by Stan Galloway
Tendai Rinos Mwanaka, in his newest collection, Ghetto Blues (Mwanaka Media and Publishing, 2023), addresses, as he points out in the Introduction, “Ghetto literature in the 21st century in Zimbabwe.” While the political situation in the country, post-Mugabe, frames up the collection, its heart is blues music. Not blues form, like one might read in Langston Hughes’ work, but blues concerns, the life of loss and struggle against an unyielding civil situation. The forms range from free verse to prose, but the concerns are all a theme-and-variation clash of blues.
In the opening poem, “Meeting him in his Religion,” the reader enters into the drumbeat: “the same drum loop that has been running for centuries.” It is tribal (Yoruba, Zulu, Bemba, representing roughly Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia) as well as purpose-driven (survival, revival, and carnival) in affirming that “Africans invented the drum ascendency [. . .] song transcendence [. . .] dance incendiary.” The “he” of the poem admits that the music replaces drugs in his life, that the poetry of the blues provides consolation in a troubled world. And the references indicate that his application is continental, not just local or national.
The music of the land takes multiple forms. The “Wind chim[es] memories” and “the flowing mountain ranges” sing while the “Soul dances” (“Before the Earth was smacked by a Hammer”). The “trail song” deals with “wear and war and waste” (“Svosve, Zengeza afternoon: 20 October 2019”). The human body becomes a musical instrument. In “Talk is cheap,” the speaker claims: “I use my sun dry bones of resistance as drum sticks.”
But the music isn’t always smooth and pleasant. Conditions of living are sometimes difficult to endure. He writes, in the introduction to his earlier book, When Escape Becomes the Only Lover, “human existence or life is really difficult for a lot of us” (vi). Inconsistent capitalization might indicate some of the publishing struggles in a country where books are a luxury. Smoother editing might have taken away some of the immediacy of the collection. It is too easy, in Ghetto Blues, though, for the music of consolation to be drowned out by the clamor of daily life, from which one tries to make music.
The later poems tend more often toward prose form, as if the effort to impose form, as the blues does, has become too much. These poems take on a more strident tone, preachy at times, as in “A flag as a makeshift alter.”:
Before you deliberately ferment chaos for a few donor dollars, the ever clever manipulative tactics of the esoteric, a sense of purpose is what you should first cultivate.
This tendency to preach might be seen even more clearly in the biblical paraphrase/parody “1 Corinthians vs 11-12.” This poem concludes not with Paul’s admission: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (NIV), but with an acknowledgement of the local human condition: “Now I know in part, [. . .] but then I also know that someone has to stand around and watch the cattle all day.” One might not fault the application of scripture to life in the country, but the exegesis in the poem wanders farther from the text than typical hermeneutics would allow. Sometimes the application becomes disconnected from the source material which renders the sermon of the poem less effective.
Ghetto Blues comes from the Mmap New African Poets Series, which Mwanaka curates from “Zimbabwe’s biggest ghetto city, Chitungwiza” (back cover). The series numbers more than 40 volumes. Mwanaka’s work has been translated into a dozen languages.
Stan Galloway writes from the hills of West Virginia. He is the founder and host of Pier-Glass Poetry. He is the author/editor of 9 collections, including Endlessly Rocking (Unbound Content, 2019).
