"Revisiting Dambudzo Marechera - old texts brought to new life"

picture:1974. Courtesy of New College, Oxford.

On the occasion of Flora Veit-Wild's forthcoming visit to Zimbabwe, the ZGS is hosting an event on the 13th of March 5.30pm, Harare, entitled:

"Revisiting Dambudzo Marechera - old texts brought to
new life"

Flora Veit-Wild, Professor of African Literatures and
Cultures at Humboldt University in Berlin, lived in
Zimbabwe for over ten years. Here she met and worked
with Dambudzo Marechera and, after his death in 1987,
became one of the founder members of the Dambudzo
Marechera Trust. She was instrumental in collecting and
publishing his posthumous works and has written about his
life and work in numerous books and articles. Up to now
she represents the Marechera estate regarding new editions
and translations of his work.

Many people talk about Marechera's life, much fewer about his texts. The ZGS will organize a panel of contributors who each present their favourite Dambudzo piece. This means, reading or performing a poem or short prose or dramatic text by the writer and subsequently engaging with it. Alternatively or additionally, one could read/perform one's own literary text inspired by Dambudzo.

Each contributor will have a slot of ten minutes. A general discussion will follow the presentations. Flora will introduce the contributors and moderate the discussion.

We herewith cordially invite you as a contributor to this event. Could you please let us have your reply by the 1st of March 2012.

Warm regards

Franziska Kramer

Project Manager @ ZGS and GZH/Harare Zimbabwe

51 Lawson Avenue
Milton Park
Harare, Zimbabwe

Tel: + 263 (0) 4704045

Fax: +263 (0) 4796836

www.facebook.com/goethe.harare

GOETHE-ZENTRUM HARARE / ZIMBABWE-GERMAN SOCIETY
51 Lawson Avenue, Milton Park, Harare
Tel: +263 (0) 4 796836; Cell: +263 (0) 773 222 314; Fax: +263 (0)4 796836; Email: zgs@zgs.co.zw

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS:The Zimbabwe International Book Fair Indaba 2012

some Zimbabwean Writers who attended the Indaba and the Writers Workshop in 2011

THE ZIMBABWE INTERNATIONAL BOOK FAIR 2012
HARARE, 30th JULY- 4th August
THEME: AFRICAN LITERATURE IN THE GLOBAL AND DIGITAL ERA

On its meeting of 5 December, 2011, The General Council of ZIBFA received, discussed and adopted as the theme AFRICAN LITERATURE IN THE GLOBAL AND DIGITAL ERA as recommended by The Executive Board after which the Board discussed several topics suggested by its members as well outside individuals who were considered to be specialists in this subject. These topics form part of our “Call for Papers” for The Zimbabwe International Book Fair Indaba.
As you are aware, the weeklong event consists of the main Indaba, Young Persons Indaba, Writers’ Workshop, The ZIBF Exhibition, Live Literature Centre and the reintroduced Traders’ Day. After reviewing the last Book Fair and noting trends, general comments and recommendations from participants, the Board came up with the following dates for each event:

• ZIBF Indaba July 30 – August 1
• Young Persons Indaba August 2 10 am – 5.00 pm
• Traders’ Day August 1 8.00 am - 1.00 pm
• The ZIBF Exhibition August 2 - 4
• Writers’ Workshop August 4

We are anticipating an improved and significant interest in the Indaba from both presenters and participants and, therefore, have tentatively given it three days. This is not yet official as it depends on the extent of interest we get from presenters and, not the least, funding. However, should we encounter any challenges with the three days, we are flexible enough to revert to the two days as in the last event. Similarly, because we also foresee greater enthusiasm from exhibitors, we have extended the exhibition to three days, before which we have left room for Traders’ Day.

Please, note that although we cannot shift the dates of the ZIBF 2012 WEEK, the dates for the programs remain tentative for the time being, as we are leaving room for contrary suggestions. We expect stakeholders to point out any conflict in the dates well in advance but if we do not hear from them by 28 February 2012, we shall consider that these dates are favourable to all.

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

We call for presentations that dwell particularly on the comparative experiences of African societies, writing, publishing and copyright.

• We believe the theme for 2012 has a great potential to make the Book Fair relevant to the needs of stakeholders of the book industry in Zimbabwe and Africa namely, publishers, writers, booksellers, librarians, Aripo and Zimcopy, educationists, government and students.

• The ZIBF Indaba 2012 theme provides a platform for critiquing and analysing the constellation of forces impacting on African Literature in the contemporary Digital Era.

• The theme also calls for participants to look into African literary creativity at a time when neoliberal regimes continue to threaten humanities knowledge production about Africa and people of African descent through the world’s fast globalising economies and international relations.

• These forces notwithstanding, it is anticipated that the participants’ responses take in their stride the resilience, impact and influence of the African creative genius on the world global stage.

