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No court poet for Mugabe: A review of Tendai Mwanaka’s ‘Voices in Exile’

Friday 14 October 2011

Philo Ikonya

2011-10-13, Issue 552
‘Court poets sung praise to power and excesses’ but Tendai Mwanaka ‘speaks truth to power directly’, writes Philo Ikonya in a review of a recent collection of works by the Zimbabwean writer, ‘filled with strong and open political poetry.’

Court poets sing praise to power and its excesses. Tendai speaks truth to power directly. Greed is indicted. Mwanaka has suffered in his flesh and blood. The metaphor he uses cuts. Politicians have to hear that they are gorging themselves. Living on corpses. Tendai Mwanaka left Zimbabwe to live in exile in South Africa where he had temporary visas. His whereabouts today are unknown. Mwanaka is a prolific writer and has poems published in over 50 magazines. Since he was 20 years old he has been writing. He worked on several manuscripts over the years. These include poetry (six collections), short stories (two collections), non fiction (one manuscript) and a full length novel.

Before exile, Mwanaka has been to a place which one never forgets: Prison cells. The reason, his voice. He was in Chikurubi Maximum Prison in Zimbabwe. In ‘Brutal Times’, the first poem in the book, he writes of the ‘beatings and gorging, chopping... of steady howling, sexual and psychological abuse.’ He has endured much. The world’s attention may have departed Zimbabwe but Mwanaka is still talking and watching. He lifts his voice... his pen. He writes in ‘A war memorial for Mugabe’:

‘How could a single man wipe out millions?
In and outside his country
and gorge thousands in daylight,
for over three decades
Whilst the whole world keeps mum?’

Mwanaka reminds me of South African poet Ingrid Jonker’s words in ‘The Child is Not Dead’:

‘... the child lifts his fists against his
Mother
Who shouts Africa
Shouts the breath of freedom and the veld.’

Mwanaka’s voice, still laden with metaphors such as the child for the land, is filled with strong and open political poetry. A child of his times, he does not hide names. He tells South Africa’s Zuma quite clearly that he played a poor role in helping South Africa. Read his thoughts on more leaders in Africa, the AU, the UN, SADC and the world. In the tone of a voice in exile we find betrayal, anger, sadness, sombre reflection, pain, doubt, suffering and a feeling of being hedged in – even hanged – expressed. But the poet and the desire for change are not dead. Mwanaka still believes Afrika. His style is free. He is lyrical, rhyming where he wills.

When an identity is confronted with a crushing power at so many levels, a sense of alienation can be overwhelming. All valves of expression can burst open or be lost. Mwanaka has known abuse of human rights. He knows of dignity flattened until it becomes a milk song. He expresses it through his cat Marvin not without a little humour:

‘I gave Marvin some milk to drink
But she just smelled it
And refused to drink it.
I spoke of the D.R.C
But she just stared at me.

‘I spoke of the elections in Nigeria and Kenya
She started jumping up and down the table.
I spoke of Zimbabwe’s problems
She stopped, and stared at me again.

‘I said it is all because of Mugabe
She just smiled at me like some elfin child.
I spoke of South Africa
And of how Jacob Zuma is good for this country.
She started mewing and growling
And moved out of the room.’

The cat goes away. Mwanaka stays in the room writing. People like Thabo and Zuma deserve no break. They are neighbours who watch Zimbabwe dying. In a few crisp lines full of images none in power will like, he does them a Zapiro, his lines like a simple sketch of a brilliant cartoon:

‘Mugabe protects himself,
From western angers
By using South Africa.
As a condom.

‘Whilst he kills
Innocent Zimbabweans.
Just like Zuma
Protects himself
From corruption charges
By using a shower cap and baby oil.
Whilst he rapes
Lady-justice South Africa.’

A young poet carries a continent alive in him examining its rot and its corruption. Looking all around the earth, he stands like Atlas. At some stage he will parade all the people he sees as The ‘Axis of Evil’ in the world, and he will ask the world a brave question. Should he exit from the human race?

