No court poet for Mugabe

Court poets sing praise to power and its excesses. Tendai speaks truth to power directly. Greed is indicted. Mwanaka has suffered in his flesh and blood. The metaphor he uses cuts. Politicians have to hear that they are gorging themselves. Living on corpses. Tendai Mwanaka left Zimbabwe to live in exile in South Africa where he had temporary visas. His whereabouts today are unknown. Mwanaka is a prolific writer and has poems published in over 50 magazines. Since he was 20 years old he has been writing. He worked on several manuscripts over the years. These include poetry (six collections), short stories (two collections), non fiction (one manuscript) and a full length novel.

Before exile, Mwanaka has been to a place which one never forgets: Prison cells. The reason, his voice. He was in Chikurubi Maximum Prison in Zimbabwe. In ‘Brutal Times’, the first poem in the book, he writes of the ‘beatings and gorging, chopping... of steady howling, sexual and psychological abuse.’ He has endured much. The world’s attention may have departed Zimbabwe but Mwanaka is still talking and watching. He lifts his voice... his pen. He writes in ‘A war memorial for Mugabe’:

‘How could a single man wipe out millions?
In and outside his country
and gorge thousands in daylight,
for over three decades
Whilst the whole world keeps mum?’

Mwanaka reminds me of South African poet Ingrid Jonker’s words in ‘The Child is Not Dead’:

‘... the child lifts his fists against his
Mother
Who shouts Africa
Shouts the breath of freedom and the veld.’

Mwanaka’s voice, still laden with metaphors such as the child for the land, is filled with strong and open political poetry. A child of his times, he does not hide names. He tells South Africa’s Zuma quite clearly that he played a poor role in helping South Africa. Read his thoughts on more leaders in Africa, the AU, the UN, SADC and the world. In the tone of a voice in exile we find betrayal, anger, sadness, sombre reflection, pain, doubt, suffering and a feeling of being hedged in – even hanged – expressed. But the poet and the desire for change are not dead. Mwanaka still believes Afrika. His style is free. He is lyrical, rhyming where he wills.

When an identity is confronted with a crushing power at so many levels, a sense of alienation can be overwhelming. All valves of expression can burst open or be lost. Mwanaka has known abuse of human rights. He knows of dignity flattened until it becomes a milk song. He expresses it through his cat Marvin not without a little humour:

‘I gave Marvin some milk to drink
But she just smelled it
And refused to drink it.
I spoke of the D.R.C
But she just stared at me.

‘I spoke of the elections in Nigeria and Kenya
She started jumping up and down the table.
I spoke of Zimbabwe’s problems
She stopped, and stared at me again.

‘I said it is all because of Mugabe
She just smiled at me like some elfin child.
I spoke of South Africa
And of how Jacob Zuma is good for this country.
She started mewing and growling
And moved out of the room.’

The cat goes away. Mwanaka stays in the room writing. People like Thabo and Zuma deserve no break. They are neighbours who watch Zimbabwe dying. In a few crisp lines full of images none in power will like, he does them a Zapiro, his lines like a simple sketch of a brilliant cartoon:

‘Mugabe protects himself,
From western angers
By using South Africa.
As a condom.

‘Whilst he kills
Innocent Zimbabweans.
Just like Zuma
Protects himself
From corruption charges
By using a shower cap and baby oil.
Whilst he rapes
Lady-justice South Africa.’

A young poet carries a continent alive in him examining its rot and its corruption. Looking all around the earth, he stands like Atlas. At some stage he will parade all the people he sees as The ‘Axis of Evil’ in the world, and he will ask the world a brave question. Should he exit from the human race?

‘MY AXIS OF EVIL
SOUTH AFRICA, CHINA, RUSSIA,
VIETNAM AND BURKINA FASO
(for blocking the sanctions resolution on Zimbabwe, especially South Africa for its
moral bankruptcy and ineptitude to deal with the Zimbabwean situation, and China
for sending arms to Mugabe, the weapons which were used to kill innocent people).
SADC, AU, UN (for their procrastinations and their failure to deal with most of the disturbances in Africa and the whole world). And the list is longer, and a typical poem does not serve him. He short prosaic breaks in between.

‘ZANUPF supporters, all Zimbabweans wherever there are now,
including me, and whilst I am still at Z, I am tempted to include
Zuma (for corruption, AIDS denials when he was deputy to the
Chief-denialist Mbeki, and for his stupidity, honestly he galls me
and reminds me of that ominous pestilence in the Mugabe-form
and making. If you were me you would run like I am already doing).
Lastly the international court of whatever justice, for letting the
above alone.

‘PS. I am tempted to include FRANCE, PORTUGAL, for inviting
Mugabe to meetings in their countries

‘PPS. Not to forget USA, UK, Canada, Japan, Australia, Italy,
New Zealand, Germany and Japan (for their becoming irritating
noises, useless pollution!), and all the other countries in the world, you
would think they would do something about it!

