mwanakacreativewriter

orientations

2012-01-14T00:17:00.000-08:00

ORIENTATIONS

We are these cells, this soul, this being.

We are the choices of our own awakening.

We are light that pours through the generations.

Innocent little children dancing to the rain song,

For a season of green to atone for our wrongs.

We are a hunter caught in his own snares.

We are a tidal wave in a sea of broken dreams.

We are flickering whimsy, a breath’s laughter.

The sacrificial dove, the hooting owl, the forlorn falcon

O, those surreptitious angels in their sweet anger!

Muttering of dreams lost, deep in our own silences.

We are haunts cries in the aftermaths of battle.

We are fine theatre made out of lost relics.

We are a spider’s webs, a tender weave of time.

Over here the wind blows, over there a story told!

We are dry leaves in this intricate whispering.

Augmenting to a morning of silent conversations.

We are this pen conversing to these sentences.

Lighting the threshold to that wordless portent

If we turn, what do we see, a river or a shiver?

Or had we bitten more dreams than we could chew,

And we are now waiting for someone who never comes?

Clockwise Cat: Review of Tendai Mwanaka's Voices in Exile by J.S. Watts

2012-01-03T01:43:00.000-08:00

Clockwise Cat: Review of Tendai Mwanaka's Voices in Exile by J.S. Watts

थे डार्क हैरेड GIRL

2011-12-27T01:12:00.000-08:00

THE DARK HAIRED गर्ल फ्रॉम माय नोवेल 'मद बोब REPUBLIC

We were out in Harare. It was end of March, on a Wednesday. I had given notice at my workplace. I had decided to leave the country for South Africa. Going to work now was a wasteful exercise. The monies I was getting at the end of the month weren’t even enough to get me through the first week after pay in. Things were beyond my reach, and the truth was even if I could afford to buy some of the things they were not even available in the stores at that. Business at the company where I worked, a motor vehicle sales company was down. We were spending days on end without any sale to talk of. I was spending most of those days getting into queues to procure basic necessities like bread, mealy-meal, sugar and other commodities. Times when I was at work I was busy looking for employment outside the country. Lately I had been concentrating on South Africa. I had given up on getting better work in Zimbabwe. Since I was seeing my last month of the three months notice I wasn’t so keen on working anymore. I had also been seeing Natasha for slightly more than four months.

It was one of those drifting jobs with her, but we were spending a lot of time together. I knew she liked me a lot but I wasn’t so sure of how I felt for her. That day I was looking for job offers in South Africa. The jobs that I could qualify for had a lot other demands that I couldn’t meet like a work permit, international driver’s licence and many others. I didn’t have the monies to access these. I had been saving for a year now and it was just enough to get me transport to South Africa, and for an emergency travel document which was cheaper and less difficult to access than a passport. I had no one I knew of in South Africa. I had no other arrangements with anyone in South Africa so I didn’t know where I was going to be staying as I would be looking around for work. I had just a bit of change money for food for some days.

I got bored with the results I was getting from the job bank I was using so I decide I needed a break. I called Natasha.

“Hello Tasha, hi baby!” I said after she had received my call. She was so happy from the tone of her voice, to be hearing from me. “Hi Tendai, how is your day today?”

“Boring!”

“Are you bored? What’s boring you?” She asked me.

“Work I suppose. I think it’s about everything..., do you think you could come over here Tasha? We could hang out, sort of. I want to talk to you about something else.” Natasha wasn’t going to work anymore those days. She had been offloaded at her workplace, at some fast food place in Harare city centre so I knew such a kind of offer was one she couldn’t have refused.

“Tendai, you want me to come there right now, now? Are you not working today?”

“There is not much work to do today.”

“But I don’t have the fares into town.”

“Can you go to my place Tasha? I am talking to my cousin now. Get the bus fares from George and come over here. I will give you the return fares when we meet.”

“Ok, I will do that.”

“Cool...”

