'Destiny In My Hands' by Primrose Dzenga

(photo:Primrose Dzenga)
Title: Destiny In My Hands
Author:Primrose Dzenga
Publisher: Salmonpoetry, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-907056-55-0
Page Count: 72
(A review by Memory Chirere)
Primrose Dzenga’s poetry collection, Destiny In My Hands is about women’s reflections on their passionate love and sometimes hate and hurt relationships with men. To read it is to snoop and listen to a woman’s heartbeat and passions. You come away with the knowledge that to relate is to invest and to risk.

At this point I want to restate what I wrote and published in 2006 about Shona women’s love poems in Shona: ‘While the traditional Shona woman had the latitude to compose and perform love poetry specifically for her man in bed (madanha), the modern Shona woman of the written word tends to avoid, in several ways, writing fully fledged love poems in the Shona language. After observing some of the key Shona poetry collections, one clearly notes that love poems written in Shona by women, avoids explicit references to ‘women in love’. Most of these poems are very rarely from a woman’s point of view. In the very few poems that portray women in love, there are usually no in depth and meaningful explorations of the love of women for their men.’

But Primrose Dzenga has fearlessly joined the few brave Zimbabwean voices of Kristina Rungano and Eve Nyemba in writing about how a woman in love (and outside love) feels. The themes of power and political violence appear to have been overplayed in contemporary Zimbabwean literature.

In ‘If he made love’ a man skilfully plays an instrument at a public gathering that the woman persona, gawking at him from the crowd, wishes she were the instrument in his very able hands:

‘If he made love,
With such joy and abandon
Tenderness and care
If he caressed
Velvety feverish caresses
Like he did the cords,
Sweet cords of his piano…’

For me, this could be one of the best love poems to come out of Zimbabwe, if it is finally agreed that it is a love poem! It is both direct and indirect.The woman is transfigured by both the music and the intimate way in which the unsuspecting man musician plays the instrument. This is in tune with Shona folklore where a man wins a woman by playing the drum from morning to sunset and a woman wins a man by dancing until she sinks into the ground beneath her and until water pours from the crater that her dancing feet have dug.

The Shona admire such arts to the extent that such a mythical girl is known to this day as Jikinya (the inimitable dancer who stamps the earth with her feet). In ‘Illusions’ the persona bemoans the dearth of true love of the old world. Men of today ‘do not kiss, they bite’ and ‘they do not caress but scratch’. Inversely, the maidens of old: ‘saw the beauty in a man’s eyes’ and ‘the depth and need of a man’s heart’.

In keeping with the old world, you find out that twilight, night, midnight and dawn are important in Dzenga’s poems. Darkness is surely the colour of love. In the village of old, night is the moment for half hidden faces of lovers in true passion, dance and ritual. It is time for truthful and undivided reflection:

‘I think of you at midnight
I dream of you awake at dawn
Conversations in mystic tongue
Lie pearly jewels between you and me’

‘Broken sentences’ is a poem in which a roguish man of today is enmeshed in his roles as woman-basher and senseless ravisher of women. During the moment of the poem, he is finally running away from the innocent woman he has just murdered. But the woman is everywhere; in his impish thoughts, in the beer mug in front of him and in his running legs. He has defeated her but his victory over her is not victory. It is a journey into doom because to kill a woman is to kill your mother and to kill the source. In the Shona world, fighting a woman or one’s mother is like falling into an abyss where you tumble endlessly, hitting against the walls of the tunnel as you descend, and your anguish cries reminding the world of the folly of raising your hand against Mother. And such is the tragedy of action without conscience.

And yet Dzenga suggests that it is not always easy and safe for a woman to give her heart to a man. And when she finally does, as in ‘Whisper’, it is with a sense of sacrificial surrender to fate and the unknown, because he has capacity either to cause her a terrible joy or to walk away with her destiny in his hands.

Sometimes a woman desperately falls for a man and at this point, she wants him to declare his love and set her and him free:

‘Whisper my love, whisper, I need to know
So free and homeward bound I can set and glide
Free my herat and soul the core of me
I am bound and stuck by your magic’

Primrose Dzenga’s poetic voice comes from a little hole on the top of a hill, rolling down fast and sometimes, haltingly towards your waiting ear. Very beautiful and nasty. All in all, these poems shock you with the insistent suggestion that the woman’s heart has twin capacities; to love uncontrollably or to suffer intensely. Suddenly you notice that there are so many women, past and present, whom you owe an explanation, maybe an apology as well.

Harare!

Ah, to be back in Harare!

