Abstract

This paper analyses three works of art namely ‘House of Hunger’, ‘The Black Insider’ and ‘Mindblast’ by one of Zimbabwe’s most famous, talented and controversial authors, Dambudzo Marechera, using mainly psychoanalytic tools of inquiry. The aforementioned works of fiction have been carefully chosen to sample the writer’s skills and concerns as a poet, playwright and novelist extraordinaire. These works, which were written between 1978 and 1984, give a fair representation of the said author’s vast and varied skills whose works according to one critic ‘read a little like a clever dissertation for a PhD’(Veit-Wild, 1992: 17) yet he never completed a first degree!

Key words: ‘House of Hunger’, ‘The Black Insider’, ‘Mindblast’