Content area
Full Text
Dambudzo Marechera. Scrapiron Blues. Flora Veit-Wild, ed. & comp. Harare, Zimb. Baobab (African Books Collective, distr.). 1994. xvi + 250 pages, ill. $21.50/L11.95. ISBN 0-908311-70-2.
Scrapiron Blues is described by its editor and compiler Flora Veit-Wild as "the third and last volume in a series of posthumously published Marechera works." This volume reinforces a form for which Dambudzo Marechera had earlier made a name with The House of Hunger--fiction. It also extends the formal variety of the author as not only a poet and short-story writer but also a writer of plays and children's stories. Composed from 1982 to 1987, these were Marechera's last writings and tell of his personal experience with a mortal disease and his perception of urban life as lived in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital. Thus there is a probing both of the self and of society.
"Tony Fights Tonight" is a series of short stories about pub life. These tales, which tend to be profane and sexual, generally portray women as tricksters. "Smith in Dead Skin" is about a married woman...