State of the Nation
Contemporary Zimbabwean Poetry

  ISBN 978-0-9563137-0-6
186 page paperback
Language: English, some Shona
Publication Date: 24.10.2009
Edited by Tinashe Mushakavanhu
& David Nettleingham
Reviewer: Memory Chirere

         

---

   Poetry Nation

 
When I received this book, State of the Nation: Contemporary Zimbabwean poetry, its very pointed title hinted that it was a project on Zimbabwe now as seen by its various poets. I know that the state of our beloved but beleaguered nation, Zimbabwe is now well known. The term ‘Zimbabwean crisis’ has even been spawned. Whatever way you look at it, the Zimbabwean crisis is characterized by serious food shortages, lack of jobs, rampant underpaying of civil servants, acute brain drain and the general collapse of public amenities.

The causes of this crisis in Zimbabwe fall desperately - and untidily too - between an oppositional view and the establishment/government view. A particular incident associated with the genesis of this crisis is the payment of hefty gratuities to the liberation veterans from ZANLA and ZIPRA, resulting in the first substantive fall of the Zimbabwean dollar in 1997.

In 1998 Zimbabwe intervened in the Congo war on the side of the government of Laurent Kabila against some rebels; this also had very negative impact on the Zimbabwean economy. In 1999 the Zimbabwean government embarked on what its opponents in the opposition and the West have called the ‘chaotic land reform.’ The ‘new farmers’, as the beneficiaries of the land reform have come to be known in Zimbabwe, have not been able, within the interim; to produce enough for the nation to consume.

The West hit Zimbabwe with the so-called ‘targeted’ sanctions, stopping the government leadership of Zimbabwe from traveling abroad. However in due course it became obvious, as categorically admitted in Article IV of the Zimbabwe Global Political Agreement document of September 2008, that the sanctions were not necessarily targeted (as Zimbabwe cannot receive the balance of payment from the IMF and institutions related to Britain.)

But the Zimbabwean government has always projected their own side of the story. First, they argued that the international diatribe against President Mugabe was basically because he took land from the former white settlers and distributed it to Africans to fulfill the long-standing cause of the 1970s liberation war. They argued further, that the British colonial policy created the social imbalances in Zimbabwe in the first place and that the problem in Zimbabwe was not about the rule of law since the West has remained silent in the face of worse suppression from elsewhere on the continent. They also claimed that the opposition was a puppet of the West helping to further the disfranchisement of the black people of Zimbabwe and that through the invitation and persuasion of the opposition; the west has slammed Zimbabwe with sanctions.

Therefore, a book like State of The Nation that boldly positions itself to look our woes in the eye raises great expectations. Poets are seers and from them we want to know ‘where and when the rain began to beat us.’ The editors did well to ask each poet to start with each a testimony on what it meant to be a poet, and sometimes a Zimbabwean poet. If you cannot read the poems, you can go for the narratives - and sometimes, as in the cases of Emmanuel Sigauke, Nhamo Mhiripiri, Ignatius Mabasa and Ruzvidzo Mupfudza, you can go for both.

But then I must state that this cannot be an out-and-out book review because I know and am known to most of the poets in here. I know the fires that begat the red brick. Reading them is like meeting again in a new country under a new sky. To me, most of these are both poets and people.

Probably the most unique thing about this book is that it has poets from Zimbabwe who are still very active. For instance Christopher Mlalazi has just won an ‘honourable mention’ in the latest Noma awards with his book: Dancing With Life: Tales from The Township. Noma is a greatly prized literary award acrossl Africa. Mlalazi is also a recent winner of NAMA, a prestigious national award. When I wrote him to congratulate him on the Noma and pointed out that he had now won both Nama and Noma, he wrote back: “Ngiyabonga baba… Now I want MANA (money).” Even his poetry is like that, spontaneous and hard hitting. In A soundless song’, a goat is described as ‘mercilessly tearing at the petticoats of a tree unable to flee’.

I see that Ruzvidzo Mupfudza’s personae have not, unlike us, left the bars. In the first two poems I see it and agree with Ruzvidzo that the region between wakefulness and sleep is a zone in which one sees further than the eye. At that moment, one’s sins (and those of people behind and ahead of us) coagulate into one event. And, ah, Ruzvidzo still sees Nehanda too!