We look forward to significant excitement and participation from Zimbabwean and African writers and publishers at home and abroad as they take stock of recent developments in information technology and how they have impacted/will impact positively and negatively on the sector in Africa. As usual, African and non-African scholars, writers and publishers outside these groups shall be warmly welcomed to participate according to their respective capacities.
We, therefore, now invite submissions of abstracts from writers and critics, publishers and distributors, and all others who are interested in African Literature.

KEY AREAS OF PRESENTATION
The Conference organisers call upon intending participants to submit abstracts that address – but are not limited to – the following themes:

• The Global Impact of African Literature or
• The Impact of Global Cultures on African Writing
• Problems of African Identities: Past, Present and Future
• Exile and Diaspora Literature of Africa
• Gender, Literature and Social Change Now
• Women’s Literature in Zimbabwe and Africa
• Copyright, Access to Books and Piracy in Africa
• The Digital Divide and the African Child Reader or
• Children’s Literature and the Digital Divide in Contemporary Africa
• Land and Literature in Zimbabwe and Africa
• Literature and Civil Rights and Conflict in Africa
• Global Cultures and the Slow Demise of African Culture and Languages
• African Literature and Technology
• Current Theories of Globalisation and the Global Themes Explored in Contemporary African Literature.


SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS

Abstracts of not more than 300 words and enquiries will be received at the following email addresses: execdir@zibfa.org.zw and: events@zibfa.org.zw up to 31 March 2012 for reviewing by the ZIBF Indaba organizers and will be reviewed anonymously. Selected participants will be notified by 30 April 2012 for development of their full conference papers. Papers should be submitted at the above e-mail addresses by 30 June 2012.

+Inserted on 9 February 2012 by Musaemura Zimunya,
Chairperson ZIBFA Executive Board

Yvonne Vera: I laugh even when the roof is falling.

I came across a rare piece of work, the interview that Grace Mutandwa did with the late Writer, Yvonne Vera for the Financial Gazette in May 2002. Wonderful work, Grace! Some bits of it here:

Q: When was the first time you received a prize and what form did it take?
A: My first school prize was in Grade Seven when I was presented with a pair of scissors for the best needlework. The art of needlework often required the patience of good stitching. I still love the creativity of cutting, sewing, choosing fabrics for their emotion and mood. I love the smell of new fabric. When I look at someone, I try to understand what their mode of dress and fabric announces. Clothes have been the greatest adornment in most human societies, our language for courtship, relaxation, celebration and even grief. At that stage, I was overweight and when I went to the stage to get my prize others laughed at me.

Q: When you are not writing, how do you best describe yourself?
A: When I am not writing, which is most of the time… it is as though I am fasting. I am preparing myself. In other words, I no longer know what it is not to be consumed by writing. I anticipate sitting down with a story the way certain women anticipate lovers — with my breath held still, my knees shaking, a tidy room, a clean petticoat, and with no idea how the evening will turn out — in this case the book. I will have had enough intimacies to acquire a general sketch, a thrill and a confidence. It is the same with books as it is with lovers. If you cannot feel your whole body move towards a book, then you are mostly doodling, or being quite separate from the act of writing. I spend many months between books fasting. I am meditative and spend many hours on my own, with my hunger growing. I love writing; it is a feast for my senses. I write to share this feast with a reader.

Q: How long did it take you to get published and what was the title of your first book?
A: I had no great plan of being published really. I perhaps sent a story to a magazine in Toronto and was asked by the publisher if I had more stories. I said yes haphazardly, though I had none. He asked for them. Therefore I set off to write the rest! This was my collection of stories Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals? This was in Toronto of the early nineties.
However I was at that stage already moving back to Zimbabwe. My challenge was to throw out everything I had imagined myself to be, till then. I had discovered writing. I loved to write as much as I loved reading. As a reader of books, I had never matched the authors’ joy in writing to my own experience of reading; but it is equal. All those marvellous sensations that keep us glued to a book also belong to the author, and are even more magnified.

Q: How did this discovery feel?
A: To discover this was magical; writing was another way of reading. It was simply like turning over in bed. I still did not see myself as a writer, just someone who had discovered a private joy. I was twenty-seven. After my first novel Nehanda, my life changed dramatically. I felt a tremendous warmth for Zimbabwean writers and my country's literature. I was yet to learn what an enormous discipline writing requires. It is as vastly rewarding as it is demanding. It requires you to be still, to listen to each word as it wraps around a thought. I have to exist completely in another world for as long as it takes for the story to be told. I write for about nine to ten hours a day without disturbance, therefore I have to move from society in these times - telephones, the day's mail, meals, the price of milk. I fill the fridge with quick foods to last a long time - forty yoghurts, cheese and dry bread. I cook after four days perhaps and, like a caveman, salivate at the taste of a fried egg. I have fruit salads, which I prepare quickly in a 30-minute lunch break and slide back to my desk - my mind never wanders form the page. I respect what I am doing. I am willing to protect this creative moment and can give up friendships for it, even permanently. I have never regretted claiming this sort of space. Fortunately, generous and giving colleagues and family members surround me; I am even luckier in my friends who seem to understand too well my desires for solitude.

