Exiled and Censored

 

State of the Nation: Contemporary Zimbabwean Poetry, ed. Tinashe Mushakavanhu & David Nettleheim, (Conversation Paperpress, 2009). ISBN: 9780956313706. £7.95

The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, ed. Mark Weiss, (University of California Press, 2009). ISBN: 9780520258945. £20.95

 

Both these anthologies bring us unfamiliar voices from parts of the world which exist, for English readers, on the periphery of our awareness, if they exist at all. We know Zimbabwe from the news programmes: pictures of riots and heavy-handed oppressive governments; and Cuba perhaps from the music and iconic pictures of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. But both these collections are historic, giving an overview of a nation’s poetry that has barely been glimpsed before.
In the case of State of the Nation, Tinashe Mushakavanhu has gathered together the first anthology of Zimbabwean poetry for over twenty years. It is inevitably touched by that nation’s recent troubled history, so there are many poems about poverty and political violence; however, there are also young voices, in particular the ‘Born Frees’ (people born after the end of Rhodesia, who have lived entirely under the Mugabe regime), as well as older poets. If that makes the collection seem rather gloomy and over-politicised, there is also plenty of humour and love of language among these poets.
Most of the poets write in a very plain and conversational style, using free verse and varied line lengths; so much so, in fact, that one is genuinely surprised by rhyme and the use of a standard meter. John Eppel has written some witty sonnets and his supple, ironic use of meter shows a poet using the European tradition to critique itself and to satirise the political situation:
Papa, Daddy, Dear Old Man:
what is about dictators that we
coddle them with terms of affection?
The lion will slaughter, and even eat
cubs of his rivals. No subordinate
stands in the way of the dominant
white-browed sparrow weaver, the ballast
of whose gonads gives him an awkward flight…

(‘An Awkward Gait’)

Though it would have been tempting for the writers to do so, there is very little overtly political rhetoric in these poems. There is a surfeit of satire and a tension throughout the book between wanting to be a poet like Clare or Wordsworth, and needing to report on the poverty, the political violence and corruption of the country they live in.

Many of the poets write of the land of their birth from a distance, as they are now part of the large diaspora of refugees from the political situation. There are poems on the experience of exile, sometimes loaded with barbed comments: Tinashe Mushekevanhu’s experience of an English pub, for instance; or Nhamo Mhiriripi’s ironic look at the supposed ‘economic migrant’ in ‘When You Meet My Countrymen’ — a powerful poem, which had me wondering whose side he was on.

There’s also the question of language. In a fascinating introduction to his own poetry, Ignatius Mabasa talks of English as the “wrong language”: there is sometimes an awkwardness in the phrases that comes from the writers using their second, or even more removed, language. Philip Zhuwao takes advantage of this, illustrating the dilemma of the Zimbabwean poet in ‘Hush Hush (Harsh) My Love’:

We no longer contemplate
I here
Yu there
as this continent
becomes a doormat
where angels make violent love
anointed by my blood.

Through all this collection, the voice of Dambuzo Marechera speaks in many of the poets’ tongues. He is seen both as the great exemplar and a figure to set one’s metaphorical spear at. His anarchism, his wildness is glimpsed in the selection of unpublished poems printed here, but also in the desires to write about love, about the poet’s own personal life.

These tensions make for fascinating reading. Most of the poets resist the urge to preach, and I never felt I was being buttonholed by a social realist ideology. Instead, what comes across is a disparate set of voices all seeking to find a way through difficult circumstances. I’m reminded at times of East European poetry, through the use of oblique references to the regime, but it’s often Mayakovsky’s approach, with its directness, that is more noticeable than Herbert’s or Popa’s . The introductory essays by some of the writers make clear the need to speak about what they see and the desire to speak for themselves. This is a poetry in transition, formed largely out of opposition to the status quo — whether that be colonialism or the present tyranny — always juggling the needs of the individual with that of the nation. It makes for an edgy, sometimes bleak, sometimes sorrowful and sometimes fiercely funny poetry.

