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The poetry of Phillip Zhuwao
Anthony Chennells
January 17, 2006

http://zimbabwe.poetryinternational.org/cwolk/view/27195

Read poems by Phillip Zhuwao

Like so many young Zimbabwean artists and poets Phillip Zhuwao died young. He was more fortunate than many of our writers because before his death, some of his poems were published in the South African journals Bliksem and New Coin, and his work did not die with him: in 2004 the Grahamstown publishers Deep South brought out a handsome selection of his poems under the title Sunset Poison. Included in the volume is an interview with Alan Finley that first appeared in Bliksem, and a biographical note by Robert Berold. Zhuwao’s admirers are deeply indebted to Deep South for making his poetry available.

Zhuwao was born on a commercial farm north of Harare and like many farm workers in that part of Zimbabwe, his parents were migrants. His father was a Lozi from what was to become Zambia and his mother was Mozambiquean. This community was always marginal to the national preoccupation of blacks and whites although it was central to the economic life of the country. Post-2001, following the increasing destruction of the agricultural industry their labour created, this centrality has become more obvious. These were people whom circumstances had made insular, and the community of whatever farm they happened to be working on. Zhuwao’s writing draws on the migrant nature of these workers’ lives and suggests experiences which take place in provisional, transient locations that are nonetheless familiar in their recurrent insecurities. A sense of constantly trying to negotiate meanings from positions of insecurity is a characteristic feature of Zhuwao’s work. Zhuwao recognises himself as a poet and confidently describes himself as such in several of his poems. In ‘My blue resignation conclude’, Zhuwao uses his background to distance his poetry from the certainties of the political ideologue: "Farm after farm Squatter/ Permanence/ Why?". In this poem, he claims that that poets experience life with singular intensity: "In their short lives/Poets live long" and yet a price is paid for this intensity. "We swallow whole chunks/ of unpronounced vocabularies" refers as much to writing in English as to the necessary isolation – perhaps even alienation – of the poet.

Zhuwao was born during the Zimbabwean Liberation War and the violence of the police both in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe provides images of torture around which the second half of this poem is organised. I admire, however, a poet who offers us the controlled wit of "We never Sing knew Song/ But plot and press electric hot/ irons over…". He domesticates torture, comparing it with a household chore and simultaneously refers to the different connotations of ‘plot’ and ‘press’. With ‘knew’ and ‘sing-song’, he addresses the age-old debate about whether poetry can be new or is merely a rearrangement of familiar material which allows it to strike us afresh with apparently unfamiliar meanings.

Given the frequent moves during his childhood, it is not surprising to find different interpretations of the same experience through a use of puns, analogies and sudden startling shifts in register. ‘What love moons over this doorway confused’ is self-consciously a poem about how self-obsessed a person in love can become. ‘Moons’ is used as both verb and noun, as well as a near pun on ‘means’, wittily addressing the self-indulgent nature of love and its inconstancy. Ideally, love is a way of breaking with the self but the repetition of ‘ma’ in this poem, usually taking the place of ‘my’, suggests that love is self-generating and self-absorbing. A young man writing of unrequited love is hardly novel. A poet who registers his despair using the registers of Romantic poetry – "What pain rends the sky’s shroud so dark" – together with those of rap artists "Gee/Its fair/One is to 1" is altogether less familiar. Any lingering suspicion of self-pity is eradicated where a moment of certainty collapses into the tentative question that ends the poem: "Definitely/ is this the end?"

‘The broken dollar in polana hotel’ cites the disillusionment familiar to so much writing from independent Africa. Zhuwao indicates the mandatory and limited claims of a socialist African with "a hand raised/ From left to left". And the hypocrisy implicit in the gesture is affirmed in the ironic necessity of "the necessary/ Swiss holiday" where banks more than ski-slopes are the principal tourist attraction. That the source of so much of Africa’s poverty may lie in its self-indulgent elites is described with chilling economy in "Povo Spa droughts". Perhaps the most striking word in this poem is ‘mortar’ which simultaneously signifies the failure to build (bricks and mortar) and the success in building the instruments of state repression (mortar as a weapon). The anxieties of love that inform the first poem considered are absent here. The concluding lines "Love/ I wasn’t there" refer as much to the absence of love in these political processes as to the poet’s own absence from the privileges of the elite.

