Creative writing workshop in Harare

 

Andrew Chatora on Ngugi's global stature

 

Ngugi wa Thiongo – Decolonial Icon, Mwalimu and Writer: A Voice Silenced, but Never Forgotten –

(Obituary by Andrew Chatora)

Behold, a great mountain has fallen! A titan of African Literature, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has passed on. A pioneering writer who told the African story relentlessly, he critiqued colonialism and the excesses of post-independence governments, with wild abandon. The inimitable Ngugi, go well, son of the soil.

I am deeply saddened by the passing on of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, a colossal figure and scholar in decolonial thought, literature, and activism. One of Africa and Kenya’s most celebrated author, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o died last week, aged 87. The highly regarded writer published his first novel; Weep Not Child  in 1964. He began writing in English, later switching to write primarily in Gikuyu. His works includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. His writing took on colonialism and also faced up to new evils by the post-colonial governments.

Today I mourn and celebrate the passing on of a literary giant and icon. Born in 1938, his writing examines the myriad of effects and legacy of colonialism. He was among the pioneering writers to tell the African story. His legacy is immeasurable and far-reaching. Ngugi leaves behind an admirable aspiration and an enduring impact.

“They came at night, in silence, their faces shadowed by masks. Those who spoke the truth or questioned the ways of power were never seen again. Their absence was a warning to the rest, a silence more deafening than words.” Petals of Blood.

This excerpt from Ngugi pretty much typified his writing and why many resonated with his works, myself amongst those many.

I studied A Grain of Wheat at the University of Zimbabwe taught by a Kenyan Lecturer Kimani Gecau, who’d been heavily involved in community theatre in Kenya where he directed Ngugi wa Thiongo’s plays at Kamirithu Community and Educational Centre. I remain forever fascinated by Ngugi’s representation of his protagonist Mugo introduced by a mesmerising first line to the book: ‘‘Mugo felt nervous.’’

Years later, after graduating from UZ, I was overjoyed to find myself teaching A Grain of Wheat to my A Level classes at Sakubva High in Mutare. Earlier, I had also taught Matigari to my students at St Matthias Tsonzo High School in Mutasa District, Manicaland. Ngugi’s writing made me sceptical and scathing of the establishment something which endeared me to my Literature students. But I only got to know of this, years on when I bumped into some of my erstwhile Tsonzo students and interacted with some of them.

We grew up with Ngugi, Achebe, Mungoshi as our staple literary diet in Zimbabwe. As a little boy growing up in Dangamvura, Mutare, I ravenously devoured a plethora of Ngugi’s gems, among them; the classics: The River Between, Devil on The Cross, The Tral of Dedan Kimathi, Decolonising the Mind among others. I may have been living in Mutare, Zimbabwe but already I was transported to the world and ridges of Kameno, Makuyu and Nyeri! Who can forget Waiyaki, Mwalimu, the teacher in The River Between, Ngugi’s enduring protagonist?

At Dangamvura high school with my peers Peter Chemvura, and John Sibanda; Decolonising the Mind was our go to manual blueprint which facilitated and fostered our Afrocentric arguments as fiery students of Literature at that nascent age. Though years later as a writer I respectfully disagree with Ngugi’s championing of indigenous languages over English or European Language’s usage perspective when one writes. As I’ve argued consistently, a writer needs to establish themselves first on the international stage before they start dissing English as a medium of writing in favour of their vernacular languages.^[1] You do this, you run the risk of being perpetually on the fringes or being thrown into oblivion.

But more critical; Ngugi had already gained global recognition writing in English when he decided to turn his back on it. So, we can all learn through how contradictory his position was on this. And besides, much as writers like Ngugi championed the use of indigenous African languages, which they did very well, they still later went on to translate their works into English and other so called imperialistic languages, which action I perceive as undermining their very argument on sticking to vernacular language use in their works. This is not meant to dent Ngugi’s contribution to the debate on the use of African Languages, but it’s just a difference of opinion and pragmatism on my part as a writer who understands the intricacies and nuances of making it big on the international  literary scene – the road to literary stardom.

Writing from a self-confessed position as an ambassador of the French language, Alain Mabanckou suggests that advocates of going back to African languages as unwilling to declare their interest. “Better yet, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s English-language publisher goes so far as to underwrite the publication of some of his books in Kenya but also in his native Kikuyu! So here we have the colonizer coming to the rescue of the colonized’s language!” Mabanckou's book, The Tears of the Black Man, is scathing and controversial, at times playing the devil's advocate on the racial question, while essentially beating the "black man" around to take responsibility. The likes of Ngugi are almost taken up as being guilty by association. Mabanckou lumps their authenticity politics with the superficiality and hypocrisy of Mobutu Sese Seko’s “Zairenization.” Ngugi, in fact, fought both Western imperialists and African nationalist dictators throughout his career. Few points, however, stand out in Mabanckou's counter-crusade, his argument that: literature is to be merited talent not activism; authenticity politics is mired in ambiguities and undeclared privileges; the languages of the coloniser allow Africans, who are, in fact, not a homogenous culture, to interact as different communities; and then, the idea that dealing in African languages requires as a working infrastructure, missing in most cases in African countries.

