Writers & witnesses
A writer’s perspective on journeys in reading & writing Zimbabwe
Ruzvidzo Mupfudza
I am told, by both my father and maternal uncle (after whom I get my so called English and Christian name: Stanley- it’s actually Jewish), that even as a boy I used to be fascinated by words written on paper. I would, according to them, pick up any scrap of written matter, whether it be the remains of a book, newspaper or magazine wherever I had found it and lovingly lug it home and put away somewhere safe. Why, they would ask, and I would shrug, saying, I want to keep it so that I can read it in future. This was of course, during my preliterate days. A memory I do have from those days is one of me, sitting on the veranda of my father’s store at Nyangavi Township in Guruve, with a book that belonged to one of my elder brothers, who were already in school, on my lap, a scholarly frown on my brow, lips moving, a finger slowly tracing word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence. This always took the people who came by to shop by surprise: “Mwana uyu akutogona kuverenga?” (“Is this child able to read already?)”. They would laugh when they were told that it was only a ruse on my part, but little did they or myself know that this was a sign of a great passion for reading and inevitably writing that already lay embedded somewhere deep in my blood and would eventually blossom as I grew older.
By the time I was in the third grade, I could actually read and I would read anything and everything I could lay my hands on, including a book about dolphins. I also started keeping a small writer’s notebook in which I wrote stories from my imagination. Back then, in the 1980s, most of the reading matter I encountered in primary school consisted of the Ladybird series, where I read the simplified version of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which, back, then, I did not realise was a scathing satire. There was also a heavy dose of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. The stories I wrote were heavily influenced by the cowboys and Indians films we watched at school and on national TV. Quite clearly I had not started reading and writing about the country that I inhabited. But this is not to say that I had not been exposed to the oral tradition of my people, for the usual fare of folktales, history, myth and legend were also part of my diet.
Years later, while at the University of Zimbabwe, a group of us would meet in a writer’s club that was chaired by the then Writer- in Residence, Chenjerai Hove. Names that readily come to mind are Nhamo Mhiripiri, Joyce Mutiti, Ignatius Mabasa, Robert Muponde and the late Patrick Machakata among others. We came together to talk about writing, read our works to one another, offer critiques and suggestions. We did not think of ourselves as a movement or generation, but the literatures we studied, the ideologies we imbibed on campus and those meetings we held were part and parcel of our becoming writers- whether we agreed with the theories foisted down upon us or not, or agreed with one another’s point of view or not, that interaction invariably shaped us.
Not surprisingly, it was during this phase that some gruelling panga- fights and duels with matters of identity and authorial world vision took place. For whom did one write and how? In high school, as an A’ level student, a teacher had lend me her copy of Mindblast and I had not been the same ever since. The House of Hunger during that first year Zimbabwean Literature course would leave a lasting mark. For most of us, Marechera’s ghost would haunt the corridors of our creative psyche and breathe through our creative works for a long time to come before we could really find our own definitive voices.
In those early formative years we published our stories, poems and essays in the English Department’s literary magazine, The Bloom- where you would find socialist realism and African nationalist theories as well as typical Marecherean iconoclasm rubbing shoulders. As a generation which was enjoying the fruits of the liberation struggle, walking freely down the corridors of the then only university in the country, which had been rife with racial tension during Marechera’s own time there, were we not supposed to be more optimistic and constructive? Marechera himself had written in The House of Hunger:
There was however an excitement of the spirit which made us all wander about in search of that unattainable elixir which our restlessness presaged. But the search was doomed from the start because the elixir seemed to be right under our noses and yet not really there. The freedom we craved for as one craves for dagga or beer or cigarettes or the after life- this was so alive in our breath and in our fingers that became intoxicated by it even before one had actually found it.
And here we were enjoying the freedom, so what right did we have to be iconoclastic? But there we were, certainly some of us but definitely not all of us, restless still, still searching for that elixir. You could sense it in one of my stories, “Cancer” that appeared in The Bloom, which Memory Chirere has now described as being full of Marecherean anguish (“Marechera Mania in Zimbabwean Literature”). Now looking at some of the anthologies that contain the stories of my peers, A Roof to Repair, No More Plastic Balls (College Press), Creatures Great & Small (Mambo Press), Writing Still and Writing Now (Weaver Press) we were going through an apprenticeship, that involved its own fair share of imitation in order to define our own voices, style and vision.
In his paper, “Marechera- mania in Zimbabwean Literature”, Chirere also writes: “But beyond this mere admiration, Marechera- mania extends to a long standing tendency amongst some very serious younger writers of Zimbabwe to use ‘Marechera style and vision’ as a temporary launch pad to their own writing careers. Later they tend to develop their own styles different from his. Marechera himself was open about influences behind his own writing. He said he did not find influences ‘pernicious’”.
Because we read each other’s works, exchanged manuscripts over time there was also a cross- fertilisation of ideas in our development as writers. In that journey towards developing our own voices, we sometimes found it necessary to kill those who had fathered us, particularly Marechera. In my own case, that stage came when Nhamo Mhiripiri said to me: “Don’t be influenced by the voices of dead writers!”
