Article
The Poetry of Chris Magadza Reviewed
April 14, 2006
Christopher Magadza belongs to a generation of great but largely unrecognised poets, whose talents emerged almost untutored, born of tenacity, inspiration and a desire to capture their particular colonial, social and personal circumstances. These were poets who worked in isolation and, for the most part, trusted their instincts. Never tempted to pander to the public, they hardly benefited from that dynamic interchange of ideas that comes with fraternity.
***
Magadza was born and raised on a farm and recalls how his grandfather, father, uncle and he himself served in various capacities as labourers on Toronto Farm, owned by the famous Mutare photographer, E.T. Brown. The story of how this ‘garden boy’ was accepted at the prestigious St Augustine’s Mission and Fletcher High secondary schools before completing his BSc and MSc at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and then proceeding to New Zealand to write a PhD reads like a fictionalised romance : from young, poor and underprivileged to prominent academic ecologist, his route incorporating many trials and tribulations.
Magadza belongs to a rare breed, he is a professional willing to set aside his empirical scientific training and don the mantle of an artist driven by intuition. In his unpublished collection, Father and other poems, Magadza explores familiar themes associated with the colonized such as the loss of traditional African beliefs and gods, the consequent crisis of cultural and spiritual identity; racial abuse and oppression, the fight for freedom and its aftermath.
In ‘Days Gone By’ the poet laments the end of a more benevolent and mystical old world in which our forefathers worshipped “in the mountain mists” and “were blessed”; a world in which the almighty manifested himself in thunder and lightning which became “torrential anger/On forests dark and haunted” but still provided rain so that:
Our land was watered
And brook and frog
Duetted the earth giving birth
Now that the gods have deserted the land or, alternatively, that Africans have abandoned their gods, the consequence is an ecological disaster, destruction through drought as “dust shrouded the defiled mountain” and the “nose-blistering breath-sucking air” have come to haunt this land. And it seems as though it is futile to appease deities who themselves have suffered an irreversible demise:
And the rain:
A distant rumbling rumour,
A dim flicker
In the evening light,
A dying convulsion
Like a spent, aged lover.
Magadza is not suggesting that the past was exactly innocent and paradisiacal because there is ample allusion to the violent storms which accompanied the blessings of good seasons. Yet it is true that his work contains themes, such as the yearning for a golden era when rainfall was regular, the relationship between the loss of African divinity and the endless droughts that paralyze Zimbabwe, and the pessimism about restoring fertility to the land and health to the people, which are some of the key archetypes in Zimbabwean literature (see, for example, Charles Mungoshi’s Coming of the Dry Season and Waiting for the Rain, and Musaemura Zimunya’s ‘No Songs’ published in Thought-Tracks).
In another poem, ‘The Herd Boy’, Magadza, has a black boy “Gulping heat [ . . . ] Coughing drought” even as “Thirsty rain from/Red hot cloud/Burning dust/Drinking sand river dry”. These are images drifting close to the apocalyptic. And, whereas, these themes seemed most aptly to characterize the socio-cultural and spiritual malaise of colonial Rhodesia, it now appears that the coming of independence only provided a transitory vision of glory and restoration of the golden past. In fact, by some bizarre twist of human psychology, there is currently a conceptual trend in which the present miseries of Zimbabwe are seen as divine retribution for the loss of a happier colonial paradise. In yet another poem, ‘The Breaking of the Drought’, Magadza devotes his literary inspiration to capturing the sometimes awesome effect of the tropical storm after a few years of the most debilitating lack of rain. The storm is seen from the point of view of some children who have yet to experience the wonder and beauty of nature and of some who already know the magic of life released by the first torrential rains to break the long, dry period. But as much as these poems are reflections on a retribution upon an errant people by some vengeful ancestral divinity, there is every suggestion that Magadza is one of those sensitive artists tormented by the ecological disasters facing Africa and driven to speak of it through his writings.
In ‘The Old Tree’, Magadza evokes the everlasting and mystical powers of a mythical old tree, one of the most enduring symbols of our ancient religions which the colonials derogatorily condemned as animism. He eulogizes about the enduring strength that has made it witness to “The rupture of mountains/The breach of the seas/And the angry thunder of broken waters/Icy”. The poet devotes his passion to this “Sleepless guardian/Of mysteries old”. And so, suddenly, the tree is invested with deistic traits and ominously – even in its silence – hears:
The savage angry cry
Of angel turned brute,
Seen the slaughter of
Father by son,
The rape of sister by brother,
The innocence of infancy
Starve to laughing demon;
At which point colonial brutality and post-colonial violence merge, leaving the common people at the mercy of those who wield power and use it in order to prevail at the expense of justice.
