Know your author: Masitera

Erasmus and Hellen, Masitera attended Nyemba Primary School in Nyika before going to Monte Casino Girls School in Macheke for Advanced education.
After high school she enrolled for a Bachelor of Education with Mathematics major at the University of Zambia.
In 1989, while teaching at Queen Elizabeth High School in Harare, she formulated a way through which the vertical angles of cones could be calculated. The formula was accepted as original by the University of Stanford in the United States and is now widely used by high school students.
To date Masitera has written four publications including “Millitant Shadow”, a collection of poems, “Now I Can Play” a collection of stories and two novels: “The Trail’ and “Start With Me”. She is currently working on another novel called “Deadly Discend.”
In 1994, she was among a group of women who published the first anthology of poems and short stories by Zimbabwean female writers. The anthology was described by local critics as “a landmark in the history of Zimbabwean literature.
In 1997, she received a merit award from the International Society of Poets for her poem, “Enter the Teetotaler,” which also appears in Militant Shadow (Minerva Press, 1996).
“I submitted the seven stories that make up the book “Now I Can Play” to a local publishing house. The editor who was handling the stories later informed me that the publishing house was not in a position to publish a collection of short stories from a single writer. Instead they wanted to do an anthology from a number of different writers.
“Some of my stories would be included in the anthology. Another four were going to be used in an English textbook for secondary schools. The publishing house had also taken another story, “Eleven Twice” and translated it into Shona for publication in a Shona textbook.
Although I let them keep my stories and choose what they wanted, I was tired of anthologies. I have been in so many of them with my poetry, so I decided to go solo and publish a collection of short stories on my own, “Now I can Play”, said Masitera.
Masitera said Minerva Press wanted to publish the collection of stories.
They had accepted the manuscript but she had a problem with being published abroad because she felt her readership was here in Africa.
“For my readers to read my work I had to order them myself which was expensive,” she said.
She had to publish it locally despite the costs. Masitera says she gave the book the name “Now I Can Play” because the entire collection is on women who have fought battles, won or lost, and who can now afford to rest and say Now I Can Play. For example, there is a schoolgirl who gets raped by her teacher and ends up having an abortion. The story looks at events that led to the abortion.
“A lot of what I have written is, to some degree, autobiographical.
“ They are things I have experienced, things I have rubbed shoulders with. I believe I am writing better because of this first-hand experience. Also, it is not too difficult for me to figure out how other people I work with, people I live with, people who were in my childhood, feel. I use them as ingredients in many cases. It is going to be difficult for me to write something totally fictitious”, she says.
Masitera said she started writing when she was in school. At times when she gave what she wrote to other people to read, they enjoyed it. She said that one or two people were shocked by what they read.
“I remember a composition I wrote once, when I was at secondary school. I went to a girls’ school. At the bottom of my composition the teacher wrote, “See me.”
When I went to see her, she pointed out some paragraphs which she said were indecent. I remember she told me, “Nice girls do not write like that”, said Masitera.
She said she did not deliberately try to be shocking in her composition but she mentioned something about the reproductive organs. Masitera did not realise the impact it would have on the white nun who taught her English. She said at that time she thought she could write about anything, especially when you write in English (things do not appear as rude or as shocking as when you write them in Shona).
“I suppose my perception had something to do with the place of certain words in culture. You find that in Shona we do not have any words on the reproductive system that can be spoken. You do not refer to certain parts of the anatomy, even to breasts, without causing embarrassment, but in English when I came across them it was in the context of Biology where you draw diagrams and label them.
“There are many reasons. I want to share my experiences with others. I want people who read my books to know that what they go through is also experienced by others. I want others to experience the same joy I experienced when I read other people’s books, and yes writing is a compulsion, an addiction,” she said.
Masitera said writing requires self discipline and a writer needs to edit her own script to achieve their desired results.