As Chirere observes again: “Prominent Zimbabwean writers who began to write in the ’90s like Ignatius Mabasa, Robert Muponde, Nhamo Mhiripiri, Phillip Zhuwawo and more recently Tinashe Mushakavanhu have been associated with Marechera either in either the content or form of their writings. But the good thing is that unlike their less gifted colleagues, they pick and develop their own versions of the master.”
Thus you will find that there is a general concern with matters that deal with the Zimbabwean psyche. There is an exploration of the tortured innerscape of the Zimbabwean soul as it tries to salvage its sanity amidst social disintegration and political malaise. There is a general commitment to the underdog. In those early years in the 1990s, it was the ex- combatant who had returned to a land he had freed but had nothing to show for his sacrifice. Examples are in my own story, “Heroes Day” in A Roof to Repair and the title story of that anthology by Memory Chirere. It was not so much that we were iconoclastic as that we were affronted by social injustice, political rhetoric and gestures without content, or real meaning on the ground.
Apart from that, there were those of us who believed, to paraphrase Mao that all literature is propaganda but not all propaganda is literature. We wrestled with matters of style and form to suit the content we were dealing with, and we resisted being co-opted into agendas that would draw us further from the real life stream. In that journey and struggle to create our style and voices, we could never really escape the shadow of towering figures like Charles Mungoshi and Chenjerai Hove. Mungoshi’s Waiting for the Rain in particular sometimes made us doubt our own worth as writers- would we ever be able to produce something that is so powerful, evocative, and full of rich multi- layers?
As Zimbabweans whom did we write for? How would we write? These questions became questions of individual survival and self-definition, even as we wrestled with matters, themes, content that had arisen out of the Zimbabwean soil. Personally I sought to develop my own paradigm in which I could anchor artistic vision. And that vision was not without laughter, a heavy dose of typically Zimbabwean humour in the face of even the ugly, horrible and potentially crippling. A story, “Faith” which appears in Dreams, Miracles and Jazz: New Adventures in African Writing (Picador: 2008) is set during the turn of the new millennium and explores in a humorous way, questions of faith, religion and apocalyptic visions. But look around the Zimbabwe of the past 10 years and today, and you realise that Zimbabweans take their faith seriously, whether they practice it in the open, in sekuru or ambuya’s abode or in a multi-million dollar worship centre.
Years ago, Chenjerai Hove wrote in an essay, “The role of the Artist in Society”: “For me the artist is a drawer of maps. The history of any society is better studied through the broadest appreciation of its artistic products. In times of despair, the artist will fuse images of hope. In times of plenty and over abundance, the artist will portray the folly of over- eating at the expense of cultivation of other values” (Social Change Development: Number 26, p3).
We are not homogenous. Our writing is amorphous. My writing in particular has been largely shaped by personal experiences. The struggle not to be influenced by dead voices has come with a realisation that I am who I am, and that has come from not only understanding my personal experiences and those of my country in the past few years but going back to the source as it were. That is, placing my being within the larger context of my clan and national history. The sound knowledge that if I were to go to Great Zimbabwe today I would be walking on land and viewing a legacy I am connected to through a rich bloodline has influenced the way I conceive the world. If you read Chirere’s “Somewhere in this Country”, for example, you come across an old man who is obsessed by the desire to see the landscape of his childhood. “Olelele- e-! Muchekawakasungabeta” the old man screams when he finally sees his beloved hills, which if you have seen the Mavuradonha range, you will recognise them here in Chirere’s description. In the face of the old man’s excitement, we are asked: “Was he just seeing those…hills? Was he?”
It would seem to me that in the new writing, there are those who see more than just the hills, like that old man, seeing connections and continuities that others do not. It is because of this ability that even the new criticism begins to realise that those folk tales, myths, legends and story telling techniques that people heard when they were young are still very much alive in the written word.
This is why Chirere is able to re-interpret Garabha in Waiting for the Rain, who comes and goes like the wind and plays the drum like one possessed. Why does Garabha become more anchored, more rooted when he is playing the drum? If you know that Charles Mungoshi is Shava Musumuvi, and that their founding forebear is known by the nickname Samambwa, how is your reading and understanding of the text redefined but at the end of the day your own writing shaped?
In his essay, “The Supernatural in Mungoshi’s Works”, Muchadei Nyota notes that: ” Mungoshi, who has a writing career that spans over thirty years, explores the influence of the supernatural on the living. The settings of the works analysed in this essay are predominantly rural, although one is persuaded to believe that even the western educated urban dwellers are not spared the influence of the supernatural in their lives.” Even a casual reading of the story “Creatures Great and Small” by Mhiripiri (Mambo, 2005: pp6- 14) will reveal that the exploration of these influences, or, at the very least, the continued existence of the belief of such influences does not end with Mungoshi. The township women described in this story believe that there is a witch in their midst, and the character, Stella, a pregnant woman suffers a miscarriage towards the end of the story after seeing a lizard no one else sees. Mhiripiri’s rendering of this story remains open minded, he simply gives you what the gossips say, what Stella claims to have seen and what happens in the end. No doubt a perfectly psychological and medical explanation can be given for what happens, but it won’t silence the gossips, or stop artists from exploring this dimension.
