An old soul in a young body

I met Tafadzwa Chiwanza for the first time in my office in 2019 when I was still a lecturer in the then Department of English at the University of Zimbabwe. He just walked in with a fellow Accounting student and spent close to an hour talking to me about the craft of poetry, all the while evincing the demeanour of someone who was eager to observe and archive. He was meeting me for the first time after months of conversing with the skeletons of my mind in the Edward Dzonze-manned Poetry Intercourse Whatsapp group. The group allowed us to spend some time conversing with luminaries such as Jabulani Mzinyathi, whom we affectionately called Uncle JB. The intercourse group was more of a dumping ground for poets who could not wait for their poems to constitute a collection before getting them out there. Poems were composed on the spur of the moment and indiscriminately thrown into the group for our restless minds to munch on. It was riotous, but in that riot, we found a home. (Chiwanza, Dzonze and I later joined other WhatsApp groups which prided themselves in their lack of chaos. For a long time, we felt like aliens traversing unfamiliar landscapes while being asked to pretend as if everything was alright. Well, it wasn’t. It still isn’t. Only Chiwanza has remained in some of those groups. Dzonze is nowhere to be found. I am somewhere in this world, sipping wine, making crazy coffee, and reading Chiwanza’s collection, No Bird is Singing Now? [2020]).

Chiwanza begins by telling you that he is an old soul in a young body and that one day he woke up feeling as old as the sea. So the whole collection reads like an explanation of the ‘why’. It is a tour into the aged and peeling crevices of a young man’s mind, a mind that, like the body of Rushdie’s Moor, is hurtling towards old age with the speed of a fox chasing a meal. I don’t know why such a young man with a whole future ahead of him is feeling old. Unlike me, squirming under the weight of middle age, he is still in his 20s!

Regardless, Chiwanza’s world is running berserk. Young boys are “blindly slipping from sanity’s hands”; a young man suddenly discovers he is a father, the discovery of which makes him cry:

How could it be,
That I a while ago was as little as they
Yet now they sprout around me,
Calling me their father!

Believe me, I once wrestled with such a question the day I saw Father holding my son, scrutinising him carefully for signs of himself. It was then, a few minutes after arriving from the city, that I realised that things had changed. Like the narrator of Mahfouz’s ‘Half a Day’, you realise that you went to bed the previous night, young, happy, and carefree, “and woke up [feeling as] old as the sea.” Growing old is something one can never get used to, and Chiwanza seems to be psyching himself up for such an eventuality by putting to words the incessant fear that stalks you the moment you realise there is no going back.

The real meaning of No Bird is Singing Now?, it seems, is what W. B. Chivaura wrestled with in ‘Kutya Kurova’. The world began, as Chiwanza remembers, with a word, with a newborn’s cries attracting ululations from perspiring midwives, but ends with “broken silence”. This knowledge that one day the persona will transition from being to non-being makes him struggle to come to terms with the fact that we are but “infected wounds/Inside the giant clay nostrils of time.” And this is where Chiwanza’s pen becomes indiscriminate in its choices of metaphors to capture the futility of existence. Here, the persona is but “a giant exclamation mark” that places itself at the end of a poem; over there, he is merely “an apparition of a full stop at the centre of a sentence” (an editor would delete this full stop, emphatically instructing the writer, “This full stop is useless! It has to go!” – O Life, what else is there besides this bone which my skeleton is finding too hard to swallow?).

As you go through this collection, you find the poet in various postures of non-being. In one poem, he is made of dust; in another, “time is constant, but it is I that flies”; in yet another poem, he is “like a cigarette stub in the snow, burning the way to my own demise.” All these postures represent the inexorable movement of the poet towards the beckoning dust. Try as he might to hold on to the hem of “life’s tattered khaki skirts”, the eventuality of death, of the “ground [taking] our kind every year, giving nothing back”, is something that he has to come to terms with. Thus, he sighs resignedly, pronouncing that he is but “a sorry storyline”.

But there are moments when the poet assumes a desperate tenacity as if he is trying to convince himself that there is more to life than its end. But as a reader, you soon realise that the tenacity is the poet laughing at his own puniness in the bigger scheme of things – whatever and wherever that bigger scheme is. Thus, even as he is declaring desperately, “I am the goblet of meat stuck between the croc’s teeth”, or “I am the new hundred-dollar bill/ Every bartender looks at suspiciously”, as readers we are quick to observe that the goblet of meat stuck between the croc’s teeth will eventually be eaten by an Egyptian Plover, and the hundred-dollar bill will “[disappear] beneath a million pennies”!

As you continue reading these poems, the poet’s philosophy begins to make you feel uneasy, and you start to look for an idiom that redeems. That is where Valerie, the poet’s muse, comes in. She is “the air escaping from a lyre”, and the persona is “the lyre kissing her bottom lip/ Soft as the tears when angels weep.” But we soon realise that even though the poet can hold her for a little while, Valerie is not there to be kept forever… she is just but a dream, a phantom the persona summoned when he “sat at the edge of memory”, the teeth of his mind munching on “sweet thoughts/ Long lost beneath the pillow.” Oh Valerie, the sweet phantom who satisfies my desires, for thee I will wait a thousand years, yes, “I will kneel here for years/ Until into my arms you leap”.

At some point in the collection, the poems take flight and begin to survey the landscape. My favourite is ‘Harare’ which I shall quote below:

In a somnolent Harare the ear
Engulfs rumours of a riot in fear.
Mail-clad citizens stand sentinel,
Ready to defend the senile.
I pause and laugh for a while
As I puff away at my cigar in style.
'Nothing ever changes around here?'

It is this Harare that the poet tries to leave, or will eventually leave. At some point, he “got [his] things and tried to leave,” itself a subtle commentary on Marechera’s famous, “I got my things and left” (although looking back, he never managed to leave…again).

Chiwanza’s imagery is astonishing in its beauty. There is always that unlikely metaphor lurking somewhere in the shadows of his mind. One wonders why such a gem of a book didn’t make a big splash. It was published in 2020, yet this brilliant collection, which deserves an iconic place among contemporary poetry collections from Zimbabwe, continues to lurk in the shadows of Zimbabwe’s book jungle. Is it a case of marketing, or of readers sleeping on their writers? Whatever the case might be, every generation has that brilliant artist who remains unknown, whose artistry is lost in the chaos of the art market where sheer brawn sometimes tramples upon brilliance’s upturned face. I hope this is not the fate of this amazing collection.

I hope this is also not the fate of Tafadzwa Chiwanza’s pen.