themes include colonialism, social destitution, violence, state-sanctioned oppression, identity struggles, poverty, dislocation, disillusionment and anger, all of which are appropriately imaged in Marechera’s visceral metaphor of the pain and violence implicit in the literary text. More specifically, corporeal imagery emphasises the unnamed narrator’s troubled existence, suffusing The House of Hunger in a manner that elicits disgust and horror, thus encouraging the reader’s affective response to the representation of the colonial condition. This article illuminates Marechera’s seeming obsession with corporeality by providing a postcolonial and psychoanalytic reading, focussing in particular on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. Although critics have objected to reading African texts through the lens of psychoanalysis, the article sets out to address this concern, noting the importance of theorists like Frantz Fanon and Joshua D. Esty in justifying psychoanalytic readings of African literature, and drawing resonant parallels between Kristevan theory and Marechera’s perspective on the colonial condition of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) in the 1970s.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Wayne, Christopher , Grogan, Bridget
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: Abjection , African literature , Corporeality
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/277138 , uj:29682 , Citation: Wayne, C. & Grogan, B. 2018. Abjection in Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger. Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde, 55(2):104-119. DOI: dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.55i2.1884
- Description: Abstract: In a description of nationalist poems about “a golden age of black heroes; of myths and legends and sprites” (Marechera 74), the narrator of The House of Hunger (1978) observes that these themes are the “exposed veins dripping through the body of the poems.” In this article we extend this observation to argue that, metaphorically on display in Marechera’s novella itself, are the “exposed veins dripping through the body of the [text]” (74). The novella’s themes include colonialism, social destitution, violence, state-sanctioned oppression, identity struggles, poverty, dislocation, disillusionment and anger, all of which are appropriately imaged in Marechera’s visceral metaphor of the pain and violence implicit in the literary text. More specifically, corporeal imagery emphasises the unnamed narrator’s troubled existence, suffusing The House of Hunger in a manner that elicits disgust and horror, thus encouraging the reader’s affective response to the representation of the colonial condition. This article illuminates Marechera’s seeming obsession with corporeality by providing a postcolonial and psychoanalytic reading, focussing in particular on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. Although critics have objected to reading African texts through the lens of psychoanalysis, the article sets out to address this concern, noting the importance of theorists like Frantz Fanon and Joshua D. Esty in justifying psychoanalytic readings of African literature, and drawing resonant parallels between Kristevan theory and Marechera’s perspective on the colonial condition of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) in the 1970s.
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Abject negotiations : the mutability of identification in selected artworks by Berni Searle
- Authors: Rennie, Christy
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Art and identity , Abjection , Searle, Berni , Kristeva, Julia
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:6219 , ISBN 978-0-620-45946-4 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/5309
- Description: In this paper I offer a reading of South African artist, Berni Searle's works About to forget (2005) and On either side (2005) in relation to French psychoanalyst and theorist, Julia Kristeva's conception of abjection. In examining Searle's use of the formal elements of tactility in representations of her own corporeality, I draw analogies between Searle's work and two Kristevian theories of heterogeneity, namely abjection and the semiotic (see Pollock 1998:9). I analyse a selection of Searle's work, focusing on her references to tactile, semiotically-driven elements in her open-ended negotiations of self-identification. Particular emphasis is placed on how she uses abjection to evoke an ambiguous sense of self-identification within a South African context. Within this context, Searle suggests the borders of self hood to be fluid in nature. This correlates with Kristeva's model of self hood, or the speaking subject, in which identity is never fixed and is seen as being always in continuous negotiation. In this model, the abject threat of dissolution of self may be contextualised within the state off lux inherent in the understanding of the speaking subject. Therefore, the threat towards one's identity is not so much nullified, but is rather no longer 'other' or separated from the understanding of self. Following Kristeva's (1991:1) thought, one may argue that the foreign 'other' and the selfare intimately conjoined.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Rennie, Christy
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Art and identity , Abjection , Searle, Berni , Kristeva, Julia
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:6219 , ISBN 978-0-620-45946-4 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/5309
- Description: In this paper I offer a reading of South African artist, Berni Searle's works About to forget (2005) and On either side (2005) in relation to French psychoanalyst and theorist, Julia Kristeva's conception of abjection. In examining Searle's use of the formal elements of tactility in representations of her own corporeality, I draw analogies between Searle's work and two Kristevian theories of heterogeneity, namely abjection and the semiotic (see Pollock 1998:9). I analyse a selection of Searle's work, focusing on her references to tactile, semiotically-driven elements in her open-ended negotiations of self-identification. Particular emphasis is placed on how she uses abjection to evoke an ambiguous sense of self-identification within a South African context. Within this context, Searle suggests the borders of self hood to be fluid in nature. This correlates with Kristeva's model of self hood, or the speaking subject, in which identity is never fixed and is seen as being always in continuous negotiation. In this model, the abject threat of dissolution of self may be contextualised within the state off lux inherent in the understanding of the speaking subject. Therefore, the threat towards one's identity is not so much nullified, but is rather no longer 'other' or separated from the understanding of self. Following Kristeva's (1991:1) thought, one may argue that the foreign 'other' and the selfare intimately conjoined.
- Full Text:
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