guest column:Tinashe Mushakavanhu THE writer Dambudzo Marechera, who died on August 18 1987 remains a popular figure in Zimbabwe. He is viewed by a young generation as a radical and counter-culture figure. Marechera became an instant star when his first book The House of Hunger was published to critical acclaim in 1978. The novella tells of growing up in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in raw and exquisite prose, a harrowing portrait of lives disrupted and young disillusionment. The rumour is that he wrote it in a tent or squat, but then perhaps he did not, for as James Currey puts it in Africa Writes Back: “Marechera developed his own life story with the self-regarding obsession of an actor.” Everything to do with his conflicted legacy had a touch of mythology. Whether it was throwing plates and cups at his hosts at the Guardian Fiction Prize ceremony, trying to burn down a university library, or travelling without a passport between countries and continents. His magnum opus, The House of Hunger, came immediately after his expulsion from New College, Oxford university. Though his publishers desperately expected him to produce the “great Zimbabwean novel”, Marechera’s later work was inconsistent. He saw two more books published: Black Sunlight (1980) and Mindblast (1984). Further work was released posthumously: The Black Insider (1990), Cemetery of Mind (1992) and Scrapiron Blues (1994). After confounding critics and foes and leading an erratic lifestyle, the writer was dead at 35. Marechera embodies celebrity and politics, spectacle and radicalism, universality and self-aggrandisement. What endears him to a generation of readers is his refusal to offer easy answers or present static identities for his fictional characters or for himself. Book covers with an illustration of a man against a spider’s web, a spider with a needle stitching a long cut on his forehead. House of Hunger. Heinemann Books London But who is Dambudzo Marechera? I never met him. He died when I was four years old and has always been an enigma. But I recently discovered a set of old letters which reveal the real import of Marechera’s influence. A visit to the archive For a long time I associated the National Archives of Zimbabwe with bureaucracy and viewed it as an unwelcoming security zone. My early visits were focused on accessing the Marechera papers, or what remains of them. The more I visited, the more items went missing, and sometimes they were truncated. When I told friends about the appearance, disappearance and reappearance of materials, many suggested that the institution has a general suspicion of researchers and that it censored information. It was during one of these visits that I saw a folder that contained a neat pile of hundreds of handwritten letters. The melodramatic structure and rhetoric of the letters disturbed the stable meanings I held about Marechera, especially their expressions of psychic pain, longing, desire, frustration, boredom, and the material details of the correspondents’ private lives — that now make them irresis