Dambudzo Marechera: The House of Hunger

This feature highlights the visceral, avant-garde prose of Zimbabwean literary icon Dambudzo Marechera through a vivid translation of The House of Hunger.

Translated and Introduced by Wael Ashry

Dambudzo Marechera was born in 1952 into severe penury in Vengere Township, Rusape, within the colony of Rhodesia—the land that would become Zimbabwe upon liberation. His father drove trucks; his mother worked as a domestic laborer. Supported by a scholarship, Marechera attended a missionary boarding high school, eventually moving on to the University of Rhodesia, from which authorities expelled him in 1973 following a student protest. A subsequent scholarship carried him to the University of Oxford in 1974. Over the following eight years, Marechera remained exiled in England, drifting without a home or a steady income. Frequent run-ins with the police culminated in periods of detention and imprisonment. His return to Zimbabwe in 1982 proved agonizing and traumatic. The new nation, having dismantled white-minority rule in 1980, proved no more hospitable to him than Ian Smith’s Rhodesia had been. Marechera died in 1987, at the tender age of thirty-five, from complications related to AIDS.

The House of Hunger, which collected a novella and several short prose pieces, appeared in 1978. It garnered widespread critical acclaim, winning the Guardian Fiction Prize the following year. There followed Black Sunlight in 1980, and Mindblast in 1984. Several works appeared posthumously, including the novel The Black Insider, composed in 1978, and his collected poetry, published in 1992 under the title Cemetery of Mind.

Marechera commands recognition as one of Southern Africa’s most formidable literary voices; The House of Hunger—with its raw candor, its violence, its fragmented architecture, and its rapid, stream-of-consciousness transitions—articulated the angst of a generation raised in the segregated townships of apartheid-era Rhodesia. It stood, and continues to stand, as a monumental inspiration for post-independence generations disillusioned by the state. This iconic novella dispenses with any discernible plot. It features no chapters, no formal section breaks. The narrator simply flows, shifting restlessly from one motif to another.

The narrative opens with the unnamed storyteller abandoning his family home—the “house of hunger,” as he brands it—after witnessing his brother brutally assault his sister-in-law over her relationship with him. As he sits in a nearby tavern (or so it appears), the narrative wanders from one tale to the next, traversing disparate landscapes and multiple eras. Through these lyrical shifts, we discern the narrator’s interiority and his past. We discover he is a writer, born of destitution, a university graduate left entirely unemployed. We witness too the life of his family, and the broader township life, defined by its stark violence and cruelty.

In the following excerpt, the narrator suffers a vicious beating. This transpires within the cyclical vortices of violence and counter-violence that dictate the fates of ghetto dwellers. The narrator had been conversing with Nestar, “one of the most notorious courtesans in the entire land,” listening to her recount tales of her white clientele, when he discovers that her son, Leslie, was responsible for assaulting the sister of one of his closest friends, Philip. The narrator summons the latter, who arrives and beats Leslie mercilessly.

In turn, the narrator faces a beating at the hands of two of Leslie’s companions. They leave him upon the pavement, unconscious. When he regains consciousness, he attempts to seek aid from the inhabitants of an adjacent house. He enters an apartment, only to find it utterly vacant. He falls into delirium. He cannot discern whether he imagines the empty dwelling or if the dwelling itself dreams him into being: “For some reason I began to wonder whether I myself actually existed there; perhaps I was merely a creature conjured by the very rooms.” The narrator flees, escaping “that house like a madman who had glimpsed the interior of his own delirium.” Ultimately, he locates a public telephone and summons an ambulance. In the hospital, we learn his condition is critical. Abandoned there, the narrative recoils into family history, focusing specifically on the father—whose physical and mental faculties collapsed at the end of his life—and his unfinished tales; fragments gathered here and there, mirrored in the very style of the book itself.