***
Not uncharacteristically, Magadza’s major preoccupation is in exploring the effects of colonial oppression and racial abuse upon the colonised. Spanning several decades and beginning in the sixties, his poetry describes and condemns the inhumanity of an institution conceived for the sole purpose of generating prosperity for one race and degrading another. On 11th November each year (the date of the unilateral declaration of independence), Rhodesian settlers celebrate their theft of the right of Africans to freedom. In the poem ‘November Eleven’, Magadza captures the frustrations of the colonized who, like Dante’s forsaken, supplicate nocturnally before a deaf and unwilling god:
But when the clock strikes
The half night hour,
Between the darkness and time
The air is feverish with prayers
Of a silent people
Whose god is frightened
To hear their supplications
By day.
They peer into time and find no respite from oppression.
Those who have had the dubious privileged of being colonized will tell you that racial abuse follows you into exile the way a fly pursues excremental odours. Thus, in the poem ‘Beneath the Rainbow’ the poet finds himself as a subject of some Caucasian children’s amusement, cutting afresh into his emotional cicatrix. Playing in the park, the children are described in romantic terms, for example, “their hair,/Like ripe wheat dancing/In the warm smiling sun” or sardonically such as:
The cherubs of content played,
Like lambs frolicking
In the sun
before they rush to the poet with a noisy plea
“Tell us a story;
Tell us that one
About what they do
To the black people
In your land;
Yes, tell us an exciting story . . . ”
It is one of the most wretched consequences of colonial culture that the stories of the suffering of one human race were remarkably turned into comic lullabies for the entertainment of young children so that would “twitter/each to the other/About the beautiful scars/On my heart”. The poet protests against a culture that nourished children at bedtime with the stories of Sambo before they went to sleep “Clutching [their] golliwogs”. There is more bitter irony in a poem like ‘The Party’ where the poet attends an anti-apartheid party in the company of white leftist Marxists and observes white liberals vicariously celebrating “Evocative Zulu rhythms”, “hypnotized/By the erotic dance/Of the bulbous bottomed/Ethnic girls” as they enjoy “Drumsticks and Castle beers”. Their commitment to the liberation struggle is summed up in their suggestion that an activist should never have been caught before he could get to England.
***
Naturally, therefore, in a sequence of several poems which includes ‘The Return’, ‘The Return of a Refugee’, ‘Ode to a Young Man’, ‘Ghosts in the Maize Field’, ‘Soldier’s Rebuke’, ‘Ode to a Star’ and ‘Tribute to a War Veteran’, Magadza celebrates the valour and sacrifice of those who selflessly put their lives at risk to liberate the people of Zimbabwe. In ‘The Return’ and ‘The Return of a Refugee’ we see two sides of the same theme – exile. In the first poem, Magadza paints a haunting picture of the liberators emerging out of an apocalyptic night of thunder that rents the darkness of colonial oppression with “Myriads of cosmic fires”:
As raindrops hung limpid
From drooping branches
Like tears on war weary faces
The tension of reconnecting with “strange faces” who are yet “loved faces” who had become “Half forgotten legends” is palpable in the poem. For, by the end of the war of liberation, brothers had become propaganda stereotypes as rapists, murderers and even cannibals – ogres of terror. They were revered for their daring against the settler regime as they were feared for their sometimes ruthless torture of informers and colonial collaborators. There is relief towards the end of the poem as the fighters “came down from the mountain/Bearing arms on their shoulders/And palm branches in their hands.” Not insignificantly, for their noble sacrifice, these heroes are hailed and sanctified in the enduring spirit of Chaminuka, that ancient Shona prophet, seer and magician. But while the return of the fighters is depicted in heroic terms, that of the refugee is not. ‘Return of the Refugee’ describes the anxiety and the hesitation that accompany one who returns from exile desiring spontaneous reunion but finding none. Indeed, so intense is his alienation that the eyes of the rooster are like cross-sights of a gun “trained on me”, “Piercing through a chink/In the coop”. The “little voices” of chicks sound terrified of his presence as though he had reminded them of days “When the night is dark/when the night thunders war/When the bleak air reeks/Of gunfire”. In short, the war has ended but the nightmare has not.
