House of Hunger: Dambudzo Marechera

`When all else fails, don`t take it in silence: scream like hell, scream like Jericho was tumbling down, serenaded by a brace of trombones, scream`

Dambudzo Marechera burst onto the literary scene in 1978 with this vivid roar of a book exploring township life in pre-independence Zimbabwe. Rejecting what he saw as the narrow stereotypes of African literature, Marechera`s stories portrayed a world flashing with violence and anarchic humour, as his narrator expresses his desperate alienation - from his family, from his student friends, from Zimbabwe itself.