Yvonne Vera's mother does it again!

Picture: Ericah Gwetai

 

Embracing the Cactus By Ericah Gwetai
Printed by Mambo Press, Senga Road, Gweru, 2012
Isbn: 9780797450653
144 pages

Reviewer: Memory Chirere

What happens when a married city man marries a second wife without the knowledge and consent of his people and that of his rural wife? Turmoil and tenacity. Such an experience is at the centre of Embracing the Cactus, a novel by Ericah Gwetai nee Mugadzaweta. She is mother to late writer, Yvonne Vera.

It is around 1950 and train driver, Sabelo Moyo meets Janet Gumede, a very beautiful Bulawayo nanny at Shangani railway station. They fall for each other instantly. Within a year, they get married. But Sabelo is already married to Immaculate with whom he has three children. Immaculate stays in Sabelo’s rural home not far from Bulawayo. Sabelo and Janet are fully aware of what they are doing but are not prepared to follow tradition.

When Immaculate eventually learns about it, she becomes bitter because tradition has not been followed. She has been taken for granted. The headman in Sabelo’s own village explains what should have happened: “Polygamy is part of our culture. There are, however, certain procedures and rituals to be followed and undertaken by a man who intends to take in a second wife. First… the man should send his sisters to inform his first wife about his intention… If she allows her husband to take another wife a ritual is performed… A goat is slaughtered and shared equally between the first wife and her rival. The goat symbolises the man that the women would share equally… the ritual is called ukuhlanganiswa meaning to be united with your rival.”

Ill luck strikes and Sabelo loses his job in Bulawayo. He has no choice but to take Janet and her soft urban children to face Immaculate and her rural children. A bitter turf war begins. Janet and her children are declared trespassers in Immaculate’s compound. Immaculate decides where they are going to be sheltered temporarily. They have to seek her clearance whenever they have visitors or want to have a family function. Immaculate decides that since she is Sabelo’s legitimate wife, she can have Sabelo in her bedroom six nights a week only allowing him to see Janet once a week.

One day Janet travels on the scotch cart from the bus stop with one of Immaculate’s sons. From nowhere, the boy rudely tells Janet that she must get ready for him in the event that Sabelo dies or becomes invalid. Janet is shocked and notices that the boy may actually rape her. She escapes into the bushes, calling for help. The boy pursues his father’s illegitimate wife. His mother has been saying many nasty things about this woman from the city. As they are doing that Janet tragically falls into a smouldering saw mill dump and is burnt severely. Her legs have to be amputated.

As if that is not enough, Janet is rejected by her own daughter, Precious. Her complaint is: Mother, why did you marry father when you knew that she was married to another woman? Precious has a meeting with Immaculate just to say: I am sorry that our father went on to marry our mother, violating your own marriage. Precious sides with Immaculate against her own mother. Eventually she escapes to Australia where she becomes a nurse. And when there is turmoil in her family back home, she writes a letter clearly stating: GIVE ME A BREAK! How many daughters out there can stand with their mother's love rivals against their very own mother? How many daughters can severely punish their own mothers for marrying their fathers?

This book is going to give all those readers and scholars who are into feminism, womanism and related ideas something to think about. Here is an African tradition ukuhlanganiswa that demands that women be respected and consulted in matters that involve them. Yet more often we are told that it is tradition that oppresses women when in most cases it is actually abuse of tradition by the uncaring that brings women down. 

Embracing the Cactus is Gwetai’s debut novel and her third book. Previously, she wrote Realities, a book of short stories and Petal Thoughts, a must read biography of her late daughter, Dr. Yvonne Vera. The biography could well be a ‘first’ ever to be written by a mother about her child. She died in April 2005. To date, the late Yvonne Vera could easily be the most outstanding woman writer from Zimbabwe writing in English.

