Chronicle Editor
Bongani Ndlovu, Showbiz Correspondent
Award-winning poet Tinashe Tafirenyika has said being a creative during the Covid-19 pandemic has been depressing as finding inspiration to uplift the spirits of people has been difficult.
The Bulawayo-based National Arts Merit Award (Nama) winner has been on lockdown like other creatives since March.
She said: “It’s been so depressing. In as much as there’s so much time to do things, when you go onto social media, you find that around the world, thousands of people have died from Covid-19 and there’s so much negative news.
“Getting inspiration becomes very complicated. You can’t always write depressing poems. Sometimes you need some happy inspirational themes.”
She said she has been observing and learning what has been going on in the world with the hope to come up with a piece.
“Before you create, you should consume the energy around you, like what’s going on in the world, country or your locality. Like with the Black Lives Matter, I might not be creating, I am learning a lot that the gap between rich and poor around the world is being made worse by this coronavirus pandemic,” said Tafirenyika, also a qualified laboratory scientist.
Tafirenyika said she has revisited some poems that she wrote years ago to try to refine them.
“It’s about recycling old poems that you did five years ago and no one ever heard and you refine it now. It might be bad not to create new stuff, but it’s good because I was taught this skill by a lady from Harare”.
Bongani Ndlovu