The missing links of local literature

Beaven Tapureta Bookshelf
Writers who attended the 2016 ZIBF Writers’ Workshop held on July 30 at the National Art Gallery were given a rather rude awakening by Tanaka Chidora, a University of Zimbabwe academic, on various issues generally previously accepted as normal in Zimbabwean literature.

For instance, Chidora argued that the tendency to place Shona and Ndebele poets in these huge group anthologies affected the development of poetry in Zimbabwe. Group anthologies are a tendency inherited from the Literature Bureau. It is colonial and was meant to disrespect local authors and local languages. This denied local authors opportunity to make substantive individual statements.

Chidora’s paper was called “The missing link (and the way forward) in the Zimbabwean literary imagination and writing. What is it that our novels, poems etc. need at the level of craft, in order to be read and bought very widely in Zimbabwe and abroad?”.

Chidora demonstrated how the Bureau would tuck poets together in single compilations and what’s more, the layout of the poems in these compilations looked ‘hurried up’ as one poem started right after the preceding one ended, on the same page! It suggested that Shona and Ndebele were not languages of sustainable philosophies. In normal publishing circles, said Chidora, each poem should stand on its own page right to the end.

What one gets from Chidora is that the Bureau and other publishers before and soon after Independence were extremely economic with the space they accorded the Zimbabwean poets who wrote in the vernacular and yet never doing the same to poets in English! Anthologies in English were produced differently.

According to George Fortune in his article “Written Shona Poetry” published in 1982 in the Arts Zimbabwe, formerly called Arts Rhodesia, he said that the poetry journals in Zimbabwe at that period catered mainly for work in English but only occasionally in special editions did Shona poets such as WB Chivaura, Solomon Mutsvairo and Edson Zvobgo get included.

Evidently, when Shona poets, the unforgettable MA Hamutyinei, IM Zvarevashe, JC Kumbirai and many others, were published by the Bureau, it was not individually but in a series of multi-authored collections such as “Madetembedzo Akare Namatsva” (1959), “Mutinhimira wenhetembo” (1966), “Mabvumira eNhetembo” (1969), and “Nhetembo” (1972). This tended to demean their stature. The system was suggesting that very little of value could come out of local languages.

Chidora’s timely observation is thus confirmed in historical annals of the Bureau.

“When I was growing up I loved reading Shona poetry in the vernacular but one thing I identified and which did not go down well with me is that most poets in Shona appear in anthologies that are multi-authored. Like the way our local dancehall artists appear on a poster in their thousands!” Chidora said.

His analogy of a dancehall poster makes one wonder, with such a struggle for space on a single poster, how much performance time will each artist get.

“For me, you have to be a stand out writer. What most poets in the vernacular have failed to do is to stand out on their own. You find Hamutyinei on page 3 and just below him, you find Chakaipa. For me, you cannot give the world your own voice when you are always appearing in a multi-authored anthology. You got to stand out,” said Chidora.

Many poetry anthologies he listed as having constituted his literature studies at Ordinary Level attest to the fact that the group anthology mind-set continued to exist after Independence.

“Many poetry anthologies in the vernacular that I studied at Ordinary Level were multi-authored, “Nhaka YeNhetembo”, “Tipeiwo Dariro”, etc. As a reader, you fail to really identify with anybody in the anthology because they are all over the place. There is need for our poets to start compiling their own anthologies. You say to yourself, ‘This is me, this is my voice and this is what I am going to give to Zimbabwe and the world,” Chidora said.

In the past few years, aggressive poets have started to escape from group anthologies, doing anthologies in which they explore and develop at length their individual styles, even if it means risking not going onto the syllabus. Chidora referred to Chirikure Chirikure’s “Rukuvhute”, Samuel Chimusoro’s “Dama Rekutanga” and Memory Chirere’s “Bhuku Risina Basa Nekuti Rakanyorwa Masikati” as the very few individual authored Shona poetry anthologies of great value.

According to Chidora, Chirere’s anthology of poems is a kind of an informal farewell to the group anthology “fever”which perhaps last saw him appearing in “Tipeiwo Dariro” in 1994.

Chidora went on to identify other limitations in the Zimbabwean literary imagination and writing and these include what he called “the Zimsec aesthetic” which “many writers are peddling,” that is, writing to appeal only to the Zimsec (Zimbabwe Schools Examination Council), an autonomous parastatal under the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education which also selects creative works that are studied in schools. He said while the Zimsec standards are legitimate and useful, all writers nowadays tend to want to write for Zimsec and this has crippled the development of alternative literature. Chidora said that some novelists in the Shona language nowadays are hardly experimental, targeting solely to be on the Zimsec syllabus where the money is.

These stories tend to be moralistic and have predictable endings. Chidora praised Ignatius Mabasa and Tinashe Muchuri for being daring and for bringing experimentation into the Shona novel, thereby taking it higher from where Charles Mungoshi leaves it with “Kunyarara Hakusi Kutaura?”

Chidora called for writers to think beyond Zimsec and this generation. He asked for writers to adopt what he called ‘strangerhood’, a philosophy where a writer does not identify with any political affiliations but with his or her craft. Later the discussion, especially of this stranger-hood philosophy, was thought-provoking.

Chidora’s paper, together with two others presented by publisher Phillip Mudzimba and renowned playwright Stephen Chifunyise, laid out the key elements which are missing in the local writing and reading business. Mudzimba mainly invited writers to understand what goes on in the publishing industry so as to nature a productive writer-publisher relationship. Interestingly, while Chidora indirectly decried the “Zimsec aesthetic”, Mudzimba strongly maintained sometimes publishers have no choice but to publish educational material because that is where the money is!

Chifunyise’s paper indicated that the local writing industry cannot operate without a national book policy. His was an update on what has been going on in the book industry in terms of coming up with a policy that will benefit all stakeholders.

The Writers Workshop’s theme “The Missing Link in the Writing and Reading Business in Zimbabwe” was appropriate for a writing industry trying to re-define itself in the inescapable global village.