That said, Ngugi excelled in doing what the essayist of, “A Dead End for African Literature,” Obiajunwa Wali saw as the duty of any writer anywhere to test the duty of his language. For diaspora writers like me, this undertaking can only be daring. Prolonged disconnect with your mother language means you may ultimately dabble in it with classicist bias whereas the language has, in fact, evolved in your absence. Dambudzo Marechera confessed to this problem, that his Shona countrymen sounded like foreigners on his return from exile. Gonzo H. Musengezi also accused Solomon Mutswairo of editing his Shona book with rigid classicism when he came back from exile, crossing out his English-contaminated words for, one assumes, high-minded new Shona coinings which nobody really spoke like. These are problems that resolve themselves in trial and error, the only path available to a writer. And then there is the question of infrastructure – the unquestionably great works of Ayi Kwei Armah and Sankomota guitarist Frank Leepah, for example, are better preserved under big-machine labels, while their “self-published” efforts are largely out of print. Again, one has to doff to the imperfect empire-building of the great Africans as an initiative a future generation may be better resourced to perfect, the vision being all.

Ngugi remains a towering figure in terms of his legacy and contribution as a writer and Literature scholar. Such is the mark of a maestro who evokes so many controversies. But in scenes reminiscent of Mark Anthony’s eulogy at Caesar’s passing on: I am here to mourn the loss of Ngugi! You fought your race brilliantly. Go well the doyen of African Literature. 

It's an African loss. Yet, it's an African celebration. We mourn the loss of an African giant. Very sad loss. He was a candid and brilliant literate. His works live on as testimony of the gigantic strides and landmarks. He will remain one of my most cherished authors and critic.

As writer Charles Onyango says; ‘‘The old lion is gone. But the roar echoes.’’

Rest in peace Mwananchi Wa Thiong’o. May your words continue to cast their spell on generations to come.

[1] [In a 2021interview with Tanya Mackenzie a Doctoral Student on her Decolonial study thesis on the interplay between Zimbabwean identity and Zimbabwean Literature, in response to an interview question on Ngugi’s argument on the use of English Language medium, Andrew Chatora first advances a similar counter argument that a writer needs to establish themselves first on the global literary scene before they start dissing writing in English. Andrew Chatora is consistent in advancing his counter argument that, it’s all right for writers like Ngugi to berate English, but the elephant in the room is they’ve already made it as internationally recognized writers using English in the first place. Besides, why do they go on to translate their vernacular written works into English and other so called imperialistic languages? In addition, where a writer makes it on the international Literary Circuit, it remains their agency and personal choice whatever Language, they elect to use in their writing.]

Andrew Chatora is an award winning Zimbabwean writer and noted exponent of the African diaspora novel. His forthcoming fifth book Darkness in Me offers a poignant, haunting examination of action and consequence, fault and attribution, acceptance and resolution.

 

 

 

 

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Andrew Chatora reads Samantha Vazhure's Weeping Tomato

                                                           (Pic: Andrew Chatora)

Vazhure’s Weeping Tomato: An Intrepid Tale of Interconnected Binary Opposites - A Review by Andrew Chatora

Below, Andrew Chatora offers a minutiae examination of Samantha Vazhure’s recently published book: Weeping Tomato. Chatora lauds this book as potentially groundbreaking as it asserts its presence in the realm of African Literature. Chatora posits that Vazhure has flirted with Jean Baudrillard’s postmodern feel here and has just about thrown the cats among the pigeons, taking Zimbabwean writing to greater heights.

Samantha Rumbidzai Vazhure’s latest offering, Weeping Tomato, is a composite four part novella, beginning with the Prologue, then the Weeping Tomato proper, through to the Mudavose’s Return section and the blistering epilogue. Weeping Tomato offers a blend of magical realism tinged with contemporary AI parlance lexicon and the science fiction genre.

The prologue uses an elaborate language that estimates painting. I know that Rumbidzai Vazhure is a painter of renown, and the prologue takes you to her depths as a painter. Readers experience the world through the sense of sight and sounds erupt from the images on the canvas. Vazhure’s prologue is delicately set in the future 2090, which is over 60 years from now!

The universe comes in speckled colours. The environment is fused with sparkling diamonds and other minerals. Everywhere there are “wildflowers in perpetual propagation.”  Down and below is the mighty Mutirikwi valley as a special passenger from a western capital arrives to pay her last respects to one Mudavose, who had lived to the ripe age of 118. The magic is evident as they soon travel in a solar powered self flying car. In the houses built in the fashion of the Great Zimbabwe monument, readers find world leading scientists, mathematicians, physicists and biologists, who returned home to Zimbabwe from the diaspora to be part of the Dzimbagwe rebuild.

In this Zimbabwe of 2090, spirit possession has long become a science and no longer a myth or a dark thing. As people wait for Mudavose to become a mhondoro, the CCTV monitors are set in motion. We are all advised, that “your purpose on earth is to change narratives and create new systems that are aligned with the code of cosmic powers.”

The collective consciousness of Vazhure’s futuristic society is constantly reinforced and captured in her refrain: ‘‘This wealth belongs to the people of Dzimbabgwe. All of them! No one here goes without’’ A far cry from the contemporary kakistocracy, kleptocracy world currently obtaining punctuated by unashamed, unbridled, rampant plunder of national wealth and coffers. Perhaps, Vazhure is teasing out her boundless optimism here in projecting a fully functioning and reconstituted Zimbabwe in future years.