The House of Hunger

My earliest memory is of the heavens tilting precipitously as I tumbled from an apple tree. The fall left me with nothing but bruised hands and knees. Mother cleansed them with warm, salted water, and I recall her cunning face stealing anxious glances at the small cot where I lay contemplating my initiation into the real world. Then came the ocular torments; my eyes burned fiercely through lucid spheres of dizzying sunlight. And the first fever, which neither aspirin nor Cafenol could soothe; it was then that I learned to harbor suspicion toward my own imagination and my own intellect. I still do not quite know whether the deluge rose to meet me then, or if it was my own body descending into the immense terror of those waters. After that, the door had to be bolted firmly, secured against my sleepwalking. The Nganga (traditional healer) was summoned. He carved incisions across my entire body, half an inch deep, and rubbed a black powder into the delicate wounds. A pot cooked with something resembling porridge, and as it boiled furiously, he made me lean over it to inhale the steam, draping a blanket over me as I did so.

The other thing I remember distinctly from my childhood is a massive hound staring at me from the caged rear seat of a car. My parents had taken me to visit someone at the African Hospital, and I had wandered somehow into the parking lot; I paused to look, transfixed, at the shaggy beast inside one of the vehicles. His eyes were black and clear. It was a clarity devoid of the slightest depth, and it made me trust him instinctively. His nose was soft and black, his ears drooping neatly to conceal formidable jaws. I felt that beast within myself with a sudden passion. As he pressed himself against the glass, letting his large eyes pierce through me, I could not resist reaching out to unlatch the door for him, to set him free. The moment the door clicked soundlessly, the beast flung his immense weight against it, snarling, and lunged at me with bared fangs.

There are crushed flies in the memory. Crowds spinning webs of prayers to catch fleeting, precious revelations. Drawings in inkblots, watercolors, chalk, pastel; tear stains, blood stains, maps of time, posters detailing the life cycles of fleas, and again, more inkblots… filthy fingers scratching at mysterious orifices; blurred images creeping deeper into the fissures of the mind’s fleas. And those who were once our parents now rot, emitting a foul stench beneath the lime of the twentieth century. An iron grid has been cast over the heavens, quietly. Now, as it tightens its grip, it bites sharply into the tenderest flesh of our minds. The heavy blows dealt to our brains have rendered us strangers, even to ourselves. Beneath all this, our minds have curdled; gangrene has set in. Like gangs. The undergarments of our souls are riddled with holes, and the hidden loins swarm with lice. We were whores; eaten to the marrow by the syphilis of the white man’s coming. Masturbating over a Playboy cover; screaming obscenities at a lonely but defiant racist; baring our backsides to the gaping pits of latrines; writing angry “black” poetry; fucking vaginas as if we were there to prove that white men did not actually exist—all of it fell within the realm of transcending the rot of our bowels. Those stitches, like a net cast over the sky, tightened around the intellect, biting, alongside the needle, into the most delicate regions of the mind.

I delivered Philip safely home; he was in a worse state than I. Dag, Sitri, Richer, Patricia, Ada, and the chorus of the three singing twins bade us farewell. I walked on, staggering toward home.

Two silhouettes detached themselves from the darkness. I did not know them. They stood blocking my path.

“We’ve been looking for you,” said the shorter one.

They drew near.

“You beat our friend badly, man. You gave Leslie a thrashing, man. Nobody beats Leslie, didn’t you know that?” he said.

Leslie was Nestar’s son.

I took a step back. My palms slick with sweat.

The taller one spat: “Ahhe!” and slammed his fist heavily into my jaw. I heard my dentures shatter from the impact. I turned to run, but the shorter one extended a foot, and I fell heavily onto the paved road. They rained kicks upon my head. I tried to spit out the fragments of my dentures. I realized I was screaming for help. I fled. I thought: “Bagged, there go my shoes!” Only the tall one pursued me, delivering wide kicks to bring me down. He was too close for me to dart into a doorway and rouse someone in the houses I passed. Soon he overtook me and fell upon me. I scrambled up and slipped into a doorway in an instant, my hand on the verge of pounding the door, when he seized me, threw me violently against the short stone garden wall, and began smashing my head against it. I screamed louder, hoping someone inside the house would hear me. With an effort, I wrenched myself free, kicked with a bare foot, and leaped desperately toward a window, shouting. I struck the window with a fist, severely gashing my wrist, and screamed for help through the gaping hole. His hand clamped over my mouth, dragging me from the window and across the open gate onto the paved road, where he beat me until I blacked out.

