Lovemore Ranga Mataire The Reader

One of Zimunya’s poetry collections, which stands out as a clear indication of the poet’s romantic attachment to nature and the rural landscape is his “Selected Poems” (1995) published in both English and Serbian languages.

Prominent author Musaemura Zimunya is regarded as a romantic poet owing to his early poetry which borrows a lot from his rural childhood experiences, anxieties, fantasies, his love for motherland and his attachment to the African landscape’s beauty.

In his foreword to “Selected Poems”, Zimunya clearly locates the inspiration behind his poems when he expresses the hope the collection will give an “insight… into the brutality of colonialism, the vagaries of growing up permanently dispossessed in a racially structured society, the tortuous quest for reconciliation of a shattered old culture with a hostile and spiritless new world cultivated to disadvantage the African” .

He further quips that the poems will be able to reveal the undying quest for harmony with nature and what he calls “artistic rhythms and traditions forever tussling for my creative attention”.

Central to Zimunya’s poetry is the African landscape, whose beauty constantly enthralls. He is equally concerned with the vagaries brought about by first colonialism, which thrust indigenous people off their lands and later modernisation, which wantonly disfigures the landscape.

His passionate concern for nature and the conflict that arises between the rural and the urban settings is also shown in one his interviews conducted by Daily News reporter Eddie Zvinonzwa in 2012, in which Zimunya points to his rural upbringing having a profound effect on his perception of the urban set-up.

Asked about his inclination to highlight the movement of people from rural to urban in his poetry and the impact of growth points in abetting this influx, Zimunya answers: “Having been raised in rural areas and suffered culture shock of city life myself, it was only natural that I would benefit creatively from the conflict and tension of that experience. My first impressions of the city and city life were actually very divided, being attraction to the bright lights and being repelled by the immorality and the ugliness of racism. As for growth points, I see them as a shaky bridge between the rural and the urban, combining the worst forms of cultural assimilation.”

The majority of these are degraded by a culture that is highly conscious of its inferiority to the urban, where aping is the natural inclination of the community. Far from just the romanticisation of the rural set-up, Zimunya’s poetry is actually perceptive and is at most an indictment of colonialism and its effect not just on the physical landscape but also on people’s sensibilities in maintaining the cultural hegemony thus far had sustained them before the coming of the white man.

Zimunya shows that he is not a one-dimensional poet who thrives on simply exploring the tensions of rural to urban migrations but also that his experience of both mission and government schools exposed him to two “different” worlds that also fed his rounded perception of issues affecting his country at that time.

In referring to his experience of both worlds Zimunya says: “It was a privilege to study at a mission school and a government school. In both cases the emphasis was on acquiring some of the culture of the Westerners. But, as Chikore Secondary School was an American mission, predictably, it was more liberal, encouraging the free development of scholarship, social responsibility and creative intuitions, although it was difficult to escape the religious regime.”

Zimunya further points out that the situation was different at Goromonzi High, which was governed by contemporary authority that reflected the oppressive colonial values where the environment was a barrier against intellectual freedom.

The label of a romantic poet attached to Zimunya is not out of the need for one to insulate himself from the real issues of the day or a form of escapism but is a natural disposition whose roots are in his love of art and its beauty, something which could have been ingrained in his young mind by his father.

In the interview with Zvinonzwa, Zimunya mentions that his father was a great mbira player, a drummer and a story teller while his mother had a “powerful singing voice and a gift for adapting new forms of singing”. Zimunya describes his family as being capable of singing that an opportunity is never missed for them to indulge in an acapella sounds at any given get together.

In a rather romantic sense, the arts and music are natural companions of his. One of Zimunya’s poetry collections, which stands out as a clear indication of the poet’s romantic attachment to nature and the rural landscape is his “Selected Poems” (1995) published in both English and Serbian languages.

It is in these poems that Zimunya explores his childhood anxieties and fantasies, his emotional attachment to the African landscape and his surgical examination of the colonial and post-colonial period in Zimbabwe.

The 45 poems that make up the collection are as much a summary of what has befallen his country as they are autobiographical, given the wide range of issues that cry out loudly as more of personal experiences. In “Children’s Rain Song”, the persona evokes the merry-making associated with children at the onset of rainfall in rural Zimbabwe.

The poems “Mountain Mist”, “No Songs”, “Spring” and “Let Me Go” all attest to Zimunya’s love and emotional attachment and fascination with nature and the African landscape.

However, these poems are not just romantic scraps but infer a deeper meaning and osmotic relationship that Africans have with their environment. “Mountain Mist” talks about the mystical presence of fog in a mountainous area where it seems to take a life if its own probably through its movement and eventual disappearance. The mist is personified as if it has a mind of its own and the reference to it having “millipede wheels” conveys its wide coverage while the likeness to a pangolin edifies its aura.

Far from being appreciative of nature in a rather superficial way, Zimunya’s poetry is perceptively deeper and broader in analysing what has become of the African landscape socially, culturally, politically and economically. Zimunya’s perceptiveness is revealed in “Mazwi”, an online Zimbabwean journal, in which he explicitly highlights the use of English language as a medium of expression and how as a young student he was inspired to use it as part of his learning experience.

The author also confesses to being inspired by early English poets like John Keats, John Milton and William Shakespeare. “It’s a curious experience really. I grew up in a very pleasant village, a very pleasant family, and spoke nothing except Shona. But as soon as I got to school, I got excited about learning. Just learning, not only about colonial history and colonial culture. Because, as you may well imagine, any new experience is more exciting than any old experience or familiar experience,” Zimunya says, adding:

“The English language is so highly developed as a literary form, that has a lot of enchantment for anybody willing to experience it. We read poems, old English poems which included John Keats, John Milton and William Shakespeare. It was excruciatingly obscure and hard, but somehow the ring of the language excited me, just enchanted me. It sounds stupid to say, but to be honest it was the most amazing experience.”

In other words, while Zimunya celebrates the beauty of nature, he is quite conscious of the need to use language and poetry to communicate hidden meanings with his fellow nationals and illuminate on a number of issues that may not be apparent.

He is also conscious of the threshold and limitations of his readership especially with regards to the fact that many universities and readers in the West barely regard African literature written in English as English literature. His romantic use of the language therefore is more to do with his early contact with the language rather than an ambiance of innocence.

In any case, Zimunya argues that it is unfair to always view the world through a narrow image of “ourselves” as the world has become broader and more intertwined. He argues that it would be hypocritical for him to rubbish the English language when he is actually earning a living through teaching it.

In summary, although there is a certain romanticisation often attached to Zimunya’s poetry, this is in no way a superficially enacted trait but is born out of his rural upbringing and his first contact with early Western poets and writers steeped in the romantic tradition as a way of expressing their exasperation with the coming of industrialisation.

The musicality that pervades and cascades Zimunya’s poetry enriches to a level where it ceases just being a wishful return to old ways of doing things but offers a proposition for a better future which does not completely abandon sanctity of the African existence.

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