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David Mungoshi

Stanely Mushava Literature Today
David Mungoshi’s debut poetry anthology, “Live like an Artist”, is a fully realised retrospective arc populated by femme fatales, oral histories, metaphysical musings and coming-of-age diaries.

Mungoshi’s dial-shifting opus is a beautiful complex where life and time bounce off each other, pain and pleasure bleed inseparably and the commonplace cues the metaphysical.

With the independent publishing scene cluttered by pulp-leaning, microwave projects, Mungoshi has given us a dense thicket of literary materials which will be analysed and enjoyed beyond this year.

The poet curates his experiences with cultural intelligence and sonic precision, morphing into a tour guide for other conflicted mortals in a museum of conscious hindsight, artistic ambition and all that can be gainfully extracted from life.

Whether intended or inadvertent, the hundred featured poems read like a unit; whether backstroke in hedonistic abandon, prostate at the feet of beauty, swept along by nostalgia or deep-diving into the unknown, the personae sit under the same roof, mirroring the reader’s fantasies, fears and foibles with a combinatorial vibe.

The book is a rare sight of what gives when industry-certified creators and critics, in this case Mungoshi, Ignatius Mabasa, Memory Chirere and Robert Muponde, are locked up in collaborative workflow.

Bhabhu Books label-mates Chirere and Mabasa edited this anthology for Bhabhu Books and Muponde provided a preface that both finger-snaps the merits of books and raps its shortfalls.

The accomplished critic’s deep-diving preface unpacks, among other things, the fascinating title of the book: “Living as an artist, as someone not driven by profit but prophecy, not by revenue but revelation; the whole persona of the artist is imbued with an aura of creation, of origins, the coming-from-nothing (not in the sense of the much-touted rags-to-riches stories).”

“The art does not easily sell because it is priceless, like life itself. The quest for freedom (free-spiritedness) and happiness in ‘the riches of poverty’, whose cypher is the vagabond who has nothing to guard, is equally as intense as the expression of poetry embodied in ‘eloquent bottoms dancing/To a choreography that shakes the world’. With this primed contrast and juxtaposition, David Mungoshi jolts us into an awareness of different levels of aesthetic intellection, combinations and rhythms.”

In a refreshing contrast to the gushing marketing statements that often pass for introductions, Muponde takes Mungoshi to task for recycling stereotypes in some of the pieces.

“Some of the poetic images in, say ‘Treat Me Like I Really Am Something’ and ‘Peasant Woman’s Beauty’, are well-intended stereotypes that err on the side of caricature. Delectable belles, she-devils, lasses, studs and beaus, are meant to widen the archive and wordplay, but end up being mere idiosyncrasy on the part of the poet. However, the frame of reference is indeed wide (beyond these clichés) and adroitly incorporates musical genres, canonical literary texts, and fashion,” writes Muponde.

Muponde also alludes to Mungoshi weighing into the anthology the critical facility that was on display during the latter’s literary journalism phase. I approvingly recall the phase, especially since it fired up in me teenage enthusiasm to follow the same path.

I had been reading all my life but a chance encounter with Mungoshi (then trading under the mock byline, Chigango Musandireve)’s Writers Corner column in the now-folded Moto magazine was my initiation to Zimbabwean literature proper, particularly Dambudzo Marechera’s work.

When I started drifting away from peers, hunched over cuttings of Mungoshi’s column in an old counter-book as we herded cattle during holidays, I knew I had discovered the meaning of life.

As I heard him tell the stories of Zimbabwean literature with encyclopaedic erudition, flipping through the archive in 2004, I instantly appointed myself a writer and felt school was an insufferable waste. Approaching Mungoshi’s anthology as one thus indebted, I am apprehensive of star-struck concessions.

The title poem, “Live Like an Artist”, despite lending itself to broader appropriation, is an artist’ manifesto of insulating yourself from popular judgement and creative control in order to live a fully realised life. “Live like an artist/ Cocooned in your creative maze/ With the promise of a future without haze/ For everything comes crawling back to art – / The story of creation out of nothing.”

Beyond the creative theatre, Mungoshi recurrently sends puppet-masters to the devil in the course of the book, affirming and extolling the beauty of individuality. “Treat Me Like I am Something,” one of the many “treat her right” prompts in the book, builds on the idea: “Make-believe I’m the last woman on earth/ Each woman is the last of her type.”

“The title of my poetry anthology is ‘Live Like An Artist’ and was inspired by my reading of artists and their struggles for fame and fortune, and how they go on living and hoping in spite of the many obstacles that they encounter practically on a daily basis. Most people hate anyone who seems to live on his wits. The unlucky thing is that those of us who engage in the art of writing have no visible sweat to show. No one sees the intellectual sweat that is characteristic of our labours,” Mungoshi cues readers in his “Shelling the Nuts” column.

“My view is that if everyone lived like an artist there would be fewer conflicts in the world and because the imagination would reign supreme, life could in some ways be a dream. If you emulate the artist you learn to hope against hope that things will work out one day, no matter how long that may take. If you learn to live like an artist you learn to be happy and at the same time thoughtful regardless of your circumstance.

“You start believing in miracles and in the creation of something out of nothing. This is why some of us only get recognition after we have passed on. That is if we are so fortunate as to have someone taking a critical look at what we leave behind and going on to appraise us in a way that makes the world sigh in utter disbelief, lamenting the fact that it allowed such a gem to go unnoticed,” writes Mungoshi.

The coding for the anthology is cracked in a short piece: “Invaluable little gems”. “From/ My sordid book/ Of experience/Are your only hope of/ Vindication.” He is packing the book around the desire to morph into immortality, with the variety and depth of the pieces adding up.

“The Legend of Sekwa the Lass” extracts the oral history around the nomenclature of Harare suburb Dzivarasekwa into a narrative feat. According to Mungoshi, Sekwa, a crushworthy village muse, without a heart to match her face, like La Belle Dame Sans Merci, sends men to catastrophic distraction but becomes the victim of her conceit when age warps the gifts of nature into oblivion.

She becomes the object of village taunts as she turns to baby-sitting, out of time in the absence of a suitor. Revenge simmers on in her mind, though, and one afternoon, she leaves the village in gaiety and song, with the children after her like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Alas, the innocents go after in a suicidal plunge to the floor of the pool that became Dzivarasekwa.

On a technical level, where longer pieces are concerned, Mungoshi tops this with “Twelve Bar Blues Story,” while the autobiographical “Stories from My Picture Album” is more ambitious. The poem, which conceptually nods to label-mate Chirere’s “Pikicha”, miniaturises the narrative arc of the anthology in an album-length self-portrait.

“Oh, this one should have come earlier/ I’m the lusty bawling infant in the old priest’s arms/ He’s trying to persuade me to bury my original sin in blessed water,” he reflects at a more pious phase of the gallery before taking a wilder drift.

Among the books released this year, the book already stands apart as one of the more ambitious offerings. The cathartic elements, the generous array of personae, the complexity of the experiences, the evocative force of the writing, the wider social concerns such as environmental awareness and the cultural intelligence, including trans-genre sampling of Leonard Cohen and others, combine into a memorable read.

Thank you, Chigango Musandireve.

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