‘MY AXIS OF EVIL
SOUTH AFRICA, CHINA, RUSSIA,
VIETNAM AND BURKINA FASO
(for blocking the sanctions resolution on Zimbabwe, especially South Africa for its
moral bankruptcy and ineptitude to deal with the Zimbabwean situation, and China
for sending arms to Mugabe, the weapons which were used to kill innocent people).
SADC, AU, UN (for their procrastinations and their failure to deal with most of the disturbances in Africa and the whole world). And the list is longer, and a typical poem does not serve him. He short prosaic breaks in between.

‘ZANUPF supporters, all Zimbabweans wherever there are now,
including me, and whilst I am still at Z, I am tempted to include
Zuma (for corruption, AIDS denials when he was deputy to the
Chief-denialist Mbeki, and for his stupidity, honestly he galls me
and reminds me of that ominous pestilence in the Mugabe-form
and making. If you were me you would run like I am already doing).
Lastly the international court of whatever justice, for letting the
above alone.

‘PS. I am tempted to include FRANCE, PORTUGAL, for inviting
Mugabe to meetings in their countries

‘PPS. Not to forget USA, UK, Canada, Japan, Australia, Italy,
New Zealand, Germany and Japan (for their becoming irritating
noises, useless pollution!), and all the other countries in the world, you
would think they would do something about it!

‘And always the last question. To be or not to be in all this?
“One wishes one could emigrate from the entire human race,
death (DYING!), that too!”’

Ingrid Jonker committed suicide at 32 years of age in 1965 in South Africa. It is clear that regardless of her own upheavals, her sharp pen and soul could not contain the gloom that ensued in the recognition of a humanity so bereft of substance, joy and meaning which bubble in the undying energies a child brings with it.

But the child is not dead. It is the undying expectation and the longing that people will together stand up for a better world that is betrayed. The child lives no matter how the agony deepens, no matter how subjective the poet is alive. His longing is that others realise that no part of the world can be in suffering and the rest be well. It is as simple as the body. If the little finger is sick, the person is unwell.

You would have to be strange if in poetry coming out of Zimbabwe you did not see HIV/AIDS and currencies; souls as destroyed as monies in millions, lives extirpated and the helplessness of opposition politics in the whole game:

‘Now they each have a free ministry
to bleed out gazillions of Zimkwachas
and farfillions of the coveted US$ and Rands
That Gono, steal, another boy
from antiretro viral funds and programmes.
Whilst Mugabe elects himself and acts
as the President, Prime minister, and
the Parliament, in the absence of
Tsvangirai who now acts as Zimbabwe’s
ambassador to Botswana.
At least with no passport of his own.
But who shall act for Zimbabweans
with nowhere to go?’

It is easy then to see that often literature is a ‘Literature scourging history’. It is also literature testing the present to see what past made it. It is literature searching timelessly. Time changes in exile:

‘To smell the heat still rising in our birth place
We are the way to the way it used to be
Foreigners in a new place, still waiting
Waiting for light, space and time’

Mwanaka writes then pouring out his soul, sees himself made into violent bombs, and he writes love and hope:

‘No one ever listens to us
So give me all your fears
Let me hold all your sorrows in my heart
This poem is yours
To harvest that which has been lost’

He says a lot but Mwanaka writes the ‘Said and the Unsaid’ as the last poem. But it is what Mwanaka writes in the poem ‘Coming Home’ that has me arrested, my mind restive and I have to hold a long silence. You will read it and walk along the village paths he is still familiar with finding things have changed. That Thomas his childhood friend who did not leave Zimbabwe went mad:

‘I was later told that he had developed
Anger inside his heart
and that he ran and ran on roads
away from what he didn’t know
in his heart, and that
he kept saying the demon’s name
and paid the price of a broken will
and vanished into the depths.’

The poet has been in two worlds, grappling with the guilt of leaving in his safer haven all the time. From South Afrika back to Zimbabwe, Mwanaka wrote this poem. It reveals that everyone at home was living in exile at home:

‘The kitchen’s doors were opening and closing
always watching, waiting for him?’