However, readers must be warned that although Ericah Gwetai is mother to Yvonne Vera, she is her own woman. Here you do not find Yvonne’s intense prose poetry. What is on offer here is a deeper and more amazing understanding of African cultural intricacies, rendered in a far simpler and unaffected prose. Her episodic chapters and very unpredictable plot constitute the Ericah Gwetai signature.

However, the production of Embracing the Cactus is not impressive. On pages 2, 3, 5, 18,114 and in so many other places, the paragraphing and annotation are not regular. One wonders if the editors and typesetters ignored the fact that this book would definitely attract an international audience. The cover too was rather hastily done. If the artist was going for an abstract representation, then it was overdone. Besides, it is not any abstract painting that can smoothly transform into a useful picture for a book cover.

Sunflowers In Your Eyes

Title: Sunflowers in Your Eyes – Four Zimbabwean Poets
Editor: Menna Elfyn
Publisher: Cinnamon Press
ISBN: 978-1-907090-13-4
Year: 2010
Reviewed by Memory Chirere
89pages
Be on the lookout for Ethel Irene Kabwato, Blessing Musariri, Fungai Rufaro Machirori and Joice Shereni. They are vibrant women poets from the contemporary working class of Zimbabwe.

It means that all of them are decision makers. Amongst them you may find a mother, sister, wife or friend of someone big or small in Zimbabwe. They variably write about individual scapes. They write about woman’s love for man who usually does not return the favour in equal measure. They write about their country (Zimbabwe) at a time of deep political strife; the period towards the Government of National Unity (GNU). Each of these women answers, in her own way, to the questions: what does a woman want? What is love? What is country?

Fungai Machirori’s is a questing poetry, sometimes demanding, and praying too, for the restoration of the dignity of woman. Machirori’s persona insists that she is:

…not ketchup,
to be had on the side,
Along with a main course

She wants to be the main meal itself because she is ‘distinct and complete’. Fungai Machirori could be the most ideologically nuanced poet in this collection. She creates balance between suffering and hope. Sometimes Machirori’s poetry is about resurrection from a fall or the contemplation on it. Her persona, a radical woman cries out: ‘No man is worth fighting for’ and ‘no man is worth dying for’, too. And if a genuine man’s love is hard to come by, she says:

I’d rather wrap cold chains and iron locks
Around the throbbing core of me
And watch and let my fetters grate and rust and cool
My blood

Machirori has no regrets and she writes with a clear certainty of those who are used to traveling until they arrive at destinations. Her other poem is even boldly entitled ‘Tears Will Not Cure’.

But Joice Shereni writes for matrimony. She does not give up on anything. Hers are probably the deepest poems in this collection, compelling and conversational. Her persona wants to reach out, to converse and reconcile with the runaway man and heal from old wounds. She hurts very deeply from inside. Suffering is not a curse but a school. It is even a career. She knows how fire burns. But she also does not want to lose control. ‘Should I let myself need you?’ she asks in ‘Destiny’. In ‘Hunters’ she feels that when you are an object of pity, you become naked until you run for cover like Adam and Eve. Shereni addresses man out there who doesn’t know how to be husband. Any man who participates in the humiliation of woman is also humiliating himself, seems to be the philosophy here.

Blessing Musariri’s poetry has lots of room, literal and metaphorical. She writes maybe the most transcendental poetry of the four, causing collocation of time and place. She is carefully laid back, edgeless like fog and reminiscent too. You find that in ‘Last Goodbye’. Musariri is a calm day that promises to be hot right there in the morning. She can also be as treacherous as honey! Because her lines pretend to wonder about, when in fact, they gather up bits and pieces to brew a final whirlwind effect as in ‘Breaking News’ and in ‘Related’. Her prose poetry is sometimes deliciously dreamy:

Daytime flights are dangerous because you see the place you might land should you chance to fall. Here among rolling clouds my thoughts meander- this is as close to snow as I as I’ll get today, as close to you- standing in the foyer, laughing about how your father bought you an Easter egg for your birthday. A glass of wine with lunch has aroused my fancy- touching cool glass as I have touched your face. High in this blue sky, in nothing else but sky, I am further than I have ever been from you.