“Love you Tendai.”

“Love you too Tasha.”

I hang up and phoned my cousin and told him to lent Natasha some monies for transport into town. George was still working at a company in the outskirts of Harare, the other side of that city. For him to get to work he had to take two lifts to work so he had been going to work once or twice per week. He had just about given up like me. He didn’t care whether he got fired at his job or not. He reasoned the best thing was to stay home most of the days than to waste the little he had by going to work. There was even not that much of work at his place as well.

She came into town and then phoned me when she had disembarked at the charge office bus stop in Harare city centre. It was about twelve mid afternoon. I lied to my immediate boss that I was off to do car valuations at Kingdom bank. It was easy to dupe him because I had been carrying out vehicle valuations at this company that week. I was happy to see her waiting for me at the bus stop. I hugged her feelingly, kissed her and was really enjoying seeing her. She had let her hair go back to a soft medium natural black. Her breasts and buttocks were big and jutted out proudly. She was an attractive girl by any stretch.

I took her to the Chicken inn at the corner of Inez Terrence and George Silundika Street. It was the biggest there was in the city so I knew we would definitely find the food we were looking for. She ordered a quarter chicken and chips. I did the same. I didn’t mind wasting a bit of the money on these orders. I was past caring about a lot of things. I also thought it was a good and fitting goodbye for Natasha. I just wanted to spoil her a bit. We talked silly nothings whilst we worked on the chicken and chips. After that we ordered ice cream for dessert. We nibbled our ice cream corns as we loitered through the dense afternoon crowds of the city. She said we could go to Harare gardens where we could sit and talk, so we made our way to the northerly direction towards these gardens. When we found some good spot to sit in the gardens I told her straight away that I would be leaving the country for South Africa.

“South Africa, but why Tendai?”

“I have been serving notice at my workplace Natasha. For almost three months now and this is my last month. I would really like to try to get a job down South Africa. There is not much work at the company where I am working right now so it’s a matter of time before I am laid off. I would like to take the initiative now. There are bound to be better prospects in South Africa, I should think?”

“But you have never told me that’s what you have been planning to do all these months, why Tendai?”

“We have started barely getting along Tasha. I wanted to tell you, I have been meaning to do that but....”

“So what does that leave us Tendai?”

“I love you Natasha. I would like you to eventually join me.” She loved me anyway and I knew it. It’s so calming to know someone loves you. It stills your own thoughts almost to a halt.

“When?”

“I am not so sure, yet.” She started sneezing and I knew she was crying, head bent in supplication. She somehow knew if I leave it might be difficult for me to return back, let alone to let her join me there. I asked her why she was crying. She said nothing. I asked her if she was crying because she thought I wouldn’t be returning back. She asked me if I would really return back. I told her I would be returning back in about three month’s time, a job or no job. She didn’t want me to go she told me that. She said I could get a job, another job at another company in Zimbabwe so I should stay. I told her I could get a better job in South Africa, and that it will be for a couple or so months that we will be separated. I couldn’t have told her I was going for the long haul. I still wanted to hold onto her. I didn’t want to have to hurt her unnecessarily. That afternoon, I had to spend that afternoon trying to convince her that it was a good move for the two of us in the long run and that she had to have hope in us, the hope that I didn’t have but I couldn’t have told her that. I told her that eventually we will be together.

That afternoon I did not return back to my workplace. I phoned Mr. Rusere, my boss and told him that the work I was doing would see me through that afternoon. That I would not be returning back to the offices after I was through but that I would be going home straight away. Mr Rusere was a good manager. Good because for the three years we had been working together he never made any unnecessary fuss over anything unless it was absolutely necessary to do so. I knew he would never check my story. He said it was ok with him. That afternoon we loitered through the streets and talked, infact I had talked her into the vision that I had for the two of us, making her feel like a part of the deal. We had argued and now we were getting along fine but I knew there was still a question she hadn’t asked me, or maybe she was hesitating to ask me. Later we returned home together. We were at her parents’ place where she stayed with her parents. We were at the gates and I was saying goodbye to her when she asked me why I was saying goodbye to her as if I was leaving for South Africa right away. All those months we had been seeing the other I never said goodbye to her when leaving her for the day. We would just hug and kiss when it was time to leave each other’s company, so I answered her.

