The Scofield, Winter 2016 Issue 1.3 - Dambudzo Marechera, The Doppelgänger

Выходные данные неизвестны. — 205 с. (на англ. яз.)Walt Whitman is not the only one who contains multitudes—we all contradict ourselves, we’re all large. Our excessivity is beyond our control, the byproduct of our existential liminality. We are in flux by biological imperative, chimeras constructed subconsciously to fulfill evolutionary drives, and this instability makes us multiplicitous. Thus, we have within each of us various selves, and these selves are inherently at odds with one another by nature of each’s inability to maintain dominance over the other. This is the primordial stew from which we must create a putatively “consistent” identity to be exhibited to the outside world—our lives have always been a curation, a filling of the next fold of the future with whatever self we find most appropriate or advantageous, culled from the dusty archives that house our various voices within.
Our spotlighted author for our third issue, Dambudzo Marechera, knew this well, and quite often he engaged with this idea of embattled identity in his work. It is, in fact, difficult to shoehorn his writing into any singular thesis because any attempt at authoritative textual exegesis, like any attempt at a definitive reading of the man himself, tends to see the specimen wiggle out from under the lepidopterist’s pin, a butterfly refusing solitary confinement and singular positioning.