Golden Guvamatanga's debut poetry collection!

 

A book review

Title: Let the Children Make a Wish,

Published in Harare by Underclass Books & Films ISBN: 978-1-77933-034-5, 160 pages, 2026.

Author: Golden Guvamatanga

 

(Reviewed by Memory Chirere)

In Let the Children Make a Wish, Golden Guvamatanga’s poems in English operate in the spirit of Blues music. The Blues are endowed with an inexhaustible energy that veils and relieves suffering.

Veteran journalist, Golden Guvamatanga’s debut poetry collection, is clearly inspired and anchored on Zimbabwe’s November 2017’s ‘Operation Restore Legacy’ movement. His poems appear to be about finding what the nation promises itself and if it really delivers. What is right and what is wrong for and about Zimbabwe?

The poet constantly wonders if April 1980 and November 2017, the two cataclysmic dates in the history of Zimbabwe, are each other’s twin shadows. What was won or lost through those two dates?  Sometimes the poet thinks that they are each other’s sparring partners. Could he be thinking, too, that they are both about running on the same spot in a dark summer night? Guvamatanga touches on the euphoric promises of 1980 and 2017, and the subsequent challenges of how exactly we can make history grant the children their real wish.

If the children were to draw Nehanda on the township wall, would they make her fly like an angel? Why? Why not?

Here, as in Blues music, is an expression of the resilience and tragedy of the people. In an overriding avuncular tone, the title poem talks about the need to let the children make a final determination about their heritage. But the children can only make that wish “only if their fate lies blissfully in their obliging hands and when their destiny is poised for their expectant, loving palms.” But do Guvamatanga’s children know who they are and what they want? Who is eating the children’s cookie?

In these ghetto-centric poems, written by a poet who grew up long after the guns of liberation went silent, we are linked to issues that refuse to die in Zimbabwe. This is often called the Zimbabwean question which is “the recurrent economic, social and political crises” from colonial conquest in 1896, up to the present. As you read these poems, you feel that Zimbabwe is a nation of unresolved conflict of over a century. Guvamatanga writes, in one of these poems:

“The old does not give in easily to the incoming new.

There is always a drift towards war when a new power

threatens

To dislodge the hegemonic control of an existing

one from the levers of power.

But this new carry promises of prosperity.

 It comes scarred by hostile tirades from the old.”

 

This is a question once raised elsewhere by another Zimbabwean poet, Tanaka Chidora. As stated by Franz Fanon elsewhere, the new and the old are failing to have a clean break because, maybe, the seeds are not exactly new. The deliberately irregular lines of these poems point at our wobbly cartwheels on which we ride in our ever-challenging quest for an anchor. The poet, however, suggests that although we are not yet there, we are the right people who must try to get there! That is the most redeeming thrust of this collection. Ties with the ancestors are created and Guvamatanga is suggesting, like Amilcar Cabral, that we can reclaim our upward thrust in history.  

For Cabral, reclaiming the "upward thrust in history" meant that national liberation was not just a political act of gaining independence, but a return to the source of a people's own culture and history, which had been interrupted and suppressed by colonial domination. In these poems the prophet keeps saying that there are many things that need correction. The ancestors keep saying that:

“Only yesterday I was like you boy

I was there too when the world craved for light

But darkness found me moseying wildly in its sight.

Just desist from following that lane, Son,

 For soon you would be talking from the grave like me.”

 

This book is about the land of notorious plumbers. They know every corner of the old sewer system. Now, these plumbers also cause the blockages so that they come to unblock them! So that they are congratulated by all and sundry! These are often called white knights or Spotlight Rangers. Both concepts refer to someone who swoops in to solve a problem they likely instigated or encouraged, often to look good. 

 

These poems dwell on the township which teems with the boys and girls who play around the township corners and the bridges. Guvamatanga appears to sympathise with them. He gives them a voice that challenges stereotypes, often using humour, oral tradition, and solidarity, to survive and critique the "ways of big people in society".  Guvamatanga elevates the ordinary experiences of these little people, showcasing their joys, struggles, and culture as worthy of artistic representation.

 

Do not be sad... because there are many sunny love poems that anchor this book, with some clearly autobiographical! This collection operates like a notebook, insisting on being unfinished and unhinged too. The poet surely wanted to dance a new and ungainly dance through poetry. Many thanks to Onai Mushava for the inspiring selection and editing. Mushava himself is a firebrand poet. Viva Zimbabwean poetry!