That is why Shimmer Chinodya’s Strife should not be read merely as a metaphor for Zimbabwe’s social and political disintegration, after all, the Gwanangwara clan seems to be at the mercy of a very ruthless, ngozi, vengeful spirit. Lo, and behold, there is also a hunter- wanderer forebear, who comes back asking for his paraphernalia as a spirit but people doubt the authenticity of his medium, while at the same time the family ‘s material and political world seems inadequately equipped to deal with the crisis. See also the story, “What angers water spirits” by Mhiripiri (Mambo 2005: pp104- 112). My own story “The Mender of Broken Soles” (online: Sable and Kubtana.org) explores the interface between orality, beliefs, tyranny and the quest for individual, social and political redemption.
The blurb to Wonder Guchu’s My Children, My Home (Artsinitiates, 2007) tells us: “ The African countryside teems with killers, seers, dreamers and fighters. In a feat of angry jealous (sic), a man manufactures a storm to snatch away roofs from school buildings. Reason: “Why is it they don’t want to name the school after me?” A village pleads with a very sick old man to die but he refuses. And then they learn chillingly, that he has the powers to keep death away. Then there is the wonder boy, Sorotiya. The life of Sorotiya is the life of a little being who has not only settled on being little, but has since won the power that little people have over big people.”
With this in mind, as well as after reading Naked by Nigel Jack (a former student of mine), short stories by Lawrence Hoba and Tinashe Mushakavanhu, I am prone to agreeing with Mungoshi who once wrote that: “To talk of Zimbabwean literature is to talk of the definition of the people themselves. It is to talk of their variedness and their awareness of themselves and their place, here, now and in future. It is rather nonsensical to limit the definition of Zimbabwean literature is like this or should be like this, when one of the things Zimbabwean literature should not be is static, rigid and un-developing. A rigid definition which loses sight of the possibilities of the development of our literature is against the very laws of creation. Zimbabwean literature will take the route that best expresses or reveals the life and times in which it exists and the hopes, aspirations and feats of its people. (“Writers are Saboteurs”, Nehanda Review, January- March 93,p 44)
And as Maurice Vambe argued at the Britain Zimbabwe Society 2005 Research Day: “popular literature genres within Zimbabwe, in both English and the vernaculars, are currently engaged in lively internal conversations about the nature of the state, and the moral imperatives facing both government and citizens. These internal conversations nonetheless reflect the presence of the wider world within Zimbabwe. The culture is the product of multiple influences from Europe, Africa and elsewhere across many generations. In this sense…all Zimbabwean literature is syncretic literature, even if written in the vernacular” (Copyright 2009 Britain Zimbabwe Society).
For my own part I will demonstrate just how syncretic my own writing is and has developed from those early days of struggling to come up with a voice and vision by quoting from the Holy Quran:
…amongst these are
Men devoted to learning
And men who have renounced
The world, and they
Are not arrogant.
And when they listen
To the revelation received
By the messenger, thou wilt
See their eyes overflowing
With tears, for they
Recognise the truth:
They pray: “our Lord!
We believe; write us
Down among the witnesses” (Surah 5, 82- 83).
When our books are read in future, our artistry is good enough to last into posterity, let them look back upon us as ones who were witnesses to triumph and despair, gloom and hope, social upheaval and revival. And like the accounts of all witnesses, do not look for perfection, for you might be disappointed, for subjectivity and selectivity colours the way we view the world. We are simply witnesses who happen to be writers, and if we write well, and a child somewhere in this country and elsewhere in the future, hordes our written matter, to read for the mere pleasure and love of the written word, and hopefully learn a thing or two, then we would have done our part, no matter how viciously the critics tear our works and each other apart.
References
- A Roof to Repair, (Harare: College Press)
- No More Plastic Balls, Robert Muponde and Clement Chihota, (eds.), (Harare: College Press, 2000)
- Creatures Great & Small, Jairos Kangira, (ed), (Gweru: Mambo Press, 2005)
- Dreams, Miracles and Jazz: New adventures in African Writing, (Northlands: Picador Africa, 2008)
- Nehanda Review, No. 1, January- March 1993, (Harare: Nehanda Review)
- Social Change and Development, Number 26, (Harare: MCS Ltd, 1991)
- African Oral Story- telling Tradition and the Zimbabwean Novel in English, Maurice Taonezvi Vambe, (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2004)
- Writing Still: New Stories from Zimbabwe, Irene Staunton (ed.), (Harare: Weaver Press, 2003
- Charles Mungoshi: A Critical Reader, Maurice T. Vambe & Memory Chirere, (eds.), (Harare: Prestige Books, 2006).
- Somewhere in this Country, Memory Chirere, (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2006)
Source : www.zimbojam.com