I believe that this whole passage refers to women again(I'm sorry if I sound self-cenetered). When the narrator's mother was telling him to go have sex she was talking about the place between the water and the earth and here the father is talking about the same place. So we'll look at it from two points : 1)as the place of birth - many man are born and all of them die; the teller of the story sends crimson man to the whorehouse to die - this is again the absurdity, the irony of life - boredom killed the man. 2)prostitutes - women are prostitutes and they carry disease, so men die due to their lust and inability to escape the maladies of love.

I personally like both(not men dying).

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that guy.... weird.... Hieronymus Bosch is scary..... we are going to learn something about the brutishness of this guy.

(74)I was in the red cross youth and they have these things called police academies where policemen come and talk with primary school students about their jobs. They usually brought the police dogs, so the kids can pet them, but when they went to schools with predominantly Roma students they couldn't because the dogs were trained to find and possibly attack Roma people... just sounded similar......

76 Really nice metaphor for the temporary.

(76) This monologue is pure anger and to me it seems like turning onto yourself. Your ancestors were abused to the point where they started abusing each other. Your current leaders are there just to get rich and your future holds no value as it's written by the kids of the chameleons and the chameleons themselves. The only way to live normally is to become corrupted.

Is he talking about the books??

(74) I reaaaaaaaaaally like this paragraph here. It's pretty awesome. This statement just sums up the whole absurdism he possesses. Baptism or christening is this really important ritual in every Christian's life and he compares it to falling into a cesspit. This leads me to think that he has this very negative view of Christianity which I completely understand because of the scene with the priest. This may be so because Christianity is very much related to colonialism. Thinking of the Crusades, they were times of strict consumption of the lands where the divine soldiers passed just like Colonialism. I think he also presents his writing journey:"when I was writing an article about shantytown and while inspecting the pit-latrines there I fell into the filthy hole." He has a difficulty with the languages and his traumatic experiences, so when he tries to observe and write about them, he falls into this never ending void of pain, violence and despair.

All these people are black people, Africans or of African descent. Their work deals with the postcolonialism and the position of the black person in society. They are leaders of this movement which wanted to inspire black people and had a tremendous impact on African culture. The presence of such names in Philip's bookcase expresses this need of understanding the needs of Africans. I think that Marechera mocks his people because the books are in the bookcase, so they seem kind of static, so no one is willing to fight. Opinions???(74)

(81) Leda is the supposed mother of Helen of Troy. There is a Greek myth that Leda was so beautiful, Zeus tried to seduce her. She had just married her husband when Zeus took the disguise of a swan and had sex with her. The product of that encounter was Helen of Troy. There is also a poem by Yeats which is about the myth. Yeats is considered to be both colonialist and anti-colonialist but the poem 'Second Coming' was written by him and we encountered it earlier on. This story is very violent so it's interesting to see how easily the narrator switches from serenity to violence. Also, the Leda myth is rebirthed through the Renaissance, so I think we can easily link this to the way African people are trying to revive the connection to their past even today.

(71)There was this Italian/Christian legend about Saint Lucy who decided to be celibate because of her faith. However, she was rich and gorgeous, so she had many suitors. One of them was so persistent, so she gouged her own eyeballs and gave them to him and basically said what Nestar said to the narrator. I really like this comparison between Saint Lucy and Nestar because it represents how women have been seen as objects throughout the centuries but also the difference of the sought attribute is very funny and in Netsar's case - way more explicit.

(57) I really like this paragraph as the narrator is talking about the stupidity of history, how the once great Africans were defeated by some beardless boys. The Rudd concession is a contract that gives rights to Charles Rudd on behalf of Cecil Rhodes to the mines of Mashonaland and current Zimbabwe. This was a huge deal for Rhodes as he had wanted to contribute to the British's Cairo to Cape railroad. This was part of the events that suppressed the natives as the treasures of their land were sold between people who had no rights to them.

(pg 60) I think that this passage holds a lot of ideas, so I’ll try covering some. First of all, the old man he is talking about is, I think, the African person, proud of their origin and willing to fight. That’s because from the 19th century onward, civilization has experienced a massive industrialization, increasing the power of rich countries which were usually white. The wheels of the 20th century refers to the fast-paced, demoralized industrialization and the whites that come with technological advancements. The next sentence refers to ‘it’ which is a monster that ate the old man and it seems as this long and never ending snake that leaves just a stain of the African. This ‘it’ should be the rulers who changed decade after decade but never thought of the wellbeing of the black people. They managed to consume the morale and pride of the indigenous person. Apparently, indifference to one’s origin is also consuming Marechera’s peers and he tries to explain that in the following sentences. He seems to be tired with the violence and the lack of perspectives in the House of Hunger, but at the same time feels the need to disprove the people who accuse or think that he is ashamed to be black. I feel as a reader this sort of indifference that rots in the soul of not being able to feel a particular sense of belonging or hate (or love). In the next part, Marechera says: “The bulldozers have been and gone and where once our heroes danced there is nothing but a hideous stain. They stretched the wings of our race, stretched them out against the candle-flame.” which sounds like this nostalgic description of the greatness of African kin. There is no hatred, no anger right here, a splash of sad reminiscence. Marechera goes on to talk about the spiderwebs, thus confirming he’s a small man.

