Mushava remembers the future through poetry

Elliot Ziwira, At the Bookstore

In his poetry collection, “In Memory of the Future”, Stanley Mushava remembers the future by combining symbolic elements, metaphors and biblical allusions to capture how religion, as a product of culture, follows the cultural dictates of any given community.

As a journalist, poet and blogger, Mushava strikes one as a man of letters, who, however, rarely utters words when it is unnecessary.

He is your kind of pastor, who hits you with only sufficient words to appeal to your inner self without judging you.

The anthology, published by Pro-Faith Press, reminds the reader of the need to sow seeds with the future in mind. Curiously, though, no religion is considered holistic, as humanity subscribes to different beliefs, the future remains ensconced in it.

Reading Mushava’s poems in the collection implores one to reflect on Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”, and the late academic, Dr Vimbai Gukwe Chivaura’s convictions on religion and culture.

Concerning identity and knowledge of the self in the quest for freedom, the unnamed narrator in Ellison’s masterpiece reasons: “If I know who I am, I will be free”.

He is convinced that if he understands his roots, then, the closer he is to understanding his tomorrow.

He has to know his roots for him to uproot those foreign to him for the sake of the future, for tomorrow’s plans are in today’s seeds, with their fertility steeped in yesterday’s soil.

As a proponent of Christianity, Mushava, the pastor-poet, subscribes to the religious poetry championed by the likes of John Milton, William Blake, John Done, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dante, Geoffrey Hill, Oscar Wilde, and William Wordsworth.

The influence of these poets clearly comes out in Mushava’s collection, which could have made Chivaura say, “Ari kufunga seMurungu (he is thinking like a whiteman.”

Culture and religion are thorny issues, as everyone is free to choose what to believe in. However, that choice, as Chivaura would put it, should not compromise the well-being of others.

According to Durkheim (1988), religion is “a united system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things, that set apart, and forbidden beliefs and practices, which unite into one single moral community called a church; all those who adhere to them.”

He adds that culture is the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, religion, material objects, and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.

Regarding the influence of non-African traditions on the Church, and the ways in which Africans have been made to despise their cultures, Chivaura would strike you in the face, convincing you that: “Murungu haasi munhu” (the white man is not a paragon of African virtues).

He believed in the sanctity of the family unit as enshrined in the symbolic representation of the tripartite heath in the African kitchen; standing for the father, mother and children. His understanding was that Europeans did not bring God to Africa, but Jesus Christ and Christianity.

To Chivaura, Africans have always worshipped in their own way as enshrined in their religious beliefs.

As an ambassador and professor of the values that shape Africans’ destiny as a people, he remains, for he refuses to die, resolute in his views that language, as a carrier of culture, has a liberating effect in a world where mastery of foreign tongues is in vogue.

This conviction finds base in Ignatiana Shongedza’s “Kagurukute Ngoma YaMutota” (2007), “Secret Lives” (1964) by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, and Charles Mungoshi’s “Walking Still” (1997).

Interestingly, though coming from different persuasions, both Mushava and Chivaura agree that religion and culture shape the future. Mushava fervently calls for heavenly riches as opposed to carnal worship and deification prevalent in today’s Church. This makes the poems as appealing as they are evocative and didactic.

Notwithstanding his principles as a Christian, Mushava is not blind to the contradictions that religion brings. He candidly pokes at these paradoxes in the title poem “In Memory of the Future”, “Church Girls”, “Hypochristians”, and “Love and Conviction”.

Man, the poet beseeches, should not be a slave to his instincts.

His drive is the knowledge of a divine power that controls his destiny, no matter how hard he may try to extricate himself from his own entanglement.

He has to give up everything to the Lamb of God—Jesus Christ, as the poet Geoffrey Hill intimates in “Lachrymae Amantis” in “Tebrae.

He writes:

“So many nights the angel of my house

has fed such urgent comfort through a dream

whispered ‘your lord is coming, he is close.'”

Oscar Wilde and George Herbert also express this view of the presence of God in life’s travails in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” and “Easter Wings”, respectively.

In “Blood on Canvas”, Mushava pleads with humanity to desist from being the target of own salvoes through deceit, hypocrisy, chicanery, avarice, and oppressive cultural mores. Like Herbert in “Easter Wings”, he believes in the cleansing effect of resurrection, reminding his fellowmen of the blood that Christ shed on the Cross.

The pastor-poet warns:

“I will return with blood and canvas

And reconfigure man’s tainted visage

After the image of the Lamb of God.”

In his view, love is only ephemeral, lustful and carnally-inclined if it is devoid of God’s love. Therefore, one should always strive to find favour in the “Lamb of God” by being born again and living a sin-free life.

The poems’ musical allure is heightened by a well-controlled metre, consonance, assonance, thematisation and repetition.

The use of a rhythm steeped in contrived punctuation and language makes the music linger on in the reader’s ears long after the beat has died down.

This ability to sustain suspense and create harmonious tunes in the ear through poetic tropes and words lends a feather in Mushava’s cap as an exceptional poet. He really has arrived on the poetic landscape with huge strides.

As the future beckons, so does the poet, playing his role as a preacher, teacher, and philosopher, entreat his people to consider the detrimental nature of their choices on posterity if they do not seek discernment from the divinity of their maker.