Engagement with a Difficult Universe

20 maart 2007 It is difficult to imagine any Zimbabwean poet having the luxury of such an approach. Instead we find Joyce Chigiya, Ethel Kabwato and Zvisenei Sandi actively engaged with the world around them. Chigiya attempts to steal a moment of privacy to write in her poem ‘Knock Knock’ and finds what she writes “like unseasoned mushrooms stewed in hard borehole water”. Without the spice of human interaction, the work does not breathe or live. Even so, she resents the intrusion of an unwelcome caller and is so threatened personally and creatively that she concludes, “if only I could use the machete”. Thus we must conclude that engagement is a necessary process but not one that is easily controlled or kept within bounds by the poet, especially perhaps the young poet.

The pressures that “continually pound at the fragile pane” and the struggle for daily survival are well documented, not only courtesy of the BBC and CNN, but as the constant talk on the streets, in computer omnibuses, in homes, in the beerhalls and offices of Zimbabwe. Even for the remaining middle-class, this struggle can become all-consuming. The three poets represented here are professional women: Joyce Chigiya is a primary school teacher, Ethel Kabwato a secondary school teacher, and Zvisinei Sandi a journalist and academic. They are necessarily in contact with other people, and with current social and economic realities.

The four poems by Ethel Kabwato track the path to our current condition. While ‘Dangamvura 1979’ speaks specifically of the time of aspiration immediately before Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 and the descent into civil war shortly afterwards, ‘Tariro’ speaks of the birth and growth of a child whose name means ‘hope’. The sense of dreams betrayed, of hope departing, perhaps never to return, is tangible in both poems. The “glimmer of hope” in ‘Dangamvura 1979’ is translated into “A ray of sunshine ... joy that lit our lives in Tariro, but, as the years pass and the child does not return, the poet comments, “the nights wore black”.

Kabwato’s somewhat mystical ‘The Witch’s Dance’ deals again, seemingly at a later time and in terms of a personal relationship, with the betrayal of trust. Whatever the undefined promise of the witch’s dance, “You said she would come/And I waited,” the excitement of the dance is over in an instant, gone “with the whirlwind and leaves nothing sustained in its wake”. The insistent, dancing rhythm of the poem accompanies the reader to the final line and the broken promise almost before they realise it. Finally, ‘The Hunter’, with the ironic reference of its title to a time long gone and consciously quaint rural imagery, deals on a more prosaic level with the current phenomenon of large numbers of Zimbabweans leaving to seek the fulfilment of their dreams outside the country.

To some extent, Zvisineyi Sandi contextualises this national ‘story’. The soldier (perhaps mercenary) in ‘The Devil’s Footprint’ has reached a point of intense danger, of increasing risk matched by increasing desperation, yet he cannot free himself from that which obsesses him – his lust, which could be for a woman, for wealth, for power or even for simple, primal violence. We may find elements of such desperation in the Zimbabwe of 2007, but Sandi locates the situation more broadly, drawing on situations and distinctive images from wars in Angola and Somalia. As a complement to this, in ‘The Face of Anguish’, she tackles a number of other situations that make up the despair of Africa. The poem is similar to many others badly rendered in the over-stated but banal rhetoric of the ‘Afrika, my Afrika!’ type, but rises above the often self-centred limitations of this popular local ‘genre’ by use of imagery that is, once again, distinctive and relevant to each individual subject.

Each of the poets engages with the world around her but the modes of this engagement, as expressed in the poems, differ widely, sometimes even within the work of one poet.

Chigiya’s ‘Awakening’ (to colour) uses colours to trace the movement from wide eyed innocence to an acknowledgement of abuse, “beat me black and blue if that is what it takes/ I am after all/ your humble servant”. Yet, in ‘Walking in the Rain’, she is tentative, apologetic concerning her own emotional limitations but prepared to take control and set the terms of a new relationship, saying “I need someone then to stand right by me/Would you feel used if that someone was you’’. As with Kabwato’s ‘The Witch’s Dance’, Chigiya’s ‘Sorrow in Joy’ (the chachacha poem) conveys its meaning effectively through rhythm, exploiting a Zimbabwean place name to capture the sense of a dance that changes tempo and mood with each stanza. It evokes a trance that enables “a relocated heart”, that is, the transformation of past pain into cathartic physical expression.

Kabwato’s four poems are fairly consistent in their evocation of loss and disappointment. Although her observations are sharp, bordering on judgmental, her stance is never aggressive and certainly not prescriptive. Indeed there is not much impression of hope for the future. And yet, she endures. As a poet, she continues to tackle a reality that seems filled with pain. One senses that her strength is almost evenly matched by her vulnerability and hurt, and perhaps it is this even matching that makes survival possible as an individual and an aspiring poet.

There are a few interiors — Kabwato’s “Tea-cups in hand” and Chigiya’s candle and “sandalwood-scented repellent” are two that come to mind, but the images in most of the poems are predominantly of the land and landscapes. They range from the gentle mood of the “ray of sunshine” in Kabwato’s ‘Tariro’, to the wild and tempestuous. The “gentle summer rain” that Chigiya’s subject walks within, the “remnants of a storm” cooked up “in cumulonimbi pots” the previous day and still contains a threat, while Kabwato’s “October rains/Pelting on the windows” are compared to “bullet fire” and the “turmoil” of armed conflict. Landscape is also employed as a symbol of memory in Chigiya’s “wintry hazy blue hills of Bikita” and “High up in the Hills of Angola/Dressed in a robe of rock/One that flowed thousands of feet/Down” in Sandi’s ‘The Devil’s Footprint’.

War, is a part of the consciousness of any Zimbabwean in their mid-thirties or older. It appears as either subject and metaphor in much of Zimbabwean literature, including the poems of Kabwato and Sandi reproduced here. In ‘Dangamvura 1979’, Kabwato talks of both the struggle for an independent Zimbabwe that moved into negotiations in that year, and the outbreak of Gukuruhundi which took place shortly after the attainment of independence. She writes about war in a manner that combines the former child’s immediate experience of conflict with the current adult’s informed observation of its outcome. Sandi’s ‘The Face of Anguish’ inevitably deals with war as one of the evils facing Africa, while, in ‘The Devil’s Footprint’ she plays with richly entangled images of war that is war and war that may be a number of other things  “a habit, an expression of power, an act of desperation”.

Clearly engagement, be it as victim, observer, protagonist or survivor, is an imperative for these three poets. The quid pro quo for their engagement with the world around them is the requirement that we, as audience, take on board their work and respond. Dickenson may have been content to have only seven of the vast number of poems she wrote published in her lifetime (and those anonymously) but these three poets of the twenty-first century wish and deserve to be read in the time and place in which they are writing, as well as more broadly.

The poetry of Joyce Chigiya, Ethel Kabwato and Zvisineyi Sandi explores the emotional and sometimes physical risk of creative womanhood in an uncertain, fast-changing and less than sympathetic environment. In the process of this exploration, the three poets discover the strength in themselves to endure, to empathise, to learn to love themselves and others, and to remain responsive to the world around them. Megan Allardice is a New Zealander who came to Zimbabwe in 1987. She has worked for Zimbabwe Women Writers and Grassroots Books; she is now a freelance writing and editing consultant. Megan is a poet and participated in the British Council Lancaster University Crossing Borders programme in 2005-06.