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Lovemore Ranga Matairer The Reader
The language of literature is often used in an emotive way to arouse emotional response, for writers generally believe that they have an obligation to ensure that the point of view or ultimate vision is not only understood by the readers but also sympathises or empathises with the issues raised either in a piece of poetry or prose.

Emotive language is some kind of heightened expression. The language relies on connotation, which refers to the implied meaning or significance of word. Writers like Thomas Bvuma in “Every Stone that Turns” and Ronald Masvi in “Flowers of Yesterday” use emotive language as a way to heighten the mood, elicit sympathy from the readers and ultimately sway readers along a certain perspective.

In the case of Bvuma and Masvi, they use language in an emotive way in order to express or create a reality of life that is able to influence the reader to adopt the author’s opinion or vision. In most of their poems, the writers use emotive language to create empathy. Empathy is when one puts herself or himself in another’s shoes so as to ensure that the reader’s emotions are in sync with those being expressed by the author.

Poems that clearly illustrate the use of emotive language in “Every Stone that Turns” by Bvuma are “Real Poetry” and “Mafaiti”. Written during the height of the liberation struggle during the 1970s, “Real Poetry”, according to Chirere (2012) defines struggle as people’s poetry. The mere fact of using poetry and defining it as some sort of a weapon or the struggle itself is in a way emotive as it shifts from assigning a denotative meaning to metaphorical level where the poem assumes a certain symbolism and depth.

Chirere says the poem exposes the author’s “power of intellect, control, rhythm and style well combined and married to the idea, action and reaction”. The explosive manner in which Bvuma expresses himself in the poem is exemplified by the following excerpt:

The Real Poetry

Was carved by centuries

Of chains and whips

It was written in the red streams

Resisting the violence of “Effective Occupation”

It was engraved in Killings in Katanga,

In the betrayals of Mau Mau

In the countless anti-people coups

Its beat was the bone in Bissau

Its metaphors massacres in Mozambique

Its alliterations agony in Angola

Instead of stating the denotative meaning of how colonialism affected the people’s resolve to fight, Bvuma posits that real poetry comes from “centuries” or years of “chains and whips” which is the dehumanising physical torment people who shed “red streams” of blood as they resisting “Effective Occupation” which is colonialism itself. The manner in which he uses words evokes a sense of loss and despair and depicts what is taking place in various countries in Bissau, Mozambique and Angola.

Bvuma employs various poetic devices that edify, intensify the whole aura of the poem and a people under siege and are involved in a struggle to overcome the difficult odds confronting them.

While defining what “real poetry” is solicit divergent views depending on the social, political and ideological perspective of an individual, Bvuma advances the view that “real poetry” is that which talks about people’s struggles or experiences. In other words, while aesthetics and other devices maybe important it is the issues that are tackled by the poem that make it worthwhile.

Bvuma subverts the traditional use of poetic devices like allegory, alliteration, use of allusions, anachronism, figurative language and metaphors and instead in a rather convincing way forces the reader to accept all these poetic devices are found within the “womb” of what he is describing. Thus, he says: “Its beat (rhyme) was the bone in Bissau/Its metaphors massacres in Mozambique/Its alliterations agony in Angola.”

This is an emotionally charged poem, which Chirere (2012) describes as “a fighting poem which insists, through content and form, that poetry should be revolutionary and popular. Poetry must spring from life’s struggles and not from back-sitting imagination and fantasies”.

Indeed, Bvuma subverts the normal disjuncture between the poem and the object or issues it is describing and makes it embody a life of its own with its pangs and pains.

In his other poem “Mafaiti”, Bvuma dramatises the communal selflessness nature of the struggle. Mafaiti the persona takes time plucking plumb lice from a fellow comrade’s hair, itself an act that symbolises the selflessness of the liberation struggle with the lice representing the parasitic capitalist and Mafaiti himself representing the collective oppressed peasants and factory workers. What is deplorable is the manner in which Mafaiti is betrayed by those he fought along with and those he died to liberate.

In a strong evoking manner, the persona says that “when the fire” ceases Mafaiti, his wife and children remain on the fringes of history. In a convincingly skillful way, the poet navigates the vicissitudes of the past and the future with the reader and along the way demonstrates that the only compass we can trust is our own. Hence the parting shot “sink your bucket where you are” probably borrowed from African-American scholar Booker T. Washington.

In the same vein, Roland Masvi’s “Flowers of Yesterday” possess the same vivid imagery found in “Every Stone That Turns” in its depiction of the disillusionment that is setting in just after Zimbabwe’s independence. One typical stanza that illustrates this depiction in a very emotive way is found within the poem “Dawn 1984,”:

The dry cracks of the mind fill up the sand

Dusty acres of self-doubt spread,

Creeping jaggedly on,

Leaving in their wake, like the runs

Of an ancient civilization

The broken fragments of a despairing vision

Sorrows that come hurtling down mind walls and

Smash into blood clots that echo

In the empty chambers of a lonely heart

“Sorrows” are objectified and are made into a moving object that inflicts pain “down the mind’s walls. The poem creates an atmosphere of despair, the stench of sorrow that probably typifies the author’s assessment of the situation at the time of writing the poem. The poem evokes vicarious experience in the reader that pushes one to be emotionally and mentally involved in it. As a reader reads through the poem, it impulsively forces one to imaginatively experience and share the same things as the characters in the story.

In the title poem “Flowers of Yesterday”, while not explicit the poem is clearly about change: “The Old World of high mountains and low vales/Of old plains that nestled towns and cities,/ Rolled away and was dissolved into Myth,/And uncovered leveled land that stretched far/To the deadly Flats of re-built Futures.”

United States based literary critic Emmanuel Sigauke says when he reviewed the poem way back in 1996, he was annoyed by what he viewed as the ‘fake” capitalization of impotent words in the poem like “Old World”, “Flats” , “Futures” but could not ignore the promise in the lines; “The Flowers of Yesterday Had become/The Weeds of Tomorrow.”

“And if Tomorrow is Today, and we are talking about the former heroes of Zimbabwe who have caused untold suffering, you can detect a prophetic message, right. And guess what happened to the flowers of yesterday,” says Sigauke.

Indeed, while Bvuma’s poem is a fighting poem that defines poem something that is people’s struggles, Masvi uses similar images of nature to describe the looming despair especially when he says “My sun is set; I lie in shade/And shadows thicken round my cave!” to describe a grave.

While Bvuma’s poems combine the revolutionary verve with a positive possible future, Masvi paints a foreboding atmosphere. However, both poets employ emotive language typical of most literature that moves the reader to identify with their visions.

In the final analysis, even with their divergent backgrounds, Masvi and Bvuma’s poems still meet Aristotle’s expectations of poetry. In his Poetics, Aristotle talks of poetry as mimetic in that it creates a representation of objects and events in the world, unlike philosophy, for example, which presents ideas. Humans are naturally drawn to imitation, and so poetry has a strong pull. Poetry can also be an excellent learning device of things that would generally disturb humans like dead bodies or disgusting animals.