Pane chimwe chinhu chiri muzita rinonzi Harare chete. Pane chimwe chinhu chinoita kuti wava muHarare ukanganwe twese twawabva wakaronga kumusha kwako. Pane nyemwe rinongouya, nyemwe rinenge shave reurombe, rinongokuti kwindi waera wati kwiti muHarare... Kana wavaonekana navo (kune imwe nzvimbo)masikati akare iwayo, vanobva vaita sawaive navo gore rakapera... Charles MUNGOSHI,1975.

I pick another NAMA!

News from Zimbabwe is that last night, my latest book, Toriro and His Goats, won a NAMA award in the Children's Literature category.I am in Namibia at the moment and my wife, Edith and our daughter, Shasha stood in for me.Many thanks to my publisher, Sarudzai Chifamba Barnes of Lion Press in the UK, for such a wonderful children's book. The National Arts Merit Awards (NAMA)is Zimbabwe’s biggest arts awards event. This is my third NAMA award. I won alongside the Zimbabwe Women Writers (ZWW)in the Outstanding Fiction category in 2006 with Totanga Patsva,a short story book that i compiled and edited for ZWW (I love you, dear friends). I won again in 2009 in the Children's Literature category with Tudikidiki, a collection of short stories published by Priority Publishing who are based in Harare, Zimbabwe.This, my third NAMA, is dedicated to my family and many friends in the Zimbabwe writing fraternity. Imiwe-e, munendipasa manyemwe!

I must also congratulate a dear comrade, Mashingaidze Gomo, for winning in the Outstanding Fiction category with apparently his bebut novel, A Fine Madness, published by Ayebia Clarke in the UK. Zvinoda kutendwa, baba!

Chekhov, Oh Chekhov!

The Death of an Officer
By Antony Chekhov
ONE fine evening, a no less fine government clerk called Ivan Dmitritch Tchervyakov was sitting in the second row of the stalls, gazing through an opera glass at the Cloches de Corneville. He gazed and felt at the acme of bliss. But suddenly. . . . In stories one so often meets with this "But suddenly." The authors are right: life is so full of surprises! But suddenly his face puckered up, his eyes disappeared, his breathing was arrested . . . he took the opera glass from his eyes, bent over and . . . "Aptchee!!" he sneezed as you perceive. It is not reprehensible for anyone to sneeze anywhere. Peasants sneeze and so do police superintendents, and sometimes even privy councillors. All men sneeze. Tchervyakov was not in the least confused, he wiped his face with his handkerchief, and like a polite man, looked round to see whether he had disturbed any one by his sneezing. But then he was overcome with confusion. He saw that an old gentleman sitting in front of him in the first row of the stalls was carefully wiping his bald head and his neck with his glove and muttering something to himself. In the old gentleman, Tchervyakov recognised Brizzhalov, a civilian general serving in the Department of Transport.

"I have spattered him," thought Tchervyakov, "he is not the head of my department, but still it is awkward. I must apologise."

Tchervyakov gave a cough, bent his whole person forward, and whispered in the general's ear.

"Pardon, your Excellency, I spattered you accidentally. . . ."

"Never mind, never mind."

"For goodness sake excuse me, I . . . I did not mean to."

"Oh, please, sit down! let me listen!"

Tchervyakov was embarrassed, he smiled stupidly and fell to gazing at the stage. He gazed at it but was no longer feeling bliss. He began to be troubled by uneasiness. In the interval, he went up to Brizzhalov, walked beside him, and overcoming his shyness, muttered:

"I spattered you, your Excellency, forgive me . . . you see . . . I didn't do it to . . . ."

"Oh, that's enough . . . I'd forgotten it, and you keep on about it!" said the general, moving his lower lip impatiently.

"He has forgotten, but there is a fiendish light in his eye," thought Tchervyakov, looking suspiciously at the general. "And he doesn't want to talk. I ought to explain to him . . . that I really didn't intend . . . that it is the law of nature or else he will think I meant to spit on him. He doesn't think so now, but he will think so later!"

On getting home, Tchervyakov told his wife of his breach of good manners. It struck him that his wife took too frivolous a view of the incident; she was a little frightened, but when she learned that Brizzhalov was in a different department, she was reassured.

"Still, you had better go and apologise," she said, "or he will think you don't know how to behave in public."

"That's just it! I did apologise, but he took it somehow queerly . . . he didn't say a word of sense. There wasn't time to talk properly."

Next day Tchervyakov put on a new uniform, had his hair cut and went to Brizzhalov's to explain; going into the general's reception room he saw there a number of petitioners and among them the general himself, who was beginning to interview them. After questioning several petitioners the general raised his eyes and looked at Tchervyakov.

"Yesterday at the Arcadia, if you recollect, your Excellency," the latter began, "I sneezed and . . . accidentally spattered . . . Exc. . . ."

"What nonsense. . . . It's beyond anything! What can I do for you," said the general addressing the next petitioner.

