Mother writes Yvonne Vera’s biography

(Yvonne Vera)
Title: Petal Thoughts: Yvonne Vera
Author: Ericah Gwetai
Publisher: Mambo Press, Gweru, Zimbabwe, 2008
ISBN:978-0-86922-823-4

Reviewer: Memory Chirere

Imagine your mother writing your biography! What would she say or leave out and why? If you were a prize winning author, would your mother’s book on you clarify certain key moments in your writings? Or, would it complicate them?

The late write Yvonne Vera’s mother, Ericah Gwetai nee Mugadzaweta has written a very enlightening biography on Yvonne Vera. It is called ‘Petal thoughts: Yvonne Vera: A Biography.’ More than anything, this amazing book shows that there are highly biographical elements in most of Yvonne Vera’s literature.

Did you know that ‘Yvonne was a result of an unwanted pregnancy’? Ericah Mugadzaweta, a Luveve girl, discovered by accident that she was two months pregnant when she felt dizzy and passed out at Lobengula Street bus terminus. Ericah was seventeen and the man responsible was one Jerry Vera who worked as a waiter at the Happy Valley Hotel in Nguboyenja township of Bulawayo.

Ericah eloped to Jerry and they even tried unsuccessfully to terminate the pregnancy because Ericah wanted desperately to go for a nurse training course. Readers of Yvonne’s Butterfly Burning will remember that there is such an anguished woman in the novel.

The girl, Yvonne moved constantly with her mother to various teaching posts in Bulawayo, Harare and Tsholotsho.

Yvonne’s parents parted ways in December 1970 after a huge quarrel when Jerry lost his job. Jerry found it hard to find another job and ‘he became aggressive’. Ericah and Yvonne eventually left for Tsholotsho where Ericah met and fell in love with one Lambert Gwetai. The girl Yvonne fell in love with butterflies out there in the countryside.

In 1984, during her teaching practice (from Hillside Teachers’ College) at Njube High School, Yvonne met a Canadian Maths teacher, John Jose and they fell in love. They were married in 1987 in Canada. They remained married until Yvonne’s death in April 2005 although they sometimes lived in separate locations because of Yvonne’s insistence that she kept in touch with her Zimbabwean writing base.

This biography shows that Yvonne’s life and writing culture were dramatic. For instance during one of her visits to Zimbabwe from Canada in 1994, Yvonne read a story from The Chronicle about a woman who had strangled her baby with a necktie. Yvonne immediately disappeared from home. Her people even reported her missing with the police. She returned home six days later with a manuscript that was to become ‘Without A Name’.

There are indications in this biography that Yvonne was headstrong and had a temper too. When she left for Canada in 1987 to marry John she just left without saying goodbye to her mother.

And more interesting Yvonne’s mother writes: “In 1996 Yvonne was going to interview some female artists who did woodcarving. It was in the evening and I told her that it was not safe for women to travel alone… We argued about that. She bolted out of the house and stood in the middle of Matopos Road. She wanted to commit suicide by being run over by a car… but when cars screeched and swerved to avoid her, I realized that she was determined to do it…”

This book will surely open windows into Vera literature. It also contains testimonies by scores of people close to Vera like her best and long time friend, Kupukile Mlambo (to whom Vera’s first full novel, Nehanda is dedicated), her editor and publisher, Irene Staunton, friends: Flora Wild, Terence Ranger, Virginia Phiri and others.

The late Yvonne Vera could easily be the most outstanding woman writer from Zimbabwe writing in English. Her acute experimentation with prose and female character has drawn lots of attention.

She specialised on abominations and those subjects that harm the woman’s body and mind like rape, abortion and suicide. These are subjects that Zimbabwean novels rarely spend their maximum length on. Vera’s women are come out of it hugely scathed and with a statement that woman’s meaningful space is very difficult to find in this world.

Why Don’t You Carve other Animals (1992) is a collection of short stories that portray women in various circumstances that force them to step out of their ordinary roles as mothers and wives. In the background is the war of liberation of the 1970’s.

Nehanda(1993), Vera’s initiation into hypnotic prose poetry writing is based on the Zimbabwean legendary liberation fighter from the 1890’s into the Chimurenga of the 1970’s. This novel is centred on fictionalising some central aspects of this world-renowned heroine. This novel was short listed for the Commonwealth Prize of 1994.

Without A Name (1994) is the most talked about of all Vera literature. Like Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Vera’s story is about a woman who travels across society, from one lover to another, in search of love, freedom and fulfilment. Her innocence is shattered much early in life when she is raped by a man in uniform. The touching moment in the text is when she kills her newly born baby and straps the corpse on her back and boards a bus back to her rural home.

Under The Tongue (1996) marks the maturation of Vera’s style and maybe that is why it is considered as her amongst her ‘difficult’ novels. It is generally the story of a child who has been raped by her father and who, as a result, loses her mother. There are suggestions that the mother kills the husband on discovering his crime and due to death or imprisonment, leaves the child (Zhizha) with her grandparents. This is a novel with a very haunting quality to it. It won the 1997 Common Wealth Writers Prize (Africa Region, Best Book).

Butterfly Burning (2000) is about a girl, Phephelapi who meets an older man, Fumbatha, in Bulawayo during the 1940’s. Their relationship offers the girl a certain measure of comfort but her pregnancy shatters her desire to become a nurse. A resultant abortion ruins her relationship with her man. After her second pregnancy, she kills herself by dousing herself with paraffin and setting herself alight because again, the pregnancy is connected with her failure to join nursing. This excruciating novel highlights the plight of ambitious women in a colonial set up.

The Stone Virgins (2002) won Vera the Macmillan prize for Africa in 2002. In 2006 it won the Aidoo/Snyder Prize, two years after its publication. Set in the outskirts of Bulawayo, this novel explores the trials and tribulations of very close sisters, Thenjiwe and Nonceba during and just after the war of liberation. It opens up the effects of the counter warfare between government forces and dissidents on the lives of ordinary people.

Ericah Gwetai should be commended both for her courage and ingenuity. It is interesting to note that she even studied some of her daughter’s books for her degree in English with the Zimbabwe Open University!

Interesting Times in Zimbabwean Literature

(picture:Sigauke)
The reflections of Emmanuel Sigauke
(with permission from http://vasigauke.blogspot.com)
It seems that one thing gained in Zimbabwe's lost decade (2000-2010?), is the courage to write on diverse issues. And courage is just a preliminary step, a useless one unless you begin to write; and even then, a beginning is only a beginning. But the new crop of writers in Zimbabwe is doing more than beginning, it is now writing with courage and commitment.

This is an interesting time in Zimbabwean writing. And a voice says, "What time hasn't been interesting?" Granted, all times have been interesting, some too interesting to yield any useful literature. Another voice says: "Useful literature?" Yes, a literature that speaks immediately to the world, with great themes, concerns and thrust. "Say what?"

Zimbabwe's lost decade woke a lot of us up, took us out of a state of comfort. This statement is a lie, of course, because for as long as I can remember, there have always been things--big things--happening in our country. By 1990, I was already writing poetry of serious change:

Zvakauya hamawe takadekara,
Yakauya nahwo uso hwainge chikara
Tikati nako kugwagwadza
Ura kuungana mudumbu mogwadza.