‘And always the last question. To be or not to be in all this?
“One wishes one could emigrate from the entire human race,
death (DYING!), that too!”’

Ingrid Jonker committed suicide at 32 years of age in 1965 in South Africa. It is clear that regardless of her own upheavals, her sharp pen and soul could not contain the gloom that ensued in the recognition of a humanity so bereft of substance, joy and meaning which bubble in the undying energies a child brings with it.

But the child is not dead. It is the undying expectation and the longing that people will together stand up for a better world that is betrayed. The child lives no matter how the agony deepens, no matter how subjective the poet is alive. His longing is that others realise that no part of the world can be in suffering and the rest be well. It is as simple as the body. If the little finger is sick, the person is unwell.

You would have to be strange if in poetry coming out of Zimbabwe you did not see HIV/AIDS and currencies; souls as destroyed as monies in millions, lives extirpated and the helplessness of opposition politics in the whole game:

‘Now they each have a free ministry
to bleed out gazillions of Zimkwachas
and farfillions of the coveted US$ and Rands
That Gono, steal, another boy
from antiretro viral funds and programmes.
Whilst Mugabe elects himself and acts
as the President, Prime minister, and
the Parliament, in the absence of
Tsvangirai who now acts as Zimbabwe’s
ambassador to Botswana.
At least with no passport of his own.
But who shall act for Zimbabweans
with nowhere to go?’

It is easy then to see that often literature is a ‘Literature scourging history’. It is also literature testing the present to see what past made it. It is literature searching timelessly. Time changes in exile:

‘To smell the heat still rising in our birth place
We are the way to the way it used to be
Foreigners in a new place, still waiting
Waiting for light, space and time’

Mwanaka writes then pouring out his soul, sees himself made into violent bombs, and he writes love and hope:

‘No one ever listens to us
So give me all your fears
Let me hold all your sorrows in my heart
This poem is yours
To harvest that which has been lost’

He says a lot but Mwanaka writes the ‘Said and the Unsaid’ as the last poem. But it is what Mwanaka writes in the poem ‘Coming Home’ that has me arrested, my mind restive and I have to hold a long silence. You will read it and walk along the village paths he is still familiar with finding things have changed. That Thomas his childhood friend who did not leave Zimbabwe went mad:

‘I was later told that he had developed
Anger inside his heart
and that he ran and ran on roads
away from what he didn’t know
in his heart, and that
he kept saying the demon’s name
and paid the price of a broken will
and vanished into the depths.’

The poet has been in two worlds, grappling with the guilt of leaving in his safer haven all the time. From South Afrika back to Zimbabwe, Mwanaka wrote this poem. It reveals that everyone at home was living in exile at home:

‘The kitchen’s doors were opening and closing
always watching, waiting for him?’

One would that there was still something in the hearts of those mad men who destroy nations that could be touched by such words coming so innocently from a man not so long ago a child himself.

That there would be more men like Mandela who would read Ingrid Jonker’s ‘The Child is not Dead’ in all our nations seeing that as it is clear that most of these countries need a re-birth, a natural one, the touted renaissance perhaps having aborted the poet does not express sensing hints of it anywhere.

‘Coming Home’ is another call that for both Thomas and Ingrid’s child we must all keep vigil and throw off the invisible and visible notorious passes:

‘Strolling along the road
But this day, without a map
I walk home
and sit on the cement bench
that surrounds the better half
of my mother’s kitchen
and had a plateful of Sadza.
Although the Sadza here
is still as good as I remember
so much has changed.’

Mwanaka’s poem, ‘Coming Home’ is the poem that will always bring me back to this volume of ‘Voices in Exile’ to feel, hear and smell the place the child seeks to call home in Afrika. The place a poet cannot lose in themselves and in our societies.

It is a long and hard walk into that hidden place with daring hearts, a sacred place. Afrika seen as our open temple, that has also been so ruthlessly destroyed and which Mwanaka wants to re-construct by meeting those ordinary friends, people he knows.

Somehow, the realisation that things will never be the same makes us press home to Afrika harder rather than lose the hope which the Child in the poet brings us. It is that hardened silence that the poet hears that calls urgently home, and I know I see him with others in exile and in the diaspora, determined to be back, to nurse the loneliness that hugs entire villages there. Before more Thomases, more Tendais are dead or maddened, take your visions home:

‘But tomorrow I will go to the meadowlands.
May the wide meadowlands still be there?
For me, unlike Thomas.
That borders on those north knolls
which seems so small, so sweet, so soothing
like when we were small and chasing rainbows.
The rush of these memories
greying with this day.
Realising another irreplaceable loss
of some fine company.
Leaving me again in sadness.’

I hope that Mwanaka can one day write new poems in the meadowland, Let us ask Mugabe, where is Tendai Mwanaka? Why are so many Zimbabweans mourning in their meadowlands, Mugabe?

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* Tendai Mwanaka’s ‘Voices in Exile’ is published by Lapwing (2010).
* Philo Ikonya is a Kenyan poet and activist.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.