Q: How do people react when they see you for the first time and are some readers justified in assuming that your books are mostly about yourself?
A: Often people expect me to be taller. Someone walked up to me and said she had expected me to have wider shoulders! It is hard to smile in such situations. Sometimes the events I write about are believed to have happened to me. When people look at me as though I have just been raped, then it is hard to return that gaze with anything else but an impatience for the moment to pass. I also wonder if all the people who say these things have met me or if they are looking at a bad photograph in a magazine.

Q: When you laugh, you radiate the makings of a free spirit but why do you always relate such sad tales?
A: I learnt to laugh freely from my mother. She is a woman with vitality and much harmony in her bones. I watched her for years and only learnt this freedom from her in my thirties, after 1995. I do not laugh often, but with the right friends I do - like my best friend Mandi - we laugh even when the roof is falling. With over-confident people, bureaucratic men, gregarious administrators and government officers, or even a meticulous lover, prison walls spring up and I am trapped in my own body.

Fire in the classroom

…one day Nakai accidentally dropped her ruler and it fell onto the floor with a clattering sound. Everyone stopped reading and writing and turned their heads.

“Sorry, madam,” Nakai said.

“Come here,” Ms Chirara said to Nakai. When she was angry, her dimples disappeared. “Come here, girl.” She said to Nakai. She was very cross with Nakai.

Nakai went to the teacher’s table. “I am sorry,” Nakai repeated

“You know me, Nakai” the teacher said. “Bend down and touch the table.”

Nakai was sorry. She was just a girl of nine who had just made a mistake. Nakai bent down and touched the table. Whack! Whack! The rubber rod sang on Nakai’s back. It was not a good thing.

Nakai cried out in pain. The whole class cheered. Nakai looked at the teacher without blinking. She was in so much pain. She continued to stare at the teacher without blinking. Teachers do not know how angry their pupils become when they hit them. It is bad to be hit by your teacher when you like her so much.

“My God, fire!” the teacher suddenly cried out. The teacher staggered back from Nakai. She dropped the rubber rod and held her chest, “Fire! Nakai, you are killing me!”

Nakai did not see any fire. She was only angry with Ms Chirara. All the other students saw no fire as well. They only saw Ms Chirara holding her chest and crying like a baby.

Nakai was still angry. She looked straight at the teacher and the teacher cried out again, “Fire! Nakai, stop it! Do not burn me.” Then she pleaded, clapping her hands, “Nakai. Nakai, my dear!” The teacher staggered and went out of the room. “I am burning up, Nakai!”

In silence Nakai walked back to her place. There were tears in her eyes. She had dropped the ruler on the floor by mistake. She was just a grade 4 girl who stayed at Number 1890 Mutamba Circle. She sat on her desk and cried. It was not nice to see Nakai crying. Her friends Nyasha, Tsitsi and Marita started crying too.

A big boy called Hardline asked loudly, “What is the fire about, people? Ms Chirara talked about fire. Nakai, what was it all about?”

“I do not know anything,” Nakai said, crying. She did not know anything. Nyasha, Tsitsi and Marita knew Nakai very well but they all did not know anything about the fire.”

Just as they were all settling and getting quiet, Ms Chirara came back into the room with the headmaster. He was called Mr. Pasi. The boys called him Danger because he was short tampered and you did not want to make him angry.

Ms Chirara kept holding her chest. There were tears in the corners of her eyes. Nobody wanted to see Ms Chirara crying. She was a pretty woman with nice dimples. Now she looked sad and it was not good.

Ms. Chirara and the headmaster came very gradually to Nakai’s desk.

“How are you, girl?” the headmaster said.

“Fine and how are you, sir?” Nakai said.

“What was it about?” the headmaster asked and touched Nakai calmly on the shoulder.

“It was a mistake, sir. I dropped a ruler and she hit me. I said I was sorry but she hit me. I love her but she hit me.” Nakai began to cry.

“What about the fire that burnt Ms Chirara?” the headmaster asked

“What fire sir?” Nakai replied. She was surprised. The whole class was surprised.

“You caused the fire that burnt Ms Chirara, didn’t you?”

Nakai was surprised. She did not know about any fire. She was only allowed to make a fire at home when they was a power-cut. She was not allowed to make fires. Children were not allowed to make fires. She got frightened and began to cry. She liked Ms Chirara and the headmaster but why were they thinking that she made fires without permission? She burst out very loudly, crying.

Then the headmaster who was still holding Nakai’s shoulder suddenly screamed and shot up, “I’m burnt! Oh my God!” He ran towards the door rubbing his hands and looking at them. He looked round and said, “Nakai, come out. Come to my office right now!” He looked at his hands and at Nakai.

There was silence in the classroom and then Ms Chirara said to the headmaster, “I told you, sir. It is real fire.”

