The Poetry of Cosmas Mairosi

September 27, 2007 Mariosi has written more than one hundred and fifty poems, many of which bear the hallmarks of material that is used in more rhetorical performance as well as simply rhyming verse. We have chosen to discuss a small selection of seven poems.

The second stanza of ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ is a counterpoint of colloquialism and measured expression. As we see from the title of the poem, Mairosi both implicitly and explicitly, with conscious irony and sometimes a more heavy tread, draws on the Bible:
“The lord is my shepherd: / Even if I walk in the valley of freedom / I am forced to attend his rallies.”

Stanzas such as:

i shall continually shout his name and sing his
praises
“long live my leader”

consist of a single sentence broken into shorter phrases. In ‘Freedom’ the vivid imagery of the demise of our once cherished freedom is diminished by his use of clichés such as “i have suffered many setbacks”, “going up in flames”, and “political turmoil”. These are journalistic not poetic sound-bites. Nevertheless, the image of a people who have been cowed by dictatorship and forced to become “wailing widows, dollar-seeking mothers” abandoning their babies, in the face of  “freedom anthems sung by decapitated souls”, while “corrupt officials fart on embezzled donor funds” is indeed a vivid, even bitter, image of a self-flagellating people “too used to oppression”.

Mairosi feels very deeply and like many young poets with little access to the work of others,
considers depth of feeling accompanied by rhythm or rhyme the essential ingredients of a good poem. This often results in glowering, overbearing imagery that leaves nothing to the imagination:

Re-furled, blood in spurting spray
and
And he standing growling, glowing, gloating
Over you
His squealing tyres a sequel deep, ripping
Into your flesh

(from ‘Re-entering Street Life’)

In a country where the rich have become richer and the poor, poorer it is not difficult to understand his anger, his emotion. But does it work as poetry? Do we need to hit the reader or the listener between the eyes, or is this the stuff of rhetoric? I have seen a woman hit by a car. The automatic convulsive reaction was to look away. Yet Mairosi thrusts this gory blood drenched image in our faces, as if in his anger for the callousness of society he wants to shock us.

I have sympathy with him. Are our values such that the lives of the poor matter no more than those of stray dogs? I wonder cynically — did the driver expect the dismembered body to apologise for staining his car with her blood, expect her to thank him for the privilege of being struck by his smart brand-new eight-litre jeep, the spoils of the “third chimurenga”. The fact that the victim’s child was standing there, seeing his mother’s body, “strewn across the tarmac” seemed to be of no import to the driver.

In ‘Amai Chido’ we are again presented with the ravages of a political system where loyalty to the party and cult worship override family values and obligations, while the party gives nothing in return except patronage to a chosen few. However, Mairosi’s tone is more varied. There is more tonal counterpoint. Here we have a husband, subdued by the feeling that his wife is no longer his, a husband whose “nights have become too cold”, while his wife spends her time “dancing before the ministers / chanting slogans and brandishing placards / attending rallies late into the night”.

However, instead of the husband angrily admonishing her for abandoning her conjugal duties, his censure is as indirect and ironic as it is sorrowful:

I know you are fighting for a noble cause.
But when you tire of trading insults with you opponents
tearing down the opposition strongholds,

Please remember me, my love,
The children and I
Need you home.

The contrast of tone, the play of images, has more impact than any amount of raving anger.
‘Dear mummy – on abortion’ is written from the perspective of aborted twins, having been denied the chance to be loved. They await, in limbo, their mother’s arrival in the afterlife and rue missing the opportunity of being given life. The perspective is an interesting one, but Mairosi has not stopped to consider more deeply the complex reasons that may have lain behind a mother’s actions in a society that too often rejects and abandons unmarried, pregnant women, or where men refuse to wear condoms and women bear the brunt of looking after children. Nonetheless, the unborn children await their mother’s coming:

Though for a time we are not told.
But when you finally join us
We’ll crowd to thee
On those knees you denied us:
Dreary twins you shall dread to meet.
Bring us gifts for pleasure sweet.

Poems such as these are undermined by easy sentimentality and mixed registers as in the use of the repeated apostrophe, ‘Oh Mummy’ and ‘Crowd to thee’. My main question is, however, why did the poet write in English? What audience did he have in mind? Had he written in Shona, might the poem have resisted some of the stylistic weakness? Curiously ‘twins’ here is used in the Shona sense, simply meaning multiple births. However, Mairosi is a poet who often relies on emotional charge for his inspiration and sees his role as that of the moraliser and preacher, and in this he is very traditional.