I woke slowly. I was alone on that stretch of road. I wondered vaguely how I was still alive. I did not know the body could endure such agony. I dragged myself up, limped through the gate, and began pounding on the door once more. There was no sound, no light within; not the slightest sign to suggest anything human drew breath there.

I turned the doorknob. The door opened instantly. I stepped inside. No curtains graced the windows; the wind and light streaming through the broken panes revealed a vast, vacant black room. It contained nothing; no furniture, nothing, absolutely nothing. My mind felt like a void. My face certainly felt shattered. An expressionless threshold gaped toward me: it led to a smaller room: numb, dark, and entirely empty as well. I could not bring myself to touch the walls to prove their physical existence. After all, the window was real enough, shattered beyond a shadow of a doubt. For some reason I began to wonder whether I myself actually existed there; perhaps I was merely a creature conjured by the very rooms. Another threshold sank into deep contemplation before me. It led to a minuscule balcony overlooking a garden that had become a wilderness swarming with weeds, and looking out onto the vastness of a dark-blue, star-studded night. Was there nothing here either? Had I called out, pleading with nothingness? I took a step down from the balcony, and as I did, something large and cunning suddenly glided through the wilderness of weeds and cornstalks, vanishing through a gap in the distant garden wall. My hand rose involuntarily to my head: a sudden pang, as though a slice of my brain’s gray matter had been precisely extracted with tweezers.

I fled that house like a madman who had glimpsed the interior of his own delirium. Somehow I reached a telephone and surprised an ambulance that actually arrived and carried me to the African Hospital. The doctor stitched my wrist and took X-rays of my head. He administered a tetanus shot. Yet he permitted me to view the X-rays on an illuminated screen. The sight of my own bones terrified me. I laughed an anxious laugh. There was nothing to my brain, to my head, save a skull that had lost some of the teeth of its smile. That broken grin—I could never erase it from my mind. And the image of my skull has since merged with the memory of that empty house, strangely terrifying, which, when I called out, maintained only an inscrutable silence. The house of hunger was the first thing that made me resent things. I knew my father only as the person who coupled with Mother from time to time, paid the rent, beat me, and was secretly cuckolded by numerous men sleeping with his wife. He drove massive cargo trucks, transporting peanut oil to Zambia, Zaire, and Malawi. I knew he was despised, because of Mother, and because he always wore khaki overalls, even on Sundays, and because he was excessively generous with his money to friend and foe alike. The one defining truth was that he was a drunkard.

Once, he got Peter and me thoroughly drunk, to the point where Mother thrashed the three of us and threw him out of the house for the night. The only time he came close to striking Mother was when she discovered a large cache of venereal disease treatments in his travel bag: syringes, pills, penicillin; she flung them into the dustbin. One night the ambulance arrived with him inside, and they wanted someone to go along. “What is wrong with him?” she asked. “He has been stabbed.” She climbed in, and the vehicle sped away, leaving Peter and me to fend for ourselves. I learned later that his assailant was the township idiot, who until then had been entirely harmless. Father was never himself after that: he turned to methanol (denatured alcohol). On certain nights, the tremors would seize him; he knew neither what he was doing nor what he was saying, while his hands shook and vibrated beyond his control. He did not know where he was, or who he was, or who we were, or where the latrine was. And he would speak of “the flies.” When in that state, he was apparently tormented by the furies, who came to him in the guise of a dense cloud of houseflies, all buzzing aloud, chanting Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” to him.

Yet Mother was feared more than she was respected. She was industrious in copulation, in managing the household, and in maintaining what appeared to be an iron grip over her husband: she was proficient in brawls, in verbal warfare, never once humiliated, and most importantly to me, she had nothing better to do than to cast her children into the jaws of any white lion’s den. Peter resembles her, whereas I am closer to my father. Of course, Father could never control Peter—only Mother could do that; consequently, Father treated me with severity.

Peter, naturally, became at an early age an enemy to every father and mother who possessed daughters. He and Mother gave the house a potent aura of scandal, strong enough to be smelled across the entire neighborhood. When Peter turned twenty-one, Father presented him, as a gift, with a fresh kit of venereal disease preventatives. Mother simply warned Peter not to entangle himself with married women. As for me, I gave him—grudgingly, for I envied him intensely—my hesitant blessing.

