Oddity of sadness: Kanjiri explores femininity of loss

IN “Looking for Mother” (2022), edited by Rosemary Chikafa-Chipiro and Onai Mushava, Nkosiyazi Kan Kanjiri depicts the oddity of sadness through exploration of the fascinating nature of love, and the way it appears to be a companion to loss, particularly when read in the context of marriage.

Before reading the poetry collection, one immediately thinks of Christopher Mlalazi’s novel, “Running with Mother” (2012), not so much for the thematic concerns raised, but the philosophical metaphor of motherhood.

Mothers are larger than life characters in both fictional experiences and lived realities.

As a result, it is easier to miss the story if one thinks of how mothers mould clay into bread in their everyday tussles with the matrimonial base, without reflecting on the way they shape individual aspirations.

Flipping through the pages, “looking for mother” immortalised in Kanjiri’s forceful repertoire of motherliness, the homesick reader is compelled to dial his or her mum’s mobile number, just to hear her reassuring voice one more time.

Momentarily, the story changes, for not all of us have such blessings of having the other end delightedly responding at the first or second ring.

Mother may no longer exist, or never did! Many stories are likely to flood the mind; home, the family unit, father, who has long died, and all the sadness one may have been gifted by life. In all this dilemma, one could as well be looking for the father figure in mother’s loss of her husband.

Feeling a lump rising from the hollowness of the stomach to block the throat, almost suffocating, the reader’s search for mother, wherever she could be, begins.

There is no need to look further than what is already known, though—hurt buried in layer after layer of love.

What may only be lacking are the right words to describe it all.

In Kanjiri’s search for Mother, through effortless words, we may all locate our individual stories, realising that, indeed, loss wears a feminine face, for “We are all Women”.

Central to the collection’s four sections, which are, Mother, Home, Memories; Things you made me Feel; Where I come from; and Do We Rise When We Fall? is the theme of love, and how in all instances, it appears to be unrequited.

The poetic honesty and dejection that the anthology conveys reminds one of Tanaka Chidora’s “Because Sadness is Beautiful?” (2019), and the complexity of wickedness and nostalgia of journeying culminating in death of expectation and despair, one encounters in Memory Chirere’s “Shamhu yeZera Renyu” (2023).

Kanjiri has a way of tossing, twirling and spinning words in such a brutal, yet alluring way that you feel them coursing through your heart; soothing and perforating it in a single swirl.

He has a way of piercing through your heart by revealing so much in a few words, taking you along as a willing participant in the transcendental poetic experience.

As Memory Chirere would put it, he teaches through invocation of tears.

About the poems in “Looking for Mother”, Tanaka Chidora says: “They leave the mind squirming under the weight of revelation, of knowing things that we may have known all along, but for which we did not have the words.”

Such is the way of poetry, and such also is the controversial nature of love, and the inevitability of death—itself an extension of life.

Using words as his forte, though sparingly, Kanjiri unequivocally exposes human folly, while celebrating motherhood and all that it represents as humanity is afforded a chance to redeem itself.

Humanity grapples with loss, mostly linked to love, either in its lack or abundance, as epitomised by Mother.

The personae, both in the male and female voices portrayed, are a reading of how Mother has metamorphosed into her different hues.

On reading the poems, you get the feeling that to love is to risk pain and hurt.

Love is impermanent, which makes it a cursory illusion, a rainbow rather, that is only as beautiful as the momentary sunshine and drizzle, following a storm.

It is such a risky affair embodied in Mother, whom the persona(e) misses, and the poet lost to cancer in 2008.

Mother appears to be trapped in the cultural stereotyping of motherhood in a culturally claustrophobic and oppressive society in which women futilely struggle to follow their hearts’ desires, while suspicion and male chauvinism stalk them.

In the poems “Hell, Heaven, Home”, “The Heart is made of Sand” and “Mother’s Memories” in the section, “Mother, Home Memories”, Kanjiri goes beyond the search for the physical female body, personified by Mother, to adeptly explore the gloomy, touching, revealing, and ghastly; yet engrossingly sizzling story of violence, intolerance, neglect, betrayal, and encumbered hope, using metaphor, symbolism and word economy.

It is a kind of exploration for the self; a return to innocence and a quest for completeness.

The poet suggests that man is a reflection of Mother in all her many forms. She exists in all of us in the way we have known her.

Her image plays out in the mind each time we are confronted by the insurmountable barricade life deals us; sometimes kowtowing to cultural dictates as she picks the grains of her broken heart and remoulding them for the sake of her children as in the poem “The Heart is Made of Sand”, becoming “different shades of heaven” when “hell breaks loose” (Hell, Heaven, Home).

In this conflation of hell, heaven and home baneful to the family unit, depicted in the opening poem, “Hell, Heaven and Home”, Mother is the heroine, who absorbs all the “fury in father’s eyes”, taking all the unprovoked violence in her gait without shedding any tears, shielding her children from the tempests of being.