Actually, that was 1992. I was a suffering temporary school teacher, waiting to go to some college or other, but I remember a society waking up to confusion (captured in the stanza above), some unable to believe this was their beautiful Zimbabwe, changing so much. Of course, we experienced long queues, and somehow, I liked to stand in them, to catch up on my reading. But in everything I wrote, which I didn't do much with--lack of knowhow on publishing/marketing--, I was chronicling these hard hours in some carthatic way. These were big themes, although I didn't know it then: economic adjustement programmes were shocking people in many African countries and elsewhere.

Perhaps a real sign of the times was how as writers we were seeking empowerment. We formed organizations like Budding Writers Association of Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe Women Writers, and Zimbabwe African Language Writers Association, and we attended all kinds of meetings, including those of the main organization, Zimbabwe Writers' Union. We read our works, showing our dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in our country, in our world. We were doing our best to depict what was happening around us, we were being artists at work. But I doubt that most of us were dreaming big then. I, for instance, pursued my writing as something I ought to do, whether or not I would publish the work. I can say that those writing today, including me of course have good reason to dream big.

Writing after Zimbabwe's lost decade (a phrase I hate because no amount of time is ever lost...), writers have begun work with high expectation (of success, of fame, of sharing something they have to say); there is, or should be, amped up level of courage, but this is not to say that most know what to do with their writing yet, considering that they often have other more immediate concerns of life. I could safely say, then, that the little we are seeing, that which is emerging in different places of the world, is just a small fraction of the courageous writing going on in Zimbabwe.

Back to the poem above; it is the first stanza of a poem called "Yauya Shanduko", written between 1990 and 1992, and performed in public from 1992-1996. I made a few appearances on ZBC Radio 2, hosted by the courageous writer Aaron Chiundura Moyo, and by then I had written other companion pieces like "VepaSpeed", documenting scenes of police-vendor chases, which would become common again in the troubled decade. I used to produce these poems for performance, and sometimes for recording. I also travelled a lot on writing business, as the national secretary of BWAZ. At each meeting where I was the guest or coordinator, I would perform some of these poems about that decade (the 90s). The poems captured the era:

Zvakauya hamawe takadekara,
Yakauya nahwo uso hwainge chikara
Tikati nako kugwagwadza
Ura kuungana mudumbu mogwadza.

I began the poem by stating that the change caught us by surprise, brought dreadful chaos. And indeed, people were not ready for the changes brought by the structural adjustment programmes. One major event then was the restructuring of companies and the civil service; workers waking up to find out they had no jobs, and failing to understand, even where it was explained, why they had lost their jobs. I observed people seeking to spiritual or religious explanations, going to spiritual healers or prophets to seek solutions, and in most cases, ending up losing the little they had saved, paying for the services rendered by spiritual healers. I was involved with a spiritual church then--1992 being the last year I attended it--, and I saw church members seeking solace in what spiritual advice the church would give, as they were supposed to do; yet there was another level of understanding that these people either avoided or ignored.

Most of us wrote about these changes, but we didn't take the process a step further. Or, being yet unskilled, we did not always produce high-quality work, although my friends and fellow writers swore I was the best at the time. And some important names came out then; we had writers like Yvonne Vera, whom we would sit with at the Book Fair--she had just come out with Nehanda, and Why Don't You Carve Other Animals. She had been in the Diaspora, and some of us thought good writing was connected with living in the Diaspora. Dambudzo Marechera, our idol, was still being published posthumously,and we awaited each work with a huge appetite. Chenjerai Hove, Shimmer Chinodya, Nevanji Madanhire, they were publishing, they were the ones we associated with publishing, and we listened when they talked about writing and publishing, about craft, when they came to run our workshops, when we went to eat chicken at their book launches.

We liked the idea that we mixed with them, and we admired that they seemed to always go to conferences overseas. But it was also very easy to observe that some of us did no writing, that we just enjoyed being among the published writers of the nation. We were budding writers, which showed promise, although among us were also spuds, those ineffective fellows with no desire work hard for their craft. Still, there was a balance, that was the balance, and we seemed to enjoy our writing lives as they were. But the writing of now demands that we all dream big; there is a certaining urgency in telling the stories of the lost decade, and of other issues we that resonate with us.

I wasn't there to see the decade losing itself, but I felt the tremors, in a big way, whether it was by constantly sending money back home to many members of the extended family, or losing money to people who were supposed to be helping me do this or that project; or it was through the loss of a relative because of lack of medication and timely care.

And when you are away in another country and your country is always on the news, you don't always have good days; you are asked questions you can't answer, partly because you are not there, or just because you figure it's not their business; but then it is, because they are also players on the global playing field, so explaining becomes not only your responsibility, but an imperative, in some cases a form of carthasis. I told people that the writing about the decade hadn't started coming out yet, wait until the writers and poets catch up with the era and you will get a sense of the complexity of the decade.

And now, this is the time. In the next few years we will see big works from Zimbabwe. Some will emerge on location in the country, others in places like the USA and Britain. This is already happening: we have seen Petina Gappah, Irene Sabatini, Brian Chikwava, Valeria Tagwira, Tendai Huchu, Christopher Mlalazi...but this is just the beginning (and beginnings can be infinite); in a few months we will see more works. I am quite appreciative of NoViolet Bulawayo breaking into the U.S. market. We will get a sense of how the US market reads Zimbabwean literature. We have seen the influence this market had on Latin American, Asian (especially Indian), Afghan, and other literature. It's a huge market, and it can mean a lot for the Zimbabwean writer.

The story that the world tends to associate with Zimbabwe is too simplistic; one version being that the presidentof that country woke up one day and chased white people from their farms; then he started to kill his own people...and ZANU PF is bad, MDC is good. Other versions focus on how grim life is in Zimbabwe, how everyone is unemployed and starving, and so on. While that's how the media works, it barely is how literature works. If you are seeking entertainment, go to the media, if you are looking for complex coverage of life, go to literature.

But some writers try to imitate the media, and focus, in very simplistic terms, on the same perspectives covered by the papers, televisions, and the internets... Perhaps there is a lasting audience for such material, but the material itself is never satisfactory to an incisive reader . This is the reason literature tends to lag behind the newspapers in covering events. In fact, literature does not cover events; it captures life.

The short story in Zimbabwe has played a major role in depicting the interesting decade. The only weakness so far is that some of the collections were agenda anthologies, driven by need to cover certain, timely themes, and when you read some of the stories, they tend to repeat that which has been covered by CNN or BBC, with the only difference being that in most cases the writer of the short story lived the situation, and hence related to it in a deeper sense than the BBC journalist reporting Zimbabwe from South Africa. You find that the act of a journalist report one country while based in another is itself better literature.

Now back to the stories that have reported what the author experienced, or saw. Some of them would work best as memoirs not as fiction. One thing to understand about literature is that the writing experience filters that which communicates with the human soul and has a durable impact. Even in memoir, the fact that something horrible happened to you doesn't mean that it's important to the reader. A quick example is that of a story of a young man who lost his virginity at the age of twenty; and the writer presented this story as the greatest on earth, a story that every reader would find intriguing. Losing virginity was so important to the narrator that he spent inordinate amounts of time talking about it; and the effect of reading that story was boredom. Was there a seed of a story in that piece? Yes. Is losing virginity important? Yes. But does that subject alone--experiencing sex for the first time--interest everyone? Not always, or not at all, except to elicit a weak, "Good for you." So then what should the writer do here? Look at the material for your story and think hard about why you should tell it to me. What is in the story that makes it worth sharing with the reader? Did it transform you in some unusual way? Did the narrator discover something in the act that could not be obvious to the reader? But most importantly, how will the story transform and reward the reader?