Ignatius Mabasa’s ‘problem’ about which language to use (or not to use) is not really a problem. Good translations (as Mabasa has done with poems like ‘Cavities’ and ‘Concrete and plastic’) will serve us well. Having seen these poems before in the original Shona, I dare say they have even gained extra subtlety. Consider Mai Nyevero’s ‘tan thighs’ and how she ‘laughs like a hyena.’ I actually see her and suffer. Harare is teeming with such women. I wonder why Mabasa did not include a piece on baba vaNyevero. Of course, I cannot run away from the fact that Mabasa’s strong point is the Shona language, rendering him one of the more successful writers of our generation with his novels, Mapenzi and Ndafa Here?

Nhamo Mhiripiri and his wife Joyce Mutiti are Zimbabwe's writing couple. I do not know if we have another. We must have more. In college we saw them courting, writing and smoking together. We wondered why they didn't fall on each other and fight because discussions at the Students Union tended to end in fistfights. They didn't give us that opportunity. Nhamo's pen is conscious of ideology and theory. Joyce's is private. Today you still see them together either at the Book Fair or the book launches in Harare.

In his own testimony, John Eppel makes the crudest series of claims and accusations that I have ever heard from one of us. First, Eppel says the late Yvonne Vera, ‘like all Shona writers with ZANU PF sympathies (was) still in too much denial to tackle the shameful period” (of Gukurahundi) and therefore Vera’s The Stone Virgins ‘is abject cowardice.’ Really?

I have quietly noticed, over the years, that John Eppel is decidedly anti Shona. Most of his bad characters have to be Shona! Everywhere Eppel’s Shonas are senselessly clobbering and haranguing either a white man or a hapless Ndebele.

Eppel also says that nobody includes him in the bibliography of Zimbabwean writers. He even claims that no contemporary of his; Mungoshi, Zimunya, Hove, Chinodya, Dangarebga, Chirikure… ever notices him except Julius Chingono! But then Eppel admits, strategically: ‘generalisation is a tool of the satirist.’ Maybe.

The five poems by Charles Mungoshi crawl all over you like ants from the underworld. As you read his poems you have a feeling that you are working your difficult way around boulders, towards some treasure. In 'A Kind of Drought' the spirit is weak because one has been lied to, cheated and finally deserted by fellow humans (and maybe especially by the leaders) and what remains are roads, because they do not lie and trees too, because they remain the same old faithful parents and one can do many things with trees, including going round and round and finally dying safely under them. And as the spirit wanders, you wish you could come to a river.

Dambudzo Marechera’s poems, given to the editors by one Betina Schmidt, are dedicated to Betina and are about Betina. They remind one of Marechera’s earlier poems, the Amelia poems. Of them Marechera once said:

‘Amelia’s presence in the flat inspired me to write the sonnets. When she had been in the flat and then left, I would still feel her presence, and any item she had touched could give me the first line for a poem. Or just the emptiness… the flat felt so completely empty, and it is this emptiness which is all around me which I have to grab by the collar and put into a poem.’

Nearly all the poems about exile in this book seem to insist on the fact that exile is more dangerous than home. These poems seem to be in the majority with the outstanding being Chenjerai Hove’s Identity, NoViolet Bulawayo’s Diaspora, Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s Tomorrow is long coming, Kristina Rungano’s Alien somebody and Amanda Hammar’s Exiles. If it is not the loneliness, it is the anxiety or the downright confusion that comes close to declaring that one has no country because things are currently unwell in one’s country.

Amanda Hammar’s reminiscence is the most uplifting narrative in this book, if you are not easily confused. What is a Zimbabwean poet, Kizito Muchemwa once asked Amanda Hammar in Uppsala in 2009. ‘Does location matter; does exile/proximity make one less or more Zimbabwean; what it is we can or should, or should not, write about, or should that even be a question at all?’ And Amanda Hammar’s answer, which comes after a long search is: ‘I am no longer solely defined by my Zimbabweanness. While for some, such a condition may seem unremarkable, for me it is both a new sensation and a big and painful admission.’