The main story, Weeping Tomato, is about Zorodzai, a fifty year old Shona woman based in the UK who desperately falls in love with a 35 year old Zimbabwean man resident in South Africa, Adam. Their trail blazing love affair begins and is played out online through Whatsapp, Twitter and video chatting. Zorodzai is fast quitting her husband James  because he is no longer interested in her. The thrill is gone. Their home, an imposing six bedroom house on a five acre estate in England’s rural Herefordshire is becoming more of a prison. Zorodzai’s questing spirit seeks to break the boundaries of marriage, age, place and distance.  This immensely beautiful segment is built in realism and is rendered in very simple language.

The love between Zorodzai and her toyboy lover Adam is sensational and escapist. Sometimes they chat on the net for six hours with no break. One day Adam asks Zorodzai to call her as she relieves herself in the bathroom saying, “I want to hear the precious trickle of your divine feminine waters flowing into the toilet chamber…just call (me) and wee, ok”

Zorodzai agrees and Adam cries out, “That was beautiful, my love. In the absence of physical contact, that is the closest I can get to making love to you.”

In a somewhat epiphany moment in an Italian hotel after experiencing a surreal sexual reawakening of great magnitude, Zorodzai reflects; 

‘‘I pause to ponder how we failed our relationship, or how it failed us. Could it be that our voices vanished with the arrival of our children? Not only did they silence our sounds of pleasure during lovemaking, forcing artificial silence where it did not fit, but they also made us stop arguing and disagreeing, forcing us to maintain an illusion of perfection and bliss.’’

Bizarrely, Zorodzai’s incessant squabbling and bickering relationship with her online toyboy lover Adam, evokes Marechera’s equally recurrent motif of erratic couples/ heroes and villains constantly fighting in their troubled relationships. The joys of Fuzzy Goo’s eccentric world is reincarnated here.

Adam contrasts sharply with James who pays Zorodzai very little attention. Zorodzai starts to write a series of love poems for Adam, and they may as well fill up an anthology. As she gets sucked up in this world, she loses her balance. She feels like a teenager. She starts to plan to escape to South Africa so that she meets Adam. When she travels, disaster strikes and that is the climax of this story. When Zorodzai comes back almost empty handed, she gradually disintegrates like a weeping and overripe tomato. She is damaged and oozing out the juices of life. She realizes that she is part of a conveyor belt made up of great matriarchs and that she has capacity to transcend into other states of being. Zorodzai gets ready to morph into Mudavose, a woman who once lived before her. Mudavose splinters into a high order of existence all the way up to the epilogue.

Through the perennial mundane exchanges between the amorous lovers, Zorodzai and Adam, Vazhure vividly paints brilliant, poignant ideas on perception of happiness, money and class. In the background underscoring the place and scope of black immigrants in a largely racist and classist Britain. But the beauty of Vazhure’s prowess is that all this is done with utmost finesse, nuance and dexterity, moving along with the reader onboard throughout.

In Weeping Tomato, Vazhure has scaled greater heights here. This is a stellar contribution to the field of Afro Diaspora Literature whose lasting impact will be felt by future generations.

Bravo Samantha! 

Long may her literary prowess continue.

Reviewer Biography

Andrew Chatora is an award-winning Zimbabwean author and noted exponent of the African diaspora novel. Candid, relentlessly engaging and vulnerable, his novels are a polarising affair among social critics and literary aficionados. Chatora’s forthcoming book, Crabs in a Barrel is characterful, topical and compelling, with a narrative which is sharp, relatable and deeply evocative. His debut novella, Diaspora Dreams (2021), was the well-received nominee of the National Arts Merit Awards in Zimbabwe, while his subsequent works, Where the Heart Is, Harare Voices and Beyond and Inside Harare Alcatraz and Other Short Stories, have cemented his contribution as a voice of the excluded. Harare Voices and Beyond was awarded the Silver (2024) Anthem Awards for championing diversity, equity and inclusion. 

 

 

 

KwaChirere reads Zagamo by Ray Mawerera

 

Title: Zagamo: The war within

Author: Ray Mawerera

Published in Harare by Royalty Books, 2023,109 pages

Isbn: 987-11779330819

 

A book review by Memory Chirere

 

Ray Mawerera will surely be in deep trouble for his pacey debut novella, Zagamo: The War Within. Some stunned readers may constantly turn over the book to look at the picture of the author himself with excitement and return to the story. Yet, some other readers may really want to take out the sjambok and ask why this writer plays hide and seek with them as if he pays them money!

 

About three full times, you appear to control this story, as a reader, but it springs up and races in all unusual directions. Yes, there is something weirdly called reader control. It is a state in which a reader of a novel is aware of what may definitely come next, and the reader feels like he also wrote the story himself. Ray Mawerera does not allow you that.

 

In the Creative Writing class, it is often said; suspense is a valuable tool for keeping a reader’s attention and interest. Suspense involves withholding information and raising key questions that pique readers’ curiosity. With suspense, you’re playing with your readers’ expectations of time. They know information is coming, but they just don’t know when.  Mawerera does that. He dribbles you and you fall then he asks you to stand up and come get the ball. He dribbles you with yet more suspense and an unpredictable plot.

 

That boy, Zagamo, just appears from nowhere.

