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The artist in times of crisis
John Eppel
May 01, 2009

The topic is rather vague. I take it to mean, for the purposes of this discussion, not spiritual crisis or domestic crisis or epistemological crisis, but economic crisis brought about by the politics of cronyism and patronage. Anybody with a sense of history can see that power corrupts so that today's oppressed will become tomorrow's oppressors. Davids are Goliaths in waiting. I believe it is my duty as a published writer to keep detached from this ugly cycle so that I can snipe at it.

Sniping is an appropriate figure of speech for writers because they attack from a distance, not like performance artists - actors, playwrights, poet-musicians, film-makers, who engage in hand-to-hand combat and who are, consequently, living a lot more dangerously. It was his plays in Kikuyu, not his novels in English, that got Ngugi imprisoned.

It's not only my genre that makes me feel a little safer in our police state. Unless you're a commercial farmer, being white still carries a few advantages in this country. For example, you're less likely to be searched at a road block. And unlike Olympic swimmers and Wimbledon tennis players, serious white writers in Zimbabwe have, until recently, been dismissed as irrelevant. While I used to find that hurtful, I also found it curiously comforting. I believe my phone is tapped, and I have had some threatening calls, and my laptop was ‘disappeared' by a senior police officer; but I have yet to see the inside of a prison, and my bones are still intact.

I said earlier that writers attack from a distance. They work at home or at the town library. They are seldom asked to read in public because the public find their readings boring. They are physically detached from their books. But I have created an even greater distance by the use of satire, a form of sniping which allows me to be disingenuous, to hide behind my irony. However, this sometimes backfires. For example, readers think I write sonnets and odes and sestinas because I am colonial-minded, but I write them to parody colonialism. I reject for mine what Coetzee said about Pringle's verse: "The familiar trot of iambic tetrameter couplets reassuringly domesticates the foreign content"

The artist is notoriously egotistical, a persistent self-promoter - crisis or no crisis. The artist would do well to heed the almost daily heroics, in Zimbabwe, of vegetable vendors, certain bloggers, certain journalists, certain human rights activists, and those who wait outside jails.

They say art thrives in times of crisis. Where then were the artists during Gukurahundi? Were they still too intoxicated by the euphoria of Independence to take notice? Where today have all the writers gone? - some into exile, some into silence, some into self-censorship, some into commercial farming!

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