Because it all boils down to technique in whatever genre you are exploring, I say to Zimbabwean writers you have lots of stories to tell the world, and please tell them, but work on technique. And some of you are already damn good with technique, you have learned it all, and you are unique innovators. So perhaps let's spread the influence, have those with technique teach those without. Yes, technique is something you can acquire, creativity is someting you can already have within you. Often then, there are these writers walking around with seeds for stories but lacking in technique. Learn. Read. And read. You will see how others have handled technique, and you might even discover that you can writer about anything and make it interest readers (the understanding here is that you are not going to satisfy all readers, but those you can satisfy, satify them well; make the experience memorable). Soon, you may be recognized by your signature style, and your readership will grow, yet you never finish learning, which is why you have to continue reading, writing, and teaching others.

With the proper training and support systems, plus resources for publication, Zimbabwean writers are in a good place and time to shine.


++Emmanuel Sigauke is a Zimbabwean writer based in Sacramento , California where he teaches English at Cosumnes River College, and Creative Writing (on a part-time basis) at the UC Davis Extension. He has published poetry and fiction. He has plans to be at this 2012 Zimbabwe International Book Fair in Harare.

Up-Close with Chirikure Chirikure

(I interview Chirikure Chirikure)
At a literary evening organised by Pamberi Trust and hosted by the Spanish Embassy on the 25th of June,2012 Memory Chirere (Zimbabwean writer and poet) interviews Chirikure Chirikure who was in the country for three weeks from Germany where he currently resides. Later on,Gerald ‘Synik’ Mugwenhi, Ticha Muzavazi, Chiwoniso Maraire and Okay Machisa performed with Chirikure Chirikure.We bring you here the full interview transcribed by Batsirai E Chigama. ++ A version of this interview also appears on:http://www.batsiraichigama.maumbile.com/blog/chirikure-chirikure-anga-ari-pedyo

The Interview

MC:Memory Chirere
CC:Chirikure Chirikure
MC: Good evening to you all. Many thanks to those who invited me to interview Chirikure Chirikure, with the view that my contribution may add value to this programme.

Our guest tonight, Chirikure Chirikure, was born in 1962 in Gutu. He is a poet, writer, actor, cultural consultant and translator. A graduate from the University of Zimbabwe, Chirikure is also an honorary fellow at the University of Iowa, USA. He worked with one of Zimbabwe’s largest publishing houses, College Press as an editor for 17 years until 2002. Chirikure has been based in Germany for the past year after being selected to be part of the DAAD Artist in Berlin fellowship which has seen him performing across Europe and lecturing. Chirikure went on a two week poetry caravan tour of Indonesia, with poets from all over the world as part of the DAAD exchange initiatives. His poetry in Shona is now translated into languages which include Indonesian, Chinese, German, Dutch, Spanish and French.

His works include the shona poetry anthology, Rukuvhute(College Press, 1989), Chamupupuri(1994), Hakurarwi published in Shona with English translation(1994), a children’s book Mavende akiti(1989). Chirikure has also written Zimbabwe Junior Certificate Revision book (1989), co-authored Zvirimuchinokoro, published by ZPH in 2004. He now has a new poetry anthology Aussicht auf eigene schatten with poetry in Shona, English translated into German. The book comes with a recorded poetry on CD.
One of Chirikure’s recent achievements is the decision by the Vienna airport, Austria to display one of his Shona poems “Kuenda, Kudzoka” in their departure lounge with effect from June 2012.

He has also been involved in music and his musical recordings include Napupekeni(2002), a fusion of mbira and poetry. He was also involved in the Ray of Hope compilation, a Rooftop production. Chirikure has worked with many artists in Zimbabwe including Oliver Mtukudzi, Chiwoniso Maraire, Albert Nyathi and bands like Uya Moya and Detembira. His latest cd is called Chisina Basa.

I first met Chirikure exactly twenty years ago. I had accompanied Ignatius Mabasa (from our student base at the University of Zimbabwe) to the ZBC radio 4 in Mbare where Ignatius was going to read his poems for airing on Chirikure’s programme, ‘Vanyori vamangwana’. I ended up reading a few poems of mine as well at the instigation of Chirikure. He invited me to submit poems for an anthology he was compiling, which later got published later on as Tipeiwo Dariro. Since then we have become familiars. Today we exchange roles and I will interview the man who interviewed me on air during our first meeting.

Chirikure, how has been your stay in Germany? What have you learnt in Germany and what have you taught them in return?

CC:I was stationed in Berlin. It has been 12 months, the program is well arranged and designed and quite flexible. They network for you such that you end up doing more travelling than staying in Berlin, travelling in Germany and surrounding countries like Austria, Switzerland and sometimes to the UK as well. The good coincidence is I had the book published in June for which the contract was done before I was even awarded the fellowship. By the time I got to Berlin the publishers were in touch with DAAD, so from the onset the publishers and DAAD were working together arranging the program for me; readings, lectures, performances, collaborations with Zimbabwean musicians based in Europe as well as European musicians and musicians from other parts of the world. It was quite an experience in that you are on the road for two, three weeks in a row, moving from one hotel to another, one country to the next to the extent that you end up getting confused as to where you are exactly. My son who is at university in South Africa kept on sending emails saying I was living like a rock star which is quite a unique opportunity in performance poetry. Also I got the opportunity to collaborate with artists across all the genres; I had opportunities to contribute to films, documentaries and audio recordings. I did a beautiful collaboration with a German beat-boxer fusing poetry and beat-boxing, we recorded one of my poems from the new book, a 4-minute recording. Quite interesting and fascinating experiences is when you are invited to a hip-hop festival and you are asked to perform with hip-hop artists and initially I would say, O my God, so you go on the internet and try to listen to hip-hop, trying to see how best you can be meaningful to the young audiences…

MC:…and what have you taught them?

CC:Teaching them is a very difficult thing to say…

MC: I mean; What did they say they like about you and the way you work?
CC:What I tried to do, first and foremost was carry the Shona language as much as possible and carry workshops talking about the Zimbabwean Culture but I also did a few things with young children, primary school kids doing story-telling, tsuro nagudo, but also got the opportunity to perform with mbira and do my humble dance just to share the rhythms of southern Africa and Zimbabwean culture. You wouldn’t say you are teaching as such but you are sharing a little bit of what you can carry on your shoulder as a son of Zimbabwe and I think it’s up to the listener to say they have picked one or two things out of it…

MC:I asked that question because more often the impression when one goes abroad among some people is that this person who is coming from Africa to Germany, is just going to benefit, just imbibe what is there and there is nothing he is going to teach and leave behind… which can be dangerous…There is a title poem, from your book here, Rukuvhute (reads the poem). Chirikure, is there anything about yourself that you think is left out whenever you are introduced to an audience?

CC:The internet has come in a very dynamic way in the sense that sometimes you feel very naked and highly exposed like the saying they have, is it in the Ibo language…the higher the monkey climbs the more it exposes…(applause)

MC:…itself , the parents are here…
CC: (laughs) So in a lot of ways people have so much information about you but the funny side of things is that most discussions end up drifting into the political environment of Zimbabwe and very few people really bother to ask the simple things like how many meals you have a day…simple things.

