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Stanely Mushava

Tanaka Chidora Literature Today
I first met Stanley Mushava in 2015. He had paid me a visit and our conversation logically turned towards cultural production and also logically turned further towards Zimdancehall. I realised how Mushava was gifted in two ways: an inquisitive and probing mind, and an inimitable way of combining words, sometimes by inventing new traffic rules of words! The irony of our first meeting was that I did not know then that the chap who was having a conversation with me was Stanely Mushava, so I remember making reference, rather embarrassingly (when looked at in retrospect, that is), to one Stanely Mushava who writes for The Herald. Mushava wisely kept himself anonymous to allow me to talk about him in his presence!

When “Survivors Café” came out, it did not disappoint me.

The word combination in that collection of poems, freestyle poems and essays actually pays homage to the artist and inquisitive reader that Mushava is.

I always say the most dangerous writer in the world is that writer who does not read.

Chances are that the writer will erroneously and naively think that he/she has broken new ground when the truth of the matter is that they are merely stealing other people’s shoes.

Stanely Mushava is a reader.

A reader does not just read books; a reader reads life. Life is a text. In “Survivors Café”, you find Kendrick Lamar, Rudyard Kipling, Bob Marley, Jimmy Swaggart, Aretha Franklin, John and Alice Coltrane and William Faulkner jostling for recognition in the limited edition of Mushava’s Café.

In this same collection, you find Mushava visiting the Vatican to commune with the Pope.

The invitation to commune with the Pope in “Coffee with the Pope” goes like this: “Pope Francis inboxed the poet last Sunday/”My good friend Stanely Mushava,/What do we do to disarm Kim Jong-Un/And simmer down Trump’s Armada/Politics is pageantry on eggshells,/And this cassock can be suffocating,/But we need to set up power moves/Before the pawns sideswipe our queen.”

Do you see how in one verse, Mushava plays around with politics, chess and religion?

So if a single verse is like that, imagine what the whole collection is capable of offering the reader. A panoramic view of the world and of the inner person!

In this collection, you also find the poet grappling with questions of spiritual importance, questions that put one’s faith to the test.

For instance, in “Lazarus’s Second Funeral”, the fear of what will happen after this life torments the poet. For him, Lazarus is a sign that even though we may rise from the dead and declare that a miracle has happened, that miracle is a sign that whoever made Lazarus resurrect, has power of judgment over humanity.

So with Pauline anguish, the poet cries: “Saviour, let miracles sustain me also/That there may be no tears for me./I do not want to cross the last pass/Before heaven flashes right of way./Let me live and master cherubic melodies/Before God auditions for the choir of angels.”

The same anguish is detectable in “Soul Travail”, a poem which follows the dilemma of Apostle Paul whose desire to do good is foiled by his lustful and incorrigible fleshy self: “What enticement will I not foil/To reach heaven and be with Christ?/Why will I gratify youthful lusts/And grieve the Spirit of God,/Till stolen pleasure fleets away/And off the height with a bleeding conscience/I supplicate a cycle of broken resolutions?”

Other themes are very political.

For example, “Blueroof Freestyle” reads like a spoken word rendition of the events of November 2017 when Zimbabweans marched en masse to the Blueroof residence of the former president of Zimbabwe.

In this freestyle, the poet assumes the persona of the former President, and plays around with the march to the Blueroof and the (in)famous “Asante Sana” speech.

The result is serious political critique of humorous proportions. After gloating over how people have lived “under the shadow of a petticoat” during the persona’s “ironcast rule”, the persona concludes with a warning, a warning that makes us pray that the next 37 years won’t see us travelling the same road of the past 37 years: “If the worship of man doesn’t follow me to waterless plains,/A Frankenstein will uncage before journalists say ‘Amen.’/History will remain a rosary with a bead for each liberator,/And a cross reserved for the Leviathan in the incubator.” Let those who have ears hear.

The saddest poem, for me, in this collection is “Povo (After Freedom Nyamubaya).”

The late Nyamubaya’s poems are not just poems; they are bayonets that pierce our potbellies of lies and deceit that turn our Independence into a deferred dream.

They are hard-hitting.

In “Povo”, Mushava pays tribute to this liberation stalwart and poet. In two verses that mimic Nyamubaya’s poem in which Independence comes, but with several parts missing including “freedom” whose shadow was seen leaving the 1980 Independence celebrations, the persona gets into the psyche of Nyamubaya and begs us to listen to her petitions that remain “Hollow where love imprinted a vacuum”, and where “Justice”, the lover, forgot his promise to meet her in Zimbabwe. The essays in this collection are equally energetic, and like the poems, they also have mind-blowing titles. For instance, one of the essays is titled “The Abolition of God.”

For 15 pages, the writer poetically explores how Dostoyevsky’s “apocalyptic vision of a world unhinged from the centre, of mankind detached from the source”, prefigures the problem of the 21st Century, a century in which atheism has become the default intellectual state. It is a century in which high-sounding euphemisms have replaced faith and uprightness and where bizarre human behaviours are protected by hypochristianised constitutions! Am I sounding like Mushava here?

Mushava’s writing is not only energetic; the wordplay is unpredictable. This is what puts Mushava’s writing on another level.

The fact that the collection grapples with the things that are relevant to our everyday lives — suffering, art, love, faith and the quest for meaning among many other themes — but alchemises those things into a very beautiful combination of words, is what qualifies him to be called a poet worthy of serious attention.