“But I told you Tasha that I will be leaving for South Africa.” I couldn’t help reminding her.

“Are you going like right now now, like tomorrow Tendai?”

“Yes, I am leaving tomorrow Tasha. I thought you realised that?”

“You are joking, are you joking Tendai?” Sadness and pain coming to squat on top of those words, she said. “What’s the matter with you Tendai?” She said that in a sheepish voice, like a little girl, like as if she wanted someone to put her out, a candle’s fire.

“There is nothing the matter Tasha and no, I am not joking Tasha. I have already prepared for an afternoon departure, tomorrow afternoon Tasha.”

“But why this rush Tendai?”

I knew it simply would have to be performance art from there onwards, some part of my heart told me I had never really been in it with her.

“I am not rushing anything Tasha. I have already made the arrangements. I don’t see why I should stay around for a little bit longer. If I go early Natasha, I will be able to return sooner as well. I also want to go before they are many complications with my travel arrangements at the border.”

“How are you travelling to South Africa?”

“I will be jumping the border through Limpopo River. A lot of people are doing that these days. I don’t have enough money to apply for a Visa now.”

“Limpopo River is infested with crocodiles Tendai. Are you crazy? Are you not afraid of the crocodiles? Why are you risking your life like that....?” She couldn’t complete the sentence because she was crying again. Drowning in the river and getting feasted upon was a painful and frightening thing for her to bear as was life to innocent children born in harm’s way. A man’s life is difficult, for how is he supposed to provide for his family? Isn’t it in our own undoing that new possibilities arise? I had to go through the motions again, trying to convince her that I will be okay and that no danger would befall me. By the time I left her for home I knew somehow Natasha had come to accept the inevitability of our separation? There was no need to explain to her that the chain was now broken and that the curve of the horizon will be my guide. She was still despondent but tried to smile up a bit and be polite. When I left her she was still sneezing silently. I couldn’t even ask her to accompany me to Mbudzi turn-off on the outskirts of the south western suburbs of Harare where I was going to take a truck to South Africa the morrow day. Trucks were cheaper so I would save a bit and the truck driver would link me with the Malaitshas (border gangsters) who were doing some roaring trade helping people cross into South Africa through Limpopo River and also transporting these people all the way to Johannesburg.

The morrow morning I was surprised when she came over to accompany me to Mbudzi turn off. She was wearing her best dress with tiny flowers all over it, with black buttons from above her naval upto her neck. I couldn’t help staring at the buttons, buttons have always fascinated me. It’s exciting to know you will be watching both the insides and the outsides of a girl and buttons are at the threshold to doing that but I didn’t like seeing her though that day. I just wanted to go without a fuss that day. I just felt like I could sort of take-off, well-pretty off, giving spark of flight to a moribund heart, light with happiness, some kind of happiness. I couldn’t quite this vagabond heart from feeling the way it was feeling. Maybe she realised about that so she didn’t make any fuss over me. She was so meek as if she was afraid I was going to ream her for being late. We hadn’t talked that much as I made my final preparations, even as she accompanied me. She seemed much calmer, not exactly grounded though, hiding behind politeness like a shell and nursing grief alone.

We took some chicken bus to Mbare Musika (Mbare market place) in Harare. On our way we were basically quite and estranged. Her facial muscles were not moving much, her posture was extremely drowsy, shoulders folding inside. Her chest hiding inside those shoulders, she was troubled. She seemed to be working on a sleeping body. I kept to the surface and did not dare invade the quite of her chosen cell. I had nothing more to say to her, nothing to promise her again so I was watching the sides of the road which were green with brush. The tall grass sighing, hanging suspended in the day’s clear air. Here a chinaberry tree, and there a mimosa tree, here an acacia tree there a poplar tree and the bluebells reeled their dances out in the air without us.