 

From the beginning, the narrator does not know that Zagamo is not the real name of his new school mate. He does not know that soon, he will discover that he is related to Zagamo. He will always be crying for Zagamo. It is the late 1970’s in the Salisbury township of Highfield and out there, a bush war is raging between the Rhodesians and the guerrillas.

 

Unkwon to his new city classmates, Zagamo is coming from the back of beyond, where he has seen his family slaughtered by the Rhodesian military. He only survived because he had been sent to fetch sugar, or is it salt, from the next hut.

 

A war is raging within Zagamo.

 

Although Zagamo is the fastest runner on the school track, he is already dead. His nights are full of ghosts. He is not a boy. He is not yet a man. Deep within he is searching for what he does not know to be revenge. The arrest of his one and only surviving relative, an uncle, becomes the straw that breaks the back of the camel…and that of big Zagamo.

 

One Friday after dinner when Zagamo and Uncle Dobola had visited, Zagamo asked Father: “Baba, where were the African leaders when the Europeans sat down to share African countries amongst themselves?”

 

The two elderly men looked at each other. Father said, slowly, thoughtfully: “They were not invited. It was a meeting of Europeans only. Why do you ask?”

 

“I thought maybe they did not know about this meeting, or they did not have ships to go where the meeting was?” Zagamo says, more to himself than the shocked audience. Why is this child speaking like an oracle?

 

And one day… Zagamo disappears from home and country!

 

You want him to return alive. But when he returns, he tests your notion of justice to the limits. Ray Mawerera’s novel is a testament that the literature about the Zimbabwe war of liberation continues to grow in many clear directions and modes. There is the story written about contact by combatants like Alexander Kanengoni and Thomas Bvuma. There is the story about real contact told by non-combatants like Shimmer Chinodya. There is the story written about this war by former Rhodesian fighters like Angus Shaw and Jeremy Ford. Then there is the story written about the activities in mobilising townships like Highfield, by non-combatants like Stanley Nyamfukudza, Olley Maruma and now, Ray Mawerera.

 

The strands keep growing, showing that war is a complex thing even for those who are not at the front.

 

Edited by prolific novelist, Philliph Chidavaenzi, Zagamo is an easy read. It will not harm you because you can read through it during a road trip from Harare to Beitbridge.

 

However, get ready for the brutally twisting plot which Mawerera has prepared for you. It appears to me that for Mawerera, the golden rule of crafting a story is that; no one and nothing is quite as it seems.

 

I predict that you will read this story and either hug Mawerera or seek his throat or both! It is thrilling to be thrilled.

 

Ray Mawerera is a veteran Zimbabwean journalist and public relations expert based in Harare where he stays with his wife Caroline. The couple has three adult children.

 

 

Three Mosi-oa-tunya poets

 

Title: Mosi – Oa-Tunya: Three Zim Poets

Poets: Tawanda Chideme, George Kandiero and Timothy Maneswa

Published by Well of Wisdoma Global, 2024

Isbn:978-0-7961-1994-0, 129pages

A Book review by Memory Chirere

 

This is a multi-tasking collection of poems by three Zimbabwean poets, Tawanda Chideme, George Kandiero and Tim Maneswa. The blessing that a multitasking anthology brings to the reader is that each poet showcases his different ways of handling various themes and methods of crafting the poem.

But inversely, and this can be an enriching reading technique, one read this book in search of what each poet really appears to specialize in and what he appears to master. What is the standalone character of each poet? What is each poet’s signature and what new themes or ways of writing are the poets bringing to the table?

I think Tawanda Chideme has mastered the Zimbabwean myths of origins. Myths of origins are stories that explain the beginning of a natural or social aspect of the world. These myths are a cultural way of explaining how something came to be and are often rich with moral information.

Chideme’s passion in that area is clear. In the poem “Hwedza Mountain” Chideme explores how that iconic mountain began as a giant that cursed the creator and he, in his anger, turned Hwedza Mountain into a heap of earth, boulders and trees as we know it today. The mountain, it is said through folklore, had just eaten a whole elephant and had drunk from the nearby Save River until that magical river became dry for a while.

In a parody of TS Eliot’s “Macavity-the mystery cat,” Chideme plays around and refashions with the well-known and charmed story about the original character of the Makwiramiti (Soko) totem. He turns it around into a story about how the ways of the monkey can be traced in our midst in contemporary society.

Makwiramti has fast fingers. He is the proverbial master fraudster. He is a pilferer. He steals like there is not tomorrow. After the act, his fingers are not found on any surface that he touches and therefore many serious modern thieves of Harare must be wearing the Makwiramuti charm!

The poet writes articulately and creatively about the Bantu migration and how and why we the Bantus left Guruuswa, the land of tall grasses, coming South to the land of Chivavarira, which means the promised land. During that journey, biblical manna is introduced. And when the Bantus reach Kasambabezi river, Biri the ancestor of ours, produced her rod and hit the waters of the Zambesi and they parted.

And as men, women and children crossed over, they were given totems by a voice from above. This poem talks about the origins of Shona people and how the soft pristine earth, at the time, was equivalent to the biblical Garden of Eden.

At that time, the commandments were given. Chief Haarari’s name became Harare as we know it today. Mambo Mbari of Shumba Gurundoro totem, had a sister called Sekwa, who was mocked and teased by Mbari’s wives for being crippled. Sekwa sulked and threw herself into a pool and that pool became known as Dzivarasekwa.

