They Called You Dambudzo: A Memoir

This book is a 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. The memoir explores their intense, personal, and sexual relationship, including their first encounter in 1983, the tumultuous months when Marechera moved in with Veit-Wild and her family, and the illness and death of the writer in 1987.

Format: Hardback
Length: 300 pages
Publication date: 06 May 2022
Publisher: James Currey

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 surface, Flora appears to have lost everything. But beneath the surface, she is determined to find a way. She travels to Zimbabwe, where she visits the places that were important to Dambudzo and his family. She meets with his friends and colleagues, and she reads his unpublished works.

Through her journey, Flora begins to piece together a new understanding of Dambudzo and their relationship. She learns about his struggles with poverty, his political activism, and his love for literature.

She also learns about her own strengths and weaknesses, and she begins to heal from the pain of his death.

In the end, this memoir is a tribute to the power of love and the resilience of the human spirit.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781847013293