When we cleared Irvine farm and were hugging the outskirts of Waterfalls suburban we started walking to the bus’s doors. I had very little on me, just a satchel with a clean pair of clothes, some food, some toiletries, emergency travel documents and some monies. I didn’t want to make my travel difficult for I knew we would be walking quite a lot for part of our journey so I travelled light. We disembarked before the bus entered the circle and turn off to Mbare Musika. The southerly breeze was blowing slowly and the late morning shadows were rubbing along the earth. It was about eleven o’clock, almost, and they were a lot of trucks coming through on their way to South Africa so we didn’t have to wait and hang around longer. I did let a couple of those trucks pass and boarded the third one that came through. I hugged her goodbye; I kissed her in a way that I didn’t think I could have done. I told her again that we will be together again sooner. That, I loved her. I really wanted to take credit for those small three words and be less lonely. Closing her eyes, she linked her hands to mine and started pulling me in; hoping for the best. When she took me into her arms again I fitted in, this stranger fitted in as he had always done. Then she nodded and smiled and as usual her bright sunshine smile leaked too much loom for fooling the sun. Something inside me broke, breaking open with her smile. I felt something ache with an unspecified longing in my heart. When she smiled like that I would really love to juggle the stars for her but I also wanted to love her in a way that would leave me free.

Then, I left her and boarded this truck into the unknown. I didn’t look back. She stayed back maybe waving her arms goodbye to love, tearfully. The dark haired girl slipped out and fell through the grains of a hazy late morning day, but she had clang on, on my mind, the face that sometimes curved a sweet smile. I could not decide if by leaving her she had done me a favour or if she was really the victim?

THE BLAME GAME

2011-12-01T05:54:00.001-08:00

Tendai Rinos Mwanaka
i have just completed my non-fiction book on Zimbabwe, THE BLAME GAME, that i have been working on for some months, so i am starting to contact publishers who might take it, any suggestions?

No court poet for Mugabe: A review of Tendai Mwanaka’s ‘Voices in Exile’ - Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group

2011-11-21T01:37:00.000-08:00

No court poet for Mugabe: A review of Tendai Mwanaka’s ‘Voices in Exile’ - Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group

Doors

2011-11-16T02:39:00.000-08:00

DOORS

It’s like you have been walking, moving. It seems like in a maze of rooms, getting through passages, doors. You don’t see any windows. You don’t know whether it is darkness or light that surrounds you. It sometimes seems like you are walking in a road, a strip road, a path but with doors. You didn’t know where you were going but you couldn’t stop. Sometimes you would feel as if you were walking in a road spiked with nails, but you don’t feel any pain but the idea of pain. You are pain itself, so you can’t feel yourself. Sometimes you feel like you have been walking in a tunnel, underground, somewhere down there, but not upwards. You are walking through doors down there. You know you can feel it, you know you are seeing a particular door. It’s ahead of you. It has an inscription “this is it.” You move closer and closer to this door. You take hold of the handle. You are about to open it. You are now opening it, you are opening it....

I was just thinking of a door, the idea of opening doors. A door you don’t know what’s lying behind it. A door that might change your life permanently, profoundly, it’s a door that you know you have to get a good feel of its handle. The idea of the police detective in a crime film opening a door, in the chase of, or looking for a crime doer, who might be waiting for this police officer, behind the door, with a loaded gun. This offers another look at what that door could represent. It might be the door to the outside, to the backyard lawn, beautiful garden, and beautiful pool. It might be the door to another door, further ahead, and the idea of opening one door after another and another...it is a perpetuating feeling. It might be a door you may never be able to open. It might be a locked door. It might require breaking into. It defeats the whole image of a door. It lets that which is behind the door to take another form, posture, to disappear, to ruffle things a little, to even change them. It is a door. It might be a door into the very insides of things, feelings, lives, worlds. Worlds that are so far into realms beyond the scribble of this pen. This journey, into doors, the path to, it takes or asks for more, for much more. It asks that you be fully there, to walk with you full weight, full feet, full belief in the journey. Full will to open these doors, and keep getting inside and outside of doors. This journey doesn’t require force, physical force but an inside will, a propelling will, a believing will, a questioning consciousness. It requires a great maturity, emotional maturity. It builds great emotional maturity.