MC:Chirikure Chirikure, what is your relationship with this name? (applause) What have you lost or gained through it? What have you noticed through this name?

CC:My mother is here as my witness, the name I have is a genuine name. (applause) It was given me at birth, but, like the average human being, when I got into my teens, I was ashamed of the name and I adopted the name Carlos.(laughter all round)

MC:Carlos who? (laughs)

CC:Carlos Chirikure, it was cool, really cool. (laughs)Later on as you get to university you get to appreciate the honour bestowed on you by your parents to be given your family name as your first name; you feel you are carrying the whole family. It gives you stamina, not just intellectual stamina but identity. A lot of people think it’s a stage name and most of the times you get invited to festivals they say, please confirm whether this is your real name before we send your ticket. Now I feel it’s an honour to carry this name and I am proud.

MC:Chirikure, what would you put down as the Chirikure Chirikure brand.
CC:To use the Shona language to talk, day to day, international, local and immediate issues instead of using the Shona language as a cultural relic where we use the Shona language to do traditional praise poetry; those things are important and part of our lives but I think we are living in a society which is on a constant transition and our language should be able to interrogate all the issues any other language of the world can interrogate. I have tried my best to use my poetry in the Shona language to interrogate issues…

MC:Why have you made this huge investment in a language that is only spoken by ± twelve million people in the whole world?

CC:I think the language itself has invested so much in me that I’ve to pay back. It’s not a free loan, by putting as much as I can into the language, into the culture, I am giving honour to those who taught me this language as well as my society. To share that with the rest of the world gives dignity to my people, to myself and make others appreciate our language.

MC:Do you feel pity for the Shona language?

CC:Nooooo, not at all…

MC:What do you mean?

CC:Pity means probably the language is dying…

MC:Why are you carrying this cross, some people would ask. You go to Germany to perform in Shona, you do well and you go to London and perform in Shona and you do well… what is the problem with Chirikure, some people may ask.

CC:Germany and London saw me doing things I do in Harare, in Gutu, Masvingo and that is what they loved, then the connection goes on and in a lot of ways it’s a mark of respect of the work that I am doing.

MC:They loved you for your performances in Shona and therefore you want to carry on?

CC:It’s much more than the language itself, I think it’s a lot of what you talk about with the language and also the respect you have for your language that makes other people respect your language too…

MC:…and in turn respect you as well…

CC:I don’t feel like I am carrying a cross as such or rescuing a language, I am giving honour to something that I was given by my fore-bearers and I am celebrating the beauty of the language, the beauty of philosophy in my own language, the beauty of the rhythm. I don’t think it would be a mission to rescue something, it’s a mission to give honour to something which already has honour, a mission to say hey, look at what we have here…

MC:Rukuvhute, the anthology, is generally about a sense of belonging. Do you still feel like that? Don’t you feel like a man of the world,now that you’ve travelled a lot?

CC:I’ve travelled a lot and it’s a big honour…

MC: (recites)‘Handisi dombo, huku kana mhepo kwete,’ powerful first line from the title poem. Do you still feel like that?

CC:If you are travelling and are not living from any particular base I don’t think you can travel very far because you need to have a reference point and say, I left from Harare airport and people ask where is Harare and you explain. It’s unlike coming from the blue…I don’t know if I am making sense?

MC:You are.

CC:In a lot of ways one cannot forsake their own background and if one makes that mistake, I don’t think you can go anywhere in life. One has to continue respecting where you come from, continue honouring those who gave you the skills, those who gave you the opportunity to be what you are. I think people wouldn’t feel comfortable inviting you and working with you if they feel you don’t belong anywhere.

MC:Are you boasting?

CC:Well, well…

MC:Tinobhomba, I like this one, I read it and say why didn’t I write this one.

CC:You know what can I make a request Prof, we had agreed with Chiwoniso and friends that…

MC:…I am not going to read it now. It’s in your latest book and the question related to Tinobhomba is this one, get ready: Although you perform, one could sense the literary tone behind your work in that it lends itself to being studied. I also note that you are very much connected to the spoken word artists here in Harare. What relationship do you have with them? I remember Musa Zimunya, who also writes, being asked the same question a year ago at the Book Cafe. Chiri, do you feel threatened by the young spoken word poets? What is your relationship with them?

CC:That’s three parts there…

MC:Yes. Although your poetry can be performed, it also lends itself to being studied. It can also be read quietly and therefore; what is your relationship with spoken word artists, do you feel you are complementing them? Are you competing against them? I don’t remember how Zimunya answered the same question a year ago.

CC:It’s quite a big honour when you can put down words. I remember when Rukuvhute came out we had a few problems with some professors who were saying it’s not the kind of poetry that can be taught in schools or colleges because it didn’t fit into the pattern most people had been taught about what poetry should be.

MC:They were lying because so many articles have written about Hakurarwi…

CC:…but that was the first few years in the 90s when Rukuvhute came out but with time, people realise what you are trying to do and the connection between performance poetry and the written and published poetry. It’s also good that the books are being studied now which is a good opportunity. In terms of the spoken word environment in Zimbabwe, I have worked with so many fellow colleagues in the spoken word field and also try to connect most of them with other international and local initiatives.

Threat? I don’t feel threatened at all because if one can be honest I’ve pretty much done my fair share and probably started at a more difficult phase of our historical development as a country, with limited resources, limited connections and a lot of intolerance in terms of the environment as well. Now I think things are much easier. It was a big honour for me to take poetry right in front of an audience so it’s so much of a big honour when I see younger poets coming on stage and we work together in the Poetry Slam for example at the Book Cafe for which they have been generous enough to accord me as the patron of the program. I work with a lot of them through the HIFA poetry spoken word program so it’s much more complementing each other than being threatened. It’s that when you are building a wall you lay down the foundation and someone comes and adds two rows of bricks and cement and you see things growing and I hope things will continue that way, that we continue working together and complementing each other.

MC:What is the real value of poetry in a society like ours? What is the real value of poetry beyond reading for the exam? Can a poem build a house? Can a poem build a blair toilet?

CC:I think a poem builds the brain which then builds the blair toilet.(laughter all round)In a lot of ways, I think poetry is a very crucial part of our society. Art in general helps us shape our minds, shape our vision, share our sorrows, dreams and our passions. It makes our society much more cohesive and it opens doors for discussion. Look at the past ten/fifteen year in Zimbabwe for example, we were so very politically divided it was either you belong here or there, as artists we have always tried to open platforms for people to debate, to negotiate and share your own feelings and I think any society that doesn’t communicate with itself is doomed and I think Zimbabwe was heading in that unfortunate direction. You look at poetry performance the world over, in primary schools in Zimbabwe, at festivals, people move out of those shows discussing and debating and I think it’s a contribution to the global growth of a society and I think Zimbabwe needs as many spoken words as possible to help the nation move forward. We need a lot of healing…

MC:Chamupupuri came out in 1994, and it has short-sharp poems. the title poem refers to British Prime Minister MacMillan’s words during his address to the South African parliament on 3 February 1960. The speech acquired it’s title from the now famous quotation embedded in it. Macmillan said “the wind of change is blowing through this continent whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a fact.” Chirikure, what did you want to achieve with Chamupupuri both at the level of style and content? Did Chamupupuri blow up the people? Chiri paiko chamupupuri ichi?

CC:That was 1994, do I remember what was happening?

