A Gothic Africa 

Postcolonial Gothic Literature: The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera

 The interplay between realism and the grotesque imbues Gothic literature, particularly when describing flawed societies. One can therefore understand and even anticipate the postcolonial world’s revival of the Gothic, as societies emerge from the termination of empire; broken, bitter, unrecompensed, and while aware of their current condition, eager to identify the cause. Where there are debates between spiritual or psychoanalytic interpretations of African narratives, the Gothic genre builds a bridge, but it is not one frequently crossed in literary approaches to this body of literature.

'It was the House of Hunger that first made me discontented with things.' (p94)

The setting of The House of Hunger is like any gothic landscape; eerie, haunted and plagued. The plague is spiritual and physical, conveying the nation's morality and mortality in the wake of insidious social change. The novel is set in 1978 Rhodesia, two years before the nation’s independence and transformation into Zimbabwe, characterising it as a period of social and political precariousness. Yet, Marechera goes a step further, wielding gothic visceral images, such as the 'insects of thought', (p12) 'the flea crevices of my mind' (p91) and the 'tinfoil of my soul [which] crinkled,' (p27) to highlight the psychological violations of a colonial heritage and reflect a deep-rooted disquiet.

'No, I don’t hate myself. I’m just tired of people bruising their knuckles on my jaw' (p58)

Initially, it is easy to be disturbed by the novel's frequent violent scenes before realising their necessity. If a common aim of the Gothic is to elicit moral education through terror and horror (Gray, 2019), I propose a postcolonial lens to justify Marechera's utilisation of gothic violence in showing the extent of the broken order. That would imply that the social insecurity of the nation with its proclivity to violence represents an instability effected by colonial rule. This supports the image of 'blood' on a shirt, 'a rather large stain which seemed in outline to be a map of Rhodesia' (p81), as violence is metaphorically intrinsic to the geography. This creates a sense of apocalyptic magnitude. One lingering passage is the narrator's recollection of how 'a foot kicking me tore through the faded cloth of my sanity' leaving behind 'the stains which had once been my raging brains' (p72). This establishes a correlation between his generation's disposition to violence and psychological suffering, as sanity is but a 'faded cloth', implying a state of impoverishment, while 'raging brains' suggests both mindlessness and restlessness. 

Perhaps the most disturbing yet memorable characterisation of Marechera's Gothic reality is in his illustration of perverse sexuality to further convey societal damage: 'the underwear of our souls was full of holes and the crotch it hid was infested with lice. We were whores; eaten to the core by the syphilis of the white man’s coming' (p91). The allusion to genitalia can metaphorically represent the innermost parts of an individual, 'our souls', in a state of contamination and decay, following forceful penetration into a functioning society soon plagued by disorder created from social and psychological reconstruction.

'It is as if it is God’s wound and we were the maggots slithering in it.' (p86)

Within Gothic literature is a tendency to present religion as dubious, corrupt and, concerning God, absent (Wendy Fall). This is also true of Marechera who decides that instead of God, it is rather 'a cruel sarcasm [which] rules our lives' (p58), implying the governance of a ruthless disdainful authority. Here, reality cannot be reconciled with faith. I find the loss of faith in postcolonial narratives to be particularly poignant as they represent more than religious doubt, but shared sentiments of integrity and security that are as essential for maintaining community as they are order. It is then no wonder why the severance of native belief systems leads to such violence and havoc, as Marechera conveys. 

Marechera immerses the reader in his Gothic atmosphere by creating a sense of claustrophobic inexorability. That is to say, a hopelessness and dispiritedness in the characters' lives that allude to decisive didactic powers outside of the people’s control. This is displayed by the metaphor of an 'iron net [which] had been thrown over the skies, quietly' (p91), an image of limitation as if in wry fulfilment of the popular maxim 'the sky is the limit.' The adverb 'quietly' implies a sinister governing figure, one whose rule is indirect, covert and oppressive; an indication of the legacy of imperialism as the nation awaits independence. I find that politically subversive implications such as these align with the Gothic intention to act as 'a safe form of transgression', (Gray, 2019) to conceal reality, though only slightly, by a thin fictional coverlet. Yet, there is also a sense of hopeful anticipation concerning the future of the nation as the narrator personifies the motherland as trembling 'in the throes of birth', yet to 'burst out, bloom and branch' (p27) into something undecidedly positive, an optimistic energy evoked by the plosive alliteration.

The typical Gothic trope of supernatural possession merges with postcolonial theory in this novel to showcase the struggle between colonial and native influence on the invaded mind. The narrator reminisces about being possessed by invisible beings that lead to his development of a stutter. I interpret this as an impediment of autonomy as well as of speech, since he is no longer free to articulate what he wants: 'I was severed from my own voice' (p40), and his words are torn between two languages as if by two spirits engaged in an 'interminable argument' (p41). This possession is so great he feels 'gagged by this absurd contest between Shona and English' (p41). Reading this passage, one may wonder as to what each spectral voice would demand of its host. The notion may be intended to resonate with diasporic individuals who vacillate between the customs, voices and possessions of distinct societies. In addition to Gothic interpretation, I acknowledge the psychoanalytic approach here to attribute the narrator’s surreal experience to a schizophrenic response to postcoloniality (Buck, 1997, p. 120) in order to convey a flawed perception and mental fragmentation. Yet, this lens may also be seen as reductive and too far removed from the cultural and spiritual contexts from which the novel is built. 

Applying a Gothic literary lens may therefore illuminate meaning in coarse, hyperbolic or sombre narrative that act as metaphorical insights into modern societies struggling to emerge from beneath imperial shadows.  

Reading List:

Buck D. (1997). African Doppelganger: Hybridity and Identity in the Work of Dambudzo Marechera. Research in African Literature. [Online]. Vol 28 (2). P 183-131. [Accessed 27 January 2024].

Fall W. (No date). Glossary of the Gothic: Religion. [Online]. Available at: https://epublications.marquette.edu/gothic_religion/#:~:text=Gothic%20authors%2C%20themselves%20questioning%20the,the%20mysteries%20of%20modern%20times.

Ibrahim H. (1990). The Violated Universe: Neo-Colonial Sexual and Political Consciousness in Dambudzo Marechera. Research in African Literature. [Online]. Volume 21 (2). P 79-90. [Accessed March 2024].

Laredo J. Gray S. (2019). A Guide to the Gothic. [Online]. Available at: https://pressbooks.pub/guidetogothic/chapter/chapter-1/

[Accessed March 2024].

Marechera D. (2022). The House of Hunger. Penguin Modern Classics.

Image attribution:

Kwedu, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons 

Note:

This essay is also available on ResearchGate

March 2025.