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Elliot Ziwira Column Name
There is something about madness that is so attractive to the psyche and inspires artistes, following modernist traits, to use it to capture the social neurosis, paralysis and malaise prevalent in modern society. Madness, in its innocence, allows the individual 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.
Modernism as postulated by Ellman and Fiedson (1965) is: “A distinctive mode of imagination which derives from the enlightenment …Strongly implies some sort of historical discontinuity, either liberation from inherited patterns or, at another extreme deprivation and disinheritance.”
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.
According to Kampt (1967) modernists are always in perpetual struggle as they seek to capture the follies and vices obtaining in their societies, as modernism is a “condition of permanent revolution”.
Modernists therefore, seem to be obsessed with loss, despair, frustration and disillusionment. The sense of impermanence, uncertainty, hopelessness and scepticism is expressed through their use of symbolic elements.
They usually seek solutions from the past, and death is used as a form 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 Chirere, Chihota, Muponde, Mupfudza and Chikwava.
The nihilistic tendencies are probably ignited by the chaotic state of affairs, which appear to underline the life of the Zimbabwean.
Categorisation is usually problematic in putting Zimbabwean writers into perspective.
However, although Mungoshi, Marechera and Nyamufukudza do not seek solace in the past like Hove and Zimunya, their nihilistic obsessions and their creation of a surreal world place them within the confines of modernism.
The writers in the collection “No More Plastic Balls and other Stories” – especially Chirere, Chihota, Muponde and Mhiripiri – use “orgies and villains” to “people the fairy tale world, the world of dreams”, as pointed out by Muchemwa (2001:102).
The creation of a surreal world provides a vent for escape.
Mhiripiri in “No More Plastic Balls” explores the subterfuge, moral blackmail and individualism prevalent in middle class experiences in the same way that Chinodya does in “Chairman of Fools”,” Queues “and “Tawonga”.
Muchemwa (2001) observes that “sanity is a very strange commodity in the fictional world created by the new generation of story tellers”.
However, the use of sanity or lack thereof, as a trope is not a new phenomenon as Shakespeare used it effectively in most of his works especially “The Tempest” and “King Lear”, to take a swipe at man’s tendency to sugar over the devil to suit his means.
Friedrich Nietzsche also raps the deification of man in the absence of God and his obsession with sadism and trauma in “The Parable of the Madman” (1882).
Zimbabwean writers in both Shona and English with their preoccupation with frustration, hopelessness and despair use madness as an elixir.
The state of affairs, neurosis and claustrophobia of the family unit, community and the nation prevalent in Zimbabwean literature has been explored through the use of the metaphor of madness.
In “Echoing Silences” (1988), Kane-ngoni examines the dehumanising effects of war, frustration betrayal and disillusionment using the metaphor of madness, as is illuminated in the following:
“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”, 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” as is expressed thus:
“She is got lots of courage. But only the kind that’s the quickest way into the madhouse”,
And; “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 examines the chaotic state and paralysis of the nation by alluding to the storm in portraying the mental state of the narrator in “The Storm”.
Sanity or lack of it is the basis upon which Chinodya explores the dream like state of the nation and hopelessness 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 also prevails in “Chairman of Fools” as is suggested 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.”
Chirere in “Somewhere in this Country” (2006) – like Chihota and Muponde in “No More Plastic Balls and Other Stories”, Kanengoni, Chinodya and Marechera – uses the metaphor of madness to portray the sense of loss the personae find themselves in, upon discovering that their lives are embedded upon thin existence underlined by ruthlessness, lack of a viable vision and poverty.
This is especially so in “The Presidential Goggles” and “When Passions Gather”.
A society of mad people reduced to invalids who perpetually queue for everything and anything is a society that has destroyed itself. It is such a society that Chinodya condemns using symbolic elements.
The analogy between the psychiatric hospital and the ship at sea in “Chairman of Fools” symbolises flight from the physical boundaries which are both restrictive and oppressive to psychological freedom, as the following may suggest:
“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. Yes, they have left Zimbabwe and its woes.”
Chinodya uses modernist aspects of nihilism and surrealism in “Chairman of Fools” to examine the general neurosis, disillusionment and frustration at both the personal and national levels. Dreams permeate Farai’s life as he is hopeless.
Like the artiste-narrator in “Queues” and the artiste-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, he 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 fosters 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; symbols which are destructive to the social strata as they epitomize 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. This is especially so because reality has lost its purpose.
He has lost hope in reality so the film offers him a vent for psychological escape to locate his personal psyche and determine who stars in the project as is revealed thus: “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.
Such is the kind of behaviour that has gripped the family unit and the national psyche that Zimbabwean writers condemn using modernism and the metaphor of madness, as frustration and lack of an authentic vision reduce all characters to victims-hopeless and helpless as they live life as a nightmare.
As there is nothing to put a smile on the burdened faces full of sweat and tears, madness and death become not an end to life but a transition into a purposeful beginning, as one is able to manipulate how one should live and die.
Online Reporter