I was by that time better versed in books and masturbation than in girls, street brawls, and rolling dice. Whenever Mother took my sheets to wash them, she would make me account for every single spot upon them. Since they were all, without exception, seminal stains, she would deliver a long sermon in a tone of profound contempt regarding the “looseness” of girls, asking, “Why don’t you sleep with one or two of them?” Or three. Or four. Or five. “The matter is no conundrum,” she would say. “You put it in the trench between the water and the dry land. Simple enough. She parts her legs, and you thrust your waist between her thighs and strike! Right there between her water and her dry land. Strike like fire, and she will take you and your testicles entirely. Is that not so? Right up to your neck. When you ejaculate, you will see how it clouds her eyes. Do not stop. Keep digging. Dig. And she will push you inside right up to the hair on your head. Do you see? Now. Why not sleep with one or two and stop soiling my sheets? You were late to wean from my breast; late to stop wetting the bed. And now you are late to pour your water inside some whore. You disgust me up to here, do you understand? Up to here. It must be those stupid books you read for what reason do you want to read books when you’ve already finished university? Yes, up to here.”

Yet the old man was my friend. He had simply lost his way into the house one day because of the rain, dragging himself along a heavily knotted walking stick. Then he stayed. His face was like a mesh of copper wires; his wrists, cords of muscle; and his broken frame appeared so fragile and fleeting that a strong gust or an insult might well have knocked him down and returned him to the rain. His broken, tobacco-stained teeth were those of an ancient horse, rejected even by the glue factories. But his sunken eyes, which bore the color of fire reflected upon water, were filled with as many tales as his tongue was swift to tell them. He would bask in the blissful company of the local assembly of flies, choking on some secret laughter. He would produce his tobacco pouch and slowly roll a cigarette, using pages from The Herald. What I loved more than anything else was to listen to him intensely as he spun cryptic, distracted, fragmented narratives. His translucent, cunning gaze, his eager laughter, his breathless cough, and a certain earthy grit in his voice—embodied the shards of things he flung in my direction as if by chance.

He would begin abruptly: “A hunter of women. To hunt something within yourself is a foolish thing. Because. He used to scream in his sleep at the fire of the cruiser. When he finally woke, it was there. Aloft. In the eye of the sky. Raging fiercely. The sun. … And he was cast out from the village, the city, the country. Cast out from the womb, from the house, from the family. A desert in every sense of the word. From among all the legumes of despair. He fed upon his indignation; yet it did not fill his belly. He fed upon his hatred for all things; yet it did not quench his thirst. Then he fed upon dreams, dreams of every sort dreams of vengeance, of absolution, of self-mutilation, dreams of the love that resides in all things. Yet even this did not slake his thirst, nor did it appease his hunger. For it was a strange thirst. An unknown hunger. They drove him away from himself, from his friends, from his family, from the things of his primary world. He wandered alone, bareheaded beneath the sun. He fed upon the exhaustion of mind and body, but the mind dies only by its own volition, and the body is a precious thing; after it fades and knots within, it progets a new being that shimmers around the old frame and dies only when the great star descends. Thus, exhaustion did not diminish his thirst or his weariness; it did not halt the gnawing of hunger in his belly. He reached a great city, but when he sought entry, the guards at the gates laughed a great laugh, and everything vanished into nothingness, into mere dunes of sand. Perhaps it did not even exist. There were large, beautiful birds within his line of sight, but when he called out to them, they transformed into vultures, cawing clumsily as they soared out of his view. It was like a sudden itch. In truth, he had already scratched gently between his legs. It was then that he said: ‘I shall live in the heart of a grain of sand.’ And he also said: ‘I shall strike a match: and when it blazes, I shall leap directly into the dark heart of its flame’s seed.’ Yet as he listened to himself, to the thirst and to the hunger, he spoke suddenly in words of gold: ‘I shall live at the source of the stream where all the questions of man begin.'”

The old man drew forth his pouch and in silence rolled a cigarette. His face that taut network of copper wires—relaxed slightly, smiling in every stitch.

