adminLovemore Ranga Mataire The Reader
MUSAYEMURA Bonas Zimunya’s contribution to Zimbabwe and Africa’s literary terrain is huge. While the author is mostly known for his poetry, he has also written a number of prose works like the short story collection Night Shift (1993) and the critical work Those Years of Drought and Hunger: The Birth of African Fiction in English in Zimbabwe (1982).
It is however true that poetry is his natural companion, even from an early age when he was still at school as he explored the racially structured literary terrain of colonial Rhodesia. Born in Mutare in 1949, Zimunya was encouraged by one of his teachers to pursue poetry as a medium of expression probably after noticing his natural flare in that genre.
It is thus logical that in Zimunya’s Selected Poems (1995) published in both English and Serbian languages, the author explores his childhood anxieties and fantasies, his love for motherland, his emotional attachment to the African landscape and his surgical dissection of the colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe.
The 45 poems that make up the collection are as much a summary of what has befallen his country as they are autobiographical, given the wide range of issues that cry out loudly as more of personal experiences.
In “Children’s Rain Song”, the persona evokes the merry-making associated with children at the onset of rainfall in rural Zimbabwe.
The anticipation of a fruitful season is apparent in the poem as indicated by the second stanza which says:
Rain fall fall
We will eat berries
Rainfall fall for all
We will eat mealies
We will eat cucumbers
Rainfall fall fall
The future tense employed in the poem heightens the expectations of a bumper and bounty harvest with the coming of the rains. The repetition of “fall” is deliberate to emphasise the need for good rains in as much as it induces a rhyming effect.
Although the persona seems to have outgrown the merrymaking associated with the coming of the rainy season, he however yearns for the innocence of years gone-by. This is portrayed in the last stanza:
Children in the rain
they don’t feel the pain
of longing all the time
to streak through my years
and dance in the rain again
The poems “Mountain Mist”, “No Songs”, “Spring” and “Let Me Go” all attest to Zimunya’s love and emotional attachment and fascination with nature and the African landscape.
However, these poems are not just romantic scraps but infer a deeper meaning and osmotic relationship that Africans have with their environment.
“Mountain Mist” talks about the mystical presence of fog in a mountainous area where it seems to take a life if its own probably through its movement and eventual disappearance.
The mist is personified as if it has a mind of its own and the reference to it having “millipede wheels” conveys its wide coverage while the likeness to a pangolin edifies its aura.
On page 89, the poet laments the disfiguring and plunder that has taken root in the once natural splendour of the rural landscape, including the loss of identity that has come about because of the disconnection of the relationship between nature and humans.
A grim picture of what has become of the environment is painted by metaphorical reference to deforestated hills as “bald heads” lying “naked”. Zimunya’s nationalistic fervour transcends politics as his love for his country comes out in the poems; ‘Zimbabwe (After the ruins)”, “Zimbabwe Bird” and “The Rooster.’
In “Zimbabwe (After the ruins)” the author alludes to the sanctity of the Great Zimbabwe monument from which the country derives its name.
Though lifeless, the ruins are said to contain rich historical secrets that have a bearing on the present. The ruins are said to be reservoir of important messages to both the young and the old.
Online Reporter