The three walked out. Ms Chirara followed by Nakai and the headmaster.They got into the headmaster’s office. They sat down. They were all very puzzled. Mr. Pasi was a serious big man and nobody wanted to trouble him. Ms Chirara was a pretty woman. Nakai was a simple grade four girl and now they were talking about a fire that she did not understand…. (extract from Toriro and His Goats)

Fire in the classroom

…one day Nakai accidentally dropped her ruler and it fell onto the floor with a clattering sound. Everyone stopped reading and writing and turned their heads.

“Sorry, madam,” Nakai said.

“Come here,” Ms Chirara said to Nakai. When she was angry, her dimples disappeared. “Come here, girl.” She said to Nakai. She was very cross with Nakai.

Nakai went to the teacher’s table. “I am sorry,” Nakai repeated

“You know me, Nakai” the teacher said. “Bend down and touch the table.”

Nakai was sorry. She was just a girl of nine who had just made a mistake. Nakai bent down and touched the table. Whack! Whack! The rubber rod sang on Nakai’s back. It was not a good thing.

Nakai cried out in pain. The whole class cheered. Nakai looked at the teacher without blinking. She was in so much pain. She continued to stare at the teacher without blinking. Teachers do not know how angry their pupils become when they hit them. It is bad to be hit by your teacher when you like her so much.

“My God, fire!” the teacher suddenly cried out. The teacher staggered back from Nakai. She dropped the rubber rod and held her chest, “Fire! Nakai, you are killing me!”

Nakai did not see any fire. She was only angry with Ms Chirara. All the other students saw no fire as well. They only saw Ms Chirara holding her chest and crying like a baby.

Nakai was still angry. She looked straight at the teacher and the teacher cried out again, “Fire! Nakai, stop it! Do not burn me.” Then she pleaded, clapping her hands, “Nakai. Nakai, my dear!” The teacher staggered and went out of the room. “I am burning up, Nakai!”

In silence Nakai walked back to her place. There were tears in her eyes. She had dropped the ruler on the floor by mistake. She was just a grade 4 girl who stayed at Number 1890 Mutamba Circle. She sat on her desk and cried. It was not nice to see Nakai crying. Her friends Nyasha, Tsitsi and Marita started crying too.

A big boy called Hardline asked loudly, “What is the fire about, people? Ms Chirara talked about fire. Nakai, what was it all about?”

“I do not know anything,” Nakai said, crying. She did not know anything. Nyasha, Tsitsi and Marita knew Nakai very well but they all did not know anything about the fire.”

Just as they were all settling and getting quiet, Ms Chirara came back into the room with the headmaster. He was called Mr. Pasi. The boys called him Danger because he was short tampered and you did not want to make him angry.

Ms Chirara kept holding her chest. There were tears in the corners of her eyes. Nobody wanted to see Ms Chirara crying. She was a pretty woman with nice dimples. Now she looked sad and it was not good.

Ms. Chirara and the headmaster came very gradually to Nakai’s desk.

“How are you, girl?” the headmaster said.

“Fine and how are you, sir?” Nakai said.

“What was it about?” the headmaster asked and touched Nakai calmly on the shoulder.

“It was a mistake, sir. I dropped a ruler and she hit me. I said I was sorry but she hit me. I love her but she hit me.” Nakai began to cry.

“What about the fire that burnt Ms Chirara?” the headmaster asked

“What fire sir?” Nakai replied. She was surprised. The whole class was surprised.

“You caused the fire that burnt Ms Chirara, didn’t you?”

Nakai was surprised. She did not know about any fire. She was only allowed to make a fire at home when they was a power-cut. She was not allowed to make fires. Children were not allowed to make fires. She got frightened and began to cry. She liked Ms Chirara and the headmaster but why were they thinking that she made fires without permission? She burst out very loudly, crying.

Then the headmaster who was still holding Nakai’s shoulder suddenly screamed and shot up, “I’m burnt! Oh my God!” He ran towards the door rubbing his hands and looking at them. He looked round and said, “Nakai, come out. Come to my office right now!” He looked at his hands and at Nakai.

There was silence in the classroom and then Ms Chirara said to the headmaster, “I told you, sir. It is real fire.”

The three walked out. Ms Chirara followed by Nakai and the headmaster.
They got into the headmaster’s office. They sat down. They were all very puzzled. Mr. Pasi was a serious big man and nobody wanted to trouble him. Ms Chirara was a pretty woman. Nakai was a simple grade four girl and now they were talking about a fire that she did not understand…. (extract from Toriro and His Goats)

Charles Mungoshi: How I came to write Waiting For The Rain

One of the worst things that can happen and often happens - to a writer is to fall into the doldrums, that scary place where nothing happens at all, yet you are screaming at the top of your voice, “I want to get out!” I have since heard it called a writer’s block, mental block or a creative block. The same thing, really. I didn’t know its name when I first came to it. (Now we are familiars!) I was so scared I sweated. I thought I would never write again.