Hereafter, Magadza’s poetry follows an all-too-familiar trajectory. We have seen the poems of religious anxiety and anti-colonial protest. We have also seen the celebration of independence. But soon, the lingering anxieties that kept peeping through the liberation dance break out with the political disturbances that came with the land redistribution. By the turn of the twentieth century, the very same heroes whom the poet eulogized not so long before become the villains of his disillusionment, committing brutalities against the innocent who may not even have been stumbling blocks in their path to the Third Chimurenga.
‘Ghosts in the maize fields’ is a rhetorically charged expression of the poet’s contempt for political opportunists and bankrupt frauds, anarchists and usurpers of wealth who masqueraded as “war vets”. In a series of questions the poet challenges these men who commit various crimes against humanity to identify themselves for who they are, not for who their tongues claim them to be:
Who are these
Who stand in the ploughed fields
Wearing stolen cloaks
In the setting sun,
Casting long cold shadows
On the young crop?
Who are these
With fattened faces
And little eyes
That see neither the sun
Nor the hungry mother? . . .
Who are these that rape
Their sisters and defile
Their grandmothers?
Who are these
That urinate
On the ancestors’ graves
And defecate
In the village well?
Magadza has a message for all men who would claim to the noblest virtues of liberation and it reminds me of my own views about political violence. I once said the following:
I believe that at this stage in our history, now one who has their hands dripping with the blood of the innocent deserves the Zimbabwe’s highest political office – whether it is the blood of one innocent, or three or three hundred! For to value the sanctity of life of your fellow citizens is the first principle of all great prophets of freedom and democracy. Everything else derives its inspiration and justification from this very principle. Murdering one voter for the sake of winning an election or strangling the owner of a farm in order to distribute it to others is the very epitome of barbaric justice.
Yet this matter does not end here. For the narrow-minded – one hesitates to use ‘simple-minded’ – it would be easy to cast Magadza’s celebration of independence as “premature and naïve”, and then to castigate his criticism of civil rights abuse as a matter of just desserts for the previous naivety and uncritical myopia, which saw him prematurely celebrate the end of colonial rule. Such critics fail the intellectual community in their lack of complexity. Life is an ever-changing prism and so are human emotions and feelings. We would benefit enormously from remembering Marcel Proust’s church spire that on a sunny, cloudy, misty or snowy day never looked the same, its shape and perspective being relative to the viewer’s distance and direction from it. So, those who lived in darkness were entitled to some cavorting once the light of providence happened to smite independence at them – even if it were momentary. We should also remember that real war veterans did not benefit from a sound programme of rehabilitation, one that would heal them of the psychological excesses of the war-oriented conditioning that was so essential to their guerilla training. So, for as long as symbols of dispossession existed – and those settler farms have always been so – the incubi and succubae would sooner or later pour forth.
***
Like most poets, Magadza is unable to resist reflecting upon the familiar phenomenon of death and life beyond the grave. It is a peculiar anxiety, but, unlike other poets, he is not phased by the lurking horror of finding one is a corpse-in-waiting. Rather, he belongs to that select breed of mankind who have peered into the nether regions and discovered the reassuring voice of an ancient prophet, or even a long-dead grandfather. In his poem entitled ‘Narita airport’, he displays two contradictory emotions: the first, a yearning to return to a carefree and amorous youth, and second, to resign himself to his death, knowing there is more beyond life. He says “When I watch the youth/Abustle and ahustle”, “Careless of the future/Chasing Eros”:
I feel like
The last passenger
On the last train
To the last destination.
But,
Unlike Tithonus
Desired by an immortal goddess,
Aphrodite beautiful,
Begged for immortality,
I am blessed
With the gift
Of death.
In other poems such as ‘By day and night’ and ‘Father’, there are a few intimations of death, pleas to the dying to remain awhile and not abandon the poet and a yearning for communion uninterrupted by death.
Because of his modesty, Magadza has been hidden from a public who deserve to hear more of its peoples’ hidden voices, voices that are the invisible talents of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has many honest voices tucked away in its cacophonous belly, alongside the political loudmouths, and it is time to draw these out and away from the very real threat of artistic extinction.
Musaemura Zimunya is a poet and critic; he lectures at the University of Zimbabwe.
For most followers of Zimbabwean literature, the canon begins with Charles Mungoshi and evolves through the man-child genius, Dambudzo Marechera. He is followed by Chenjerai Hove, and then comes the unique flourishing of women’s writing represented by Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera. Yet it is the novels of these writers rather than their poetry that receive the most coverage – understandably, since so few of us are tenacious enough or have time for the reading and enjoyment of poems.