One would that there was still something in the hearts of those mad men who destroy nations that could be touched by such words coming so innocently from a man not so long ago a child himself.

That there would be more men like Mandela who would read Ingrid Jonker’s ‘The Child is not Dead’ in all our nations seeing that as it is clear that most of these countries need a re-birth, a natural one, the touted renaissance perhaps having aborted the poet does not express sensing hints of it anywhere.

‘Coming Home’ is another call that for both Thomas and Ingrid’s child we must all keep vigil and throw off the invisible and visible notorious passes:

‘Strolling along the road
But this day, without a map
I walk home
and sit on the cement bench
that surrounds the better half
of my mother’s kitchen
and had a plateful of Sadza.
Although the Sadza here
is still as good as I remember
so much has changed.’

Mwanaka’s poem, ‘Coming Home’ is the poem that will always bring me back to this volume of ‘Voices in Exile’ to feel, hear and smell the place the child seeks to call home in Afrika. The place a poet cannot lose in themselves and in our societies.

It is a long and hard walk into that hidden place with daring hearts, a sacred place. Afrika seen as our open temple, that has also been so ruthlessly destroyed and which Mwanaka wants to re-construct by meeting those ordinary friends, people he knows.

Somehow, the realisation that things will never be the same makes us press home to Afrika harder rather than lose the hope which the Child in the poet brings us. It is that hardened silence that the poet hears that calls urgently home, and I know I see him with others in exile and in the diaspora, determined to be back, to nurse the loneliness that hugs entire villages there. Before more Thomases, more Tendais are dead or maddened, take your visions home:

‘But tomorrow I will go to the meadowlands.
May the wide meadowlands still be there?
For me, unlike Thomas.
That borders on those north knolls
which seems so small, so sweet, so soothing
like when we were small and chasing rainbows.
The rush of these memories
greying with this day.
Realising another irreplaceable loss
of some fine company.
Leaving me again in sadness.’

I hope that Mwanaka can one day write new poems in the meadowland, Let us ask Mugabe, where is Tendai Mwanaka? Why are so many Zimbabweans mourning in their meadowlands, Mugabe?

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Tendai Mwanaka’s ‘Voices in Exile’ is published by Lapwing (2010).
* Philo Ikonya is a Kenyan poet and activist.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

See online : No court poet for Mugabe: A review of Tendai Mwanaka’s ‘Voices in Exile’

CHRISTINE JOHNS
5.0 out of 5 stars Voices from Exile, August 9, 2011
By
Christina L. Johns "twitter ohiopoet" (Ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
This review is from: Voices from Exile: A Book of Poetry (Paperback)

Voices from Exile A Book of Poetry
Tendai Mwanaka
Lapwing Publications
Ballysillan Drive, Belfast BT14 8HQ
lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com
9781907276484 $10.00 / $5.00 (Digital Price in PDF)

Christina Johns
Reviewer

From his blog, African poet Tendai Mwanaka speaks: "Sometimes the beautiful colours of the rainbow myth are a pointer telling you to look beyond their poetic-singed about beauty and the hollowed hauntings of those rainbow colours results in one colour ultimately playing the god-insect function."
- May 1, 2011

Tendai Mwanaka, is a creative writer, worldly anthologized poet, short story writer and non fiction writer. At publication time for Voices from Exile, he was a Zimbabwean citizen staying in South Africa on temporary visas. Though he has had poetry published in over 50 countries, this is his collection about political exile in South Africa. His political exile.

Beginning his writing career when he was twenty years old, Tendai has had his work published in the USA, UK, Southern Africa, India, Italy, France, Spain, New Zealand and Australia. He is also a songwriter.

"Brutal Times," leads the collection by introducing the reader to one of the dark sides of being a political prisoner.

"Brutal Times

The arrest and slammed doors

In a cell, in Harare

The beatings, gorging, chopping

In the throes of a shape-shift

The walls of my cell in Chikurubi

Maximum prison.

