They Called You Dambudzo

A Memoir

Flora Veit-Wild

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English

James Currey
04 September 2023

Memoirs; National liberation & independence, post-colonialism

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

By: Flora Veit-Wild
Imprint: James Currey
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781847013347
ISBN 10: 1847013341
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 04 September 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.

Reviews for They Called You Dambudzo: A Memoir

After 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 *