Commemorating
sight and sound
from: http://thisisaerodrome.com/review-textures-john-eppel-togara-muzenanhamo
Textures must
be one of the most unusual, even ironic, poetry collaborations to have come out
of Zimbabwe in recent years. Zimbabwe’s publishing industry being in a state of
near-total collapse now, amaBooks in Bulawayo represents a rare light of
literary trust and hope – and this is a particularly brave publication.
One limb of this attractive
double-hander is John Eppel, probably now the country’s most long-standing
resident poet and satirical novelist. He is vilified in government-controlled
rags such as The Patriot, partly just for being
white, inconveniently and persistently present, partly because his
satiric tone and self-deprecating demeanour are routinely missed or
misunderstood. He has now published a number of poetry volumes, beginning with Spoils of War (1988),
and a swathe of satirical novellas and short-story collections. These have
become a little more serious of late, approaching the seriousness of the poetry
in this volume (except, to be sure, the poem “Dorothy Recollects”, in which he
sends up his own ‘colonial’ Wordsworthian Romantic inheritance).
The second limb is less well-known, a younger and almost
preternaturally talented newcomer, Togara Muzanenhamo. Unlike Eppel, who as far
as I know has never been published in volume form overseas, Muzanenhamo has
already been picked up by Carcanet Press in the UK. These two poets’
contributions (some 30 poems apiece) are arranged in interlocking groups,
setting one another off in intriguing ways.
It is both ironic and heart-warming to see the white and the black,
the established and the upcoming, in counterpoint and communion. Ironic also
because – contrary to stereotype – it is Eppel (though South African-born) who
appears the rooted local, Muzanenhamo the globally-travelled intellectual.
Eppel writes about the local flora, fauna (especially birds, here), and
landscapes, and of highly personalised feelings; Muzanenhamo writes mostly of
anywhere but Zimbabwe – Peru, the USA, Norway, Mozambique – alongside
apparently wholly unlocatable, almost fantasial scenarios.
The volume is prefaced with a perceptive introduction by Drew
Shaw, then lecturer at Zimbabwe’s National University of Science and
Technology. He quotes a revealing and poignant comment by Eppel:
[A]s you
get older you have a much more powerful sense of mortality, so you don’t take
being alive for granted anymore. But you don’t see life and death in nature;
you just see one form of energy changing into another form of energy, in nature
time is cyclical. And somehow I think there’s consolation for ageing poets to
spend more time observing the minutest details out there.
Those details, however, are always turned to inner psychological
capital, with mythic resonances, as in one of the several bird poems,
“Brown-Hooded Kingfisher”:
You have been immobilized
by instinct, by a chronic state of bliss.
You once
fished in waters above the sky,
in the firmament of death and desire.
…
…
Impossible beak,
orange legs, reddish feet glued to a tree;
Dickensian eyebrows, unnerving shriek
shadowed by a gentling, ‘pity for me’.
This exemplifies a number of characteristic features of Eppel’s
poetry: the intimate, almost scientific detail, the precise rhythms and
stanzaic rhymes, and a certain intrusive note of the maudlin. Also, the hint at
his wide reading in the allusion to Dickens; such referencing – a trait he
shares with his companion poet – gets quite dense on occasion:
Can’t get that dangling girl out of my mind,
nor the jealousy that provoked it. Why
are pampered Olympians so unkind
to mortals who challenge them, vivify
them in the first place? Athene, mistress
of weaving, versus the Lydian wench,
Arachne, who dares to make Olympus
say yes to human pain. How do the French
put it: la Terre détruit le Ciel?
It’s a story Sartre might want to tell. (“Golden Orb Spider”)
A jocular tone wrestles with nostalgia for the entanglements of
thwarted or lost love – perhaps his presently most common theme – and the
colloquial ironically counterbalances the careful form. The hyper-local is
viewed with affectionate wryness through the lens of world literatures. These
are subtleties typical of Eppel at his best. He works persistently
with ‘traditional’ European forms – four-line stanzas, villanelles, and
especially sonnets, as in the sequence here of five sonnets exploring the
environs and sentimental meanings of Bulawayo’s Hillside Dams. Here, childhood
memories, lost loves and everyday textures mingle in intimately realised scents
and sounds.
Muzanenhamo, by contrast, tends to
utilise the limber and fragmented forms characteristic of late Modernism: he
combines, one might say, the intellectual prism of an Auden with the vivacity
of a Neruda. Like Eppel, though, Muzanenhamo reveals an extraordinary range of
reading, often glimpsed in his poems’ epigraphs, which come from unlikely
sources, ranging from a cricketer and a Tour de France cyclist to quotation
from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. A lot of his reading, and so
his subject-matter, is historical: so he manages to derive strangely universal
meaning from locales ranging from a car mechanic’s workshop to a sailboat to a
cemetery in Lexington, USA. In almost every case the technical terms are
wielded with complete confidence. Yet most remains visceral and vivid: a poem
about a typically abstruse subject, the 1665 Battle of Vågen in Bergen, Norway,
includes this segment:
Cannon fire
thundered with the heavy vibrato of war.
From his vantage point he could see the crafts
shivering after bouts of light hung
long then rang with distant noise.
In his
mind, the thought
of men dying could not be reconciled
with what he viewed. Rain coursed down his face
salted with tears he could not hold back…
Muzenanhamo has an enviable ability to imagine himself into such
an historical situation. Other of his poems also seem to displace the
‘personal’ emotional life at one remove into imagined scenarios; some read like
snatches from South American magic-realist novels. “Peruvian Sunsets” opens
thus:
Xalvadora
stumbled back after Alvaro removed his boots. It wasn’t that Alvaro’s foot was
metallic, nor was it the foot’s cold mercurial glow that caused her to panic
and suddenly retreat with fear; no – it wasn’t that at all. When Xalvadora
looked down again at Alvaro’s bloodless ankle, she saw her own face staring
back…
It’s all rather mysterious yet, within its own world, weirdly
persuasive. Muzenanhamo’s final twenty-poem sequence, “Game of 12 Moons” – an
extended collection to balance Eppel’s Hillside Dams series – is more
poetically lyrical but equally cryptic, like overheard segments from lost
folktales:
She had
been playing the game
with her shadow,
the game of twelve moons –
lifting floorboards in the kitchen,
whispering hurriedly to herself.
The sun would rise soon,
the smell of the air would change,
as would everything else
in the forest.
This is airy and simple, compared to most of his poetry, which
incorporates a rare and cerebral sophistication. Nothing could be further from
the run-of-the-mill Zimbabwean fare which deals obsessively and dully on common
themes, reducing poetry to obvious proverbial mantras and demonstrating a
tentative grasp on linguistic accuracies. Eppel writes more accessibly,
perhaps, though the loops of his thought, self-consciously yet conversationally
threaded through careful patterns of rhyme and syllabics, present enough
density to reward many re-readings.
In a way, the two poets are united by so high a degree of craft
that almost every poem – they are not all equally weighty or felicitous –
serves as a kind of meta-meditation upon poetry itself. As Eppel writes in the
poem “Tortoise”:
[T]hose who
commemorate sight and sound –
poets, composers, and picture-makers –
will complete the work of undertakers,
and begin the work of he ‘who with his finger wrote on the ground.’
Dan Wylie is professor of English at Rhodes
University.