"He won't speak," thought Tchervyakov, turning pale; "that means that he is angry. . . . No, it can't be left like this. . . . I will explain to him."

When the general had finished his conversation with the last of the petitioners and was turning towards his inner apartments, Tchervyakov took a step towards him and muttered:

"Your Excellency! If I venture to trouble your Excellency, it is simply from a feeling I may say of regret! . . . It was not intentional if you will graciously believe me."

The general made a lachrymose face, and waved his hand.

"Why, you are simply making fun of me, sir," he said as he closed the door behind him.

"Where's the making fun in it?" thought Tchervyakov, "there is nothing of the sort! He is a general, but he can't understand. If that is how it is I am not going to apologise to that fanfaron any more! The devil take him. I'll write a letter to him, but I won't go. By Jove, I won't."

So thought Tchervyakov as he walked home; he did not write a letter to the general, he pondered and pondered and could not make up that letter. He had to go next day to explain in person.

"I ventured to disturb your Excellency yesterday," he muttered, when the general lifted enquiring eyes upon him, "not to make fun as you were pleased to say. I was apologising for having spattered you in sneezing. . . . And I did not dream of making fun of you. Should I dare to make fun of you, if we should take to making fun, then there would be no respect for persons, there would be. . . ."

"Be off!" yelled the general, turning suddenly purple, and shaking all over.

"What?" asked Tchervyakov, in a whisper turning numb with horror.

"Be off!" repeated the general, stamping.

Something seemed to give way in Tchervyakov's stomach. Seeing nothing and hearing nothing he reeled to the door, went out into the street, and went staggering along. . . . Reaching home mechanically, without taking off his uniform, he lay down on the sofa and died.

Ethel Irene Kabwato, Blessing Musariri, Fungai Rufaro Machirori and Joice Shereni

Title: Sunflowers in Your Eyes – Four Zimbabwean Poets
Editor: Menna Elfyn
Publisher: Cinnamon Press
ISBN: 978-1-907090-13-4
Year: 2010
Reviewed by Memory Chirere
89pages
These four women poets of Zimbabwe in this collection are young. Ethel Irene Kabwato, Blessing Musariri, Fungai Rufaro Machirori and Joice Shereni are poets who belong to the contemporary working class of Zimbabwe. It means that all of them are decision makers and amongst them you may find a mother, sister, wife or friend of someone big or small in Zimbabwe. They variably write about individual scapes. They write about woman’s love for man who usually does not return the favour in equal measure. They write about their country (Zimbabwe) at a time of deep political strife. Each of these women answers, in her own way, to the questions: what does a woman want? What is love? What is country?

Fungai Machirori’s is a questing poetry, sometimes demanding, and praying too, for the restoration of the dignity of woman. Machirori’s persona insists that she is:

…not ketchup,
to be had on the side,
Along with a main course

She wants to be the main meal itself because she is ‘distinct and complete’. Fungai Machirori could be the most ideologically nuanced poet in this collection. She creates balance between suffering and hope and one is reminded of David Diop, the Senegalese poet. Sometimes Machirori’s poetry is about resurrection from a fall or the contemplation on it. Her persona, a radical feminist cries out: ‘No man is worth fighting for’ and ‘no man is worth dying for’, too. And if a genuine man’s love is hard to come by, she says:

I’d rather wrap cold chains and iron locks
Around the throbbing core of me
And watch and let my fetters grate and rust and cool
My blood

Machirori has no regrets and she writes with a clear certainty of those who are used to traveling until they arrive at destinations. Her other poem is even boldly entitled ‘Tears Will Not Cure’.

But Joice Shereni writes for matrimony. She does not give up on anything. Hers are probably the deepest poems in this collection, compelling and conversational. Her persona wants to reach out, to converse and reconcile with the runaway man and heal from old wounds. She hurts very deeply from inside. Suffering is not a curse but a school. It is even a career. She knows how fire burns. But she also does not want to lose control. ‘Should I let myself need you?’ she asks in ‘Destiny’. In ‘Hunters’ she feels that when you are an object of pity, you become naked until you run for cover like Adam and Eve. Shereni addresses man out there who doesn’t know how to be husband. Any man who participates in the humiliation of woman is also humiliating himself, seems to be the philosophy here.

Blessing Musariri’s poetry has lots of room, literal and metaphorical. She writes maybe the most transcendental poetry of the four, causing collocation of time and place. She is carefully laid back, edgeless like fog and reminiscent too. You find that in ‘Last Goodbye’. Musariri is a calm day that promises to be hot right there in the morning. She can also be as treacherous as honey! Because her lines pretend to wonder about, when in fact, they gather up bits and pieces to brew a final whirlwind effect as in ‘Breaking News’ and in ‘Related’. Her prose poetry is sometimes deliciously dreamy:

Daytime flights are dangerous because you see the place you might land should you chance to fall. Here among rolling clouds my thoughts meander- this is as close to snow as I as I’ll get today, as close to you- standing in the foyer, laughing about how your father bought you an Easter egg for your birthday. A glass of wine with lunch has aroused my fancy- touching cool glass as I have touched your face. High in this blue sky, in nothing else but sky, I am further than I have ever been from you.