A more ambitious political poem is ‘Ode to god’. The god of the title is as much one of the new political leaders as a malevolent god "Whose children burn mercedes tyres/ for heart warmth in Spring's Spite." It would be almost impossible to better those lines of political disillusionment. If some of Zhuwao’s poetry may lack the virtue of simplicity, this is not true of a chilling line like "Nobody was hungry yet".

A powerful poem, ‘Why should those big eyes not see’, shows a wonderful control of word play as it glimpses death in life and more unexpectedly allows life to emerge from death. "I am lo/ and/ She is lo" makes the wonder of love – ‘Lo!’ - simultaneously connote depression and possibly death. Typically, the poem completes a moment of sexual fulfilment – "The oil between our thighs is" – with "From pressed shit." And in the last lines, the paradox of the body that lives, loves and dies is expressed as a metaphysical question: "Why should we mean nothing to each/When we're really nothing." ‘Mean’ and ‘really’ are denied possibility by the repetition of ‘nothing’.

An example of Zhuwao at the height of his power is ‘the rotten fruit.’ One of its contexts is the Eden myth but another is a world without answers which justifies its own lack of charity with the phrase "Times have changed." What gives the poem its authority are the epigrammatic concluding lines: "When man prays to God/and gets nothing/he gives nothing to his fellow man/For he will feel betrayed". When Zhuwao is at his most economical he reveals his power as a poet.

There are a few poems which are obviously autobiographical. ‘Always I’ve loved big cars’ explains its title by the poet’s exclusion not only from big cars but from any car at all. The love becomes a love of the unattainable. ‘This morning nigger’ begins with his attempt to sell two copies of New Coin, one of the journals in which Zhuwao was published. The pathos of that detail is placed alongside an Africanist gesture which mentions Vumba, Kalahari and Barotseland, his ‘biological homeland’. But this apparently pious claim is complicated by a reference to ‘Oom Smuts’s autobiography’, and to Upsala and Heidelberg linked tenuously to the poet by ‘british airways’. As in ‘Always I’ve loved big cars’, Zhuwao registers the immediate diversity of life by recording his own poverty in the context of other people’s wealth, and his own disadvantaged life in the context of other people’s advantages – signalled by references to university scholarships.

As a poet, Zhuwao enters a world made available by his cosmopolitan reading and this makes his identity more complex than simply being the son of a Lozi from a family of migrant workers. This combination of elements is brought together in the fine concluding lines of the poem: "this dark little room where/the unmattresed bed/the tens and tens of books/the oversized jacket behind the door/the holed shoes/are POETRY themselves.’

Zhuwao is far too good a poet not to know that the details in those lines are present to the reader not as objects but through the intermediary of the words of the poem, and the poem ends with that paradox, making reference to the paradox of his own life as a poet whose abilities were largely neglected during his own lifetime, certainly in Zimbabwe. If that poem hints at cosmopolitanism, "The rose with marigold blooms" is resplendent with it. The exotic flowers of the title –‘blooms’ can be characteristically both verb and noun – mix the regal and the homely.

The poem also revels in its range of references: Shakespeare, Greek and Hebraic myths, a Christmas carol and the epic. These are invoked in the opening lines of the poem: "Come/To see my grave I've lived on talk/Future is my death, my image/I've not died yet/I've died a thousand times" which refuse to establish a simple opposition between life and death but allow instead death to be a part of life, if only because literature can speak of death and literature is a part of life. But the poet is not talking simply of death as literature speaks of it. "The/Uzi has shattered all fingers of art’s fillip" brings us back to the violence of Zimbabwe’s present and past and exploits both meanings of ‘fillip’/Phillip so that the Uzi literally disables the poet and refuses art one of its possibilities, that of giving form to hope.

This sense of poetry born from life lived amidst squalor and in sight of violent death is confirmed in the poem "Watching the funeral thru a cracked wall". The poem miraculously manages to discover a deep spirituality in what the poet is observing. It moves from the flippant pathos of "poor paddy/ somebody’s daddy" to the epiphany of: "and/ from the rear,/that was the doves drop/O/Spirit/a willow on the shiver". Though his life was fraught with extraordinary difficulties, the spiritual is never absent from Zhuwao’s poetry.

*Anthony Chennels is Professor of Literature at Arrupe College, Jesuit School of Philosophy and Humanities, Harare and Professor Extraordinary, Department of English, University of Pretoria.

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