Yearning for homely home
TO the African as it is to the European, American, Asian and any other peoples of the world, the story of toil is as clear as the dry season sky. However, to the African, the blame somehow has a way of shifting to everyone else, except himself.
The search for home and what constitutes homeliness permeate African literature in general, and pertinently, Zimbabwean literature. The African longs for a home, which he ironically appears to be pulling down, consciously or unconsciously.
True, colonialism is a reality that cannot be wished away, seeing that its aftermaths are still ripping through Africans’ hearts.
There are words that refuse to be bloated out of the African’s mind each time imperialism is made reference to.
Such stubborn words are; mutilation, molestation, brutality, segregation, violence, plunder and hypocrisy.
But the African needs to outgrow the words, not by simply making reference to them, for they are indelible, but by fashioning hope out of them.
Musaemura Zimunya and Chenjerai Hove are uncompromising in their condemnation of the colonial city, and its inhuman character.
The two doyens of Zimbabwean poetry unite in their quest for an ideal home in the rural abode of their romantic dreams.
However, with the advent of the new brigade of drivers in black skins and white masks, as
Frantz Fanon points out, driving bulldozers across the African landscape, pitting black against black in the race for wealth, and blaming it on the borrowed guises, home has lost its homely appeal.
Using borrowed guises on social media, the rootless African rubbishes his homeland, and all that it stands for. One is reminded of the Nigerian poet, Christopher Okigbo’s poem, “On the New Year” (1958), as he pessimistically decries the Africa’s loss of roots:
Where then are the roots, where the
solution
To life’s equation
The roots are nowhere
There are no roots here
Probe if you may
From now until doomsday. Without roots, hope becomes a mirage to the common man—an elusive jelly in a bottomless can .
As the sun mercilessly scorches the dithering landscape, the roots to hold on to wither in the maze. Having lost its lustre through plunder, deceit, individualism and deceit rooted in colonialism, devoid of roots, the burdened landscape yawns.
Indeed, society loses its roots, if hope is lost in its own ethos, where the individual struggles to locate himself/herself in the national biography that shapes his/her experiences. If the walls and roof that should shelter the individual keep on falling, exposing him to the vagaries of both Man and nature, the essence of home disappears.
Okigbo’s masochistic pessimism in “On the New Year” finds base in TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land”.
But can hope be that hopeless?
Eliot writes:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief
And the dry stone, no sound of water. Both Eliot and Okigbo use visual, aural and tactile imagery derived from nature’s armoury, and metaphors to rob the oppressed people of hope, creating scepticism and crybaby mentalities. Thus, engraving hopelessness in the individual’s psyche.
It is within the individual’s power to track his/her roots, instead of simply blaming it on the dry seasons of his/her toil hunkering on the horizon of hope. The intricate knot has to give in, for a homely outcome to be realised.
The quintessence of home is embraced by Zimunya in “Kingfisher, Jikinya and Other Poems” (1982), “Country Dawns and City Lights” (1985) and “Thought Tracks” (1982), and sceptically questioned by Charles Mungoshi in “Home”, “Coming of the Dry Season” (1972) and “Waiting for the Rain” (1975).
It is also masochistically frowned at by Dambudzo Marechera in “House of Hunger” (1978) and Stanley Nyamufukudza in “The Non-Believer’s Journey” (1975); and glorified by Hove in “Up in Arms” (1982) and “Red Hills of Home” (1985).
To the artists, the city, a colonial creation, is a monstrosity that menacingly crouches in the African’s way, frustrating all his hopes and aspirations.
However, Mungoshi, Marechera and Nyamufukudza refuse to accept that the rural home is neither “sick” nor “corroded”, and that drudgery is a colonial creation, as embraced by Zimunya and Hove.
In Zimunya’s poetry, the city is “an orgy
that preys on the African migrant”, and has no permanence in its rustic, hostile, violent and luminous walls and ramifications, which offer no protection to the African.
This rationale is depicted in Hove’s poems “At Work”, “Just before the War”, “Migratory Bird 1” and “Migratory Bird 2” (Red Hills of Home, 1985).
With their disruption of the flow of time, city lights are more than deceptive, but are also an anti-thesis to country dawns.
They are neither symbolic of enlightenment, wisdom nor social and scientific progress of mankind.Instead, they are symbolic of deception, illusion and betrayal.
The deceptive nature of the city is explored in an interesting dimension in “Beneath the Glare”, as the horrors and callous murders, which are synonymous with city life, are exposed.
The depiction of light and blood in “City
Lights”, as contrasted to “country dawns”, demonstrates the existence of parallels between the city and the countryside. The blood associated with the city is symbolic of death, futility of life and destruction, whereas that in “Country Dawns” symbolises regeneration and continuity.
In the poem “Traffic” the poet juxtaposes the violent inclinations of the city with the superstitious horrors of the countryside. The city’s capacity to brutalise, however, is infinite and inexhaustible.
Zimunya writes: “But I hear again something wailing/in frantic search for the smell of blood/and human life wrapped up in mangled steel/at dawn/midday/and sunset.
The city’s insatiable appetite to brutalise, its capacity to shred societal moral fabric and lack of homeliness is profound in the metaphorical portrayal of the mangy dog.
The mangy dog is symbolic of the mun
dane and squalid existence of the downtrodden thrown into slums of unjust, heinous, grotesque and diseased deprivation.
This rationale of the city as a dungeon of death is depicted in the poems “Mangled” and “Mangy Dogs of Delivery Lane”.
The deprived voice groans: “To think I had found myself a meal/ tender and soft flesh/ until the mangy tribe came/and started a fight over my meal.”
Therefore, the brutal nature of the city and its individualistic tendencies is touchingly brought to the fore, because “the world is a grease pile/and men are mangy dogs,” as highlighted in Zimunya’s “Please Stay” and Hove’s “Skyscraper” in “Red Hills of Home”.
Like Zimunya, Hove is aware that the city is an albatross of death, whose outlook is discouraging to the oppressed, as they “walk the streets of pain/in the mud risen so high”.
Humanity’s cannibalistic nature and its inherent century old voyeur that draws excitement from trauma and pain; inspired by fraudulent civilisation, a precursor to colonialism, is exposed in Zimunya’s “Dungeon” (Country Dawns and City Lights).
The city dweller is violently poked in the eye, “through decades that run like rivers/endless rivers of endless woes/through pick and shovel, sjambok and jail,” and “jaws of steel” with his/ her “blood/anointing the brick heightened,” (Hove, “Skyscraper” in Red Hills of Home).
Not only does death lie in wait for the defenceless city dweller with its “jaws of steel”, but the city itself reduces him/her to a shell.
The black migrant lured to the city, however, as portrayed in Zimunya’s poetry, and forced by circumstances beyond his control, as depicted in Hove’s poems, is not only prey to the city seeking his labour, but he is also at the mercy of the colonial creations of the city woman and the bar.
These creations ensure that the migrant does not only work for nothing, as the wages of his labours are siphoned by ladies of the night and barmen, and back to the capitalist’s coffers, but they also keep him yoked to his workstation in his vain attempt to bring parallel ends together.