Ndiko Kupindana Kwemazuva had just been published. And then I found myself completely dry. Each time I wrote something down, I quickly destroyed it in disgust. Anything I wrote looked like the worst thing I had done in my life. I became depressed. I was scared of my writing desk.

I would welcome any excuse to be away from that desk: trips away from home, a wedding party or an interesting movie, trips to the beer garden, anything that would get me away from that damned desk, I accepted with both hands. And to compound it all, there were people who said they liked my work. It seemed they were in cahoots to torture me. “What’s in the frying pan these days?” they would ask. Some people think that to a fiction writer lying is child’s play. I have found that it isn’t so, I answer, best as I can, “Myself!” They laugh, thinking: It’s one of his jokes again. It is not a joke but it is a relief to say this because it elicits some benevolent responses like, “It can’t be that bad!” or “Come on, we are waiting” from the audience.

The sympathetic remark may be quite welcome and will probably raise your morale/spirits but it won’t drag you to your office/house and force you to sit at that desk to face what you have to face alone.

What I am driving at is, leaving your desk starts at some point. The thing is not to leave your desk indefinitely. If you can only leave it physically and not psychologically or spiritually. One of the saddest experiences I have had (outside of myself) was to run into a fellow scribbler, who had not been at his desk since his first (and only?) book was published way back. “What’s cooking?” I asked him. He went on to describe this wonderful story which he was about to finish. When he finished, he said, he will be back with wings on. I ran into him again, two years later.“What’s cooking?” I asked. He went on to describe this wonderful story he was about to finish. When he finished, he said, he will be back with wings on. There is probably no medicine for this walking-away-from-your-desk disease, but we have to try our best. And the best we can do, I suppose, is to try and guard against walking away from our desk forever. Walking away from our desk because the story won’t move, or won’t come, because you have hit a black spot, you forced yourself into a cul-de-sac dead-end and you can’t go forward.

I suppose, like in all things, this becomes a very personal issue where the outsider, counsellors, ministers of religion, etc, can only shout from the bank, without throwing any ropes, while you drown. But, finally, the formula is still the same, as in all things: don’t walk away, don’t turn your back. You can take a walk, yes. Go see your grandmother or whoever is good at cheering you up in the family (or any of your friends), go and play a game of whatever you feel good at playing. (I strongly advise against drinking on your own, if you feel a strong despair about your failure to go forward in your writing). Above all, leave your mind alone! (I know only too well how easy that advice is to follow!)

As soon as you are refreshed, come back to your desk and look at your story again. Change a few things. If your story is 200 pages long do not worry. There is more where that came from. (More than you think, in fact!) You do not have to destroy it. (Although some do, including yours sincerely!) You can leave the story as it is for future reference or as a monument. Re-focus and start afresh. (If you can completely abandon a story and start on another one, the better. Unfortunately, some writers get so involved with the one story they are writing, they become so obsessed with it that they cannot do anything else. Please try to be patient and gentle with yourselves. Listen.)

If you feel you want to continue with your story but you just do not know how, then try to see how you have been presenting it all along. Try and see it as a whole. Unfortunately, if it is already 200 pages long, you cannot just graft a new approach into it; it has to grow ‘organically’ as it were. So you really have to begin at the beginning, you may find that you need to change its point of view.

Point of view is, simply, the way your story “interprets the world”. Who is talking? By changing who is talking in your a story, you are, lets hope, forced to see the same story through other eyes, as it were. It may be that the way you were proceeding with your story is getting beclouded, that you need to detach yourself a little, stand back at a distance and take a look at it, that you have got yourself so entangled in it you cannot tell whether one of the characters is not you! Or it is also possible that your enthusiasm in the story has plummeted to rock bottom. Any or all of these things are possible, and, usually, in such situations one of the most desirable things, one of the easiest things to do, is to cop out. Some walk away from their desks – forever. Some become too sensitive and defensive it’s hard to get any help-lines to them. And so on. And so on.

Well, here are some personal experiences.

I think there are now more than a comfortable number of people who have heard (from the horse’s own mouth, no less!) that there is a Shona novel in the pipeline. This must have come out some 15 or so years ago! I have got a manuscript whose ink is fossilling into the colour of a cave painting on page 116. That unfinished story sits there like a lesson to me. It was once a shame, an embarrassment, but it also taught me some things I would not have learned otherwise. Now, it has been absorbed into me, it has become part of me like all the aborted journeys I have ever embarked on, the bad trips I have ever taken, the things that I broke before delivery, I wince when I read part of it today. But I won’t destroy it. It sits there. It exists as a reminder of the attitude I had when I started writing it: With this book, I want to break every record. I want to surprise people, to really show them…Good old vanity!

Be warned writer!

Most of that creative block comes from wanting to be better than you really are. Flying too high, reaching too far, and riding too fast! Just write!Now the embarrassment is out of the way.