Mambo Mbari had a son in law called Kambudzirume, and that is the origin of the word Kambuzuma. Mufakose is a name coming from Shava Mhofu who is related to Mbari through his wife, Mwera. He is Mufakose because he is like the proverbial maize cob which is roasted from both sides, and it loses it all in the fight for life. Mabvuku, which is another area within today’s great Harare area, comes from the word mabvukubvuku, which means an area of many springs. This poem is a must read!

Pain runs across George Kandiero’s poems. His persona has capacity for various emotions. He is a master at naming various forms of pain.  “She is nolonger mine” is the most excruciating statement that a man can utter. I presume that the man has lost a mother, sister or a lover and the memories of “her sweaty brow, a scruffy frock, the swollen legs etc” remain on one’s mind which, we are told, runs “on cruise control.”

“Mr. economy” is an emotional piece. You notice that the economy begins with a small letter ‘e’, but it ravages the person’s body and soul until he cries out, “just retire, Mr. economy!” It is a song sung at a huge unrelenting giant: “Mr. economy unhinge us from the hook of your horror.”

Then there is the poem about one Cynthia who stays next door to the boy persona and all he recalls is how the adults abused the 8-year-old endlessly. There is the cracking whip that splits Cynthia’s flesh, the whistling slap that left Cynthia numb and the drunken daze of fists and kicks. She is a Christ-like figure. It is apparent that that the abuse of children is rampant in our society.

Cynthia is always clad in a purple oversized uniform and Cynthia’s screams of pain each day echoes across the township, ripping to pieces the calm of the night. Nobody rescues Cynthia and the persona could not do anything because he is also another child of eight.

Kandiero’s shorter poems like Jazz, Today and Beer may actually do well if sung with the accompaniment of an instrument as they feel like they were written with a close consciousness of rhythm and emotion.

Tim Muneswa’s poems are about the bewildering magic that erupts from real places, people and time. He writes with a dreamy and edgeless brush and the spooky worlds come alive in his key poems. Edgeless art is not driven by a desire to be understood but by a desire to draw out experience as felt by the artist in its original dream like state, without giving away predictable meaning

“The water people,” for example is a poem about all those haunted places we have known. A man or woman stands near a real pool, with an elder going deep into the history of the goings on around the pool.

The pool cannot be pointed at with a human finger, because as they say in Shona, the finger may actually grow gangrene. So the elder points at the pool using his shaking elbow. In the mornings, we are told, you can hear the sounds of spoons scouring last night’s meal, girls giggling as they cook and the clanging of iron beating iron, making spears and hoes.

In the afternoons, if you are by the pool, we are told, you hear sounds of women pounding sorghum in their mortars and can you actually see freshly laundered clothes. In the evenings, we can actually hear the sounds of herd boys driving cattle home and the narrations many more hair rising things. The voice of the narrator insists that these things really take place.

In the poem “Encounter” a beer drinker says good bye to his drinking mates in the night and, as is often his habit, he passes by the graveyard by the road, loudly speaking to each of the relatives buried there, updating them on the events in the family; “Anzvirai resigned from the army. Timo and his family are now in South Africa. Sabhuku Ganje got an ox from Simba’s case.” And many other news are shared.

Then on this particular night, something very nasty and shocking happens to the beer drinker when he is talking to the dead in the cemetery. The dead show him that they are not really dead and that they may not always be exactly friendly to talkative and daring drunken passersby.

“Goooooal!” is another poem that dwells on the baffling and mysterious side of everyday things like a game of football. For instance, the crowd and the short sighted referee say the penalty has yielded a goal but the goalkeeper and several other conscious players can actually see that it was not really a goal. The biggest challenge is that the goal posts are not adorned with nets at the time.

In these poems by Tim Muneswa, there are many invisible things that ordinary people see beyond our simple three dimensional world.

This is a collection of poems meant for readers who are looking for unity in diversity. That the colection is named after Tawanda Chideme’s poem, “Mosia-oa-Tunya” is a clear indication that the fulcrum to this whole collection is the society of Zimbabwe and its superimposing spiritual and physical traditions.

 

 

Dambudzo Marechera writes again to Samantha...

                               
 

     Dear Samantha

This is a deathbed epistle! Conversely, it is some kind of postscript. With sheer hindsight, I dwell on my impending death and what will happen after I am gone. The grime. The cheap and sordid details. Telling it all as if I had never died in the first place. Fasten your belt. Which of you two bastards is death?

 

In our culture they say, if you meditate long enough, you may eavesdrop into key events that will take place long after you are gone. Do you also have it in your culture?

 

The Shona mbira player is often a seer. Sometimes he wails, “Ndakanga Ndabaiwa! Ndakanga ndabaiwa! Hoyi hoyi!” Singing about that kaleidoscopic view of what takes place long after you have expired. Those kind of cheap and sordid details which are the channels through which the universe flows.

Sometimes you are allowed to gawk at your crestfallen doppelganger. There are lots of opinions about how long a departed soul remains in contact with loved ones and foes. Death does not kill, our people often muse, as they pass on the calabash of chibuku from one hand to the other, while sitting beneath the tall msasa tree whose branches scrape the corrugated iron roofs.