Ethel Kabwato’s haiku are better than all that she writes here. There is especially the very short poem ‘Hate’ which goes:

So consuming
like uncontrolled
veld fire.

Or the other one called ‘Painting’:

Show me that painting
again
of happy children
playing.

But Kabwato’s political persona is a rock with a jagged edge. She goes deep to the jagular vein, as violent sometimes as Zimbabwean politics. She shouts at what she sees as betrayal of the nation by its own politicians. She writes the most tumultuous poetry in this collection, pricking you especially where the heart is supposed to be. Kabwato has no faith in the nation’s history or its institutions for she thinks that they are only full of political mobs. You travel down her lines and discover that she actually has faith in the individual conscience that registers and registers and registers the misdemeanors of those with power, reminding you of Charles Mungoshi’s friend in Waiting For the Rain, who is being buried alive, ‘minding the sand no more’.

This is a collection to remember; crispy, inspired and sparsely put together for readers who hate melodrama and verbosity. Many thanks to the Welsh poet, Menna Elfyn who brought together these pieces.

From Where The Wind Blows: a book review

From Where The Wind Blows: An Anthology Of Modern Zimbabwean Poetry

Edited by  Oliver Nyambi and Tendai Mangena
Published by Mambo Press, 2012
Reviewed by Aaron Mupondi

 From Where the Wind Blows edited by Oliver Nyambi and Tendai Mangena and published by Mambo Press in 2012 is a breath of fresh air on the Zimbabwean literary landscape.  I say so because from the beginning of the 21^st century the Zimbabwean readership has been so much bombarded by short stories that made Ruby Magosvongwe end up remarking that at the moment, ‘Zimbabwe is a short story country.’

The title of the new arrival (From Where the Wind Blows) is derived from the title of the last poem,  ‘Where the Wind Blows’, by  Mika Nyoni which to me is not surprising because the poet proves to be one of the more probing voices in the collection.  The title of the collection is a very appropriate one in the sense that Zimbabwean readers can easily guess that Zimbabwe is the place ‘from where the wind blows’.  The metaphor of the wind in the title reminds one of the unsettling situation in Zimbabwe during the years of economic meltdown (1998-2008) which were characterised by hyperinflation, scarcity of basic commodities, erosion of salaries, political violence and polarisation to name but a few issues.  The link between the ‘blowing wind’ and change is not lost to a discerning reader.

It is interesting to note that poems in the collection come from people from different walks of life and with different life experiences rendering the collection richer in terms of insight and creativity. The collection was written by established writers such as Zvisinei Sandi (the only female poet in the collection), university lecturers Jairos Gonye, Mika Nyoni, Madhlozi Moyo, Mickias Musiyiwa and Aleck Mapindani, a banker John Gotora, a nationalist Elisha Zacharia Kahari and students Austin Shumba and Hillary KeniWitsani.

The collection is divided into five sections: ‘Trying in ‘Trying’ Times’, ‘Going and Coming Around’, ‘Conflicting Spaces and the Haunting Past’, ‘Feeling and the Dreaded Shadow’ and ‘Odes’ although the editors indicate that the last section is ‘From the ‘Mind’ of a Mind’.  I agree with the editors that many poems burst the seams of the categories into which they have been ‘imprisoned’ to also fit into other categories or even go beyond all the laid down categories in the anthology.  However, one notices that the majority of poems harp on the predicaments the majority of Zimbabweans experienced during the ‘decade of crisis’ while others warn society about the AIDS pandemic and yet others re-assert the African culture and its past but others especially by Gotora and KeniWitsani appear very personal and private.