Nonetheless, even though some writing has withered for lack of nourishment, and some has remained locked away in private keeps, Zimbabwe has been profoundly blessed with many years of continuous literary flowering. Indeed, over the years, I have been privileged to read handwritten manuscripts of poems by such powerful and little known writers as Tobby Moyana, Solomon Mahaka and Eddison Zvobgo. (I have also had the rare honour of reading the diaries of a political prisoner in which he documented the sardonic horrors of a life of indefinite punishment – that slow asphyxiation called detention; and told of the relentless torture of prisoners of political conscience.)Christopher Magadza belongs to a generation of great but largely unrecognised poets, whose talents emerged almost untutored, born of tenacity, inspiration and a desire to capture their particular colonial, social and personal circumstances. These were poets who worked in isolation and, for the most part, trusted their instincts. Never tempted to pander to the public, they hardly benefited from that dynamic interchange of ideas that comes with fraternity.
***
Magadza was born and raised on a farm and recalls how his grandfather, father, uncle and he himself served in various capacities as labourers on Toronto Farm, owned by the famous Mutare photographer, E.T. Brown. The story of how this ‘garden boy’ was accepted at the prestigious St Augustine’s Mission and Fletcher High secondary schools before completing his BSc and MSc at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and then proceeding to New Zealand to write a PhD reads like a fictionalised romance : from young, poor and underprivileged to prominent academic ecologist, his route incorporating many trials and tribulations.
Magadza belongs to a rare breed, he is a professional willing to set aside his empirical scientific training and don the mantle of an artist driven by intuition. In his unpublished collection, Father and other poems, Magadza explores familiar themes associated with the colonized such as the loss of traditional African beliefs and gods, the consequent crisis of cultural and spiritual identity; racial abuse and oppression, the fight for freedom and its aftermath.
In ‘Days Gone By’ the poet laments the end of a more benevolent and mystical old world in which our forefathers worshipped “in the mountain mists” and “were blessed”; a world in which the almighty manifested himself in thunder and lightning which became “torrential anger/On forests dark and haunted” but still provided rain so that:
Our land was watered
And brook and frog
Duetted the earth giving birth
Now that the gods have deserted the land or, alternatively, that Africans have abandoned their gods, the consequence is an ecological disaster, destruction through drought as “dust shrouded the defiled mountain” and the “nose-blistering breath-sucking air” have come to haunt this land. And it seems as though it is futile to appease deities who themselves have suffered an irreversible demise:
And the rain:
A distant rumbling rumour,
A dim flicker
In the evening light,
A dying convulsion
Like a spent, aged lover.
Magadza is not suggesting that the past was exactly innocent and paradisiacal because there is ample allusion to the violent storms which accompanied the blessings of good seasons. Yet it is true that his work contains themes, such as the yearning for a golden era when rainfall was regular, the relationship between the loss of African divinity and the endless droughts that paralyze Zimbabwe, and the pessimism about restoring fertility to the land and health to the people, which are some of the key archetypes in Zimbabwean literature (see, for example, Charles Mungoshi’s Coming of the Dry Season and Waiting for the Rain, and Musaemura Zimunya’s ‘No Songs’ published in Thought-Tracks).
In another poem, ‘The Herd Boy’, Magadza, has a black boy “Gulping heat [ . . . ] Coughing drought” even as “Thirsty rain from/Red hot cloud/Burning dust/Drinking sand river dry”. These are images drifting close to the apocalyptic. And, whereas, these themes seemed most aptly to characterize the socio-cultural and spiritual malaise of colonial Rhodesia, it now appears that the coming of independence only provided a transitory vision of glory and restoration of the golden past. In fact, by some bizarre twist of human psychology, there is currently a conceptual trend in which the present miseries of Zimbabwe are seen as divine retribution for the loss of a happier colonial paradise. In yet another poem, ‘The Breaking of the Drought’, Magadza devotes his literary inspiration to capturing the sometimes awesome effect of the tropical storm after a few years of the most debilitating lack of rain. The storm is seen from the point of view of some children who have yet to experience the wonder and beauty of nature and of some who already know the magic of life released by the first torrential rains to break the long, dry period. But as much as these poems are reflections on a retribution upon an errant people by some vengeful ancestral divinity, there is every suggestion that Magadza is one of those sensitive artists tormented by the ecological disasters facing Africa and driven to speak of it through his writings.