 

Yes, which of you two bastards is death? I am serious. Samantha, I am not hallucinating. By the time you read this letter, I could be six feet under. Right now, I am writing from a hospital bed in Zimbabwe. But when you read this piece in the future, these things will be happening exactly as I give them now. What is time but a revolving grenade, searching for a target who has since moved on!

 

It is strange how the thought of death both scares and emboldens me. However, I can say, like Dylan Thomas, I don’t want to go gently into the night. Like that poet with a tortured soul, I have also acquired a reputation as a "roistering, drunken and doomed poet." And there will be no silence in the cemetery because always there are burials and more burials of people.

 

But look, Samantha, here I am, raging, raging… against the dying of the light! To understand Dambudzo Marechera or any other writer for that matter, you first have to know his background, experience and influences.  I do not consider influences pernicious: they are a type of apprenticeship.

From early in my life, I have always viewed literature as a unique universe that has no internal divisions. I do not pigeon-hole literature by race or language or nation. It is an ideal cosmos co-existing with this crude one. I had a rather grim upbringing in the ghetto and have ever since tried to deny the painful reality of concrete history.

I have psychoanalysed myself because I don’t think anybody else can even come an inch to understanding who I am. Forget about what critics, friends, psychiatrists and even my relatives say about me.

 

I am surprised how literary critics trouble themselves trying to unravel the meaning of a writer’s work instead of first studying the writer. The degree of pain may differ but the torturer’s technique is the same. We are not at the beginning, we are at the end-we are at the mid-point of the scream, the eye of the storm.

 

They say Dambudzo loves white women, Dambudzo likes his bottle, Dambudzo this Dambudzo that! Am I really this Rasputin or black Cassanova they invent who is always hungry for white pussy? It is more complicated than that. And by the way, what I write about sex is largely from my extensive reading on sex than my own experience.

 

To understand me, go back with me on the horrid journey back to the slums of my boyhood. My life there formed in me the sharp contrast of wretched black decay and white paradise that I saw at the University when I first started encountering whites first hand.

 

This was worsened by my mother resorting to prostitution to feed us in the absence of our father. My love for white women is just a tolerable alternative to sleeping with black women since whenever I sleep with my own kind, I feel like I am sleeping with my mother!

 

Incest.

 

Imagine hearing sobbing sounds from your mother in the next room and getting a hard on! I remember one regular lover, some clerk in Smith’s government who used to leave a lot of money and foodstuffs like bread, butter, eggs and Mazoe… visiting our house one day and asking me if my mother was around. If only he knew the murderous demons that were brewing in my chest, he could have run away. Run boy run, like Shimmer Chinodya was going to write in some Zibf script writing competition. I could have killed the bastard body and soul. I could have crushed him to a stain.

I was shaking.

 

Well, I lied that my mother had gone out. Unfortunately, my mother, who was in the kitchen heard me and came out of the house to reprimand me for lying before retiring to the bedroom with that horny rascal. I had a strong temptation to creep back to the house, get a butcher knife from the kitchen and kill both of them. Instead, I had chosen to go out and cry.

 

I had read about the Yorkshire killer Pete Sutcliffe who, like me, had heard voices while working as a gravedigger. He claimed the voices originated from the headstone of a Polish man, Bronisław Zapolski, and that the voices were that of God. Sutcliffe pleaded guilty to seven charges of attempted murder. Despite my voices being indecipherable unlike Sutcliffe’s voices that ordered him to kill prostitutes, I knew their source.

 

For Sutcliffe, all women were whores and it was only his “perfect” mother who lived up to his warped ideal of womanhood but even that illusion was shattered when her secret extramarital affair was revealed.

 

To me my mother was chaste, a Madona figure up to the time my father died when she became a harlot. Despite the circumstances, I found it impossible to accept and hated her with a passion.

 

I remember the first time I lost my virginity shouting Venezia, my mother’s name and withdrawing my dick just after several thrusts. The woman I was making love to pulled me back, surprised at my action. She didn’t realise that she was making the same sobbing sounds I had heard from my mother’s bedroom when her numerous lovers visited. I felt like I was making love to my mother! Thought is more fatal than bilharzia.

 

Somehow I identify with Malcolm X’s relationship with Sophia, a "Negro-crazy" white woman in the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Because of Sophia, Malcolm jilted Laura — because Sophia was more of a status symbol than his black girl. I eventually jilted all black women for my white Sophias, Samanthas and Floras. Either the relationships with black girls was short and unromantic or they brought a feeling of immense guilt.

 

Samantha, there is the other equally formative experience that together with my sexual memories would make people come close to understanding me.

 

Towards 1969 or sometime in the early 70s, I am not sure when, my grandmother, who was accused of being a witch and left in the bush to die a slow painful death sometime in the 1890s started haunting the family to find a host to live in. Dying the way she had died in such a gruesome manner meant that her spirit never rested and came back to haunt my mother who lost her mind.

 

She just lost it the same way I somehow did when the same spirit entered me birthing the Dambudzo the world knew and respected or despised in equal measure.

 

My mother’s madness I am told caused so much despair that when she sought advice from a witchdoctor, he told her that she could only get rid of the mental illness by passing it on to one of her children.

 

She did not choose my eldest brother Lovemore, because he was her favourite. Neither did she choose my other brother Michael because he was named after a powerful ancestor whose spirit would protect him from such things.

 

The bitch chose me instead.