I like to open doors, new doors, than closing doors, old doors. New doors propose something exciting. Closing doors is a hard take. It’s either when you close a door you close yourself inside or outside. Closing yourself inside a door could equate to closing yourself in a personal prison sometimes without the wherewithal to get outside. It makes you feel so caged in a prison. Closing yourself inside doors become a problem, a big problem when you know you won’t get outside of these closed cells of your own making. Failing to find answers, solutions to questions and problems is a headache, especially to problems that won’t let you alone But, of course, closing yourself inside doors sometimes makes you feel so safe, secure, ensconced, protected. Closing myself outside doors tend to make me feel liberated. I feel I would rather stay outside closed doors, explore the outside. It is a horizon world. The only problem is knowing I can’t go back inside the door I have just closed. Even though I know there is not much to be got by going back, the impossibility of it all is an idea world. The idea is an idea....

Ideas are like doors, are another thing that amazes me. They open up like doors. You have to open them, pursue them, and own them, if you can. The more you pursue them the more you get deeper and deeper into their mysteries, their meaning worlds. The worlds of ideas can be a soft or stubborn take. Love takes to the idea of doors too. It can be a stubborn thing. It all depends on the pursuing, the opening of doors, and its own love doors. Lives, countries, worlds and many other things follow the idea of doors, the opening of doors...

अरेवोलिंग कागे फ्रॉम थे नोवेल, केस इन थे रिवर(मार्च २०१२ रिलीज़)

2011-11-07T00:27:00.001-08:00

A REVOLVING CAGE?

Charlotte came over to Chitungwiza Friday night and spent the weekend at her brother's place in the Seke suburb of Unit C. We had agreed we would see each other at the church on Sunday. It is a bit of a crack-thing to negotiate for this compromise with her. I met her three years before. Even to negotiate for a date with her was a crack-thing. It was a fucking job interview! The moment I met her, I discovered that she had the mark of the one who would be stubborn.

After church, I waited for her like a dog waiting for its owner to come over and pat and ruffle its sheaves of hair. Maybe, I should have barked a little bit like a dog and take no responsibility for the noise. Just like death, she hadn't been taking responsibility for the way she had been mistreating me over the years. But, there was nothing I could do about it other than waiting for her. I didn't even know what would become of that waiting. I also knew that it was even possible for her to come and say.

"No, I don't want to see you." "No, I am busy for that." "No, I do not have any prior arrangements with you about that." "No, I don't remember agreeing to that." Regardless, I waited all the same.

A thick raw of marigolds along the church's yard fence are a fierce dark orange and burnt orange and the rhubarb plant near the gates where I am standing is bright clear orange and sunshine yellow. They have turned their faces towards the yard walls for some mysterious reason. Maybe, so that I won't be able to appreciate their beauty! I listen to the sound of the bees and tune their musical instruments according to what I am hearing. Deep down, I am watching, listening, and imitating the bees' reaction to the flowers even as they walk away from the flowers, they continue playing their songs. I remembered my grandfather, who was so good at harvesting the bees' honey saying that if you can manage to imitate the bees' music you can also be able to put a swarm of bees and the queen bee into a trance and take away its honey without killing not even a single bee. I couldn't also help thinking that there were people in life who would never really appreciate others; the love they would be getting or even the love they have for the other person.