Then you realize that this book is also about identity. In Europe, Mushakavanhu’s persona feels like ‘a dark presence’ and his ‘coal black hand tightly clasping’ the long white fingers of a half-desired white wench cause heads to turn on the streets of Europe.

In her narrative, Jennifer Armstrong says she writes as a poet and not as a white girl. She says 'the black white history of Zimbabwe (and Rhodesia)' has given us 'the remarkable and highly dubious gifts of race and gender.' And her shortest poem goes:

I don't think
my race
will win
this race
although it might
come second

It is refreshing to come across the new voices; Beavan Tapureta, Tinashe Muchuri, Batsirai Chigama, Josephine Muganiwa... voices associated with the spoken word at the Book Cafe and the Zimbabwe-Germany society.

Maybe Emmanuel Sigauke's poems stand out for not going necessarily for the 'state of the nation'. They are not about what I need from my country and government but are about what I did and may do. His poems as in his book Forever Let Me Go are about personal journeys from the past to the present. Poems about what could I have been had I not been married to you and about the dramatic happenings in distant villages and the zinc roofed houses that we didn't and have forgotten to build.

My worry though with most Zimbabwean poetry since And Now The Poets Speak of 1982, is the prevalence of melancholy. Our poets are yet to find an idiom that redeems, regardless of the well-known woes. The poetry of Jorge Rebelo and Jose Craveirinha are an example of poets who, while chronicling the ills of their society, reflected also on what they should offer. They went beyond the realm of 'look what they have done to me' and began to show 'what we have to do about it'. I honestly believe that Zimbabwe is not the worst and last place God made. We shall overcome.

Nevertheless, poets Tinashe Mushakavanhu and David Nettleingham have done well to put together the first major anthology of Zimbabwean poets writing in English since And Now The Poets Speak. And in both cases, the poets are concerned about the state of their nation. Mushakavanhu walks with a spring, head up, chest out and before he talks, he rubs his hands together like the soothsayer that he is. Somewhere in some uncomfortable weather we once talked about how, one day, he was to become Zimbabwe’s youngest publisher.

_______________________

 

Memory Chirere's 
short stories are published in No More Plastic Balls (1999), A Roof to Repair (2000),Writing Still (2003) andCreatures Great and Small(2005). His latest collections are;Somewhere in This Country (2006) andTudikidiki (2007).

He compiled and editedCharles Mungoshi: A Critical Reader with Prof Maurice Vambe, . He is with the University of Zimbabwe where he teaches literature.

Hungry By the Numbers 

How the government defines hunger — and what it looks like up close. A photo essay.

By David Bacon and Betsy Edwards

• Beverly Cherkoff in front of the van where she lives.

                             

 

The federal government, in its infinite wisdom, has tried to define for us what being hungry means. They've come up with a yardstick, called "food insecurity." It means people who have less food than they want and need. It includes people who actually go hungry, but also those who've had to reduce the amount they eat, skip meals, or eat food they know isn't good for them, because they can't afford what it really takes to eat.

Late last fall the US Department of Agriculture shocked even those people who are used to thinking about the problems of hunger, when it released a report that counted the number of hungry families in this, the richest country in the world. It turns out we're not so rich after all, as anyone who's lost a job or a home in the Great Recession could easily tell you. Still, the numbers are like a sharp blow upside the head.

Some 16 percent of all families were food insecure — they didn't have the money to buy enough food at some point duirng 2008, up from 12 percent the year before. That amounted to 49 million people, including more than 16 million children. That's almost a quarter of all the children in the United States, and 4 million more than it was in 2007. This year we know the number is higher — we just don't know how much higher — yet.

About a third of those families simply didn't get enough food to eat. That's called, in USDA parlance, very low food security. That means these families went hungry. That included 12 million adults, and 5 million kids.

The other two thirds of food insecure families only survived because they had access to federal food programs, or got food at a local food pantry or soup kitchen. That means they were hungry too, but not quite as much.

Hunger isn't really spread evenly, as is obvious when you think about it. More in Oakland. Less in Lafayette. More than a quarter of all black and Latino households were food insecure — compared to 16 percent in general. And more than 13 percent of all familes made up of single moms and their children were not just food insecure, but outright hungry.

