adminElliot Ziwira
At the Bookstore
Not that mental health issues are to be trivialised, but there appears to be something attractive about mental illness to the psyche, which inspires artists, particularly those who follow the modernist trope. They use the metaphor of madness to capture the social neurosis, sadness, paralysis and malaise prevalent in the modern society.
“Sanity is a very strange commodity in the fictional world created by the new generation of storytellers,” observes Muchemwa (2002).
However, the use of sanity or lack thereof, as a trope is not a new phenomenon as Shakespeare uses it effectively in most of his works.
In “The Tempest” and “King Lear”, he uses the trope to take a swipe at Man’s tendency to sugar-coat the devil to suit his means.
Friedrich Nietzsche also lambasts the deification of Man in the absence of God, and his obsession with sadism and trauma in “The Parable of the Madman” (1882), using the metaphor of madness.
In its innocence, use of mental illness allows an artiste to poke at humanity’s follies and vices through sarcasm, humour and ridicule, and get away with it. It is this lack of inhibitions that excites the satirist and challenges him to look at himself from another angle.
Modernists have been as much imbued with a feeling for their historical role, their relation to the past, as with a feeling of historical discontinuity.
Kampt (1967) notes that modernists are always engaged in struggle as they seek to capture the vices obtaining in their societies. Modernism is considered a “condition of permanent revolution”.
Modernists, therefore, seem to be obsessed with loss, despair, frustration and disillusionment. The sense of impermanence, uncertainty, hopelessness and skepticism is expressed through symbolic elements.
They usually seek solutions from the past, with death and mental illness used as forms of escapism.
Zimbabwean writers who seem to subscribe to the modernist theory are those in Generation Two, as categorised by Veit-Wild (1993); and the emerging crop of writers like Memory Chirere, Clement Chihota, Robert Muponde, Stanley Mupfudza and Brian Chikwava.
The nihilistic tendencies are probably ignited by the socio-economic challenges facing the nation State.
Although categorisation is usually problematic in putting Zimbabwean artists into perspective, there are some writers that can easily fit in.
Even though Charles Mungoshi, Dambudzo Marechera and Stanley Nyamufukudza do not seek solace in the past like Chenjerai Hove and Musaemura Zimunya, their nihilistic obsessions and creation of a surreal world place them within the confines of modernism.
In “No More Plastic Balls and other Stories”, Chirere, Chihota, Muponde and Nhamo Mhiripiri use “orgies and villains” to “people the fairytale world, the world of dreams”, as pointed out by Muchemwa (2001:102). The creation of a surreal world provides a vent for escape.
In the story “No More Plastic Balls”, Mhiripiri explores the subterfuge, moral blackmail and individualism prevalent in middle class experiences in the same way that Chinodya does in “Chairman of Fools” (2005),” Queues (2003)“and “Tawonga” (2005).
Preoccupied by frustration, hopelessness and despair, Zimbabwean writers use mental illness as an elixir.
In “Echoing Silences” (1997), Alexander Kanengoni examines the dehumanising effects of war, frustration, betrayal and disillusionment using the metaphor of madness.
Kanengoni writes: “As always, it began with the cry of a baby somewhere perhaps in his mind and he instinctively reached for the bottle of sedatives in his pocket — but he knew it was hopeless . . . Munashe’s mind had already fallen in”.
To Marechera in “The House of Hunger” (1978), living itself is a lunatic asylum where one is confined for life.
The image of a “madhouse” like that of the “annexe” in Chinodya’s “Chairman of Fools”, pervade the lives of the occupants of the House of Hunger.
Marechera informs the reader: “She is got lots of courage. But only the kind that’s the quickest way into the madhouse . . .
“That night all the lights I had known flashed through my mind. The pain was the sound of slivers of glass being methodically crushed in a steel vice by a fiend whose face was very like that of my old carpentry master who is now in a madhouse. The skin-lightened dancer-she was burning the madness out of me.”
Muponde also alludes to the storm in portraying the mental state of the narrator in “The Storm” to reflect on the national discourse.
Sanity or lack of it is the basis upon which Chinodya explores the dream-like state of the nation in his later works as the following may suggest: “Like when she told me . . . out of the bluest of blues, that she was a chronic manic-depressive.
“Like when she told me she had taken herself off medication because it was too expensive, and addictive” (“Queues”).
This rationale also obtains in “Chairman of Fools” as is depicted in the following lines: “He tells me about the thumping, marching noises in the ceiling, the black and brown dogs on the highway and his persistent dreams of being trapped in a mire of human waste.”
In “Somewhere in this Country” (2006), Chirere, like Chihota and Muponde in “No More Plastic Balls and Other Stories”, Kanengoni, Chinodya and Marechera, use the metaphor of madness to portray the sense of loss the characters find themselves in, upon discovering that their lives are embedded upon thin existence underlined by violence, sadness and poverty.
The analogy between the annexe and the ship at sea in Chinodya’s “Chairman of Fools” symbolises flight from the physical boundaries, which are both restrictive and oppressive to psychological freedom.
“The ship is as big as a football field so that he cannot see the sea . . . They are going to Jamaica to eat coconuts, bread, fruit, pork and goat meat, and lie on white benches; already he can hear the wild, welcoming sounds of reggae, calypso and samba,” Chinodya writes.
Chinodya uses modernist aspects of nihilism and surrealism to examine the general neurosis, disillusionment and frustration at both the personal and national levels.
Dreams permeate the protagonist, Farai’s life as he is hopeless.
Like the artist-narrator in “Queues” and the artist-hero in “The House of Hunger”, the protagonist in “Chairman of Fools” struggles to locate himself in the national biography.
He finds himself dwelling on the fringes of its boundaries. As physical escape is impossible, because of the restrictive nature of the realistic limitations of the family structure, the narrator seeks psychological escape into the world of reverie as a way of authoring his own epic — an epic in which he will star unrestricted.
As a gifted individual, the protagonist is able to escape from reality so that he fashions his identity. It is only in hallucination that he strives to locate his own biography.
The dream discourse is manifested in his quest to escape from the claustrophobia of the family home and all that he distastes as symbolised by Veronica’s Corolla, which has been the “elusive harbinger of his fears”, the logos in his bedroom and the silver Cronos.
These symbols are destructive to social strata as they epitomise ambition, obsession, avarice and deception.
It is in the surreal world that Farai finds solace as he is able to conquer his fears.
The motif also extends to his obsession with the film project, which seems to be a figment of his own imagination.
To him, reality has lost its purpose. So, the film offers him a vent for psychological escape to locate his personal psyche and determine who stars in the project.
He says: “They are shooting a film of my life, and there is a part for a secretary if you can act and find my children. My children have to be there.”
The film, therefore, would offer him an opportunity to redefine himself, reunite him with the family, which he has lost in real life, and allow him to reflect on what could have been.
Online Reporter