Editorial: September 2005

January 18, 2006 As a rare treat, three previously unpublished poems by {id="5755" title="Dambudzo Marechera"} are featured in the Zimbabwean magazine. The poems were written for Bettina Schmidt in 1986 when she was living in Zimbabwe, and are shown together with images of the originals typed on Marechera’s Olivetti typewriter. In an accompanying essay, Dr Schmidt discusses Marechera’s position as ‘inside-outsider’ in Zimbabwean literature, unwilling to compromise his writing for political goals.

New Dutch poet {id="4006" title="Esther Jansma"} is an archeologist by profession, specialised in establishing the age of wooden artifacts by studying the growth rings in the wood. In the work published here, her concern with the progress of time, loss and death is evident, as well as her desire to salvage something from it all in her poetry:

It is scrabbling, in pursuit of the vanishing,
the people of the past, shards of thought,
sequences which led to action – planing wood,

snipping out small clothes – moments,
long ago, which really were and were really
vanished till someone grasps them, reads them back.

{id="970" title="Shang Qin"} (1930) was born in southern China and joined the Kuomintang army at the age of fifteen. As he wrote in his preface to Between Dream and Dawn, a “series of escapes” defined this period: “I wanted to return home, but on my way there I was repeatedly captured by other troops; again and again I escaped.” ‘Escaping’ to Taiwan with the troops in the late 1940s, Shang Qin became interested in modernism and started to publish his own poetry. He left the army in 1968. One of the first to write prose poems in Chinese, his poetry is characterised by a laconic tone, dry sense of humor and certain surrealist elements. In his poems, characters “drown by moonlight”, snowflakes are caused by angels’ “arguments and sighs” that “gradually crystallize and fall one by one”, and people, arriving home, unlock their hearts:

While I looked for my key the kindhearted taxi driver aimed his
headlights at me as he backed up. The ruthless glare projected the
inky silhouette of a middle-aged man onto the iron gate. It was only
after I had found the right key on the chain and inserted it straight
into my heart that the good fellow drove off.

An instance of poetry as self-healing can be found in the latest work of Bengali poet{id="2722" title="Joy Goswami"}. The book from which the current selection is taken came out of a “terrible depression”, Goswami explains in the accompanying interview, and poetry at that time presented the ultimate refuge amidst the disasters and socio-political changes he saw around him. Yet by facing up to these nighmares Goswami has created poems that are bleak, surreal and strangely invigorating:

A mound of earth a heart
Crowned by a set of bones playing
Bones. Dice. Bones.

A mound of earth, a heart
The ground awaits your spade and shovel
It’s your right, so dig will you?

Finally, the second Indian poet to be published this month, and the last poet in this issue is {id="2726" title="Kunwar Narain"}, one of the ‘grand old men’ of Indian poetry. Narain (1927) is associated with the New Poetry movement in Hindi. His poems reveal a marvellous awareness of language in its own right, and a reflective, at times philosophical attitude that never loses sight of what it means to be human. Thus, in a poem like ‘As Usual’ we can find “a heap of ashes/ and charred bodies”, while ‘A Shop That Sells Peace’ and ‘A Strange Day’ present wry, wonderful meditations on the small mercies – with large implications – of everyday life:

A STRANGE DAY

I wandered all day
            and nothing happened
I met people all day
            and no one humiliated me
I spoke the truth all day
            and no one felt hurt
I believed everyone all day
            and no one deceived me.

The miracle is
that when I returned home
it wasn’t someone else
            but I
            myself
            who returned home
                        totally intact.