Dambudzo Marechera - The House of Hunger

Reading at the College of Music in Harare, 1984

The House of Hunger first appeared in the Heinemann African Writers Series in December 1978, with an edition soon published by Pantheon in New York. A translation of the whole sequence into German followed after his appearance at the Horizonte Festival in West Berlin in 1979, with others into Dutch and French, with Protista going into Norwegian and Burning in the Rain into Portuguese. For the original edition he was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979, jointly with Neil Jordan (250 each). Reviewing it for The Guardian, one of the competition judges, Angela Carter, remarked: It is indeed rare to find a writer for whom imaginative fiction is such a passionate and intimate process of engagement with the world. The first edition included the title novella, with nine additional sketches and short stories, a few of which were intended to be read as interrelated with the main text. Here some of the makeweights have been omitted in favour of later pieces written to complete The House of Hunger cluster. They are The Sound of Snapping Wires (first published in West Africa on 7 March 1983), with the three last essays, all unpublished at the time of his death. The prefatory An Interview with Himself of 1983 is also an addition here.

Kole Omotoso in West Africa (14 September 1987):

Dambudzo Marecheras life provided the material for his art. His existence, to those intent on their business of living, seemed dedicated to dying. On 18 August he finally completed the process that began with his birth.

David Caute in The Southern African Review of Books (Winter 198788):

The writer Dambudzo Marechera died in Harare at the age of thirty-five. A brilliant light, flashing fitfully in recent years, is extinguished. He once wrote: Its the ruin not the original which moves men; our Zimbabwe ruins must have looked really shit and hideous when they were brand-new.

Dieter Riemenschneider in Research in African Literatures (Fall 1989):

Marecheras first-person narrator in a story like The Slow Sound of His Feet is unable to restore a life that is both meaningful and worth living. He paints a harrowing picture of the individual suffering of a person who bears much resemblance to the author himself.

Dan Wylie in English in Africa (October 1991):

Marechera is the misfit. His The House of Hunger is a characteristically turbid, angst-ridden, dadaesque story virtually unparalleled in African fiction, by a profoundly dislocated writer living in a shattered, repulsive environment of mindless violence, raw sex, filth and madness.

Lisa Combrinck in Work in Progress (August 1993):

Above all, Marechera believed that the task of the writer in a changing society was to be honest, true to him- or herself and never hypocritical. Young South and other Africans who read Marechera will probably, like their Zimbabwean counterparts, embrace his works as a militant young lion who bravely criticised the government in the post-uhuru period.

Jean-Philippe Wade in Alternation (1995):

The House of Hunger is one of the most important texts to emerge from Southern Africa in recent decades. It should be on every school and university syllabus, because these powerful stories challenge just about every complacently hegemonic view of what African Literature is.

Wole Soyinka, nominating Scrapiron Blues as his book of the year (1996):

A profound, even if exaggeratedly self-aware writer, an instinctive nomad and bohemian in temperament, Marechera was a writer in constant quest for his real self.

A K Thembeka in Laduma (2004):

He was a black who read all their books, and let them know it in the relentless stream of quotes that littered his prose. The literati rewarded him, not for his achievements, but for his struggle.

Kgafela oa Magogodi in Outspoken (2004):

my song grows from the ground
where Marechera rose to write

Stephen Gray (2009):

The central text in this revised The House of Hunger collection is well enough established by now as the unforgettable, virtuoso accomplishment of African writing in English of the 1970s. Indeed, with its overlapping scenes of horror and of humour, it rattled the staid and timorous establishment like a refreshing outburst from a mighty imagination, setting itself impressively free. Supported here as it is now by various satellite pieces to complete the cluster, it reads all the more finely.