MC:ESAP was beginning to bite and so on…

CC:Like you said, the reference to the British Prime Minister’s words and analysis within the context of a continent which is evolving and addressing a South African parliament at a point where we were also hitting hard against the British society, politics and colonial baggage was also a risk and gamble on my part in the sense that you are…you know what I am trying to say. On the other hand the bottom line is where there is wisdom we should accept words of wisdom whether they are coming from a mad man or not or whether they are coming from your enemy or not and try and learn something from whoever is saying something meaningful. In terms of my vision I also saw our society going beyond what MacMillan was referring to, he was talking of the winds of change in terms of moving from colonialism to independent Africa but I tried to look further, the majority of African countries after independence lot’s of other issue came in, more like the whirlwind. The winds of change turning into whirlwinds, picking up more speed and destroying their own more than the enemy so I tried to stretch Macmillan’s vision into a more futuristic…in terms of style; how does the poem go I can’t quite remember…

MC:I like the poem 'Pfungwa dzebenzi', are you going to perform it tonight? You can read any other that you are not going to perform tonight.

CC:I am very honoured to see that the University of Zimbabwe has this book(referring to Chamupupuri that Memory Chirere was holding).

MC:Ja, we have it and you can read it now. Tell you waht,I like that poem a lot.

CC:(Reads Pfungwa dzebenzi)

MC:Maybe a young poet would be sitting out there in the audience saying, 'Well you (Chirikure) are a poet, a musician, and the question is Chiri, what have you achieved through your artistic work? Ungoriwo rombe here? Chii chinobatika chaunoita namabasa aya?'(applause)

CC:In terms of material things?

MC:Just shoot in any direction because the youngsters are always asking this question, whether you are a musician, whether you are a poet. They are always asking us, 'Chii chamakazowana pazviri?'

CC:Ah, ndozonetswa mumbhawa ndichinzi tenga doro. (laughs)

MC:I want you to volunteer whatever you want to volunteer. It’s very important. You are actually a role model and some of the people here are the youngsters who admire you. They want to know kuti zvinombopei? Shamwari dziri pano, vabereki vari pano. just be careful.

CC:I will be as careful as possible, I have been fortunate in that I’ve always had other jobs, full time jobs. I was working as a publisher for years. I was working just down the road for HIVOS up to last year as a Programme Officer for culture. And the writing and performance side of things were always coming in as things I would do after hours but the artistic side of things has opened so many doors for me including being invited to do copy for advertising. There, I would get quite a bit of money, doing translation work for NGOs like UNICEF over the years, doing a lot of stuff for radio and television and newspapers. This is all because people identify that you have a bit of ability to work with language and in the process I have managed to give the family at least three meals a day for all the past years, which is a big honour…

MC:That’s an achievement.Sadza rinonetsa.

CC:Sadza rinonetsa and also to pay school fees for the children and buy uniforms and once in a while bring my father and mother a packet of sugar. My son is at university at Rhodes. I have never been given the opportunity to be given the Presidential Scholarship to send my son. I have been paying from my poetry and from my work as a publisher.

MC:Mazvinzwa here imi, mamwe marombe imi? Hurombe hwedu uhwu, kwanza hunobhadhara! (laughter all round)

CC:Also I have friends like you, Tuku, Chiwoniso, Machisa and others who are here tonight. We work together, collaborating, contributing lyrics and through that you also get a little more than what you would get from performing. You know when we started performing at the Book Cafe, Chiwoniso here is my witness, we would be given a plate of sadza and two beers then we would go home. But after years, people started appreciating what we were doing and slowly agreed to pay to get into our shows.

MC:Zvaingonzi sadza nehwahwa izvi, zvonzi- hamba?

CC:I think the bottom line is the passion and the drive, I think eventually if you keep holding on you will get something out of it. Shimmer (Chinodya)my good friend over there can be my good witness, Chiedza Musengezi, Virginia Phiri. You work so hard over night, sleepless nights, it’s very easy to give up actually. You look at others driving nice cars, they did accounts at university and you decided to do Shona and Divinity and you say ok, where did I go wrong. Eventually when you see things adding up like that you also enjoy the little you are making and the things you are doing. It’s a big, big blessing to make a living out of what you enjoy because a lot of people I know go to their offices and curse themselves everyday, jump into a combi kuenda kubasa and when the day is done they go kubhawa to get past the fights they had with the manager manje isusu naChiwoniso tikaridza apapa tonakidzwa hedu whether we make a cent or not, basa redu kufara nekufadza vamwe whilst enjoying.

MC: Thank you Chirikure. Thank you all. Please, do not go away because Chirikure and friends are now going to perform.

Night Shift: the prose from Zimbabwe's most anthologised poet

Despite its special place in the Zimbabwean short story canon, Musaemura Zimunya’s ‘Night shift and other stories’ will always need a bold footnote.

Appearing in 1993, it is the only creative prose book by a man who has always written and published mainly poetry since the late 1960’s.

Musaemura Zimunya is clearly Zimbabwe’s leading poet. He is, arguably, the most anthologized of all Zimbabwean poets. He writes poetry both in the English and Shona languages and is also a prominent scholar of Zimbabwean literature. His ‘Those years of Drought and Hunger’ (1982) is considered a pathfinder text on Zimbabwean literature in English.

He broke into print gradually in the ealry 1970’s in periodicals like Two-Tone and Chirimo. Later, he appeared more emphatically in group anthologies like Gwenyambira (1979) and Kizito Muchemwa’s Zimbabwean Poetry in English (1978).

Afterwards the floodgates opened in such a record breaking way for Zimunya. He published the following books of poetry: And Now The Poets Speak (1981), Thought Tracks (1982), Kingfisher, Jikinya and other Poems (1982), Country Dawns and City Lights (1985), Samora! (co-authored in 1987), Chakarira Chindunduma (co-authored and edited it in 1985), Birthright (1989), The fate of Vultures (1989), Perfect Poise (1994), Selected Poems of Zimunya (published in a Serbian language and in English in 1995).

In an ‘afterword’ to the Serbian/English version of his collected poems in 1995, Zimunya describes his poetry thus: “When you read these poems, it is my cherished hope that you will gain some insight… into the brutality of colonialism, the vagaries of growing up permanently dispossessed in a racially structured society, the tortuous quest for reconciliation of a shattered old culture with a hostile and spiritless new world cultivated to disadvantage the African and… the undying quest for harmony with nature… And then also you may wonder about the chaos artistic rhythms and traditions forever tussling for my creative attention.”

Indeed’ Zimunya’s poems over the past three decades reflect on the physical beauty of his country, his people’s struggles against settler occupation and racism, the meaning of African myths and traditions and the meaning of freedom to the individual.

Maybe his most enduring poems include ‘The Valley of Mawewe’, ‘Zimbabwe (after the ruins)’, ‘Zimbabwe bird’, ‘The Mountain’, ‘To be young’, ‘Kisimiso’ and ‘No songs.’ One of these has been adopted by the curio shop at the Great Zimbabwe monument as a theme poem. It must be to do with the poem’s evocation of the spirit in rock and the seeming silence of traditions that have deep roots.

It is important to remember that Zimunya, like Henry Pote, Kizito Muchemwa and others, emerged at a time when the challenge was to forge a believable black African poetic sensibility in an environment that often persuaded the black poet to imitate wholesomely the poets of empire. Zimunya refers to this in an essay as ‘the jacaranda-piccaniny-musasa-culture’.

