2022-23: Disruptive Dialogues: The Legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in Harare and Oxford
'Disruptive Dialogues: The Legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in Harare and Oxford'
TORCH - Brookes Knowledge Exchange Fellows
Dr Tinashe Mushakavanhu | Faculty of English | University of Oxford
Dr Niall Munro | Poetry Centre | Oxford Brookes University
Partner Organisation
Old Fire Station Arts Centre
Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
Who was entitled to live in a city? How could the energies of writing and publishing be harnessed to ensure that those who had been marginalised were not forgotten, whilst also keeping in mind the structures and spaces that had caused such marginalisation? The Disruptive Dialogues project addressed these questions, inspired by the work of celebrated Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera (1952–1987) and based around a series of creative dialogues. The project built on research by Dr Tinashe Mushakavanhu into Marechera’s archive and legacy, and by Dr Niall Munro into marginal spaces in the city and the disruptive qualities of cultural memory.
Author of the award-winning novel The House of Hunger (1978), Marechera entered the University of Oxford in 1974 but was forced to leave in 1976. He subsequently experienced homelessness in the city before squatting in London and later moving to Harare. The project initiated an important critical and creative exchange between two cities with which Marechera was closely connected by working with two partners. The primary partner was the Old Fire Station Arts Centre in Oxford, where most of the work took place, alongside artistic communities and organisations in Harare.
Introduction from Dr Tinashe Mushakavanhu and Dr Niall Munro
https://www.youtube.com/embed/4wPomomJP4A
The first strand of the project, Mapping Power, drew attention to the dynamics of colonial power and marginalisation present in the built environments of both cities by bringing Marechera, through his collection Mindblast (1984), which he composed in Harare while sitting in what was once Cecil Square, into dialogue with British imperialist Cecil Rhodes. The aims of this mapping were to highlight relationships between power and space and to crowd-source creative responses to the legacies of both Marechera and Rhodes in Oxford and Harare.
The second strand used Marechera’s experiences of homelessness in Oxford and Harare to reflect on the situation of homelessness today through a series of workshops called Untold Doors. The project worked with the homeless charity Crisis, based at the Old Fire Station, to create two workshops for members of the Crisis community, focusing on poetry and visual art in November 2022 and led by poet Dr Jennifer Wong. Drs Mushakavanhu and Munro then ran two similar workshops in Harare in early 2023.
The final strand was the creation of an exhibition called The Centre is Everywhere, which brought together the other two strands of the project and was shown at the Old Fire Station in Summer 2023, placing creative work from both cities in dialogue. The exhibition featured material from the Dambudzo Marechera Trust archive, responses from the crowd-sourced map, and work produced by participants in the Untold Doors workshops. The project also worked with architecture students from Oxford Brookes, who responded to the themes of power and space that underpinned the project.
Just as Marechera became a mentor for young artists upon his return to Harare, the project used the workshops and the showcasing of writing and art in the exhibition and online to encourage the establishment of publishing infrastructure, something that was broadly lacking in Harare’s arts community. The project drew on both Dr Mushakavanhu’s experience as a publisher in different media and Dr Munro’s work with Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre’s Ignition Press to advise on small-scale and alternative publishing models that could support an emerging artistic community.
Events Related to This Project:
Disruptive Dialogues: The Creative Legacies of Dambudzo Marechera
Event
Date: 12 May 2023
Disruptive Dialogues: The Legacies of Dambudzo Marechera
Exhibition
Dates: 4 July – 26 August 2023