Some 42.2 percent of food-insecure households had incomes below the official poverty line, which is $21,834 for a family of four in 2008. So more than half of all hungry families actually had incomes above the poverty line. That poverty line, that official yardstick, is so low that millions of families not officially "in poverty" still don't have enough money to buy the food they need.

This was 2008, when the recession was just beginning. Last year, with unemployment in California reaching more than 12 percent, these numbers all went up. Again, we don't know yet by exactly how much, but we can be sure it's going to be a big jump.

We do know that the breadwinners in hundreds of thousands of California families suddenly lost their jobs. Families that formerly had no trouble feeding themselves, and even went out to eat in restaurants, couldn't put enough food on the table at home at some point to keep everyone from getting up hungry. So people went to food banks, food pantries, and soup kitchens to try to make up for what they could no longer buy. Almost five million people went to food pantries last year, up from 4 million the year before. About 625,000 ate in soup kitchens.

National numbers sometimes don't tell the local story, though. How many hungry people do we have where we actually live? Alameda County, with a population of 1.5 million, had probably a quarter of a million food insecure people in 2008. Contra Costa 160,000. Oakland 64,000. Berkeley and Richmond 16,000 each. Hayward over 22,000 and Alameda over 11,000. There were over 20,000 hungry children in Oakland alone. Do the math for your own neighborhood or city.

These are the numbers. The real question is, in your neighborhood? On your street? In the house down your block, or next door? Or could we be talking about you?

Here are a few of our neighbors — people who live around us. Let's forget the numbers and look at their faces. Hear their stories of how they've managed to survive — and eat.

Beverly Cherkoff cooks her meals in a tiny kitchen in a van, where plastic flowers climb the radio aeriel and spill across the windshield. Cherkoff, who parks the van in the parking lots of a couple of local factories, says she discovered one day, talking with the Mexican workers there, that they sometimes came to work hungry. She got a little extra food from the Davis Street food pantry, and began cooking for them also, while making her own meals. Today she fills big bags with lettuce, and carts away boxes of mushrooms. Shared food, she believes, makes you feel like people can all survive if they look out for each other. Most of the other people who get food at Davis Street have jobs too, but often still don't make enough money to both buy food and pay rent.

Mary Katherine Jones lives with her son Curtis in a single-room occupancy hotel in downtown Oakland. Jones receives SSDI as a disabled diabetic, and Curtis is her in-home care provider. The room has no refrigeration or kitchen, so they have to keep their perishable foods in a cooler, and buy ice every day or two. Food doesn't keep well this way, and it's also important to wash the cooler out every day in the one bathroom all residents on the floor share, in order to prevent sickness. Mary Katherine sometimes has to choose between paying for medications and buying food. To get to the store they have to take a bus and pay $2 round trip. Ms. Jones is a gospel singer and had been singing in LA with a ministry until they encouraged her to move to Oakland about a year ago. Now she spends her time going to bible school, singing, and writing music. She goes to St. Mary's Center for seniors, located on the Oakland/Emeryville border. Curtis was an actor in bit parts in LA, and takes classes in computer repair while looking for similar work in the Bay Area.

Coleen McEneany used to be a private investigator. Her husband worked for Circuit City as an information technology specialist. But the PI work dried up in the recession, and Circuit City closed. With their daughter, they moved into the Fremont home of her mother, a retired sixth-grade teacher. While the home has a pool in back and well-tended garden, the family resources were stretched so thin that they now depend on food and help from Tri-City Volunteers. Ironically, she knew about the food pantry because she and her husband were both donors to the program back when they were working. Nevertheless, with a degree in criminal justice, Coleen has hopes that she'll somehow find a job. In the meantime, she is taking courses for a degree in early childhood education.

Nnekia Stevenson was living with her three-year-old son and his father in Berkeley last fall. Despite holding down two jobs, though, while her son's father worked in construction, she couldn't make ends meet and moved in with her mom in an apartment in the Fruitvale. Neither had much money, and hardly any furniture to fill the vacant living room. Nnekia works with children at a local agency, ISOP, and was able to get a few days' work a month on call at the New United Motors Manufacturing plant in Fremont. But NUMMI closed in April, however, so Nnekia plans to start school at Laney in the fall to get a degree in childhood development. Nnekia's mother, Terri, gets SSI for her disability, which disqualifies them for food stamps. Terri was homeless off and on for thirty years, but finally moved into a shelter, Chrysalis, where she participated in rehab and got help finding a home.

