Tinashe Mushakavanhu (Kent,UK) - A week after the three day Dambudzo Marechera celebration that took place from May 15-17 the Oxford  academic community has mixed feelings about the event as reported in Cherwell, the Oxford University's award winning student newspaper.

 According to the report of May 21 headlined, ‘Oxford celebrates poet it once shunned’, there are mixed feelings about whether or not the Marechera event was the right thing to do. Professor Elleke Boehmer, co-organiser of the event, is said to have acknowledged that the Marechera event "seem(ed) on the surface" to be hypocritical, welcoming back the writer now that he was safe and dead.

But she also pointed out that ‘the English Faculty and academia has moved on. We're now in a place where black writers' work are discussed and celebrated. It's a different Oxford from the one Marechera experienced. This isn't in any way trying to excuse or make up for the past, but a genuine recognition and celebration of his work.’

However, this well intentioned gesture did not stop some students from questioning it. They objected to the perceived double standards of the university. Second-year student Sophie Lewis who directed a production which combined two of Marechera's plays, Servants Ball and Blitzkrieg,  “split” from the conference organisers "after a very difficult beginning." Lewis objected to the idea of the University embracing the writer after rejecting him as a student.

"I don't want to see Marechera's dramatics, his nationsroman, his poems, stultified by the academic institution he rejected, and which rejected him," she explained.

An unnamed English undergraduate  also queried Oxford University's double standards. "I always think it's quite ironic when Oxford welcome(s) back someone they barely cared about at the time. I don't think they mean to be hypocritical, but there is the sense that they want to share in Marechera's success."

Growing up on the margins of poverty in Vengere township, Marechera tore like shrapnel into the soft flesh of Zimbabwe’s smug literary culture with his 1978 publication of The House of Hunger, which went on to receive the prestigious Guardian Fiction prize the following year. Some of his work was published posthumously after he died prematurely of AIDS related complications.