So after a compact and long poetic stretch, Zimunya broke into short story in 1993 with ‘Nightshift and Other stories’.

Although this book might never win the war against the books of poetry by the same author, it breathed and still breathes fresh air into the Zimbabwean short story.

Dominated, until very recently, by Stanley Nyamfukudza and Charles Mungoshi, the Zimbabwean short story tends to be an exercise in the use of the technique of understatement. It tends also to be about the underdog against the ‘bigger’ society. The narrative tends to alternate conversation with description of action. There is almost always the use of realism – man in the everyday tangible environment. There is also the twist in/of tale that recalls the works of foreign masters like Hemingway, Poe and others.

Zimunya’s short stories, especially the more endearing ones, tend to explore reality as it relates with the vast underworld. There is also exploration of the functions and sometimes dysfunction of myths and traditions. Zimunya goes for what is generally not visible in men and women, their other deep-seated realities much more than any other writer has done with the Zimbabwean short story. Thankfully, he does that to show the link between the spiritual and the physical and not as an exercise in dabbling with empty superstition.

In the ‘Mbira Player’, Hakuna’s relations and conversations with his father and his totem, the monkey/baboon, is real. As he plays the mbira in an auditorium in wintry London, Hakuna sees ‘the moving shadow of a baboon ambling with that superior grace and defiant air which only baboons are capable of. As it did so, it turned and cast one long gaze at him and then suddenly began to run towards Murehwa mountains.’

In ‘The Peach Tree’ a sickly grandmother almost manages, rather unwillingly too, to bring her wrath upon her daughter when a branch of a tree that she is lying under falls onto and injures her daughter. She is shocked by what she can cause to happen through her wishful thinking. In that story reality and religion are one and the same thing. Prayer too is portrayed as not always conscious and positive. The electricity within the being is part of the being’s character.

In ‘Tambu’, a village girl is obsessed with water that she is constantly going down to the well to fetch it even when there is lots of it in the home already! She is in touch with njuzu the underwatwer goddess. She provokes fear and sly whispering in the village and nobody wants to marry her. But when Tambu is rapped by an unknown assailant- some suspect that it is by her demented father- the village well dries. The message here, maybe, is to do with the fall of the African people after the great rape at the moment of conquest. The metaphor is monstrous and far reaching.

The magical powers in central characters in stories like ‘Mother’ and ‘Crocodile Bile’ raise the issue of domestic sacrilege that becomes national sacrilege. The killing of fathers and mothers by their sons and daughters point at a people who strike down all connections with history, and begin to worship at the alter of empty anger and pride. Inversely the story points at the fact that elders need to conduct themselves with care so as to safeguard prosperity. If you see a son picking an axe and chasing his mother in order to hack her down, to injure her or to rape her, there must be something going wrong in the universe. The short story called ‘Mother’ makes good reading but it leaves you with genuine fears of the world and of relations that we have often taken for granted.

Zimunya’s short stories, even those that are based on realism, shift from the technique of ‘description and dialogue’ to one where the narrator seems to know something you need to know now-now, telling the story as if it were happening in a dream inside a dream. Therefore Zimunya allows you to fly away from three dimensional reality and see ‘what was’ or ‘what could be’, more like the effect of folk tale.

One hopes that there could be another prose collection from Zimunya before he returns to his beloved poetry.

Musaemura Bonas Zimunya was born in 1949 in Mutare and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe where he lectures in Literature. He is the current chairperson of the Zimbabwe Writers Association (ZWA)
(Zimunya- emphasising a point while chairing a Zimbabwe Writers Association meeting recently)

+ Essay By Memory Chirere

Zimbabwean gunner and helicopter technician writes fiction on the Congo war

Title: A Fine Madness
Author: Mashingaidze Gomo
Publisher: Ayebia Ckarke Publishing Limited, UK
Isbn; 978-0-9562401-4-9
174pages
(a review by Memory Chirere)
When an excited friend brought to me the manuscript of Mashingaidze Gomo’s A Fine Madness, at first I thought that there was something unfinished (and spooky too) about it as the jagged lines ran and ran seemingly incongruous. But I began to sense that the script was deceptive and I could have been fooled into dropping it. I started reading it in the middle of the night and I was alone and I never went to sleep afterwards. I felt that the room was peopled by all the heroes and traitors we read about in African History.

I remembered all the moments when a work of literary art had slowly dragged me to its depths in a similar way. Firts it was with Brathwaite’s The Arrivants. The second time was with Cesaire’s A Notebook of the Return to My Native Land. The third was with Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons. You pick a book, saying to yourself, ‘What do we have here?’ Then – gone!

The act of reading becomes a long and wide dream in which you are taken through the paths of human joy and agony, ending in a whirlpool of emotions. You want to curse. You want to laugh. You want to revenge. You want to walk about the room. You want to go away and be mad. You want to forgive and be forgiven.

Immediately after, I asked to see the author because I had been told that he was a gunner with the Airforce of Zimbabwe. I wanted to see him in order to ascertain that he had indeed written A Fine Madness. Then what I met was a soft spoken gentleman! It was really an anticlimax! Later, I concluded that Mashingaidze Gomo is an interesting case because he doubles up as a man of action and a philosopher. He lives at the cutting edge of history but he is able, meanwhile, to reflect on the African condition, piece by piece.

Then I gave the script to a colleague, a professor of Zimbabwean literature. He threw the script among his old papers saying, ‘We will see.’ He was used to many pretenders over the years that showed him things that they called stories. Things that ended up eating up one’s time for nothing. Then one day the professor came to me in the morning with red eyes and said, ‘I didn’t sleep, last night.’ It was because he had made the mistake of reading the first few pages of A Fine Madness. He was not able to stop!

We were both agreed that this script should be published because A Fine Madness is a charmed, mad and maddening prose poetry in which an armed man snoops into Africa’s history of deprivation and strife to do the painful arithmetic. Meanwhile, the Congo civil war of the late 1990’s rages on like a monstrous fire, eating and allowing brother and sister to get eaten by the syphilis of the West’s relentless desire to plunder. At the centre of this story is the anger and the question why the West is always at the centre of African conflicts, siding with one side and arming it against the other, as in the 1998 civil war in the Congo.

The narrator who is out at Boende in Congo sometimes reflects on his relationship with Tinyarei, an African beauty back home in Zimbabwe:

"The woman I am missing now is a beautiful woman
An older woman aged in beauty
A beauty that hangs on even as age takes its toll
Lingering on like a summer sunset… reluctant to go
A beauty digging in…making a last stand around the
eyes where her smile is disarming.
I missed Tinyarei with a wretchedness that was like
madness
A very fine and enjoyable madness
And it always feels pleasant to miss a woman
Sometimes it is even better to miss than to be with her
And at Boende, it felt nice to miss Tinyarei..."

But, as you read on, you notice that Tinyarei is a lover, a mother, a trophy to be won and sometimes she stands for mother Africa herself.

Sometimes the narrator watches the Congolese men, women and children dance to Ndombolo and wonders why poverty sucks and stinks and erodes self confidence. The Congo war which pitied brother against brother and neighbor against neighbor, gives Mashingaidze Gomo opportunity to listen to human voices and messages from the Congolese flora and fauna and come up with multifaceted pan African philosophies. He also wonders why we often give in easily, why we think less about our dignity, why we are turned against the real substance and asked to take in abstract values, why we don’t wonder why we are considered ‘the whiteman’s younger brother’… and why… and why?