While hell blazes on her burning cheek, Mother becomes that soothing voice of assurance that shapes the family’s ambitions as she fashions out “beautiful stories” out of violence, deceit and hurt.

Juxtaposing metaphors of hell, sun, and storm; and heaven, stars, rainbow and the moon, Kanjiri questions society’s sincerity in the moulding of the individual capable of transforming shared dreams into reality.

On other occasions, Mother is that sturdy voice of reason, which, even in her silence, implores you to behave and observe rules of etiquette and morality.

In some of the fleeting images, she strides, macho style, and meets masculinity pound for pound, either through silence, sweet talk or outright salvoes of prickly words.

One’s image of Mother, therefore, is informed by individual strands, which, however, are stitched up into one national blanket of consciousness.

Not only is she used for quenching carnal desires as her body is sexualised, she has also learnt to use the same to her advantage.

The poems that speak to this are “But Forgive Me Mother” and “A Lesson from Mother”.

Tellingly, the persona in “When Mother Died”, informs the reader that he “did not cry when Mother died”, for he has never known “the pain of losing a mother”, but only the pain of “seeing her wilt”.

So, to him now home is “mound of memories” as all that it once stood for was buried with Mother’s cadaver (“Home is a Memory”).

He bemoans: “I carry home in me/because home is the memory of/Mother’s eyes staring into nothingness/It is my footsteps fading into vanity/In search of love.”

A close reading of this reveals that Mother exists in all of our daily tribulations with life. She is a paragon of filial unity, wholeness, moral uprightness and love.

“Looking for Her”, therefore, implies the return to the source; using the path to Mother’s unifying heart.

“It is a kind of journeying into the past to find bearings for the future in view of today’s drawbacks.

The persona mourns: “I felt Mother running down my face/the day I cried. /She had been staying in my eyes for five years since she died. /I had been looking for her.”

The implication of self-reflection as a cleansing mechanism clearly comes out when other sections are read in relation to the permeating extended metaphor of Mother.

As has been highlighted earlier on, Mother metamorphosises into two split personalities; male and female.

The female voice in “A Lesson from Mother” has “mastered” the art of “wearing” her skin “inside out” as a way of preserving her beauty against roving “men’s eyes”.

However, as portrayed in “Scars”, even though she has been able to deceive men by hiding her beauty, she has not been able to insulate herself against insults.

She has somehow exposed her inner beauty, which is prone to vagaries of masculinity. She remains a woman—carrying the scars of womanhood.

In this instance, the female body escapes sexual exploitation, yet it remains prey to objectification.

Mother knows how best to respond to such iniquities.

The male voice, which is predominant in the collection, insists that there are many ways to kill love, yet he mirrors all that Mother endured.

In “But forgive me Mother”, he becomes a disciple to the women, down South, whom he religiously worships by “paying homage to the city between their thighs”. Here, Mother is contrasted to the women of the South, who turn men to “idolaters”, playing gods and “beckoning discipleship” to their “shrines”.

Through exposure to the smooth-talking city woman, the persona loses touch with Mother’s teachings, although he pretends to have kept them “at the back of (his) palm” in remembrance of “devotion”.

Nonetheless, as each section speaks to the other through the extended metaphor of Mother, whose memory appears to have been lost, love becomes any other feeling that leads to betrayal, individualism, violence, sexual gratification and exploitation, in all its variables.

“Looking for Mother”, therefore, becomes key, for through femininity of loss, humanity checks on its follies and vices through tears, which has a cleansing effect.

This rationale is evident in “We Are All Women”, for upon reflection of the “good old memories” lost in the maze, man cracks in desolation:

“His heart melts into nectar, a stream in which feet of nostalgia dance in solitude. A man thinks of Mother, staring into middle distance, gone.

He thinks of love lost, of the crisp petals of the girl’s heart, he trampled on. When memories grow wings and fly, a man becomes a woman.

He cracks and mourns and weeps.” When his masculinity is asphyxiated through loss, symbolised by Mother, man remembers his mortality.

There is a need, therefore, to return to the source. For Kanjiri the mound under which Mother lay is the starting point. Her memory and love well in his eyes. It is here, it is there, and it is everywhere, persistently hugging him to be a transformed image of his father.

For some of us, it begins in the heart; we carry Mother’s image in our eyes wherever we go. When confronted by unfamiliar landscapes and unable to make decisions, we ask, “What will my mother think of me?”

Misogynistic man, therefore, soon learns that, after all, he is just feminine in loss.

Having been born and raised by a woman, he is only a version of Mother—a paragon of eternal love, resilience, unity, forgiveness and regeneration. It is for his own good, and indeed, for humanity’s progress, for him to crack, mourn and weep, in memory of Mother.