 

You remember Samantha how that tarot reader at an Oxford fair reacted when we went into her tent. She hysterically asked us to leave complaining that I was going to disrupt her energies because I had a more powerful spirit than hers. You laughed it off as mere superstition but I knew better.

 

The spirit that possesses me is the Dambudzo Marechera the world knows. The innocent boy Charles died many years ago to be replaced with a disruptive, bohemian, bellicose and wayward being.

 

Throughout my life, I have secretly been connected to this spiritual realm. The contact is devastating and oppressive. What people see are only results of this relationship emanating from the spirit that has possessed me. That is why in my works, I have explored madness, dreams and day-dreams, abnormal states of mind and all kinds of erratic inclinations.

 

Do you remember at Oxford, how I continuously played music by the Doors especially the song Light My Fire long before I discovered that the band’s frontman Jim Morrison was a shaman like me. Like me, Morrison was called to play a particular role in life before being called to the other world at an early age.

 

Jim's experience on the New Mexico highway as a five-year-old is an excellent example of this type of "calling" experience. And while his family stated that they did not recall the event, this in no way negates its authenticity.

 

While driving from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, the family came upon an overturned truck. Beside the truck, and scattered along the highway, were numerous passengers, one of whom was a Medicine Man who was in the process of passing into spirit.

 

Throughout his life, Jim could vividly recall the spirit of this shaman entering his own body when he died. This was the initial calling and meeting with his guide, according to tradition.

With me my guide is the spirit of my grandmother who was left in the bush to die and could not rest till it found home in a family member who happened to be my mother and later me. Since being hospitalised, I am more aware of who I am.

I contain different characters what you people call dissociative identity disorder or multiple personality disorder, a mental health condition where you have two or more separate personalities that control your behaviour at different times.

I know the sources of my personality; my grandmother’s spirit and sexual disorientation-driven Dambudzo that is the strongest and most dominant of my character. The other me is humble, shy, cowardly and peaceful. It is this me that has come out to reclaim its place as I lie dying in the hospital ward waiting my fate.

What many people saw in public and in my writing is a masquerade that belied the true image of the Dambudzo that is unadulterated by my experience in Rusape and the spirit that is coming to claim me the same way my grandmother was violently claimed.

When the Oxford college authorities earlier offered me the choice of a treatment or expulsion, I agreed to see the psychiatrists at the Warneford Mental Hospital, where the doctors concluded that I was not mentally ill, and instead suggested counselling.

I did not take up the offer because I knew the Dambudzo they wanted to treat and what ailed him. It was not an illness that any psychiatrist could diagnose. That was long before I finally took my things and left.

Like I have stated before, Samantha, the other me is craven and peaceful. The other side of me that you and others saw so frequently was a cover-up.

This reminds me of the collective courage you see in soldiers especially in battle. The masochism you see is usually borrowed courage expressed by singing and pretending to be brave.

My cousin who fought in the second Chimurenga where a number of his colleagues had earlier been killed told me a story of a very macho and outwardly valiant commander who barked his commands at everyone and meted out punishment at the slightest misdemeanor.

One day, when the group of soldiers was about to go out for some operation following an earlier heavy loss of his colleagues, my cousin went into the commander’s office to report something. To his surprise he caught a tearful commander praying with a picture of his daughter and a Bible clutched to his chest.

Don’t forget that cowards are pretty consistent in their cowardice. They can sometimes do something brave. The truth is if you put a courageous person next to a coward, the coward will become less scared.

However, it is possible that the coward is just acting brave because he is afraid of the consequences of having a braver person witnessing his cowardice.

For me my audience was society comprising anyone in authority. Later it was literary critics, Zimbabweans at home, my family members, university students and of course the white populace, the latter group where I sought validation.

I can confess that my experience at my first contact with whites did not just provoke protest against their racism but a strange craving for anything white and a loathing for anything black.

In America, I could have right come out as some Uncle Tom, which I am inwardly, but because of fear of being shunned by the so-called progressive Africans, I have always tried to fit in as some revolutionary leftist unhappy with the status quo of white dominance. It is as a result of this loathing that I come out loving white girls and shunning my black women because of what is perceived as my shameful Shona heritage.

I was like Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. He is a coward inwardly but pretends to be brave just to be accepted in the Ibo society that valued bravery over cowardice.

In that vein I regret how I treated a fellow writer Aaron Moyo who writes in Shona when we went to a book function at a township school some years back after my return to Zimbabwe. His inimitable Shone novel, Ziva Kwawakabava was still hot from the oven and the brother was having his time in the sun. A friend had shown it to me in London and I read it all, catching the smell of my own mother's armpits in every line.

People appear to recall that I once shouted at Aaron, “Take him out; he is not a writer, he is a munyori!”

It was at a writer’s event in good old Harare. “Uri munyori iwe, not a writer!” they say I thundered.

I am a writer in the English sense and Moyo is a writer in the African sense since he writes in our native tongue. He must fully embrace the term munyori in order to promote the language that he writes in. Is that not accurate? I wanted to horsewhip Aaron for appearing to hesitate to take the munyori label!

The cases of Charles Mungoshi, Chenjerai Hove and Musa Zimunya and others, who write both in English and Shona and winning awards always left me envious. Was my soul spinning? There are writers like Dostoevsky, who only wrote in Russian but the sheer power of his art sent all translators rushing around like mad, translating his works into many world languages. 

