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Elliot Ziwira
At the Bookstore
Ruth Tsopotsa’s debut poetry anthology “Oasis in Crisis” (2021) is a fine example of what the combination of patience, thoroughness, passion, resilience, and humility does to a work of art — it lends it such an enthralling magic that soothes the heart.
Published by Ancient Pageant and set to be launched on September 25, 2021, the book makes Tsopotsa one of the few female writers who have successfully done solo poetry anthologies in Zimbabwe.
She joins the likes of Batsirai Chigama, Primrose Dzenga and Tariro Ndoro who announced their entrance onto the grand stage with the titles “Gather the Children” (2018), “Destiny in My Hands” (2010), and “Agringada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner” (2019), respectively.
The desire to see one in print has been many a budding writer’s nemesis in that quest to share experiences through ink and paper, which, in countless instances, leads to mediocre manuscripts finding their way to the printing press, supposedly as books.
Battalions of new kids seeking to make it to the literary block have often times found themselves on the harsh critic’s guillotine, and deservedly so.
The outrageous lack of depth and atrocious editing in many hastily self-published works are an affront to readers’ intelligence and an injustice to literature as a body of knowledge.
As Friar Laurence cautions Romeo in William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, there is no harm in going about it “wisely and slow”, for “they stumble that run fast.”
A book is more than a product of personal intuition and inspiration — it is more than an individual’s baby — hence it requires nurturing, moulding, and hand-holding from a multiplicity of players. This is why Tsopotsa’s collection has made an impact at the Bookstore; an impression that débutantes rarely make.
It is a product of a five-year journey of false starts, introspection, mentorship, perseverance, thoroughness, and self-confidence.
It is a journey I share with her, and which I will give you a glimpse into.
Covering a plethora of thematic concerns permeating human life in all its paradoxes, the poet fractures form and style through tapping into several types of poems; from the haiku, ballad and lyrical to the narrative and descriptive, which makes the reading of “Oasis in Crisis” a refreshing experience.
Although she is a débutante, Tsopotsa’s unique poetic voice exhibits traits of seasoned artistry. The book exudes that brutal poetic honesty and beautiful sadness found in Tanaka Chidora’s “Because Sadness is Beautiful?” (2019); the throbbing and sustained tempo implicit in the Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s works; and the sophistication of depravity and intricate nature of life and death, leading to disillusionment and despair, one encounters in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922).
The way she juxtaposes paradoxical representations of experiences, leaving a lingering feeling of hanging onto the gates of heaven, reminds one of David Mungoshi’s “Live Like an Artist” (2017); cathartic and therapeutic to the soul, yet sadly alluring in its brutish reminder of the inevitable passage of time and death.
A wordsmith par excellence, Tsopotsa does just about anything with words. She has a way of spinning, tossing, and casting a story like a dice, coin, or round nut that you feel it twirling and coursing through your heart, and precariously landing on its edge.
Like an experienced weaver, she can weave life’s intricacies, slowly, adeptly, scintillatingly, passionately, brutally, and unequivocally.
In a few words, she can expose and lash out at human folly, and celebrate humanity’s capacity to stand for its kind — affording society a chance at redemption — all in a single swish.
“Oasis in Crisis” is that kind of book that you would burrow into and bury yourself. It is so engrossing that you do not want to get out of the aura that it creates.
Memory Chirere says of the anthology: “These inspirational poems by Ruth Tsopotsa indicate that although we may walk the rough and busy roads of life, we need to have our many sorrows purified by self-renewal.
“This book is about searching for a broader and brighter view of life. These pieces are meant to provoke healing thoughts. They insist on negotiating the duality we live through; shadow and light, sunrise and sunset. Nothing dies, though all things change.”
True, life and death, vice and virtue, trust and jealousy, love and hatred, opulence and poverty, youth and maturity, lack and abundance; are enigmas of life which exist side-by-side as time takes its toll on humankind. Nothing is new and nothing is old, but everything is newly old.
Shimmer Chinodya says Tsopotsa is “a magician of words and poem forms” whose experimentation with “same line rhymes, startling imagery and haiku-like forms” makes “Oasis in Crisis” an “ambitious collection” of “wide-ranging themes and craftsmanship”.
Born in Mutare, Zimbabwe, on May 1, 1981, like Musaemura Zimunya, Tsopotsa was inspired by the picturesque Eastern Highlands of her childhood, which induced the rich metaphors, images, and symbols that she uses to paint different hues of life in her poetry.
Using a combination of forceful language and nature’s symbolic armoury, she dexterously weaves through humanity’s travails in the face of adversity and pandemics like Covid-19.
In the poems “Life”, “Art of Life”, “Life is Famous”, “The Plague”, “Death Stay at Bay” and “Conversation”, the poet philosophically questions the essence of being in a world fraught with hurt, jealousy, hardship, and hate, where death appears to be the ultimate winner.
Though the heart may be weighed down by the many crises that the individual faces in life, he/she has to reinvent himself/herself, knowing that for every drawback, there is a vent.
The juxtaposition of the contradictory components that make up life, as the poet adeptly pairs them, makes it possible for the positive-minded goal-getter to ride on the crest of its “famous” and “perfect imperfections”.