Some positive experiences. In Coming of the Dry Season, the opening story “Shadows on the wall” is one story that cured me of something I didn’t even have a name for up to today. I had this image of this couple who gave each other hell everyday. I wrote the story from the omniscient author’s point of view. I gave the story my own interpretation. I found myself sort of screaming at reader: sentimental, melodramatic, and gushy. I tried to let the husband tell the story; I sort of could not get inside his skull. (Maybe this was partly due to the fact that I had never been a husband when I wrote the story!) I just did not have enough – as they say- dope on him. I tried the wife’s angle and I found that no reader would even feel any sympathy for her because she felt sorry for herself so much; the story would be awash in tears before she even told it. I could make no headway. Yet the story kept on tugging at my creative strings. It would not let me go. It wouldn’t let me leave it to write another one. Then one day it happened.

I was sitting in our kitchen – you know the one: round, fireplace in the centre, etc. It was raining outside and the chickens started in out of the rain, feathers wet and gathered round the fireplace, sending the most pitiful squawks into the already depressing atmosphere. And there, perfect image for the story! Not the couples fighting, no. Just the lonely child, alone with the chickens on a desolate wet day:Where is mama and papa? To answer that question, I found the son telling the story. So here, I had found the correct point of view from which to tell the story. And when I wrote it, I did not have to revise it. The pain it held was too vast to be told – yet it had to be told – and those chickens and shadows on the wall told it. That was my very first experience of how a story can be written in another way (or several ways) through a change in point of view.

Waiting for the Rain was another eye opener. This time the point of view was not in characters but the temporal, the tense. I had started off a short story on one of the characters, Betty and her unwanted pregnancy and her understanding brother, Garabha. It was all in a once upon a time tense. There was a girl called Betty, etc, etc. When I brought in the other characters, the story kept on expanding and before I knew I had over 100 pages of script on A4 on my hands. Yet something kept nagging at the back of my head: something is missing here. Yet I kept on writing, putting down everything that happened in the story. And the more I went on writing the more this uneasiness kept growing: Are you sure you are doing the right thing for these people (the characters)?

I had begun to notice a kind of distance, a coldness growing between them and myself. And I seemed to be losing interest in them, little by little, day by day. Then I completely felt disgusted by the whole exercise and I really walked away from my desk. I left the manuscript sitting there for days, meaning to destroy it when I came back to the desk, meaning to start on something else. Then a strange thing happened. I brought a friend home – a fellow writer (although he hadn’t been published yet) may God rest his soul – and we were drinking and I showed him the thing I meant to throw into the fire. (I almost didn’t show it to him. I was that embarrassed and also, I felt, he was a much finer stylist than I was and that added onto the reluctance). He took the manuscript home and the following day – the following day! He came back gushing: “What do you mean you want to throw this away? If you do not like it I will finish it off for you, write your name on the title page and send it people I know.”

I listened to him. Took back the manuscript, but, look at it as I might, I couldn’t see why he was so excited about it. The whole thing just left me cold.

Then one day I went to my local beer hall (masese) and there I watched that Jerusalem drum expert (now the national news signal!) and the people – his group and the sense, the feeling of being family, and all of them each with his or her problems and the drummer trying to assuage these with his unifying drum, and how the drum has been inherited from the past and how these long - gone – ones are present now with us in the drum and it was like a prayer joining people past and present and it can only be in a present continuous tense –urgent, very urgent, no time to dither, seemed to be the message of that drum.

I had meant the chapter in which Garabha plays the drum to open Waiting for the Rain but I felt that would be like pre-empting the story. Anyway, I had found out that this story was as urgent as the message of the drum and the only urgent thing is the present moment.

Another thing, another discovery I made, was that in the present tense, the characters became closer to me. They were like real living people. The landscape, the physical life of the book became much more alive, much more there because I was living it as I was writing it and I have never felt as blessed as I felt writing (or re-writing) Waiting for the Rain (I do not think I revised –not much, any way – this second version.) So, a story that had been destined for the fire was rescued by the writer’s change of point of view: This story didn’t happen in the past. It is a drum. It’s happening, it is playing, now.

And my late friend, the one who had forced me to look again at my story, even liked the final version better.

What I am saying is: you need not get stuck in a story. I do quite understand (and appreciate) the pain one feels in abandoning or re-adjusting, the story. Some writers even refer to their stories, “children” – there is danger, to the writer – in that. Well, if you feel they are your children, then be a surgeon and carry out this brain tumour operation on them!

For exercise, try to see in how many ways you can write a particular story. Dance around with this “point of view” thing. It is quite creative and it actually relieves your mind from a lot of unnecessary strain. Sorry about having to abandon a story on page 300, but this comes with the territory and, anyway, put it down to growing up, the necessary experience to be able to survive, to continue.
Hope this helps a bit.But write, write, write.
+ From the Writers Scroll, the newsletter of the Budding Writers Association of Zimbabwe, No.2, pp29-32, 2002.

O, save me from this story here!

You Lazy (Intellectual) African Scum!

