A Special Edition of Unpublished Poems by Mungoshi and Chingono

28 mei 2008 Zimbabwe, as we have said before, is a nation of poets. Indeed, I would hazard that one in ten young people write poetry, and many hope to have their work published. What is sad or disturbing, however, is that virtually no one buys poetry (unless it is prescribed as a school text). A few facts might exemplify this more clearly: Weaver Press has published two small collections by well-known poets – within Zimbabwe, we are lucky if we sell twelve copies a year. In 1998, Baobab Books published three collections of poetry by Mungoshi, Hove and Chirikure. Beautifully designed and produced, these collections have, on average, sold less than 400 copies in a decade. And yet, virtually every month I receive enquiries about our established poets and their work from international readers, and requests from school book publishers in the UK and South Africa, to include their poems in anthologies. We know that the Zimbabwe page of the Poetry International Website is read by a wide audience.

Thus when Charles Mungoshi, one of Zimbabwe’s best known and most loved poets, approached me with his new collection of work – his first for many years – I knew that no matter whether we have a subsidy or not – and all the above collections were subsidised by HIVOS and could not have been published at all without their support – publishing the work in hard copy to sit in a warehouse is not sensible, especially at a time of great economic hardship. Publishing the first edition of these poems on our Zimbabwe site will give the poets the audience they so rightly deserve.

CHARLES MUNGOSHI
At Poetry International Zimbabwe, we are proud to be able to give voice and make known this new collection of twenty poems, Mungoshi’s first for many years. His spare, lyrical poetry brings what is liminal to the surface of reality, putting words in our hands like small river pebbles smoothed by experience and its distillation in thought. It moves between the intensely personal and essentially human, as in ‘The Sixth Year’, and the world that impinges, sometimes forcefully, on private concerns – as in ‘After the May ’98 Riots’. Between these two worlds, as between two magnetic fields, Mungoshi seeks for meaning, sometimes in the most discreet or ephemeral of gestures.

JULIUS CHINGONO
Chingono was little-known as a writer in Zimbabwe, despite his early publications Chipo changu (My gift) in 1978, Mureza werudo (Flags of Love) in 1980 and Flag of Rags in 1996. Not least among the reasons for this was that he had spent all his life working as a blaster in the mines and living in the small settlement of Norton. Chingono would, I think, be the first to agree that publishing his poetry on the Poetry International site, followed by an invitation to the Poetry Festival in 2004, provided him with his first taste of entering the world as a literary figure and encouraged him to spend more time writing.

Like Mungoshi, his work is accessible, but he engages more directly with a world by which he is constantly provoked or outraged. A man, a poet, without any stable or fixed income, he feels the concerns of the poor and destitute, and is prepared to do so without flinching or sentimentality, thus giving consciousness to that which is too easily brushed aside or forgotten.