Sandi’s poem ‘Mercenary Thoughts’ (Trying in ‘Trying’ Times) is full of anger towards the greedy and unscrupulous in society. The militant mood in this poem is loud and clear. The poem itself is an instrument of war. In Nyoni’s ‘40 in 2008 in Zimbabwe’ we realise that some people find consolation in having survived the lean years.  The people are aptly referred to as the tree with scars in Nyoni’s other poem ‘Aggrieved’.  The ‘scars’ represent the problems that afflict the people while the ‘axe’ stand for the source or sources of the problems.  Gonye in ‘A Scene in Independence Street’ focuses on the tribulations of a typical worker whose salary is not enough to meet his endless obligations.  I have noticed that in a number of his poems Gonye who is a university teacher himself is a spokesperson of teachers whom society of late, has chosen to look down upon.  In this section, Shumba’s poem ‘To be Free’ makes effective use of irony to lash at the selfishness of the rich and powerful.

 Poems in ‘Going and Coming Around’ deal with prostitution, among other issues.  Shumba’s ‘Sisi Anna’ uses dialogue between a prostitute and her prospective client to dramatize negotiations for sex.  In ‘Ximex Mall’ Shumba reveals how some people in Harare unashamedly practise shaddy deals for the sake of money.

From the section ‘Conflicting Spaces and the Haunting Past’  one gets the feeling that the city represents a soulless modernity that is so stifling to the individual that he resorts going back to the rural area which provides him freedom and cultural shelter as the persona in Nyoni’s ‘Re: Letter of Resignation’ does.  While others flee from the city to the rural areas, others migrate into exile as shown in ‘Little Victories’ by Moyo.

The section, ‘Feeling and the Dreaded Shadow’ has poems about personal emotions and AIDS.  In ‘AIDS’, ‘Mucha’, ‘The Boy at the Clinic’ by Nyoni, Shumba and KeniWitsani respectively show how AIDS preys on its victims. However in this section one cannot fail to be moved by poems by Gotora.  The persona in all these poems is lamenting the loss of a beloved son whose name is  Gift as shown in ‘Once Upon a Time’. The loss of Gift is heart-rending as the persona in ‘Did You Have to: says, ‘My heart is bleeding internally.’ In ‘What Should I Have Done’ the persona asks existential questions about the meaning of life and death.  He ends up turning to God for comfort.  The poems makes us realise that mortals cannot escape pain and sorrow as Homer puts it, ‘human beings are wretched things, and the gods…have woven sorrow into the very pattern of their lives’. Indeed we are puppets of fate. Gotora’s poems are autobiographical. They are based on his first-born child, Tatenda Gift, who was killed in a road traffic accident when he was just about to arrive at his school, Kutama College on 6 February 2011. (‘Notes on Contributors’)  The poems are an attempt to heal the emotional wounds of the poet/father.

From Where the Wind Blows therefore makes a serious engagement with pressing problems in the contemporary Zimbabwean society particularly the ‘decade of crisis’ from which we are emerging. This book is highly recommended for study in High Schools, Teachers’ Colleges and Universities.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

ZWA goes to Masvingo

Picture: a recent ZWA meeting in Harare: Mashingaidze Gomo in white cap.

 

The Zimbabwe Writers Association (ZWA) is having an outreach meeting on Saturday 1 December 2012 in Masvingo at the CHARLES AUSTIN THEARTRE'S DOUG HILL ROOM (Masvingo Civic Centre) at 9am to 1pm. Writers around Masvingo and the outlying areas are all invited.

Our outreach would take the shape of introductions of associations and individual writers, followed by an open exchange of problems, challenges, ideas etc as the basis of consultation. On our part, we shall introduce the idea of ZWA and its constitution to Masvingo and what we have managed to achieve so far and how beneficial it has been to writers. In other words, it is really an open ended occasion. We shall discuss the ZWA constitution and how those interested may join.

Our contact persons are Dr Shumirai Nyota 0772529014 and Dr. Jacob Mapara:0772387981. Membership fee is only $10.

