Flora Veit-Wild

They Called You Dambudzo (eBook, PDF)

A Memoir

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Compelling memoir of Flora Veit-Wild and her relationship with the Zimbabwean novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist Dambudzo Marechera, one of Africa's most innovative and subversive writers and a significant voice in contemporary world literature.

How shall I tell our story? I hear your voice ringing in mine. I struggle to disentangle a dense tapestry of memories. One thread will be caught up in another. Early images will embrace later ones. My gaze will often be filtered through your eyes, your poems. In the end I will not always be able to tell the original from the reflection. Just as you wrote, Time's fingers on the piano / play emotion into motion / the dancers in the looking glass never recognise us as their originals.
This book is a memoir with a 'double heartbeat'. At its centre is the author's relationship with the late Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera, whose award-winning book The House of Hunger marked him as a powerful, disruptive, perhaps prophetic voice in African literature. Flora Veit-Wild is internationally recognised for her significant contribution to preserving Marechera's legacy. What is less known about Marechera and Veit-Wild is that they had an intense, personal and sexual relationship. This memoir explores this: the couple's first encounter in 1983, amidst the euphoria of the newly independent Zimbabwe; the tumultuous months when the homeless writer moved in with his lover and her family; the bouts of creativity once he had his own flat followed by feelings of abandonment; the increasing despair about a love affair that could not stand up against reality; and the illness of the writer and his death of HIV related pneumonia in August 1987. What follows are the struggles Flora went through once Dambudzo had died. On the one hand she became the custodian of his life and work, on the other she had to live with her own HIV infection and the ensuing threats to her health.

Jacana: Southern Africa

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Wits University Press
• Seitenzahl: 300
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. Mai 2022
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781800105553
• Artikelnr.: 63918213

Autorenporträt

Flora Veit-Wild is Emerita Professor of African literatures at Humboldt University, Berlin. She lived in Harare/Zimbabwe from 1983 to 1993 and became known for her work on Zimbabwean literature and as literary executor and biographer of Dambudzo Marechera and a founder member of the Zimbabwe Women Writers. Her numerous publications include studies of body, madness, sexuality and gender in Anglophone and Francophone African writing as well as code-switching and linguistic innovation in Shona literature.

Inhaltsangabe

PRELUDE PART ONE: TRAJECTORIES Escape from the House of Hunger The Last
Image of My Father Flower in the Snow Defying the State From Frau Mücke to
Robert Mugabe PART TWO: HARARE IN HEAT December 1982 German Christmas in
the Tropics The Mozambican Bogey Man The Oracle Becoming Expatriates
Elective Affinities Boscobel Drive Guest of Honour Harare International
Book Fair 1983 PART THREE: EAGLETS OF DESIRE Getting Entangled Nowhere to
Go Having a Home Max and Dambudzo Facing the Publishers The Taxi Has to Be
Paid Vumba and the Grand Finale Coda 1: The Accident Coda 2: I Hate Death
PART FOUR: HEAVEN'S TERRIBLE ECSTACY A Reading and a Murder Charge They Are
Boiling My Bones in the Kitchen 8 Sloane Court The Ghost of Amelia The
Other Woman Projects and Rejects Patterns of Poetry Angry Notes Lake
Mcllwaine: The Entrapment Coda 1: Seroconversion Coda 2: Conception PART
FIVE: BASTARD DEATH The Great Scare The Hourglass How to Live On Shadows of
Death He Is Dead PART SIX: ENTANGLED LEGACIES The Execution The Tracking
The Moment of Terror Carnival and Cockroaches - The Appointment The Lady in
Black The Valley of Death or: Busting the Kraken Out of the Closet