The forgotten writings of Phillip Zhuwao
by Tinashe Mushakavanhu
06 October 2011
A few years ago Memory Chirere of the University of Zimbabwe wrote a piece on ‘Marecheramania in Zimbabwean literature.’ He listed a small group of black male writers, me included, as Marechera disciples. I knew everyone on the list – the late Ruzvidzo Mupfudza, Robert Muponde, Nhamo Mhiripiri and Ignatius Mabasa.
These were all writers I had met, writers who had mentored me at various periods of my development, and academics I call on for advice. But then, there was another writer on the list I had never heard of before – Phillip Zhuwao, who as would become apparent, had died quietly at a young age.
I was excited and disappointed at the same time. Surely, for this ‘obscure’ writer, in my eyes, to be mentioned in the same breath as Dambudzo Marechera meant that he must be very good. Why had I not encountered his writings before? What did he actually write?
Unfortunately, as I was to discover, none of his work is published in Zimbabwe. After five years of research and intense curiosity, I eventually discovered that Zhuwao left behind a fairly accomplished body of work, currently in the hands of South African publisher, Robert Berold. Berold currently has plans to publish a long overdue Collected Works of Phillip Zhuwao.
His poetry collection, Sunrise Poison, is slowly getting international acclaim with some of the poetry already featured in South African literary journals and more recently on the Dutch website, Poetry International. He also co-wrote a book of chain poems, The red laughter of guns in green summer rain (2002), with Alan Finlay. In 2003, Zhuwao’s only surviving interview with Alan Finlay was included in the book, South African Poets on Poetry (2003).
I also had the privilege to include five of his poems in State of the Nation: Contemporary Zimbabwean Poetry (2009) featuring several other poets.
Biographical details are slippery things in Zhuwao’s life story. In fact, not much is known about him. I am yet to see even a photograph of him. Some reports suggest he died in 1994 at the age of 23, others indicate 1997. It is as if he never existed or if he did he remains a mythical figure. And that is compounded by the sometimes bleak, sometimes haunting poetry he wrote. It is a series of recordings of premonitions of his own death. The dedication of his collection, Sunrise Posion, is a roll-call of departed family members, and including his hero Dambudzo Marechera.
However, this much we know: Phillip Zhuwao was born in 1971 to immigrant parents who worked on a farm at the out-skate of Harare. His father was originally from Zambia, while his mother’s family came from Mozambique. This contributed to his disorientation. He felt within himself a number of different identities and it was the conflict between these that he mined to such good effect
His work is heavily autobiographical too, as if it was very important for him to write himself, to make permanent the fact that such a soul as him was once part of this earthly world. Despite the poverty and lacking background he came from, there was an incisive and courageous intelligence in him. It is sad that the sheer inventiveness and originality of his writings has been grossly neglected.
His facility with the English idiom almost matches up with his hero Dambudzo Marechera, constantly stretching and contorting language and imagery. While he is less political, his writings are deeply spiritual – a duelling with the daemons of his young and troubled existence. Perhaps, this is something he shares with Marechera – a sort of cursed existence periodically intruded by darker and insidious forces that make one restless and erratic.
Zhuwao’s literary education was self-taught. “I read every book I came across, Shakespeare, Kipling, Rider Haggard. The books I couldn’t buy I read in the bookshops, Kingstons mostly. I had to risk the wrath of security guards and the police. I would enter a bookshop, pick up Don Quixote, check for guards, and start reading where I left off the last time … I read many books this way till I was unwelcome at the bookshop.”
He was also fascinated by the Russian poets Pushkin, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva; by classical Greek mythology, and by other European modernists: Pound, Eliot, Joyce and Rilke. References to these writers and their literary traditions are scattered through Sunrise Poison and his other writings. Could it just be showing off, a pretentious but sophisticated art of name dropping incidentally perfected by Marechera, especially in The Black Insider?
Despite this immersion in European literature, Zhuwao remained grounded in African literature and African traditional culture. “Colonialists said a lot about African culture without understanding it. They mangled the little knowledge they had into horrendous tales of terrible witches and cannibals and shrieks of old hags sending chills down your spine. Rider Haggard was the most terrible. When Christianity came, it attacked loudly all African customs as devil-worship, refusing to get within, to understand and respect another man’s comprehension of God.”
In his short life, Phillip Zhuwao did not gain any form of recognition in Zimbabwe or elsewhere. Had he lived longer, who knows what he was capable of producing. There are plans, however, for the publication of his collected works that will include both his poetry and long prose. This is befitting tribute to a truly gifted Zimbabwean writer who deserves to join the pantheon of our published literary gods.