If there was something lacking, I think it was the voice of the land itself: its animals and its wild places, its ecology. I didn’t want landscape poetry so much as to hear what the land had to say for itself: Zimbabwean ecopoetry. When animals or trees or the land do enter the poetry, they are either a background to the human dramas or are symbols of it: Mugabe as a devouring lion for instance. Perhaps now is not the time for such things; and there is the danger of prettying the place up for the tourist, a trinket of the big five African animals, or writing poetry that ignores ‘the state of the nation.’ But a poetry entirely focused on the human seems lacking a vital spark from the earth itself.

That aside, however, this is a very welcome and necessary collection that goes a long way towards opening up the poetry of a country that is only known to us, if at all, through the news headlines. The poets are all struggling to sing their songs, sometimes in a foreign land, sometimes in a land made foreign by tyranny, and they do it with gusto, humour, anger and a kind of furious love of homeland.

Another kind of singing comes from the land of Cuba. This enormous selection from the last sixty years can only be summarised here. I was only vaguely familiar with one or two of the names in this collection, not so much as poets but merely as names I’d seen somewhere. Which is a bit like Cuba for many people: it’s an exotic place that to some means salsa, the rumba, afro-cuban jazz and tequila, and to others means Che Guevara, radical ideals, a bastion against United States hegemony; rarely does it mean a real place.

Well, as with the Zimbabwean collection, so with The Whole Island, except that Cuba has a much longer tradition of recorded poetry, and the language is Spanish rather than English. A fine editorial by Mark Weiss gives us a brief history of the poetry of the island, with the main division seeming to be between the conversacionalistas, and the neobarrocos; or, as it were, between a plain ‘common man to common man’ verse and a more symbolic verse, derived from the Symbolists and the modernist traditions that sprouted from them. We start off with the great Nicholás Guillién, and his extraordinary sequence, ‘The Great Zoo’:

THE CARIB

In the aquarium of the Great Zoo
swims the Carib.

                  This animal
seagoing and enigmatic
has a crystal crest,
a blue back, a green tail,
a belly of dense coral,
a hurricane’s gray fins.
In the aquarium, this inscription:
                                                            “Caution, it bites.”

That inscription could provide the epigram to this whole anthology. In contrast, though, to the approach of Guillién and others such as Herberto Padilla, Eugenio Florit and Fayed Jamís, the neobarroco tradition allowed itself to be more florid, less direct, more ‘poetic’, as in this extract from José Lezama Lima’s seminal ‘Thoughts in Havana’:

Because I dwell in a whisper like a set of sails,
a land where ice is a reminiscence,
fire cannot hoist a bird
and burn it in a conversation calm in style.
Though that style doesn’t dictate to me a sob
and a tenuous hop lets me live in bad humour,
I will not recognise the useless movement
of a mask floating where I cannot…

Surely Rimbaud and Baudelaire stand behind this poetry, looking on with approval.

Some of the younger poets seem to shift between these two extremes, bringing in influences from American poetry too, even from Language poetry, but it seems to me that it’s a dilemma that all poets face. How much are we trying to communicate with the world outside our own heads? Is poetry just a way of exploring ideas and language, or does it have something to say outside its own world?

It’s a dilemma, of course, faced by both anthologies; in both countries there are consequences if you speak the wrong thing, if the government thinks your poetry is criticising its politicians and policies. Several of the poets here have either exiled themselves, or been censored: sometimes for their poetry, sometimes for their sexuality. In England, you can say what you like because nobody but other poets are listening. Not so in Cuba, or Zimbabwe.

Both these collections have widened my knowledge of the world of poetry, and have made me think about the role of poetry in the world. These anthologies contain some great poetry that will live with me for a long time. The limits of time has meant that I feel I have only been able to scratch the surface of the various poetries contained within — the Cuban anthology in particular is a fat book with six hundred pages of poetry in it (or three hundred if, like me, you can’t read the Spanish…) For those who wish to step outside of the English poetry world for a while, these are two great places to begin your journey from.