At this stage it is difficult to determine whether Mairosi has developed a distinct style of his own. Some of his writing can hardly be considered poetry. Raging and painting gaudy pictures, as in his portrayal of the West African and Rwandan atrocities (not reviewed here) verge on the obscene for a sensitive reader. It is not necessary, in poetic medium, to paint gory pictures to capture the reader’s sympathy. The scene in Shakespeare’s Macbeth of Lady Macbeth trying to cleanse herself of Duncan’s imagined blood on her hands is not of a bloodthirsty murderous butcher, but a very troubled soul.

In addition, his use of language is often quaint and not deliberately anachronistic as if he had had to rely for his own reading not on contemporary Zimbabwean and other poets but almost exclusively on the English poets of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Such vocabulary – as in the last two lines of ‘How Quickly Time Passes’ – “… flat-chested lassies that once bounded in banter// Now amble in measured guile…”, can jar, appear comic, or distort the Zimbabwean reality or context in a manner which does not appear to be deliberate or conscious but rather the style of a man trying to find his own voice in a situation where he has few, if any, resources.

When, however, he addresses the Zimbabwean political malaise rather than more philosophical issues, his verse is often more powerful, more immediate. If he has a fairly limited repertoire of literary techniques, he has an uncanny way of metamorphosing the mirage of normalcy into the pathos of despair that it is:

In ‘Dear Loretta, Mistress Mine’ which must surely be a conscious or unconscious echo of the Clown’s song in Twelfth Night, a book which was commonly studied in Zimbabwean schools, a young man praises the virtues of a beautiful young woman:

I have heard you singing as you went about your
daily tasks
I have watched you basking, browsing in the sun
I have watched your goings-in and goings-out

The reader is primed for an ensuing romance saga, but

I am the jackal that lurks in your halls of freedom
I am the snake that slithers in your garden
I am the lion that roars in your neighbouring hills.

Unsuspecting,
I have seen you lavish me with your smile
I will lure you, Loretta, with my riches and guile
I will leave you, Loretta, to the hyenas when I have
had my fill …

The poet references the predatory sugar daddies in Mercs who hunt down unsuspecting young women with promises of unlimited largesse.

Though Mariosi might write with the simplicity of the street kid, he conjures up some very powerful imagery: “a crippled economy balancing on expired bank notes ...” (‘Visions’) says more than volumes of econometrics and poverty datum indices. That the economy is ‘crippled’ suggests it can’t find its balance on an expired bank notes. The lines “freedom manufactured into a delectable dish by /hooligans and despots”  contain a suggestive power which indicates that Mairosi is developing away from the overstatement and melodrama of “freedom written in children’s blood / freedom oozing from decaying bodies and fermenting / torsos.”

I have likened Mariosi’s writing to that of an innocent child, narrated very simply but truthfully. In ‘Entering Street Life’ he indeed becomes one of them, one of those countless little beggars we encounter on practically every street corner. They are so numerous these days we have become immune to them, they have become part of our culture in our assumption that we are not like them. There are now at least three generations of children having children in the streets. We hold our breaths when we walk through underpasses for the smell of urine and other foetid odours: we hold our breaths when we walk through their homes. At the traffic lights we wind up our windows and look straight ahead, avoiding those terrifying, penetrating little eyes that say “there is a child inside me”.

‘The Sun is Setting’ is a poem with obvious references to Zimbabwe’s political doldrums. It is a very contemporary poem, which, divested of its context, might be shrouded in some mystique conferred by the imagery, but not to a Zimbabwean reader. For every motif Mariosi uses, it can be simply restated in terms of people’s day-to-day frustrations and despair:  “My crop is not yet harvested /My cattle are still a-field”.

The way out is obvious but, again drawing heavily on biblical imagery, “My people haven’t yet crossed the river Jordan / My people are still to arrive in Canaan” because
“The leaders have not yet signed the peace accord / The sun is setting.”

Cosmas Mairosi is a man using poetry as a medium to convey his anger, his bitterness, his passion about the injustice and failure of the state to provide for its people, as was promised after Independence. Born in 1977, his education and entire adult life has been based on unfulfilled promise and we can do well to listen to what he and other young poets are telling us.
He, in turn, needs to realise perhaps that poetry is and should be more than emotion conveyed in short lines on a page, no matter how starkly or frankly delivered. The tendency to tell the reader what it was like, to sermonise, can also suggest an implicit patronage, as if he were the only to understand what is happening. For his poetry to last, he perhaps needs to step back a little, to work his poetry to a greater pitch of irony and complexity, styles that he is reaching towards but needs to develop more fully if his poetry is to last into a new era.