“It’s amazing how you all sit there and watch yourselves die,” the man next to me said. “Get up and do something about it.”
Brawny, fully bald-headed, with intense, steely eyes, he was as cold as they come. When I first discovered I was going to spend my New Year’s Eve next to him on a non-stop JetBlue flight from Los Angeles to Boston I was angst-ridden. I associate marble-shaven Caucasians with iconoclastic skin-heads, most of who are racist.
“My name is Walter,” he extended his hand as soon as I settled in my seat.
I told him mine with a precautious smile.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Zambia.”
“Zambia!” he exclaimed, “Kaunda’s country.”
“Yes,” I said, “Now Sata’s.”
“But of course,” he responded. “You just elected King Cobra as your president.”
My face lit up at the mention of Sata’s moniker. Walter smiled, and in those cold eyes I saw an amenable fellow, one of those American highbrows who shuttle between Africa and the U.S.
“I spent three years in Zambia in the 1980s,” he continued. “I wined and dined with Luke Mwananshiku, Willa Mungomba, Dr. Siteke Mwale, and many other highly intelligent Zambians.” He lowered his voice. “I was part of the IMF group that came to rip you guys off.” He smirked. “Your government put me in a million dollar mansion overlooking a shanty called Kalingalinga. From my patio I saw it all—the rich and the poor, the ailing, the dead, and the healthy.”
“Are you still with the IMF?” I asked.
“I have since moved to yet another group with similar intentions. In the next few months my colleagues and I will be in Lusaka to hypnotize the cobra. I work for the broker that has acquired a chunk of your debt. Your government owes not the World Bank, but us millions of dollars. We’ll be in Lusaka to offer your president a couple of millions and fly back with a check twenty times greater.”
“No, you won’t,” I said. “King Cobra is incorruptible. He is …”
He was laughing. “Says who? Give me an African president, just one, who has not fallen for the carrot and stick.”
Quett Masire’s name popped up.
“Oh, him, well, we never got to him because he turned down the IMF and the World Bank. It was perhaps the smartest thing for him to do.”
At midnight we were airborne. The captain wished us a happy 2012 and urged us to watch the fireworks across Los Angeles.
“Isn’t that beautiful,” Walter said looking down.
From my middle seat, I took a glance and nodded admirably.
“That’s white man’s country,” he said. “We came here on Mayflower and turned Indian land into a paradise and now the most powerful nation on earth. We discovered the bulb, and built this aircraft to fly us to pleasure resorts like Lake Zambia.”
I grinned. “There is no Lake Zambia.”
He curled his lips into a smug smile. “That’s what we call your country. You guys are as stagnant as the water in the lake. We come in with our large boats and fish your minerals and your wildlife and leave morsels—crumbs. That’s your staple food, crumbs. That corn-meal you eat, that’s crumbs, the small Tilapia fish you call Kapenta is crumbs. We the Bwanas (whites) take the cat fish. I am the Bwana and you are the Muntu. I get what I want and you get what you deserve, crumbs. That’s what lazy people get—Zambians, Africans, the entire Third World.”
The smile vanished from my face.
“I see you are getting pissed off,” Walter said and lowered his voice. “You are thinking this Bwana is a racist. That’s how most Zambians respond when I tell them the truth. They go ballistic. Okay. Let’s for a moment put our skin pigmentations, this black and white crap, aside. Tell me, my friend, what is the difference between you and me?”
“There’s no difference.”
“Absolutely none,” he exclaimed. “Scientists in the Human Genome Project have proved that. It took them thirteen years to determine the complete sequence of the three billion DNA subunits. After they
were all done it was clear that 99.9% nucleotide bases were exactly the same in you and me. We are the same people. All white, Asian, Latino, and black people on this aircraft are the same.”
I gladly nodded.
“And yet I feel superior,” he smiled fatalistically. “Every white person on this plane feels superior to a black person. The white guy who picks up garbage, the homeless white trash on drugs, feels superior to you no matter his status or education. I can pick up a nincompoop from the New York streets, clean him up, and take him to Lusaka and you all be crowding around him chanting muzungu, muzungu and yet he’s a riffraff. Tell me why my angry friend.”
For a moment I was wordless.
“Please don’t blame it on slavery like the African Americans do, or colonialism, or some psychological impact or some kind of stigmatization. And don’t give me the brainwash poppycock. Give me a better answer.”
I was thinking.
He continued. “Excuse what I am about to say. Please do not take offense.”
I felt a slap of blood rush to my head and prepared for the worst.
“You my friend flying with me and all your kind are lazy,” he said. “When you rest your head on the pillow you don’t dream big. You and other so-called African intellectuals are damn lazy, each one of you. It is you, and not those poor starving people, who is the reason Africa is in such a deplorable state.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say,” I protested.
He was implacable. “Oh yes it is and I will say it again, you are lazy. Poor and uneducated Africans are the most hardworking people on earth. I saw them in the Lusaka markets and on the street selling merchandise. I saw them in villages toiling away. I saw women on Kafue Road crushing stones for sell and I wept. I said to myself where are the Zambian intellectuals? Are the Zambian engineers so imperceptive they cannot invent a simple stone crusher, or a simple water filter to purify well water for those poor villagers? Are you telling me that after thirty-seven years of independence your university school of engineering has not produced a scientist or an engineer who can make simple small machines for mass use? What is the school there for?”