We bring along a guest; writer Mashingaidze Gomo, whose NAMA-winning novel, A Fine Madness is currently on the Advanced level syllabus. Gomo has agreed to answer any questions on his book towards the end of the meeting. Teachers and their students who are reading this book for exams are welcome.

The Zimbabwe Writers Association (ZWA) is the newest nationally inclusive writers Organization whose formation started in July 2010 leading to the AGM of June 4, 2011. Zimbabwean writers have taken the initiative to coordinate themselves to form an organisation to represent them and defend their interests. ZWA was registered with the National Arts Council in January 2011 and has since been to Gweru, Bulawayo and Mutare.
+inserted by ZWA secretary, Tinashe Muchuri:0733843455

Sunflowers In Your Eyes

Title: Sunflowers in Your Eyes – Four Zimbabwean Poets
Editor: Menna Elfyn
Publisher: Cinnamon Press
ISBN: 978-1-907090-13-4
Year: 2010
Reviewed by Memory Chirere
89pages
Be on the lookout for Ethel Irene Kabwato, Blessing Musariri, Fungai Rufaro Machirori and Joice Shereni. They are vibrant women poets from the contemporary working class of Zimbabwe.

It means that all of them are decision makers. Amongst them you may find a mother, sister, wife or friend of someone big or small in Zimbabwe. They variably write about individual scapes. They write about woman’s love for man who usually does not return the favour in equal measure. They write about their country (Zimbabwe) at a time of deep political strife; the period towards the Government of National Unity (GNU). Each of these women answers, in her own way, to the questions: what does a woman want? What is love? What is country?

Fungai Machirori’s is a questing poetry, sometimes demanding, and praying too, for the restoration of the dignity of woman. Machirori’s persona insists that she is:

…not ketchup,
to be had on the side,
Along with a main course

She wants to be the main meal itself because she is ‘distinct and complete’. Fungai Machirori could be the most ideologically nuanced poet in this collection. She creates balance between suffering and hope. Sometimes Machirori’s poetry is about resurrection from a fall or the contemplation on it. Her persona, a radical woman cries out: ‘No man is worth fighting for’ and ‘no man is worth dying for’, too. And if a genuine man’s love is hard to come by, she says:

I’d rather wrap cold chains and iron locks
Around the throbbing core of me
And watch and let my fetters grate and rust and cool
My blood

Machirori has no regrets and she writes with a clear certainty of those who are used to traveling until they arrive at destinations. Her other poem is even boldly entitled ‘Tears Will Not Cure’.

But Joice Shereni writes for matrimony. She does not give up on anything. Hers are probably the deepest poems in this collection, compelling and conversational. Her persona wants to reach out, to converse and reconcile with the runaway man and heal from old wounds. She hurts very deeply from inside. Suffering is not a curse but a school. It is even a career. She knows how fire burns. But she also does not want to lose control. ‘Should I let myself need you?’ she asks in ‘Destiny’. In ‘Hunters’ she feels that when you are an object of pity, you become naked until you run for cover like Adam and Eve. Shereni addresses man out there who doesn’t know how to be husband. Any man who participates in the humiliation of woman is also humiliating himself, seems to be the philosophy here.

Blessing Musariri’s poetry has lots of room, literal and metaphorical. She writes maybe the most transcendental poetry of the four, causing collocation of time and place. She is carefully laid back, edgeless like fog and reminiscent too. You find that in ‘Last Goodbye’. Musariri is a calm day that promises to be hot right there in the morning. She can also be as treacherous as honey! Because her lines pretend to wonder about, when in fact, they gather up bits and pieces to brew a final whirlwind effect as in ‘Breaking News’ and in ‘Related’. Her prose poetry is sometimes deliciously dreamy:

Daytime flights are dangerous because you see the place you might land should you chance to fall. Here among rolling clouds my thoughts meander- this is as close to snow as I as I’ll get today, as close to you- standing in the foyer, laughing about how your father bought you an Easter egg for your birthday. A glass of wine with lunch has aroused my fancy- touching cool glass as I have touched your face. High in this blue sky, in nothing else but sky, I am further than I have ever been from you.

