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Elliot Ziwira The Book Store
HOME is where the heart yearns for; where it grows fonder upon one’s realisation of its fulfilment of purpose, charm, harmony, serenity and permanence. It is that special place that one would always cherish; and would like to be all the time, without feeling betrayed, disillusioned or frustrated.
Such is the essence of home embraced by Musaemura Zimunya in “Kingfisher, Jikinya and other Poems” (1982), “Country Dawns and City Lights” (1985), and “Thought Tracks” (1982).
Here the city is a monstrous giant crouching menacingly in the way of the African migrant, frustrating all his aspirations as it is a colonial creation.
The rural home as portrayed by Zimunya in his poetry, especially in “Country Dawns and City Lights”, encompasses beauty and embraces pastoral innocence and serenity.
It is about the vulnerability of the fragile.
In his depiction of the rural landscape, which espouses home – the real home – Zimunya, like Chenjerai Hove, is inspired by the untainted Eastern Highlands, whence he comes and grew up.
In his poetry, Zimunya seeks to immortalise the beauty and sacredness of home as a golden paradise, as is expressed in the poem “I Like Them” in “Thought Tracks”.
He writes: “Crouching like a monstrous lion/always ready to pounce on the western,” and, “I like the Chevrolet western mountains lying still below the vivid blue of the sky/with wheels of boulders/and axles of earth/and windows of stone/tearing its way towards south.”
The sense of home – its roots and well-being – evident in “I Like Them”, also obtains in “Home” (“Thought Tracks”).
In this instance, the poet is conscious of the fact that even in the face of starvation and deprivation, a spiritual shelter still abounds in the rural home.
For him, home ceases to be an “aftermath of an invisible war/a heap of dust and rubble”, where “the sharp-nosed vulture smells carrion”, and “the witch demands ransom for your soul” (“Home”, Mungoshi, 1975).
Like Hove in “Red Hills of Home”, Zimunya’s home has a spiritual connectedness.
It is this spiritual attachment to the land which unites people along and is drastically absent in the city.
As an optimist seeking to recreate a home which has not only suffered the bane of colonialism, as is seen in Hove’s poetry, but one that only faintly exists in his imagination as an exile consumed in Western academia, Zimunya’s community is not “sick and corroded” as Charles Mungoshi’s; and neither does it yearn in defeatist eulogies, like Charles Marechera’s.
Zimunya’s home is “a golden paradise”, driven on by a truly African sensibility.
This makes Zimunya “a sensitive poet engaged in a fierce struggle to render the native culture as it undergoes radical changes in the20th century” (Zhuwarara, 1985).
In the poems “To be Young” and “Love Potion” (“Country Dawns and City Lights”), the poet traces the blissful instances of the social aspects of sex and love in a traditional society, which should be preserved as opposed to the rather puritanical view of love and sex enforced on the black youths as portrayed by Marechera in “House of Hunger” (1978).
In “Love Potion”, the unnamed boy has to indefinitely postpone the inevitable trial of manhood by hiding behind “a screen of books” much to the chagrin of his father who sarcastically retorts: “Then you will marry the alphabet.”
Sex is symbolic of regeneration, the vitality of youth and health in traditional society; as such it should be pleasurable and productive as contrasted with the disease ridden sex for sex’s sake in the city.
This is evident in the poem “Country Dawns” in “Country Dawns and City Lights”, where a boy enters life by deflowering a virgin.
Virginity here is symbolic of purity and the uncorrupted life of the African before the advent of colonisation.
The strong images of hope, harmony, love and unity as well as communion pervading Zimunya’s poetry lend him a companion in Hove.
Notwithstanding his glorification of home, the poet is conscious of the vagaries that burden the rural abode, like drought, floods and witchcraft.
He is also aware of the seasonal changes that can unsettle the serenity of home.
However, unlike Mungoshi in “Home”, the poet refuses to despair as hope is his trump card.
The tide of change sweeping across his rural landscape, does not escape the artist’s critical eye, as he captures it all in “Dry Ancient Season”, (“Country Dawns and City Lights”).
He succumbs, reluctantly and rather unconsciously, to the travesty of home as the following suggests: “But soon time will age/and each to melancholy will be thrown.”
The poet is also aware that it is not all rosy in the golden paradise which he calls home as capitalistic tendencies grip the native businessman in “Do Not”, who is forced by “hunger and beggary” to rape his daughter as a ritual for success.
Witches make life in the rural home a horror show as depicted in “Witchcraft”.
The hyena-riding witches and their insatiable appetite for human flesh make individuals live in perpetual fear and mutual suspicion.
However, despite all the rigmarole that may put a damper on the rural landscape, the poet is adamant that home still remains home, and thus, refuses to be drawn into despair.
City lights are not only deceptive as they disrupt the flow of time, but they are also an antithesis to country dawns. Unlike the dawns of the countryside, the lights are not symbolic of enlightenment, wisdom or social and scientific progress of mankind.
Instead, they are metonymic of deception, illusion and malice.
The juxtaposition of the two metaphors exposes the folly of colonisation and cultural erosion.
In the poem “Beneath the Glare”, the deceptive nature of the city is explored in an interesting dimension when the horrors and callous murders embedded in its bowels are exposed.
The depiction of light and blood in “City Lights” as contrasted to “Country Dawns” demonstrates how Zimunya is conscious of the parallels existing between the city and the countryside.
The blood in the city symbolises death, futility of life and violence, but the blood in the rural set-up is symbolic of reproduction and continuity.
In the poem “Traffic”, the poet juxtaposes the violence of the city and the superstitious horrors of the country.
The city’s capacity to brutalise is infinite and inexhaustible as illustrated here: “But I hear again something wailing/in frantic search for the smell of blood/and human life wrapped up in mangled steel/at dawn/at midday/and sunset.”
The city’s destructive nature and its lack of homeliness is profound in the metaphorical presentation of the mangy dog; which is representative of all that is unjust, ugly, grotesque, diseased, hungry and deprived.
The city as a dungeon of death is depicted in the poems “Mangled” and “Mangy Dogs of Delivery Lane”.
Thus, the brutal nature of the city is shockingly brought to the fore as “the world is a grease pile/and men are mangy dogs”, as expressed in “Please Stay”.
All hope is lost on the black man lured to the city by its illusions which to him remain mirages etched on the horizon.
The cannibalistic nature of humanity, the century old voyeur inherent in Man which is excited by disaster and inspired by fraudulent civilisation; a precursor to colonialism, is laid bare in “Dungeon” (Country Dawns and City Lights”), as the African migrant is violently poked in the eye “through decades that run like rivers/endless rivers of endless woes/through pick and shovel, sjambok and jail”.
However, the black migrant lured to the city in Zimunya’s poetry, or forced by circumstances beyond his control in Hove’s, is also at the mercy of the colonial creations of the metropolitan woman and the bar.
These creations see to it that the migrant remains yoked to his work station as he would want to make ends meet as is evident here: “She took him/and cleaned his pockets out”, and, “The credit van backed up/to the entrance…/ and collected the bed, radio-gram/ and furniture-to the hum of the township” (“Country Dawns and City Lights”).
It is for this same black migrant that: “Beerhalls were built/community run and Chibuku was bought/community drunk/and drowned the sorrows in children’s fees,” (“Just Before the War”, “Up in Arms”, Hove, 1982:4).
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