The individual should conquer his/her fears and confront life with its impetuous zeal to set dreams ablaze — daring to “beat the life out of” it — calling it to order and putting it in its place.
The rationale that fear is a state of mind persists in the poem “Environment”. The persona in the poem refuses to be intimidated by appearance, itself a perceptive reality. If the lion is told “many times” that “he’s a monkey,” his targeted prey may be saved as “soon he will believe:/Destroy himself within.”
In its ambivalence, life has to be lived to the fullest, and not be dreaded as some kind of plague. Even the plague in her poetry, the new coronavirus, which has left bleeding hearts in its wake; trading death and the fear of death for love, does not escape the artist’s censure.
In “Death Stay at Bay”, Tsopotsa chides the Grim Reaper for his insolence.
Although Covid-19 has brought death and distance among loved ones, as a brother “stood afar” as a sibling’s “shrouded body was dropped” in the “gapping ground cold”, with neither “prayers” nor “verse”, the global contagion cannot simply let humanity fade “in this type of end”, the poet insists.
“Beautiful”, the shortest poem in the collection, goes beyond the face mask — now in vogue owing to the need to keep Covid-19 at bay — to capture the hypocritical tendencies inherent in humanity.
Tsopotsa concisely lays it bare: “Everyone is beautiful/Behind the mask”. Hiding behind the mask, the individual wittingly schemes the downfall of others. Human nature is prone to deceit — people enjoy being lied to — they are fascinated by facades, as the poem “Mask” purveys.
As she points out in “Bridge”, Tsopotsa’s transformation into a celebrated poet, as she is poised to become, was not a suave glide on ice.
The poet has had to endure “crossing the bridge of criticism.” I first met Ruth Tsopotsa (nee Chikosi) in 2016 when I was informed at around 5.30pm that I had a visitor at the reception at Herald House: a doctor. Despite having had professors and doctors visit me before, I was anxious to know who it could be.
When I got to the reception, I came face-to-face with an infectious smile I had yet to meet from my surprise guest, who introduced herself as Dr Ruth Tsopotsa.
I would later learn that she was a dental surgeon, and was referred to me by a dear colleague, Monica Cheru, whom she met on a writers’ platform. Having been visited by the poetic Muse at 15, she wanted an honest critique of her latest poems, a selection of which she had on hand.
I jokingly told her that doctors are not writers or poets, which means one has to discard titles when writing as the first port of the artistic calling. Readers are not patients, I emphasised: she got the point and we both laughed.
Since she wanted a candid response to my reading of her poems, for the love of literature, I gladly told her, as critics are wont to do.
Careful not to blow her bubble, I asked her about the books she had read, and the authors who inspired her. You see, writers or aspirant authors who do not read are a huge put off, and we have come across them aplenty at the Bookstore.
I impacted on her the need to read widely, and find her own poetic voice within the many that have already been heard, or are still to be heard. Join a library if necessary: that was the short of it. Spot-on, writers, as gifted individuals, are able to write and do exceptional deeds, not from knowledge or expertise, but from some kind of divine inspiration.
However, inspiration alone is not enough. There is another component that is required: the critic, or supposed professional outsider.
Those with expert knowledge of a given subject do not err in their judgments about that particular discipline, and can be relied upon to teach it extensively (Plato, 427-347 BC in “Euthyphro”).
Therefore, the gifted writer and the learned critic need each other, but in some instances, they do not see eye-to-eye, which does not augur well for literature. I do not know if my critical knife was too sharp or too blunt, but it would not be less than six months before I met Tsopotsa again. It was in academic and writer Chirere’s office at the University of Zimbabwe around 2017. She smiled and disappeared once more.
She was in safe hands, and I realised then that I had made an impact on her as she took heed. She would also get some valuable insights into the world of art from Cheru and Chinodya.
Then, in early 2018, she visited me again at Herald House, accompanied by her husband, Dexter, an affable and humble specialist medical doctor (anaesthetist), who has contributed immensely to the collection through his unwavering support.
This time she had a bound copy of more than 200 poems under the title “Twilight Highlights”. It was about two years before the outbreak of Covid-19, which features prominently in “Oasis in Crisis”.
She wanted me to edit the manuscript for her. The transformation was noticeable, and I was impressed, but editors are even more brutal than critics, if I may say. Lines and phrases disappeared under scrutiny, titles could not hold on, and some poems merged.
I intimated to her that poetry is not an arrangement of lines in a particular pattern.
A poem should speak from the heart; it has a soul, a heartbeat, pace and rhythm. It is meant to be heard. Therefore, she should read her poems out loud until they start whispering to her from the heart, as they would do to her audience. This is how emotions are evoked.
Thus, a firm mentorship, marked by mutual engagement and fruitful exchanges, was established, which saw the wonderful new kid on the block striding onto the Zimbabwean literary podium with the sure foot of a veteran.
As Chirere aptly says, her transcendental debut poetry anthology, “Oasis in Crisis” (2021), is “enough to assure Ruth Tsopotsa of a place in Zimbabwean poetry.” She, indeed, deserves a slot in Zimbabwean literature’s Hall of Fame.
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