"Home Means Nothing To Me”

2017

Created in collaboration with writer Tinashe Mushakavanhu and designer Nontsikelelo Mutiti, "Home Means Nothing to Me" is an innovative mapping project that traces the movements of iconic Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera through Harare between 1982 and 1987, following his return from forced exile in the United Kingdom. Published in the June 2018 issue of Chimurenga's The Chronic and shortlisted for the 2018 Brittle Paper Award for Creative Nonfiction, the project challenges popular misconceptions about Marechera's work and identity.

The title, borrowed from Marechera's film House of Hunger, reflects the project's mission to locate the man within the mythology. Through cartography rather than conventional literary analysis, the team sought to ground Marechera in actual Harare spaces while playing with his complex relationship to place and identity. The project pushes back against scholarship that has stripped Marechera of his African and Zimbabwean identity, labeling him as a "universal" writer disconnected from geographic roots.

By mapping Marechera's Harare experience which became his primary interaction with post-exile Zimbabwe, the project explores the tension between the personal and mythological, the local and universal. It complicates questions of literary identity while acknowledging Zimbabwe's Harare-centric nature, ultimately asking whether Marechera is a writer from Harare or from Zimbabwe, and what that distinction means for understanding both the writer and the place that shaped him.
Team: Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Tinashe Mushakavanhu & Simba Mafundikwa

Artist Residency at Keleketla Library in Johannesburg South Africa




Process

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