Somehow, they are distorted. If you give them a flower, then they would throw it in the dustbin without even smelling it. Good things always make them feel inadequate and insecure. It reminded me of this girl, who I grew up with. We called her the kicking girl. She was so competitive and distorted. She played football with the boys. She fought with boys. She would beat us even though we were of the same age. The thing that was funny about her was that she was afraid of fighting other girls and even got beaten by girls younger than her. But with boys, there were no rules so she always won. If you were small she would beat you, if you were bigger she would kick you. She would go about provoking for fights. If you run away, then she would laugh at you so you had to stick around and fight her so that she won't have the pleasure of humiliating you. The best thing you could do was to hurl hurtful words and know they have hurt her by the way she flies at you. This girl came from an unstable family.

I am still thinking of this kicking girl when charlotte comes for me. She came half an hour later and fortunately for me she is good on her word this time. She is with her friend which I feel is a welcome thing for it meant we could try to talk to each other without trying to kill each other. I also knew that she would try to tolerate me a bit today. A soft quite, a kind of soft enlacing fills me as I accompany them to Zengeza 2 shopping centre where she was going to take a lift back to Harare. They had previously stayed in Chitungwiza, but later relocated as a family to Harare.

Our church, where we are meeting, is in the middle of a small forest so we take the small trail out of this forest. This small trail revolves into a footpath, which revolves into a big road. Observing this natural progression, as we are making our way, I can't help noticing, thinking; it should have been the case with our relationship. Even though we had been seeing each other for three years, we were still basically estranged as lovers, fighting everyday for our spaces and identities. But, seeing her was the only thing that seemed to hem in my longing for her a bit but it also inflated my depression.

We were at the intersection of the big road when she entered the intersection without checking for traffic on the other side of the road. I had to grab her real hard to make her avoid getting run down by a truck that was coming from the other side of the intersection, turning into the side of the road that we were in. This made me realize that there is something that is troubling her. She lightened a bit when we met some friends who were dating and the girl had a new pair of shoes. We joked with the girl telling her that her boyfriend was such a good keeper, taking care of her and my girlfriend's friend, Melody, even made some jibes at me saying that I was not doing any better by my girl. I replied her jokingly, that I was a sucker for pleasing my woman so if I had to do something it had to be the best there was but also that she wouldn't take it. All this was easy banter and it made us laugh a little bit.

When we came midway our journey, Charlotte told us that she collapsed during midweek and that she had been admitted at the Avenues clinic, in Harare Avenues areas for a couple of days. I ask her what was wrong and she says.

"Maybe its stress."

She looks so vulnerable with a look of exhaustion in her eyes. I would really like to hold her in my arms and protect her from whatever was troubling her but I can't take the chance. I ask her what was stressing her and she says petulantly.

"You could be the one who is stressing me."

It makes me feel bad. I know that's exactly how she wants me to feel so I do not let that trouble me that much and do not show her that it is troubling me and that she has hurt me. I know Charlotte likes to fight with me and is always spoiling for a fight and that some other times that I have avoided getting sucked into a fight with her by keeping my cool but some other times that I just couldn't keep cool but raised some of the issues with her and we would fight it out like bloody hell.

We were just Euclidean's children, parallelism in constancy right to the end of things, and that I had come to accept about us. I have always tried to make her feel comfortable with me but that a non Euclidean way of being in which lines, ideas, thoughts and feelings could come together here or far out there, at the vanishing Lough was not to be ours to have. I had also come to accept that the grab zone was always too bigger with us and that the corners were always too sharper and that it always made her feel better whenever she had to fight things out with me. Maybe, I had just gone along, in this typical woman style, believing that if you were always fighting with your partner, then it meant there were problems, and that the relationship was doomed. I knew I believed love was not an easy chair, but it sure made the harder parts easier to work through, maybe that I just wanted the kind of love that was as comfortable as old slippers. I also knew that this fighting was corroding my sense of self worth so the only way out was for me to try to avoid situations that could put us onto each other's throats

When she realized that I had ignored her, she provoked me more by saying that it would be her last time coming over to Chitungwiza since they had finally packed as a family and were now staying in Harare. She said something like.