Ethel Kabwato’s haiku are better than all that she writes here. There is especially the very short poem ‘Hate’ which goes:

So consuming
like uncontrolled
veld fire.

Or the other one called ‘Painting’:

Show me that painting
again
of happy children
playing.

But Kabwato’s political persona is a rock with a jagged edge. She goes deep to the jagular vein, as violent sometimes as Zimbabwean politics. She shouts at what she sees as betrayal of the nation by its own politicians. She writes the most tumultuous poetry in this collection, pricking you especially where the heart is supposed to be. Kabwato has no faith in the nation’s history or its institutions for she thinks that they are only full of political mobs. You travel down her lines and discover that she actually has faith in the individual conscience that registers and registers and registers the misdemeanors of those with power, reminding you of Charles Mungoshi’s friend in Waiting For the Rain, who is being buried alive, ‘minding the sand no more’.

This is a collection to remember; crispy, inspired and sparsely put together for readers who hate melodrama and verbosity. Many thanks to the Welsh poet, Menna Elfyn who brought together these pieces.

Tafataona Mahoso: the poet that you may not have known

You may not have known that Tafataona Mahoso is a published poet. His one and only collection of poems published in Harare by Nehanda Publishers in 1989 is entitled ‘Footprints about the Bantustan.’

 

When you happen to come across Mahoso in an auditorium, he tends to quickly fold up after the greetings and niceties. He appears to listen to the voice inside the voice of whoever is speaking at the podium.  But when he wants to respond, he shoots up and speaks his mind. He has dedicated his life to pursuing the project of demystifying myths, especially western myths on Africa and Africans.

 

His poetry is just like that!  The man is his poetry and the poetry reminds you of the man himself in many ways. Although these poems were published in 1989, there are pieces in there from as far back as 1976. 

 

On the plain white cover of ‘Footprints about the Bantustan’ are four naked footprints of what must be a gigantic walker going down a village path.  But when you look closely at the footprints on what appears to be a sandy background, you realise that each footprint roughly assumes the map of Africa.  The naked footprints must refer to the usually soulful and unassuming African personality. 

 

These footprints on the sand may also stand for the idea of being fully rooted in Africa, a subject that Mahoso can dwell on at length.  He will also talk about the all-embracing African concept of the circle.

 

Mahoso’s poetry, like most of his other writings, is decidedly about the unequal relationship between what he often terms ‘the North and the South.’  Sometimes Mahoso calls it ‘the North America and Europe against the rest of us.’  Reading these poems, one’s knowledge of the man’s voice is very useful for they are meant to be read aloud.  They are rhythmic, cascading and cajoling.

 

In ‘To The Guardian Angel of Consciousness,’ the persona unravels the whole historic western project of the pacification of Africa and the Third World through lies and the glitter of cheap gadgets.  Like that moment in ‘Hard Times,’ the persona sets out to find ‘the facts’ about the relations between the North and the South, to prune out the chaff and get to the bare realities:

 

“I wanted facts, unslanted, but penetrated like beads

with sinews of analysis:

the ability of the mind to thread issues

out of the paralysis

of denominations, the ability to choose

what is seminal

from what is marginal.”

 

That could be as well be Mahoso’s chosen forte: to undress imperialism and its machinations.  Written in 1979 and revised on July 30 1987, the poem taunts western characters against using haze biblical excuses for the West’s exploitation of ‘the other.’  The persona scoffs at those who threaten the so-called non-believer with the Christians’ devil and hell.  The persona also insists on the point that only critical thinking and open rebellion, instead of giving the other cheek, gave birth to Zimbabwe in 1980.