I agree with Ngugi Wathiongo when he says (in the preface) that this prose poetry book is not only about ‘the horror and loneliness of war; but also the beauty of resistance’ and that Mashingaidze ‘can yoke the most contradictory into a searing insight.’ And yet I do not agree with Ngugi that the emergence of postcolonial dictatorships and their actual relationship to the Western corporate bourgeoisie’ can always be explained better by always taking a class perspective. This book’s forte surely transcends explaining the emergence of postcolonial dictatorship in Africa. A Fine Madness dwells on the varied patterns of the relationship between the North and the South from before colonialism to date.
(the author: Mashingaidze Gomo)

Sketches of High-Density Life by Wonder Guchu

‘Sketches of High-Density Life’ by Wonder Guchu
Weaver Press, Harare
Isbn: 77922 031 6
(A review By Memory Chirere)
Wonder Guchu’s first short story collection, ‘Sketches of High Density Life’ is thankfully very experimental and bound to change the meaning of “short story,” at least in Zimbabwe.

I started waiting for something from Wonder Guchu from the first time I saw him way back in the early 1990’s. It was at a writer’s workshop at Bindura’s Chipindura High School. Guchu was in a heavy crimson jacket and a green–green oversize trousers that trailed on the floor. He peered alternately at the resource person at the podium and at something out in the school grounds and seemed disinterested and bewildered. At tea break, he ambled to a corner and cracked a biscuit (they were hard!) On being introduced, much later in the day, the unsuspecting budding writers were pleasantly surprised to be in the company of a popular Sunday Mail magazine short story writer!

Then the Sunday Mail always carried a short story either by Guchu or the late Stephen Alumenda. You searched for The Sunday Mail in order to read a story and it went down well with a Sunday tea and biscuit.

But wonder Guchu was not very happy with his own stories. Sipping his tea and between bites of the stony biscuits at the workshop, he volunteered that he was looking for a “new form”, something that approaches the story “from inside”. I honestly thought he didn’t know what he meant and his stammer didn’t help matters. I thought he would write a long novel-like Dostoevsky because I thought he looked severe, energetic, if not wayward too.

Trailing a long-long way behind current literary traditions, the editors have named Wonder Guchu’s collection “Sketches,” which is slightly unfortunate. Sketches? What sketches? These are deeper and finer narratives than sketches. These are “flash” stories. They are ‘finished’ and ‘complete’ as they are.

I remember talking to a friend who kept on insisting that I should quit short stories and write a novel as soon as possible! Even in Guchu's case, that these are ‘short-short’ stories does not mean that they are not ‘serious’. If a story is short, it does not mean that it is not important. It also does not mean that it is incomplete!

Dwelling on one seemingly insignificant item - a person, a subject… the Guchu short story drills a tiny-tiny hole with a needle in order to make you howl. The intensity of each of these stories pays you dearly and makes up for the physical brevity and “abrupt” departures and arrivals.

They remind you of the rare stories of Lanston Hughes, especially ‘Thank You Mum.’ and Earnest Hemingway’s ‘Up in Michigan’. The short story has fast retreated from being a novella. The short story is fast approaching the intensity of ngano and subtlety of a joke well told.

Guchu has done well to choose particular locale – the city of Harare and its down-trodden ‘fellas.’ Here, as in Laguma, Gordimer, Mphahlele and others, ‘writing’ the high density suburb calls for a “hurrying” style.

People and place are glimpsed and only become whole in their collective bewildering monotone. This is ably executed in Guchu’s “The Wooden Bridge”. There is a realistic sense of place and you are not “reading” but you are there:

"I heard footsteps - four or five pairs-coming behind me. Breaking into a trot… No footsteps approached. The road was deserted. The night was still. A few neon lights flooded the dark streets with an assortment of colours. Streetlights, some choked with dead insects, flickered on and off."

There is a very silent theory here. It is the world being painted that demands a special kind of brush-stroke and a certain texture of canvas. These are not “sketches.” This is how this ‘world’ has to be presented if it has to be true.

If a prize will be given, it should be for Guchu’s ability to ‘hurry’ and create pathos at the same time. Usually narratives about the city as in Laguma’s rarely achieve immediate pathos but Wonder Guchu’s do. Though sneaky and measured, “Fading like a flower” is underlain by very poetic echoes:

"It’s the children. They ask too much. And every time they ask, I force a smile. But I tell them that it’s alright … They believe me. Later, I sneak into the bedroom because I do not want them to see my tears because then they will then know that I’m lying …"

In a very short space and with very few words, the writer manages to peg down the reader, causing almost the equal amount of depth and force which would take Dickens or Dostoevsky acres and acres of print.

The intensity of these short-short stories sometimes comes through the “photographic” style used. “Size 4,” for instance, reads like a film script - the sense of staccato, the deliberate ‘overvisualisation’ and the move towards the twist in the tale…

A shoe is thrown into a room-but you don’t see the man who throws it. You see a man’s feet walking – but you don’t see the full frame of the man. A man dies and the suburb watches the police collecting the carcass and the aura attacks the reader like a sharp adze.

But there is one aspect of a Wonder Guchu short story which I fail to define, however hard I try. It is the idea of “the dead body”. In many of these stories there is a dead body. The urban violence is almost a machine, churning out dead bodies at the rubbish dump, the river, the bridge and even right on the road between the rows of township houses.

I am generally unnerved by dead bodies in a short story or film but each of Wonder Guchu’s dead bodies tends to be metaphorical. Each dead body is a kind of ‘harvest.’ Each dead body is as anonymous as the crowd of onlookers. Always its face is deformed or hidden from the view of the crowd. Looking for lunch, one meets a dead body in the park. These stories dwell on the fragility and the temporariness of the body. Dying is as easy as taking a cup of tea.

These stories tend to challenge a certain blind love for the city that young Africans often have. In these stories, Harare is a giant which man built. Now Harare escapes man’s grip, forcing man and fate to perform a curious art. One senses that there is a sick God on the loose. The pursuer and the pursued dash in a certain madness, doomed to catching or being caught. Even at midnight sleep is pretence and death is next door.

Wonder Guchu achieves a certain description of city people that does not render them visitors or passers-by. These people here trap and are trapped by the city. The brutalities do not make them less human. They still love, listen to music and laugh and one identifies with their fears and desires.

In ‘The dollar’ a man helps strangers look for a dollar coin which one of them has supposedly lost, yards and yards into the tall grasses, until he is mugged. In ‘The Township Fella’ a man turns into a witty beggar-conman and he laughs with pride as he does it.

And for some of us who are Guchu’s contemporaries, Sketches of High Density Life is the mouth of a creative river, stretching from here and branching towards a broad green valley whose grasses need to be watered constantly….

Maurice Vambe tries to end 'the poverty of literary criticism in Zimbabwe.'

(veteran literary critic, George Kahari, standing (with the book) between Maurice Vambe (left) and I)

African Oral Story-Telling Tradition and The Zimbabwean Novel in English, By Maurice Vambe, Unisa Press, 140 pages, ISBN 9781868883042
Reviewed by Memory Chirere
It is a fact that there are very few complete books that discuss Zimbabwean literature in English alone. Therefore, the very few names of George Kahari, Musaemura Zimunya, Flora Veit Wild and Rino Zhuwarara constantly recur in virtually all essays on Zimbabwean literature in English,the world over.