Slanting backwards with weights

Of a cracked head, gorged flesh and chopped

Limbs of my own body.

And my steady howling and gnashing cries.

"The CIO's beatings, questions,

Sexual and psychological abuse

Trying to bleed answers from me.

Also from my next cell's occupant.

Talk, talk, talk the insistent hammer

Of those words repeated again and again.

Where are your handlers? Where are the weapons?

What was the plan...that I never had?

That I never knew of, and in the next cell

The green bombers rage at the cell's occupant..."

From The Brutal Times, Voices from Exile, page 7.

The poems are plenty and run a gamut of emotion. Perhaps one of the most touching poems is one entitled "That Child," which describes the horror of coming of age in a war-riddled place and searching for meaning from the sad conditions.

The words here paint pictures that the reader can touch. Some good pictures and some not so good pictures:

"They hit me with those sticks, gun butts, belts, etc, on my stomach. The child I was carrying broke to pieces inside my stomach. The baby girl died inside me. Though my husband died that night, it was God's desire that I did not die too.

"It was at the hospital that the child was born afterwards. The doctors had to cut my stomach to remove those pieces. A head alone, then a leg, an arm, the body, piece by piece."

--Breaking the Silence, Voices from Exile, Pg 12

This book will be enjoyed by poetry lovers and anyone wondering about what has been going on for the people in certain parts of Africa. Though the countries are war torn and seem a mystery to those of us lucky enough to be somewhere else, Tendai furnishes us with a portrait of the place he calls home. (from MWBR Aug 2011)

MICHEAL NORTHERN
Some books of poetry achieve their effects through subtly of language and close attention to craft, others through the power of piled on images. Zimbabwean poet Tendai's Mwanaka's Mad Bob Republic - Blood, Bile and a Crying Child is one of the latter. Mad Bob is, of course, Robert Mugabe, the dictatorial leader of Zimbabwe. Even Americans need little to convince them of the damage that Mugabe has visited on his country. Recently, merely crossing the border from Zimbabwe to Botswana, this reviewer was able to surface signs of the problems. Travelers were warned to keep their cameras out of site. Bus van drivers were charged more to cross the border than their vehicles were worth. Zimbabweans willingly exchanged a over $30,000,000 Zimbabwean note for one U.S. dollar or South Africa rand. Mwanaka's book, however, takes the reader much more deeply inside, giving a first hand view that only one who lived in Zimbabwe could have:

Hope in Zimbabwe is knit with lives lost
And plaited into a pattern of suffering
Hope afraid of unbraiding the past
Waits for others to undo the knots

The book begins with the poem "Brutal times", describing the general state of affairs in the author's country.

The arrest and slammed doors



In a cell, in Harare.



The beatings, gorging, choppings



And in the throes of a shape-shift-



The walls of my cell, in Chikurubi



Maximum prison.

After "Brutal Times" the poems are arranged in no particular thematic order or chronology. Rather, a number of leitmotifs seem to wind back upon each other contributing both a sense of the confused state of affairs in Zimbabwe and to a sense of some of the major issues that confront the author. One of the things that Mwanaka tries to do is give a picture of Mugabe himself. In several cases, the author writes a monologue from Mugabe's point of view. One such poem is "Paradigm of Mugabe's Mind," which begins

My people laugh at me
just to taunt me!
Obama looks at me through
Bush's warmongering eyes
More taunting!

I clip one person
and those western bigots curse me
and we grind across disagreements
but I am not moved by their angers.
Not surprisingly a number of the poems in Mwanaka's collection focus depict of Zimbabweans trying to get out of their country. A cluster of poems including "Journey to South Africa," "At Beitbridge Border," "Refugees," and "Voices of Exile" center around these experiences. In one of his most visceral and compelling poems, Mwanaka describes attempts to escape to South Africa and crossing the Limpopo River, which takes on an almost symbolic motif throughout the book.