"There is nobody I care about good here for me to come here again."

She either was feeling the forthcoming loss to become of her move to Harare and the gravity of fear of being alone was eating her consciousness or she was really meaning well this time, that she doesn't care anymore about anyone that side of Chitungwiza.

I do not know what to say to her, but I want to say. "I do care a lot about you Charlotte. So, you shouldn't be saying that." But, I can't say that because I am afraid it might invoke Dear John bombs like. "I don't want you to care for me." "You are not so important to me." "I don't want your love." "Tat tat tara, tara..." When she finds out that I have ignored her again, she starts to talk girls' stuff with Melody. I can only join them here and there when I know something about whatever they were talking of but most of the times I am just quiet to myself. Somehow, I know without accepting that this is going to be the last day I could ever lay my eyes on her if she is going to stick to what she had said.

I also knew that all this angst that was being directed at me had something to do with another guy she had been seeing, who hadn't been coming out good. Her friend Melody told me about that guy. Deep down my heart, I was happy that their relationship was imploding. I was also happy that I could be the only one vying for her heart. I also make a new conviction to fight for her even though I meant to let her go when I heard about that guy a couple of weeks ago. Anyone could have realized that it was the cage that was revolving here.

By the time we reach the bus stop, we are settled into each other's company for the day. I also know there is something that is still bothering her. She takes the next bus that comes by. When she is embarking and is reaching for her bag that I have been carrying for her, I tell her I am coming with her. She is surprised, but doesn't protest against this. Deep down my heart, I have come to terms with the fact that this is the last time we could be seeing each other. What I want to do is to spend as much time with her as is possible. That's why I have instantly decided to accompany her. She takes a seat of two in the middle of the bus. When we settled down, we start to talk of my birth place in Nyanga, Nyatate area. This comes about when she says she still misses her time at school. This school, St Mary's Magdalene secondary school, is in my birth place. Even though we are now communicating well this time, I can still feel some contained thing or some sort of energies inside her waiting to explode any moment. I also realize there is a creature inside her that I could never be good enough to bring out or even be stronger enough to reach out for. But, I keep to the conversation about Nyanga. When she starts to answer me with boredom yawning in her voice, I keep silent. We do not talk about anything much after that because she is engrossed in whatever is in the storm of her heart or in the landscape of her own psychosis. So what gives with her? But, I do not ask her.

Later, when I am paying our bus fares to the Conductor, she says.

"This is the last time you will be paying for my bus fares, so thanks a lot David."

She seems to be talking to someone inside her. The conductor throws a shadow at her. She shivers. I do not know whether it is due to fear of our parting or of something else that she is shivering. I do not have small money to pay for our bus fares so I use the $100 billion note that I have when all that the conductor wants is only $2 billion dollars for the two of us. When I give the conductor this bill Charlotte looks at me with this look as if she is saying I am just being pretentious but the conductor tells me that he will give me my change money when we will be disembarking at the Charge-office bus stop.

I am dry for something more to say to her and the bus is moving so slowly as if its destination would never come and don't even enjoy the freedom of this open road. Outside the bus, the western sky is a beautiful blue. Such sweet blue is curled around the sun, but, inside the bus, it is so hot, clammy, and noisy. I wonder a lot why all the other people in the bus have so much to talk to each other about when Charlotte and I didn't have anything to say to the other. This is the fitting example of the tone of our relationship for three years now. Very little to talk to each other about and we have always been two desolate islands standing against each other, lost and abandoned. The problems we needed to fix ran deeper, leagues and leagues into the ocean of our relationship. Charlotte is very physically attractive in a fragile way. I am animated with her, but never flirtatious around her. I have always been flirty with other girls, but this lack and the dilemma is also a problem.