 

In that poem, the persona who has been to a colonial school rises above the colonial propaganda and sees reality for what it is.  What comes out is that the colonial school and its syllabus are not education but a whole project of alienation.  The project was not to make the pupil understand where he is but to move him from where he is.  That was the only method to make him a perfectly unquestioning servant.

 

The title poem called ‘Footprints about the Bantustan’ is a single monstrous eight page poem.  It swallows and embraces various traditions that you find in each of the other Zimbabwean poets of Mahoso’s generation, ranging from the early nationalistic Chenjerai Hove to Musaemura Zimunya’s sweet-sad romances, through to the combative verses of Freedom Nyamubaya and Thomas Bvuma.

 

To the persona, all colonized space is a Bantustan, as in Apartheid South Africa.  In that case the poem insists that the colonized must dutifully rediscover his fighting spirit so that he can create and name a new reality and identity for himself.  All because in the international Bantustan in which we live, there is:

 

“…enough

drought and dust here.

I cannot count the footprints of

the tick, now all glossy

from sucking the sick dog.”

 

Fortunately, the victim in the Bantustan is not lying down on ‘our page of history.’  The Bantustan cannot be a decent destination because it is made for ‘us’ by ‘them.’  However, as the poem suggests, there is need for us to use this tiny space that we are trapped in, to write our rebellious signature and retrace our footprints out of the Bantustan, back to positive history.  Using our mission-school-taught handwriting, we must, instead, write our very own signature.  The persona in the poem does it in front of the other awestricken villagers:

 

“I go out to scribble my name

over your footmarks in the dirt: Tafataona:

Before we die yet, we shall have seen…

Before we die yet, we shall have realised…

Why would you name a child so?”

 

That poem reads much like Aime Cesaire’s ‘Notebook of a Return to My Native Land’ where history becomes a filthy emotion that becomes a beautiful emotion, that becomes life, that carries the once upon victim to an eternal hygiene! 

 

For the Mahoso persona, the challenge that people of the South face is how to turn from victimhood to becoming agents of their own lives and destinies. 

 

The third poem called ‘Zimbabwe’ is quite a bold poem.  With it Mahoso critiques what happened in Zimbabwe at independence: reconciliation without compensation.  Written in July 1980, the poem shows Mahoso’s bitterness with the new nation’s presumptuous theory of reconciliation.  Mahoso  asks  why we chose to reconcile with those who had not even given up that which they had looted:

 

“Will the nerve reconcile itself

to the naked knife?  By what softness

 of heart can we turn

swords into ploughshares

when we never had swords?”

 

But Mahoso is not through with you yet.  His persona asks another question:

 

“On whose terms, dear commander,

shall the lamb feed together

with the fox? Can the worm bask

in amity with the hoe

which only yesterday cut its spine

into halves?”

 

Indeed, as events would show, two decades down the road the policy of reconciliation in Zimbabwe was proven to have been ‘a strange hope.’  Its basis had been sunk very far from the real ‘goods’ that define life.  As soon as the victims started to reclaim the real ‘real economy,’ Zimbabwe went ablaze!

 

But Mahoso the poet is not just as tough as teak.  He also has some very titillating love poems.  He describes man’s love for woman in a mouth-watering way and could challenge even the master of romance Musa Zimunya himself. In ‘Professor’s Cards A, B,C,D,’ Mahoso goes:

 

“Vivian Mavhaire, since you graduated

I ache like a crater relieved

of its last volcano.”

 

Mahoso’s love poems praise the African woman as the original woman:

 

“African woman of the South

you know how to provoke passions

sharper than the flame lily of Zimbabwe.

Your nipples are packed

with nodules of firm sweetness,

like the black raspberry

of the Sabi River ripening

in its wildness.”

 

Beyond his poetry, Mahoso gives speeches and writes newspaper articles. He was born in 1949 in the Eastern Chimanimani District of Zimbabwe.  He holds a Doctorate in History.

+ Memory Chirere