Jim Reagan used to live in Peoples' Park in Berkeley. Last fall he traded the companionship of sleeping bags under the trees for a room in a single-room occupancy hotel in Berkeley. Before living in the park, he worked in homeless shelters, but then became homeless himself for two years. Now he hopes to become a caterer, while living month-to-month waiting for SSI checks. We met Jim at "Night on the Streets — Catholic Worker," a crew of dedicated volunteers, many from local churches, who bring breakfast to homeless folks in Peoples' Park and Provo Park every Sunday Morning. He stores the food he brings behind his house.

Oscar Fernandez, a day laborer from Mexico, lives in Hayward. His family lives in Merced in the Central Valley, where his wife works in a large retail store. Oscar can't find work in Merced, however, so during the week he comes up to Hayward and only sees the family on the weekend. Once a month Oscar and dozens of other mostly Mexican families spend the night on the sidewalk, waiting for the food distribution by Hope for the Heart on Saturday morning.

Perfectly Formed Short Story Competition

Perfectly Formed is our first short story competition, in association with Pan Macmillan and the Arvon Foundation

Want to have your work read by thousands of book lovers and get professional guidance for your writing career? Then enter Perfectly Formed, our first short story competition, in association with Pan Macmillan and the Arvon Foundation.

The competition

Books Quarterly is proud to announce the launch of the inaugural Waterstone’s Books Quarterly short story competition, Perfectly Formed: the search for the best unpublished writer in the country who can create a story that is small but... perfectly formed.

We’re looking for the best short story of 2,000 words or less. All our readers are eligible, as long as you’re over 18 and haven’t had fiction professionally published before. Your short story can be about any subject and in any fiction genre, be it drama, comedy, crime, historical or modern – just make it punchy, original and imaginative.

The prize will be judged by: Waterstone’s booksellers; the Books Quarterly and Waterstones.com teams; Arvon Centre Director Claire Berliner; Editorial Director Will Atkins of Pan Macmillan and its top Macmillan New Writing discoveries, James McCreet, Ann Weisgarber and Brian McGilloway:

Get handy tips from writer James McCreet
Get handy tips from writer Ann Weisgarber
Get handy tips from writer Brian McGilloway

 

How to enter

To submit your entry to Perfectly Formed, click below and attach the document of your original story of 2,000 words or less (please read the terms and conditions for details of format, entry requirements and deadlines). Remember to include your name, address and telephone number with your entry.

Please make sure you read the competition's terms and conditions (please note these terms and conditions are subject to revision) before submitting your entry.

This competition closes on 1 July 2010.  

The prize

Photo: Phil Grey

The winner will see their work published in the October issue of Books Quarterly to our readership of more than a quarter of a million, and online at www.macmillannewwriting.com, www.arvonfoundation.org, Wbqonline.com and Waterstones.com. But that’s just the start. The winner will be invited to attend an exclusive publisher’s lunch with Will Atkins, Editorial Director at Pan Macmillan, and author James McCreet to gain feedback and ideas on where to take their writing career in the future. And just to top things off, they will receive £200-worth of quality reading from Pan Macmillan of their choice.

To develop their skills, the winner will also receive a place on a week-long Arvon Foundation creative writing course of their choice.

The prize includes all tuition, food and accommodation (like that at Totleigh Barton pictured above.) During the week, the winner will have plenty of opportunity to spend time working on their own writing, as well as taking part in workshops, readings, and a one-to-one session with a course tutor. This year’s tutors and guest writers include Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, top screenwriters Jez Butterworth and Patrick Marber, and award-winning novelists Lionel Shriver and Sadie Jones. This is a fantastic opportunity for any aspiring writer.

The three best runners-up will receive concise written feedback on their entries, which will be published online, as well as winning £50-worth of Pan Macmillan books. So get writing on something small yet perfectly formed – and good luck!

