Title: For Women
Trying To Breathe and Failing
By Batsirai Chigama,
Ntombekhaya, Harare: 2021, 132 pages
Isbn: 978-177925-791-8
There are many ways of writing protest poetry. One of
them is for the poet to take on that which she abhors, head on. The poet could
settle on subjects like politics and violence and get to their roots, sampling
their DNA, pointing out the perpetrators themselves etc etc.
The poet could also lambast the way men ill-treat
women in general. She could even write against the usual clobbering of women by
men for no particular reason. The poet could go round and round until the page
is wet. Or, she could grieve all the way, burning a hole that runs from cover
to cover.
The poet could then breath in and out, take a walk or
make a quick cup of tea for herself. Or, she could just rest and settle like
fog upon the earth.
But in this her new book called For Women Trying to Breathe and
Failing, Batsirai Chigama has, for me, one very special section called How Love Should Be. In that section,
Chigama chooses to protest against man’s abuse of women by actually giving us
the alternative man. This is a rare feat! Here is a man that the women would
prefer…
In school we used to call that the control experiment!
When a male reader goes through that section, he may
definitely come face to face with what he could have been when the world was
fresh and the hills were still soft. It is like coming home in the middle of a
rainy night to find your better version sleeping in your very bed! When that
happens, and you are able to control your nerves, you may see what you could
have been and not the brute that you have become. We tend to come into the
world too late or too early to be sane.
In one of those poems by Chigama, a woman gazes at a
man and thinks, “of all the places (that) I could live, your heart is the
paradise I choose.” In another, a woman refers to her man as “a best seller to
me” and more specifically, “babe I would carry you around in the duffel bag of
my heart, flip through you, slowly grasp(ing) every single word profound…”
Then she describes an imaginary good, lovely and well
behaved man with:
“There are some rooms in your palms
Where I feel I belong
Quiet
Calm
Steady
Warm
Full of you.”
These are the kind of men’s palms that women look for
everywhere without finding. Those palms with rooms! But that is only the
beginning because in yet another poem, the title poem to this section itself,
the poet writes about her man’s “gentle softness” and her man’s “dewy kindness
that drips each time you look at me and hold me strong in the embrace of each
syllable.”
And the man is so good that the woman even admits her
own faults, “I am a mess I know, yet the way each vowel curves in your iris is
the magnet that centres my universe.” And that electric section of poems continues
unabated.
In another piece, a joyful woman reads a book of poems
by the window as her caring man wears the apron to prepare a toast for her,
roasting a chicken drumstick for her and the sad part is that the man does it
that only on Sundays. If he could do it more regularly, the better!
Here you find a man who knows how to spell love even
in his sleep. There is also talk about “a man who smiled with his eyes,”
causing a woman bloom like a flower in season. That is not even enough because
in yet another poem, “ a woman meets her former lover (so that she is able) to
touch the wrinkles on his body and realizes that she still loves him even more than
before and that it was really “stupid (hat they had) let each other go the way
we did.”
Then there is a section called For Women Who Forget To
Breathe While Alive, which has poems about how women’s woes affect their
private and bodily lives. There are also sections about women failing to
survive and another more reassuring section about “women finding their feet.”
There is also a section that carries “the random thoughts of a woman sojourner.”
Maybe these are about the poet’s feelings at all the different spaces she has
visited (at home and abroad.)
And yes, this collection has sections about politics,
particularly our turbulent politics and how much we have developed wounds that
run deep. Zimbabwe of the recent times goes under appraisal.
This is Batsirai Chigama, unplugged. With this her
second collection after Gather The Children, which won the NAMA award 2019, this
poet decided to come out more flaming and establishing her identity as a poet
about raw feelings and the troubled internal landscapes as experienced by woman
and country.
Very ably edited by fellow poet, Ethel Kabwato, with
designs by Chiratidzo Chiweshe-Sauro, this book will find a place in Zimbabwean
poetry alongside firebrand poets like Freedom Nyamubaya, Eve Nyemba, Primrose Dzenga,
Hope Masike and others.
+ Book review by Memory Chirere, Harare.