The raven's voice falls silent in the darkened leaves
The trees are the only ones who pray for themselves
For the moon always passes on top of them
And in the dark nights we wait for the moon
To tell us to venture into the hungry crocodiles in Limpopo
And I can see their red tongues stretching out
To lick the slime of our yoke and blood.

We are another one among these marauding herds
Limpopo River is now a mixture of silt, blood, bones and scars
Where other traumatised adults giggle chorus of grief
And every anguished cry feed these fat crocodiles
We are now bones within this river's churn
Soon fish will have to negotiate us.

Once in South Africa, Zimbabweans still face a host of problems. In "Lives Not Lived" Mwanaka describes the hardships they encounter as a foreign people in an unwilling country.

Corpses scrambling out of Zimbabwe
gasping for fresh air, while South Africans
squirm from this encroaching pestilence...

Huddled along the tarred roads.
Waiting for a day's cleaning job
or to fix and fit, load and unload
some rich man's looty-booty.

Crowds standing shoulder to shoulder
under the bright southern sun.
Their browned shaggy bodies
can't support them against ridicule.

Political and economic refugees
migrating into an alien culture.

One technique that Mwanaka uses effectively in his poetry is that of the litany. It is a choral form that allows for the poet to give expression not just to his own singular voice, but the collective cry of a people. In "Voice in Exile", the poet is actually able to achieve both in the first two stanzas of the poem.

From the loneliness of this time
From yesterday, today, tomorrow
From this hour, this minute, this second
From what might have been
From gazing at dreams rotting in the sun
From the need of closure from our illegal ourselves
From time served being refugees but still unwanted
From an echo of ourselves that no longer exist. This poem is the soft call of one lonely raven
That has lost her loved birth-ones
It is the voice of reason in times of pestilence
It is the voice of the spirit that left luggage
And bundles of bones in Limpopo River
It is the voice of flesh and blood that sustains
Fish and crocodiles in Limpopo
Year in, year out

For the Western reader, this form also carries with it the overtones of the Greek chorus and the Latin Mass, both of which are suppications to the gods, rendering these stanzas as much prayer as poem.

Mwanaka is not shy about pointing a finger at those who do not answer the prayer, including the United States, Russia, Australia, Japan, Canada, Germany and the UK, who sit around doing nothing about the situation. EVen stronger accusations are leveled at South Africa for quot;moral bankrupcy and ineptitudequot; and at China for supply Mugabe with weapons. His sharpests barbs, however, are leveled against ZANUPF, the ruling political party in Zimbabwe, for the crimes against its own people. It will not be lost on American readers, of course, that one of the poems in which he excoriates these groups is called "My Axis of Evil".
As the title of Mad Bob Republic - Blood, Bile and a Crying Child implies, Mwanaka's poems are not all bile and blood. Moments of tenderness and compassion for particular individuals do punctuate the book. In "For Nigel" "For Nigel" he describes the plight of a young boy whose parents have been killed, in "Coming Home" the author reflects on the effects of the fear in Zimbabwe on his friends Thomas, who did not leave the country, and in "Milk with Marvin My Cat" he shares some personal moments. The inclusion of such poems remind the reader that even in the midst of generalities about groups of people, at its base life and poetry both come down to the individual experience.

There are times when the social aims of politcal poems are sufficient to justify their being read, regardless of their literary quality, as in the case of Basanta kar's The Unfold Pinnacle. Mad Bob Republic deserves to be read, not only as a political document, but also because of the power of its images and, occasionally, its lyrical verse. While there are certainly some poems such as "Journey to South Africa" and "For Nigel" that easily stand on their own, it is really the cumulative effect of the book that provides its power. Some may feel that certain poem are repetitious or that images from one poem have been co-opted for another as well, but it is the loading on of these experiences that help to provide the reader with something of what the oppression that weighs on the lives of those Mwanaka is writing about. A reader invests the relatively little time it takes to reader Mad Bob Republic, will gain a much deeper understanding of what the poet means when he says:

This is not the life we dreamt of
But it is the life we have.