Julius Chingono: a reflection

January 18, 2006 So, as assessors, we divided over Chingono's book. The reason was that his novel seemed too simple: he used commonplace words and he had an understated plot. However, someone persuaded us that though the story was not thrilling, it contained a poignancy, a rare sincerity and a concern for human beings.


It is this sincerity and relevance that I now find in Chingono's poetry though similarly when I first read his earlier poetry, I was dismissive. In retrospect, I think I must have read his poetry with a closed mind or - and harder to admit - a published writer's impatience, or is it arrogance?


But, one day, we shared the same stage at a reading and I quickly realised what I had missed, when I read some of his poems aloud before an audience. I recognised his sincerity and his feeling for humanity. I also understood that the simplicity of his language disguises the complexity, the irony, the double entendre that lies beneath the surface. You rarely read one of his poems the same way twice.


Much of his earlier poetry in Shona seem to be about love or the pains of love:

Ndakoniwa mudiwa ndakoniwa // I resign my love, I resign,
Dikita rangu rinonyungudututsa matombo mumugodhi // My sweat meets the stones,
Asi ndinoshama iwe woye // Underground in the mine
Ratadza kupfavisa wako mwoyo // But fails to melt your heart.

(Translation by Julius Chingono.)


His poetry in English is more varied in terms of the subjects addressed, but everything he writes reveals Chingono's deep concern with life around him. A keen observer, he uses language to create images that create often surprising links between unrelated objects and states of mind.


His poems range from the war in the seventies, the early post-Independence years in the eighties, through to the strugglesof the nineties. He does not deal in 'isms' but in personal detail, he looks at situations that many would prefer to forget but which much be remembered for the sake of our humanity. Sometimes the images overlap - it need not be in war, it's simply people suffering and surviving:

"Those coming from troubled areas / talk of no place to spit saliva."


Poems about broken families, broken homes, which may be the responsibility of the individuals but are surely a consequence of economic and social circumstances. Many of his poems are sited on the city streets, where the street kids seem a reproach to humanity as they try to eke out a living:

Fungai,
you will live on water
from the toilets
Brace up
for a long, long day.


And there are also intensely personal, almost mystical, poems in which Chingono looks inwards, and/or at situations drawing on an ambiguity that compels the reader to search for the key to the poem's enigma: 'Grapes' did this for me as did a 'Kind of a Meal'.Despite his seeming preoccupation and empathising with suffering humanity, Chingono can also laugh as shown in 'My Pipe' or in 'An Epitaph' in which Stephen Pwanya is survived by his pipe:

"The smoke could not wait, / it took to the wind."


Chingono has developed his art to a spareness not found in some of his earlier work, a clarity and lucidity that is difficult to achieve without self-control and reflection. There is no doubt that he will one day achieve the recognition that he deserves in Zimbabwe. That he has been largely ignored is due in part to his own humility, but also his refusal to bend to the winds of rhetoric or to engage with the great transitory winds of political change. He looks at the world around him, and he tells it as it is.