Description
Book SynopsisCompelling 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
Trade ReviewAfter reading such an intense and passionate memoir so masterfully crafted and narrated by an accomplished literary critic, one can only recommend it most strongly to every lover of literature. * IFE: Journal of the Institute of Cultural Studies *
This book is a personal biography: a biography of love between the writer lovers, told often in an intimate second person voice. What Flora Veit-Wild did to preserve Dambudzo Marechera's work was tremendous. -- Miho Kinnas * Literary Shanghai *
Table of ContentsPRELUDE 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