In ‘The Old Tree’, Magadza evokes the everlasting and mystical powers of a mythical old tree, one of the most enduring symbols of our ancient religions which the colonials derogatorily condemned as animism. He eulogizes about the enduring strength that has made it witness to “The rupture of mountains/The breach of the seas/And the angry thunder of broken waters/Icy”. The poet devotes his passion to this “Sleepless guardian/Of mysteries old”. And so, suddenly, the tree is invested with deistic traits and ominously – even in its silence – hears:
The savage angry cry
Of angel turned brute,
Seen the slaughter of
Father by son,
The rape of sister by brother,
The innocence of infancy
Starve to laughing demon;
At which point colonial brutality and post-colonial violence merge, leaving the common people at the mercy of those who wield power and use it in order to prevail at the expense of justice.
***
Not uncharacteristically, Magadza’s major preoccupation is in exploring the effects of colonial oppression and racial abuse upon the colonised. Spanning several decades and beginning in the sixties, his poetry describes and condemns the inhumanity of an institution conceived for the sole purpose of generating prosperity for one race and degrading another. On 11th November each year (the date of the unilateral declaration of independence), Rhodesian settlers celebrate their theft of the right of Africans to freedom. In the poem ‘November Eleven’, Magadza captures the frustrations of the colonized who, like Dante’s forsaken, supplicate nocturnally before a deaf and unwilling god:
But when the clock strikes
The half night hour,
Between the darkness and time
The air is feverish with prayers
Of a silent people
Whose god is frightened
To hear their supplications
By day.
They peer into time and find no respite from oppression.
Those who have had the dubious privileged of being colonized will tell you that racial abuse follows you into exile the way a fly pursues excremental odours. Thus, in the poem ‘Beneath the Rainbow’ the poet finds himself as a subject of some Caucasian children’s amusement, cutting afresh into his emotional cicatrix. Playing in the park, the children are described in romantic terms, for example, “their hair,/Like ripe wheat dancing/In the warm smiling sun” or sardonically such as:
The cherubs of content played,
Like lambs frolicking
In the sun
before they rush to the poet with a noisy plea
“Tell us a story;
Tell us that one
About what they do
To the black people
In your land;
Yes, tell us an exciting story . . . ”
It is one of the most wretched consequences of colonial culture that the stories of the suffering of one human race were remarkably turned into comic lullabies for the entertainment of young children so that would “twitter/each to the other/About the beautiful scars/On my heart”. The poet protests against a culture that nourished children at bedtime with the stories of Sambo before they went to sleep “Clutching [their] golliwogs”. There is more bitter irony in a poem like ‘The Party’ where the poet attends an anti-apartheid party in the company of white leftist Marxists and observes white liberals vicariously celebrating “Evocative Zulu rhythms”, “hypnotized/By the erotic dance/Of the bulbous bottomed/Ethnic girls” as they enjoy “Drumsticks and Castle beers”. Their commitment to the liberation struggle is summed up in their suggestion that an activist should never have been caught before he could get to England.
***
Naturally, therefore, in a sequence of several poems which includes ‘The Return’, ‘The Return of a Refugee’, ‘Ode to a Young Man’, ‘Ghosts in the Maize Field’, ‘Soldier’s Rebuke’, ‘Ode to a Star’ and ‘Tribute to a War Veteran’, Magadza celebrates the valour and sacrifice of those who selflessly put their lives at risk to liberate the people of Zimbabwe. In ‘The Return’ and ‘The Return of a Refugee’ we see two sides of the same theme – exile. In the first poem, Magadza paints a haunting picture of the liberators emerging out of an apocalyptic night of thunder that rents the darkness of colonial oppression with “Myriads of cosmic fires”:
As raindrops hung limpid
From drooping branches
Like tears on war weary faces
The tension of reconnecting with “strange faces” who are yet “loved faces” who had become “Half forgotten legends” is palpable in the poem. For, by the end of the war of liberation, brothers had become propaganda stereotypes as rapists, murderers and even cannibals – ogres of terror. They were revered for their daring against the settler regime as they were feared for their sometimes ruthless torture of informers and colonial collaborators. There is relief towards the end of the poem as the fighters “came down from the mountain/Bearing arms on their shoulders/And palm branches in their hands.” Not insignificantly, for their noble sacrifice, these heroes are hailed and sanctified in the enduring spirit of Chaminuka, that ancient Shona prophet, seer and magician. But while the return of the fighters is depicted in heroic terms, that of the refugee is not. ‘Return of the Refugee’ describes the anxiety and the hesitation that accompany one who returns from exile desiring spontaneous reunion but finding none. Indeed, so intense is his alienation that the eyes of the rooster are like cross-sights of a gun “trained on me”, “Piercing through a chink/In the coop”. The “little voices” of chicks sound terrified of his presence as though he had reminded them of days “When the night is dark/when the night thunders war/When the bleak air reeks/Of gunfire”. In short, the war has ended but the nightmare has not.