Scattered in world journals, the rather sparse scholarship on Zimbabwean literature is drowned and overshadowed by the scholarship on literatures from more populous African nations like Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa. This is so when, in fact, works from Zimbabwe by the likes of Musaemura Zimunya, Charles Mungoshi, Dambudzo Marechera, Shimmer Chinodya, Chenjerai Hove,Yvonne Vera and others compare very favourably to other works in the African region.

There is a glaring poverty of written critical works on Zimbabwean literature. In that regard, Maurice Vambe’s new book “African Oral Storytelling Tradition and the Zimbabwean Novel in English” automatically becomes a very welcome publication in numerous ways.

Vambe introduces a special way of reading the creative writing of Zimbabwe in English by showing how the otherwise “modern” works of Marechera or Mungoshi or Vera are very well informed by the rich oral forms of Zimbabwe. Here is a very deliberate radical revision, and sometimes, fierce contestation of what the very few critics before him had tentatively established.

Yet, Vambe’s biggest claim remains that the Zimbabwean novel in English is hugely permeated by oral forms which gives this novel both some novelty and semantic instabilities. Vambe also asserts that many a critic have agonised over this matter with very controversial levels of success. Previous critical works from Zimbabwe and abroad “vilified orality in an attempt to understand the interface between orality and the black Zimbabwean novel”. More importantly, “orality was seen as an art form incapacitated from within, hence unable to handle themes of history, culture and the politics of resistance to colonial values and its legacies”.

A few names and their “crimes” are identified. George Kahari in his work of 1990 called “The Rise of the Shona Novel”, is blamed for being convinced that orature “contaminates” the novel form. Emmanuel Chiwome in his 1998 essay is considered to have “merely detailed instances of orality within (the Zimbabwean) novel without evaluating the contradictions generated by the interface between orality and literacy in the novels he considers”. Matshakayile-Ndlovu in his M.Phil thesis (1994) “seeks to show how orality is reflected in the novels, thereby suggesting that the novels in question are simply mirroring orality”. Flora Veit Wild in her 1993 book, “Teachers, Preachers and Non-Believers” is considered to have “underestimated” the relationship of orality to the novel in English as she claims that Zimbabwean writers are not “significantly influenced” by orality.

The danger, as Vambe points out, is the failure by critical writers to see even “the contradictions within orality as a volatile cultural space”. Accepting the good work of Alec Pongweni in his celebrated book “Songs that Won the Liberation War”, Vambe, however, thinks that there is often a silence on cases “where popular songs were appropriated by colonialism for its own goals.” Maybe, outside debating the various fine ways in which modern Zimbabwean writing is informed by orature, Vambe’s book is more useful as it revises (sometimes radically) the path-finding critical books on Zimbabwean literature.

To date, some of the major complete one-author texts on Zimbabwean literature in English are Kahari’s “The Search for Zimbabwean Identity” (1980), Zimunya’s “Those Years of Drought and Hunger” (1982), Wild’s “Teachers, Preachers and Non-Believers” (1993), and Zhuwarara’s “Introduction to Zimbabwean Literature in English” (2001.) These are books of remarkable insight which insist on a very historically conscious reading of the major texts in Zimbabwean literature. Vambe’s book is amazing in that it criss-crosses these founding books, pointing at some glaring lapses, but always with the wisdom to uphold fundamentals assertions.

Vambe works vigorously on the use of allegory, folk-tale and spirit possession in Solomon Mutsvairo’s “Feso”, Geoffrey Ndhlala’s “Jikinya” and Mutsvairo’s “Chaminuka Prophet of Zimbabwe”, respectively. He opens up new ways of reading these seminal texts. With “Feso”, Vambe insists that Mutsvairo went for a “folktale” with elasticity and intertextuality that “imagine( s) different kinds of audiences ranging from the lone reader in his isolated room and the performer at the political rally”. “Feso” could be a bourgeois, peasant, and radical cultural nationalist novel in one. It has, too, capacity for what Vambe calls “generic self-criticism and self-interruption”.

In “Jikinya”, Vambe discovers “an internal self deconstructive strategy that ensures that no single meaning of the text ever settles or establishes itself as the dominant one”. Maybe Chapter Five is the most exciting one in this book as it works with text preoccupied with Zimbabwe’s period of active and visible cultural nationalism. Stanlake Samkange’s “On Trial For My Country” (1966) and Wilson Katiyo’s “A Son of the Soil” (1976) seem to search through fantasy and realism for “a unified discourse of national resistance” which is more often faulty and simplistic. The sense of black nationhood in these two texts is inorganic and not clearly plausible.

However, Vambe discovers depths in Mungoshi’s “Waiting for the Rain” (1975), which portrays nationalism as a space for new African identities which are constantly in the making. What Vambe celebrates in this Mungoshi novel — which has fast become a classic — is the ability of the author to show two contradictory African narratives: one of resistance and the other of complicity. Veit Wild had deduced pessimism in this novel, but Vambe thinks it is all because she fails to unbundle the mythic legend underlying the story in Mungoshi’s book. The legend can carry the reader for distances in any direction because it is crafty and fluid. It has both adequate spaces for Lucifer (collaborator) and Garabha (culturalist) and none of them ever waits in the direction that he takes.

Vambe’s book demonstrates a remarkable amount of bravery by assigning passages to Marechera’s “Black-Sunlight”, a book most scholars of Zimbabwean literature would choose to refer to only in passing because of its density, obscurity and outrage. And as Vambe admits, “Black- Sunlight” is “a novel about many things” and about multiple rejections, too.

However, Vambe, in contrast with Mbulelo Mzamane, goes for “cultural resources of allegory that act as an interceptive grid” in “Black- Sunlight”. Indeed, this “novel” is a critique of the process of narrating resistance as Marechera invents new ways of oralising history and resistance . In a move that will definitely challenge most Zimbabwean readers, Vambe makes a very subtle analysis of Yvonne Vera’s “The Stone Virgins”, to date the only book based on the “disturbances" in Matabeleland just after Zimbabwe’s independence.

Vambe works on Vera’s “politics of remembering” and “illicit versions and war”. According to Vambe, Vera refuses to dwell on the historical causes of the “disturbances”, thereby running the risk of dehistoricising this war between the Government and “dissidents”. More revealing is the observation that Vera “twists the knife” too because even individual stories by “dissidents” such as Sibaso cannot be accepted at face value. “They have inherent internal instabilities . . . and are influenced by social ideologies meant to satisfy certain aims,” opines Vambe. Vera’s book is, therefore, a narrative that stands outside cause and effects but sustaining its claims.

Of all the critical works on Zimbabwean literature in English, Vambe’s book will be very outstanding for going for a method that loudly goes against one way of perceiving and reading. It, however, borrows very heavily from the language and attitudes of both Nationalism and postcoloniality. There is a way in which Vambe has got “the best of both worlds”. That is not accidental seeing that this book is a development from Vambe’s D.Phil. thesis which was supervised by both Rino Zhuwarara and Anthony Chennells.

One imagines it being used across high schools, but much more effectively in tertiary institutions. The only sad thing here is the cover which is rather plain. It needed some deeper imagination to dramatise the sense of orature that occupies the book. A more naturalistic picture reflecting dance or song or carving or the trance of spirit possession can do. Maurice Vambe is a Professor of African literature at the University of South Africa (UNISA). He is a graduate of the University of Zimbabwe's Department of English where he also taught for close to a decade.