He said: “There was a race of men in Africa whose women were bottles. And inside each bottle was a ship. The men prized the ships highly, but they cared little for the women themselves. In any case, what is the worth of a ship in a bottle? Those bottles were unbreakable. And the men could not break their women to reach the ships…”

The old man lit his cigarette with a glowing ember. I turned the roasting corn: it was turning a delectable yellow, resembling the heart of an overwhelming sunset.

He said: “A man wakes in an immense night and steps out to urinate, but he is never seen again.”

He gasped and choked on his cigarette, and between his gasps, he relayed to me the following: “A man found a small egg in a small hollow beside which stood a massive tree blasted by lightning. When he returned home, he gave the egg to his newly wedded wife, who loved eggs as plants love dampness and water. She cooked it and ate it. That night, a storm broke. But the good couple went to bed early to enact their own storm of love. Afterward, they slept in one another’s arms. Then the lightning scattered and the black night stitched itself together, and as its thundering drum rattled above that house, the husband fell from the bed with a thud. The woman woke too. ‘You pushed me!’ he said angrily, attempting to climb back into bed. ‘Make room for me!’ he said with greater tenderness. ‘But I am here on this far side,’ she replied truthfully. He tried once more. But there was something there, and he could not get in. He grew furiously angry, and the air was piercingly cold. ‘I shall settle this matter once and for all!’ he said, and lit a candle. He pushed back the blankets. There lay an immense, blood-stained egg; still soft, as though freshly laid. The woman, transfixed, pushed back the remainder of the covers and looked down at herself: she lay stained with blood like a woman who had just given birth. The man stared like one listening to the wings of a curse hovering above his head. And as they looked, they felt the storm outside quietly subside, stepping into the room on tiptoe to listen to them.”

The old man paused. He took a drag from his cigarette, its ash growing long. I pulled the roasted corn from the fire, blew the ash from it, and placed it on a plate to cool slightly.

He said: “A writer drew a circle in the sand and said as he stepped inside it: ‘This is my novel,’ but the circle, as it leapt, cleaved him in two.” And he took his corn and began to eat it. I quickly followed his example, for I love roasted corn. The old man chewed slowly, savoring every minuscule drop of sweetness.

He swallowed with a sigh and said: “An angry young man chose a spot upon this small globe. Then he remained in that small spot for a long duration. Waiting, I suppose, though he did not even believe he was waiting. He did not believe in living long enough in one place to extend roots from his angry mind or blossom leaves from his angry intellect. No. No. He merely remained there in that exceedingly small spot. Until his vision cracked like a fragile twig and his life, having withered greatly, began to shimmer around his remains. Years passed. The four winds roared around that spot. Lightning stitched the air. Below, the earth moved as it always does.” He stole a brief, yet piercing glance at me.

“Do not take these things more seriously than they warrant. It is the delirium of a vagrant. Merely shards and fragments I picked up and placed in my satchel.”

He said: “There was a man to whom everything under the sun had happened, who was walking home when he met a green dwarf who looked up at him with disdain and mockery. ‘Why do you walk with a crutch?’ the dwarf asked contemptuously. The man extended his hands and stamped his feet upon the gravel path, saying: ‘Do you not see that I have no crutch? Surely I have no need of it.’

Yet the dwarf spat upon a passing chameleon and said to the man: ‘You have the largest crutch I have ever seen a lame man use.’

The man wondered, astonished, and perhaps slightly angered: ‘What crutch?’

And the dwarf, after spitting once more upon the concealed chameleon, said: ‘Your mind’—and here they parted. Now the road lies between the water and the dry land, and many have grown old and died in their journeys upon it. Because everyone uses it, beggars like myself frequently travel that road. One day I too chose my spot and sat within it, waiting for travelers to pass me by. It was a Sunday, early in the day. Soon a stout young man in a crimson jacket scrolled toward me and asked if I knew where he might purchase a white chicken. Do you know where I sent him? To the brothel of the white soldiers: they beat him until he became sawdust. Or perhaps paste. I am not certain. No one else came, and I grew bored, beginning to fidget and cast my gaze about. It was then that I found this small scroll. The owner of the crimson jacket must have dropped it. It contains pictures of you and your friends and small notes about what you do. Take it … I believe trouble is knocking impatiently at our door.”