(pg 47) I think that Merechera is quite the showman or at least sees and tells stories of aggression through a lens of simplifying. For the second time, we see him experiencing something quite violent as a performance or a game even. The first time that happens is when Immaculate is being beaten and he says:"At that moment I could have sworn that she was putting on a show for me. I laughed". This seems to me as a way to minimize the trauma that violence has or it's just that he doesn't acknowledge it because of its frequency. I think that it's both because they are connected. In the fight with Harry, he represents their possible tiredness as this insincere flirt. They don't want to fight each other - they do it for the sake of fighting.They don't put their hearts into this fight meaning that they are not especially angry. Most of the violence we see in the book is not because of the anger itself, I think (except Peter's). Its just the way to be - when Philip and the protagonist beat Nestar's son, when the father beats the protagonist for speaking English. These are all forms of discipline as I understand. But really Harry and the narrator fight not for discipline but for proving a point and in the end it feels like a game.

he compares lyrics to poems ugh

These are all references to different poems. "The Tyger" by William Blake is the first one. Some of its themes include perfection and symmetry found in nature caused by divinity, but also the primal aggression. In "House of Hunger", the people live in this society which is everything but perfection; they are God-forgotten even. As perfection is fearsome, the lives of all these poor people has become routineous for them, so they try to stay afloat and are braver. The second reference is from "The Second Coming" by Yeats. The poem describes an alternative Second Coming of Christ, one not worth looking-forward to as it presents a more brutish future. This was written during WW1, so I think it's more relevant to the context of the novel as the people's innocence is stripped down and people got a punishment instead of a second Christening. In Rhodesia, people were hoping for freedom with their independence, which came way later and proved not to be what they wanted.

This confined place without hope or perspective has infiltrated his mind.

He may be preparing to put on a show. That's why he sees red curtains - as in theatre.

Very weird metaphor. A house is a mere reference to a building and not to a home. So the author/narrator feels no or very little emotional attachment to this place. A house is also a confined space, meaning it's closed, so it provides protection, but we don't know if you can come and go out of it easily. I feel like it''s where you stay because you have to. It is a place defined by its hunger which describes well enough the morals of most people.

The wording is a bit weird. It's not a mistake by the author as we can see his style as being very well-thought out and coherent. Normally, a person would say ‘we gagged him one stormy night’ and the weather may go unnoticed because the gagging is the significant part. The narrator is trying to ‘distract’ the reader from his involvement in violent events, but in effect, this puts more emphasis on it to underline how frequent violence was.

That was funny the first time I read it, but we can definitely see the desire (and not just sexual) for childlike people. Children are usually careless, so all who are tormented by the mundane but painful reality are always looking for this sweet breath of divinity that is the uncorrupted mind of a child. Especially in the scenery of the ghetto where the different struggles are already portrayed, a child is the happiest. However, this initial sweet and childish person later is developed into this very resilient woman who doesn’t succumb to the physical pain caused by domestic violence - she even makes a show out of her beating and encourages her punisher to ‘go on’. I think there is the element of the shock factor as ‘full of his sperm’ sounds a bit ironic - like full of love or something cliched. By using these words, the author manages to be original and hint at his jealousy because Immaculate and him seem to have a distant but loving relationship (although he says he loathes her).

The word 'bloody' is commonly used in Britain, Australia and Commonwealth countries. It's used to amplify the emotion of the speaker, and to strengthen the meaning of the following adjective. It was considered obscene in the 18th century until the 1960s. It has recently become a marker word for British English. The phrase 'bloody whites' is trying to amplify the meaning of the word white, I suppose. White people in Rhodesia were separated from the native population which was pushed to extreme poverty and misery. We see this word being used by Peter who was in prison. He probably wants to express his strong anger towards the white oppressors, but it is ironic. The capitalist and imperialist have pushed their culture so far down the indigenous peopl’s throats that to express their feelings vividly, the native has to use the words of the oppressor. That is also found in the struggle of Merechera who writes in English, not in Shona. Lastly, many Turkish words are found in the Bulgarian language.

Here, the author blames a woman for his disease. Although he expresses disgust, we can see the word 'wholehearthedly' which means that he would actually suffer.

I get the idea that people are not really able to dream because they can't even imagine the feast that can await them

We can imagine the character kind of isolated from the rest. He chooses solitude even in the bottle store as a store sounds less sociable than a hall. He also goes under the tree, and not on the veranda.