I first encountered Dambudzo Marechera at an out of way boarding school in the farming district of Selous in Mashonaland west province in Zimbabwe. I was 14 years old. Our small school library had a full collection of all Marechera books. The House of Hunger was the first book I read. I vividly remember moments I would sit under library tables or hide behind colossal bookshelves and read a Marechera book. Reading Marechera was like an initiation into a secret society. There was something wonderfully subversive about his writing; he said things that were too dangerous to say, things that we all knew but couldn't say. In this way, Marechera prompted me to pursue him.

I saw in his fictional creations the streets in which my mother and father grew up, the streets in which I was growing up – the hunger, the squalor, the poverty, the prostitution. Literature became the motion picture of my existence. And then something happened. In 2006 I made my first trip to Europe, and in my travelling bag I carried with me the Marechera books I owned – a blurry photocopy of The House of Hunger with missing pages, and The Black Insider. Interestingly, of these books, it would prove to be The Black Insider that would have the most profound effect on me.