Ethel Kabwato’s haiku are better than all that she writes here. There is especially the very short poem ‘Hate’ which goes:

So consuming
like uncontrolled
veld fire.

Or the other one called ‘Painting’:

Show me that painting
again
of happy children
playing.

But Kabwato’s political persona is a rock with a jagged edge. She goes deep to the jagular vein, as violent sometimes as Zimbabwean politics. She shouts at what she sees as betrayal of the nation by its own politicians. She writes the most tumultuous poetry in this collection, pricking you especially where the heart is supposed to be. Kabwato has no faith in the nation’s history or its institutions for she thinks that they are only full of political mobs. You travel down her lines and discover that she actually has faith in the individual conscience that registers and registers and registers the misdemeanors of those with power, reminding you of Charles Mungoshi’s friend in Waiting For the Rain, who is being buried alive, ‘minding the sand no more’.

This is a collection to remember; crispy, inspired and sparsely put together for readers who hate melodrama and verbosity.

Contemporary african literature: call for essays

New and young poets from different African countries performing together an improvised piece at a recent SADC Poetry festival in Gaborone.

Call for Essays
CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN LITERATURE:
THEMATICS AND CRITICISM (2011)
To be Edited by
J. K. S. Makokha (Free University of Berlin, Germany)
&
Leonard Acquah (University of Cape Coast, Ghana)
We are seeking critical essays for a new edited volume on major works of African literature by new writers emerging after 2000 or by established writers but published after 2000AD. Contemporaries of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ngugi represent the two age groups of African writers. We are interested precisely in new critical essays focusing on themes and thematics in the new works of these two writers and/or their African contemporaries across the continent or living in Diaspora.
The first decade of the 21st Century has just ended affording critics with the window for retrospection needed in order to ensure objectivity in our critical enterprise as set out in the intention of this project. The aim of this celebratory collection of new essays is to offer emergent critical perspectives on the concerns highlighted in the exciting new literary output of African writers after the fin de siècle. The works under study should be in English or in other Afrophone or Europhone languages with English translations.
The contributions should be original and couched in relevant and current theories and frameworks of literary interpretation. Essays on new African literature that are related to the broad focus of the collection (i.e. theory of literature) and move beyond specific cases in an attempt to expand the discussion within a theoretical perspective are highly encouraged; the role of African literature or writers can be two good points of such a broad focus. Contributions are invited on essays that explore any of the following topics/themes/ideas in prose, poetry or play genres. Moreover, we explicitly invite contributions on topics or thematics not mentioned below but still fitting under this book project title above:

1. Representing the Diaspora
2. Gender
3. Memory and Hybridity
4. Cultural translation
5. Borderland subjectivities
6. Translocation and multilocality
7. Migration and nomadology
8. Multicultural and/or multilingual writing (narratives)
9. Traveling Selves
10. Maps and Mapping
11. Postmodernism and Postcolonialism
12. Genre Criticism
13. Politics of Writing/ Cultural Politics
14. Democracy and Governance
15. African Renaissance and new Pan-Africanism
16. Urbanization and Cosmopolitanism

NB: Send us a short abstract of 300 words via the email adds below by February 14, 2011

JKS Makokha - makokha@zedat.fu-berlin.de copy to jksmakokha@yahoo.com and
Leonard Acquah – leoacquah@yahoo.com

The book will be published in 2012. Kindly note the important dates below:

1. February 14 – February 28, 2011 – Assessment and Selection of Abstracts.
2. March 1, 2011 – Notification of Acceptance.
3. March 5, 2011 - July, 5 2011 – Writing and Submission of Article.
4. July 5, 2011 – August, 5 2011 – Blind Peer Review Process.
5. August 5, 2011 – October 5, 2012 – Revision of Articles in line with Peer Review Reports.
6. October 6, 2011 – Deadline of Submission of revised articles.
7. December 5, 2011 – Submission of Complete Book Manuscript to Publishers.


The formatting guidelines will be sent on March 1, 2011 to the authors of the selected abstracts.

writer Julius Chingono dies

KUDZAI (by Julius Chingono)
Kudzai when your first birthday passed
Without a word
Without a symbol
You kept quiet
And when your second passed
Without a present
Without a party
You kept quiet
But when your third birthday passed
You made your own car
A mud car you drove around
Making your own world
Marking your life with care
At the closed gate of privileges.

** Famba zvakanaka mudhara wangu