Hereafter, Magadza’s poetry follows an all-too-familiar trajectory. We have seen the poems of religious anxiety and anti-colonial protest. We have also seen the celebration of independence. But soon, the lingering anxieties that kept peeping through the liberation dance break out with the political disturbances that came with the land redistribution. By the turn of the twentieth century, the very same heroes whom the poet eulogized not so long before become the villains of his disillusionment, committing brutalities against the innocent who may not even have been stumbling blocks in their path to the Third Chimurenga.
‘Ghosts in the maize fields’ is a rhetorically charged expression of the poet’s contempt for political opportunists and bankrupt frauds, anarchists and usurpers of wealth who masqueraded as “war vets”. In a series of questions the poet challenges these men who commit various crimes against humanity to identify themselves for who they are, not for who their tongues claim them to be:
Who are these
Who stand in the ploughed fields
Wearing stolen cloaks
In the setting sun,
Casting long cold shadows
On the young crop?
Who are these
With fattened faces
And little eyes
That see neither the sun
Nor the hungry mother? . . .
Who are these that rape
Their sisters and defile
Their grandmothers?
Who are these
That urinate
On the ancestors’ graves
And defecate
In the village well?
Magadza has a message for all men who would claim to the noblest virtues of liberation and it reminds me of my own views about political violence. I once said the following:
I believe that at this stage in our history, now one who has their hands dripping with the blood of the innocent deserves the Zimbabwe’s highest political office – whether it is the blood of one innocent, or three or three hundred! For to value the sanctity of life of your fellow citizens is the first principle of all great prophets of freedom and democracy. Everything else derives its inspiration and justification from this very principle. Murdering one voter for the sake of winning an election or strangling the owner of a farm in order to distribute it to others is the very epitome of barbaric justice.
Yet this matter does not end here. For the narrow-minded – one hesitates to use ‘simple-minded’ – it would be easy to cast Magadza’s celebration of independence as “premature and naïve”, and then to castigate his criticism of civil rights abuse as a matter of just desserts for the previous naivety and uncritical myopia, which saw him prematurely celebrate the end of colonial rule. Such critics fail the intellectual community in their lack of complexity. Life is an ever-changing prism and so are human emotions and feelings. We would benefit enormously from remembering Marcel Proust’s church spire that on a sunny, cloudy, misty or snowy day never looked the same, its shape and perspective being relative to the viewer’s distance and direction from it. So, those who lived in darkness were entitled to some cavorting once the light of providence happened to smite independence at them – even if it were momentary. We should also remember that real war veterans did not benefit from a sound programme of rehabilitation, one that would heal them of the psychological excesses of the war-oriented conditioning that was so essential to their guerilla training. So, for as long as symbols of dispossession existed – and those settler farms have always been so – the incubi and succubae would sooner or later pour forth.
***
Like most poets, Magadza is unable to resist reflecting upon the familiar phenomenon of death and life beyond the grave. It is a peculiar anxiety, but, unlike other poets, he is not phased by the lurking horror of finding one is a corpse-in-waiting. Rather, he belongs to that select breed of mankind who have peered into the nether regions and discovered the reassuring voice of an ancient prophet, or even a long-dead grandfather. In his poem entitled ‘Narita airport’, he displays two contradictory emotions: the first, a yearning to return to a carefree and amorous youth, and second, to resign himself to his death, knowing there is more beyond life. He says “When I watch the youth/Abustle and ahustle”, “Careless of the future/Chasing Eros”:
I feel like
The last passenger
On the last train
To the last destination.
But,
Unlike Tithonus
Desired by an immortal goddess,
Aphrodite beautiful,
Begged for immortality,
I am blessed
With the gift
Of death.
In other poems such as ‘By day and night’ and ‘Father’, there are a few intimations of death, pleas to the dying to remain awhile and not abandon the poet and a yearning for communion uninterrupted by death.
Because of his modesty, Magadza has been hidden from a public who deserve to hear more of its peoples’ hidden voices, voices that are the invisible talents of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has many honest voices tucked away in its cacophonous belly, alongside the political loudmouths, and it is time to draw these out and away from the very real threat of artistic extinction.
Musaemura Zimunya is a poet and critic; he lectures at the University of Zimbabwe.
© Musaemura Zimunya
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