Garcia Marquez’s most successful work as a writer is the long and expansive Spanish language novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude which became a huge success in the years after its publication in 1967, selling more than 10 million copies in more than 30 languages! It made Márquez a leader of the Latin American literary "boom" and an international phenomenon.

My own The House of Hunger would really look shit in Shona, Twi, Amharic, Kiswahili, Zulu and other African languages if translators out there had guts!

Bless Tinashe Mchuri and others for finally rendering Animal Farm into Shona. Who could have imagined such a miracle in our days except perhaps Ngugi Wa Thiongo himself? And to think that guy Ignatius Mabasa has written a whole PhD thesis in Shona! What a coup! Language is like water. You can drink it. You can swim in it. You can drown in it.

All that makes Aaron Chiundura Moyo a pathfinder! When will his Ziva Kwawakabva burst into other languages beyond Shona? God, where are our translators?

The munyori incident reminds me of a comedian I saw at some show in Harare. The comedian sent the audience laughing by juxtaposing African names with European ones. He said the mangy dogs you saw in townships were imbwa-dog in Shona, while those well-fed dogs one saw in white suburbs were ‘dogs.’

He went on to say that the uncle from townships or villages who came to social function in urban areas were sekurus while those who drove cars and had acquired western education were ‘Uncles.’ He went on to give parallels of African and western things to the delight of the audience.

Some people have begun to wonder if I ever wrote in my mother tongue, Shona. However, I did write in Shona even when people rarely talk about it. I have written a Shona play ‘The Servants’ Ball and it is a sequel to ‘The Toilet.’ Don’t faint. It is real.

It is not difficult to place the play ‘The Servants’ Ball.’ Other than being in Shona, it is in the mode of my Mindblast plays like ‘The Toilet’, ‘The Coup’, ‘The Gap’ and several others which satirise the new African elite and the local and international white racist and corrupt associates for not showing responsibility in their exercise of power and business. It is written in scintillating, Chiungwe, the dialect dominant in my Rusape district in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Province. ‘The Servants’ Ball’, like the Mindblast plays, is an attack on the corruption of the newly-independent Zimbabwean society.

Various scenarios seem to have driven home the idea that I would never write in Shona. In an ‘interview’ with Veit-Wild in which I interview myself in 1983, I declare my relationship with the Shona language. I had asked myself if I had ever thought of writing in Shona. I answer: “It never occurred to me. Shona was part of the ghetto daemon I was trying to escape. Shona had been placed within the context of a degraded, mind-wrenching experience from which apparently the only escape was into the English language and education…I took to the English language as a duck takes to water…”

 

However, earlier on, on 6 May 1982, I did put my so-called diatribe against Shona into context. I am quoted by Veit Wild as having said:

“In Zimbabwe we have these two great indigenous languages, ChiShona and SiNdebele… Who wants us to keep writing these ShitShona and ShitNdebele languages, this missionary chickenshit? Who else but the imperialists?”

 

Here, I was simply putting forward the argument that the kind of Shona and Ndebele narratives churned out from the 1950’s to 1980, were heavily manipulated by the establishment through the Southern Rhodesian Literature Bureau.

 

A study on this matter reveals that the bureau was created in 1956 as part of the Ministry of Information. Its salient objective was to direct the novel along ‘the path of least ideological resistance to the Rhodesian government.’

 

Its founding director, a Mr Krog, set out to search for subversive material in every manuscript before it was published. This was counterproductive to the development of the novel in Shona and Ndebele rendering it generally “silent on contemporary socio-political crises” and “having characters who are neutral on colonial economic policies.”

 

This saw the development of a fiction dabbling in stereotypes based on idealistic morality and caused ‘a dearth of exploratory historical fiction.

 

As I watch Zimbabwe degenerate into a failed state just like Nigeria, Congo DRC and Somali under Mugabe’s dictatorship, I have realised that maybe I have been too hard on this regime. I have acted like a strict father trying to control his child who has a learning disability.

 

Well, Africans have their own way of doing things inherent in their DNA. Imposing westernisation on them is like expecting a dog not to bark. I say this knowing how most western interventions fail to sprout on African soil.

 

Oh Samantha, I have to end here, I have started feeling nauseous, feverish and a little bit dizzy. I wish to die during the day. Nights are nightmarish with unbearable spiritual visitations that I cannot stand.

 

Remember in our class how I loved quoting Dylan Thomas. He is even more relevant now since I am asking myself whether it is right to surrender to death, or to resist it.

 

Yours faithfully, Charles.

+ Austin Kaluba is a Zambian journalist, poet and short story writer. He is the author of the epistolary short story "Dambudzo Writes to Samantha" that went viral especially in Zimbabwe. Many Zimbabweans believed it was written by Dambudzo himself because of the similarity of the language Kaluba employed and that of the late writer. Kaluba has turned the Marecherean writing methods into a stand alone art form. Kaluba who also lived in Oxford and frequented some social joints where Dambudzo used to hang out after being expelled from the university, has been a keen follower of the troubled writer as evidenced by this sequel to Dambudzo Writes to Samantha. Here he unravels Dambudzo's troubled background especially after his father died and the family secret of a grandmother haunting the family for a host and the many things that have taken place ever since Dambudzo's death....

+Dambudzo Marechera pic by Ernest Schade