 

The Arvon Foundation has been running inspirational creative writing courses for more than 40 years. The week-long residential courses, which cover a variety of themes and genres, take place at four historic writing houses across the UK, each one situated in stunning countryside. Courses are led by published writers who live and work alongside participants throughout the week. To find out more about Arvon visit www.arvonfoundation.org or call 020 7324 2554.

Launched in 2006, Macmillan New Writing is a unique publishing initiative that aims to publish the best debut fiction, and welcomes submissions from unpublished novelists in all genres – they have considered more than 12,000 novels. Some works have been shortlisted for major international prizes, foreign rights sold, and graduated to Macmillan’s mainstream imprints. To find out more, go to www.macmillannewwriting.com

  

Terms and conditions (please note these terms and conditions are subject to revision)

Read the full Perfectly Formed terms and conditions here

Announcing the 2010 winner of our Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, judged by Josip Novakovich:

Peter Brown, A Bright Soothing Noise

to be published November 2010

Katherine Anne Porter Guidelines

The University of North Texas Press announces the 2011 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. The winner of this annual award will receive $1000 and publication by UNT Press. Entries will be judged by an eminent writer.

Entries can be a combination of short-shorts, short stories, and novellas, from 100 to 200 book pages in length (word count between 27,500 and 50,000). Material should be previously unpublished in book form. Once a winner is declared and contracted for publication, UNT Press will hold the rights to the stories in the winning collection. They may no longer be under consideration for serial publication elsewhere and must be withdrawn by the author from consideration.

Please include two cover sheets: one with title only, and one with title, your name, address, e-mail, phone, and acknowledgment of any previously published material. Your name should not appear anywhere on the manuscript except on the one cover page. Manuscripts for the 2011 award should be postmarked between May 1 and June 30, 2010. The winning manuscript will be announced in January 2011. Watch for more details in Poets & Writers. Manuscripts cannot be returned and must be accompanied by a $25 entry fee (payable to UNT Press) and a letter-sized SASE for notification.

Send entries to:

Laura Kopchick, General Editor
Katherine Anne Porter Contest
English Department
University of Texas at Arlington
203 Carlisle Hall, Box 19035
Arlington, TX 76019

Fantastic Voyage: Infusing Rhythm and Music into Writing and Performance  Lyrical City Workshop #7    Saturday, June 5, 2:00-4:30 pm, Historical Society of Washington, DC, 801 K St. NW Workshop Facilitator: Holly Bass Busboys and Poets resident writer Holly Bass guides participants through a joyous odyssey of poetry, performance and sound. Participants will uncover new ways of infusing music into their written texts. Special focus will be given to freeing the voice—both written and spoken—as a way to connect with audiences on a deeper level. How can we evolve our ears to enhance our writing? What do musicians, DJs and nature have to teach us about sound and communication? This workshop is open to all but it is especially recommended for writers, solo performers, poets and musicians. Participants will leave the workshop with new work and an opportunity to be featured performers at Busboys and Poets’“Sunday Kind of Love” series taking place June 20th at 4pm. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 To register for the workshop, please send an email to langstondays@gmail.com with: -your name -a brief statement (50-150 words) explaining what you hope to get out of the workshop -one poem or short prose sample (optional, to give facilitator a sense of your style) Applicants will be notified on how to make advance payment. Participants will be invited to present their work at a reading at Busboys & Poets in June! Participants are also welcome to join the five-day Twitter poetry writing workshop which precedes this workshop. This workshop is a partnership between Busboys & Poets and the Historical Society of Washington, DC and is funded by the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, an agency supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

About Lyrical City
Lyrical City is a writing workshop series facilitated by award-winning writers with a strong DC connection. The workshops focus on various cultural aspects of the city and in particular DC’s African-American poetry tradition. Participation is limited to 15 people, on a first-come, first-served basis. The sessions are open to all. The cost of each workshop is $35. A few partial scholarships are also available.

OTL: Robben Island: A Greater Goal

Duration: 18:37

 

Outside the Lines tells the remarkable story of the political prisoners of Robben Island, who learned through soccer how they could one day forge a free and peaceful South Africa