I held my breath.
“Do you know where I found your intellectuals? They were in bars quaffing. They were at the Lusaka Golf Club, Lusaka Central Club, Lusaka Playhouse, and Lusaka Flying Club. I saw with my own eyes a bunch of alcoholic graduates. Zambian intellectuals work from eight to five and spend the evening drinking. We don’t. We reserve the evening for brainstorming.”
He looked me in the eye.
“And you flying to Boston and all of you Zambians in the Diaspora are just as lazy and apathetic to your country. You don’t care about your country and yet your very own parents, brothers and sisters are in Mtendere, Chawama, and in villages, all of them living in squalor. Many have died or are dying of neglect by you. They are dying of AIDS because you cannot come up with your own cure. You are here calling yourselves graduates, researchers and scientists and are fast at articulating your credentials once asked—oh, I have a PhD in this and that—PhD my foot!”
I was deflated.
“Wake up you all!” he exclaimed, attracting the attention of nearby passengers. “You should be busy lifting ideas, formulae, recipes, and diagrams from American manufacturing factories and sending them to your own factories. All those research findings and dissertation papers you compile should be your country’s treasure. Why do you think the Asians are a force to reckon with? They stole our ideas and turned them into their own. Look at Japan, China, India, just look at them.”
He paused. “The Bwana has spoken,” he said and grinned. “As long as you are dependent on my plane, I shall feel superior and you my friend shall remain inferior, how about that? The Chinese, Japanese, Indians, even Latinos are a notch better. You Africans are at the bottom of the totem pole.”
He tempered his voice. “Get over this white skin syndrome and begin to feel confident. Become innovative and make your own stuff for god’s sake.”
At 8 a.m. the plane touched down at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Walter reached for my hand.
“I know I was too strong, but I don’t give it a damn. I have been to Zambia and have seen too much poverty.” He pulled out a piece of paper and scribbled something. “Here, read this. It was written by a friend.”
He had written only the title: “Lords of Poverty.”
Thunderstruck, I had a sinking feeling. I watched Walter walk through the airport doors to a waiting car. He had left a huge dust devil twirling in my mind, stirring up sad memories of home. I could see Zambia’s literati—the cognoscente, intelligentsia, academics, highbrows, and scholars in the places he had mentioned guzzling and talking irrelevancies. I remembered some who have since passed—how they got the highest grades in mathematics and the sciences and attained the highest education on the planet. They had been to Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), only to leave us with not a single invention or discovery. I knew some by name and drunk with them at the Lusaka Playhouse and Central Sports.
Walter is right. It is true that since independence we have failed to nurture creativity and collective orientations. We as a nation lack a workhorse mentality and behave like 13 million civil servants dependent on a government pay cheque. We believe that development is generated 8-to-5 behind a desk wearing a tie with our degrees hanging on the wall. Such a working environment does not offer the opportunity for fellowship, the excitement of competition, and the spectacle of innovative rituals.
But the intelligentsia is not solely, or even mainly, to blame. The larger failure is due to political circumstances over which they have had little control. The past governments failed to create an environment of possibility that fosters camaraderie, rewards innovative ideas and encourages resilience. KK, Chiluba, Mwanawasa, and Banda embraced orthodox ideas and therefore failed to offer many opportunities for drawing outside the line.
I believe King Cobra’s reset has been cast in the same faculties as those of his predecessors. If today I told him that we can build our own car, he would throw me out.
“Naupena? Fuma apa.” (Are you mad? Get out of here)
Knowing well that King Cobra will not embody innovation at Walter’s level let’s begin to look for a technologically active-positive leader who can succeed him after a term or two. That way we can make our own stone crushers, water filters, water pumps, razor blades, and harvesters. Let’s dream big and make tractors, cars, and planes, or, like Walter said, forever remain inferior.
A fundamental transformation of our country from what is essentially non-innovative to a strategic superior African country requires a bold risk-taking educated leader with a triumphalist attitude and we have one in YOU. Don’t be highly strung and feel insulted by Walter. Take a moment and think about our country. Our journey from 1964 has been marked by tears. It has been an emotionally overwhelming experience. Each one of us has lost a loved one to poverty, hunger, and disease. The number of graves is catching up with the population. It’s time to change our political culture. It’s time for Zambian intellectuals to cultivate an active-positive progressive movement that will change our lives forever. Don’t be afraid or dispirited, rise to the challenge and salvage the remaining few of your beloved ones.

+Field Ruwe is a US-based Zambian media practitioner and author. He is a PhD candidate with a B.A. in Mass Communication and Journalism, and an M.A. in History.