When we arrive at the Charge-office bus stop, we are in the middle of the bus. So we follow the line of those disembarking and the queue ahead and after us is ten minutes long. When we disembarked the conductor still didn't have my change money so we waited for him as he finished checking the other half of the queue of those disembarking. Charlotte starts complaining about this waiting and tells me that her father is waiting for her at the Fourth street bus stop so she couldn't wait any longer and I beg her not to leave me but to wait for a couple more minutes for I still want to keep her company. When the conductor finishes checking all the tickets he leaves for a couple of shops nearby to look for the change money and this time I can't hold her back anymore. I let her go and she seems like a wind, walks like it, seems to come from it. I also realized that there were some winds we would never really understand even though we faced them every day and that the slowness of the conductor in giving me my change money had now acted as the dominator of our destiny.

When the conductor returns back with my change money about two minutes later, I am happy I might run and catch up with her before she has reached her father. But, the conductor starts rolling through the possibilities of numbers slowly trying to figure out how much he owes me. At one moment, I am almost leaving everything in my anger with this conductor, but some voice deep inside me tells me that I have already lost her and that our relationship has become simply confusing, not confusing and worthwhile. That it is stupid of me to have to lose the money as well in the process. So, I wait through the conductor's mathematical additions and subtractions.

I do not mind anymore how longer it could take this conductor to work through the numbers for as I am now drenched in a loss like loss I had never felt before and in the salt waters of my heart I knew that was that. She had left me with more than I had left her with. A dry sob hit my chest with the thought attached to it. I have never really opened my heart to anyone before Charlotte. I have had a chance to do that but now she is gone. I do not know whether I could ever find someone someday to give my heart to again. I also thought of sexual ecstasy and how I had never felt it and of how dating, such a huge strain it was, having to gear up to acting as a social being?

When the conductor had given me my change money, I loitered through the deserted Sunday streets of this city. I was not seeing anything even though I was sometimes gazing into the windows of the buildings in this city. My mind an essay to itself. I don't even enjoy the sun's rays that I have always enjoyed before when the sun was falling low in the western skies and its golden rays were sipping through tall and small buildings laying broad healing stripes of pale gold on the gap toothed streets. All that I was seeing were the ends of these streets. I just walked and walked until when I was tired and then I took the next bus back to Chitungwiza.

थे प्रोमिसेस ऑफ़ लव, यौर लव mirror

2011-10-12T04:02:00.001-07:00

The promises of love, your love mirror

You stare and stare and it stares back at you. You laugh and it laughs back at you. You also know that whatever your image is. It is feeling the same things that you are also feeling. You aren’t blocked. You aren’t disturbed. You feel yourself entering into this image of yours. You are stuffing it up with all the things that you are feeling. You lock her in your arms. You close the world down. You fold time in. You also kill things from sheer curiosity here! You know you are also making an unconscious effort not to keep staring at this image. You can’t close your inner eyes though. They keep staring at this image that is now deeply embedded inside you. She has become faith to you.

ठिर meeting

2011-10-12T03:55:00.000-07:00

Their meeting

It just happened

They were going

The same direction

They never stopped to ask

For directions

Or go separately

They did not compare notes

Try to define the methods

To get there or the end of things

They never thought of love

It just happened

It was beyond time even

Though time had other agents

Ivy, stealthy, prising them

They did not know what moment

Tipped time into abandonment

It just happened

Like two dolphins caught

In the shaft of the moon’s light.

बुक रेविएव वोइसस फ्रॉम EXILE

2011-08-15T02:02:00.000-07:00

Voices from Exile A Book of Poetry

Tendai Mwanaka

Lapwing Publications

Ballysillan Drive, Belfast BT14 8HQ

lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com

9781907276484 $10.00 / $5.00 (Digital Price in PDF)

Christina Johns

Reviewer

From his blog, African poet Tendai Mwanaka speaks: "Sometimes the beautiful colours of the rainbow myth are a pointer telling you to look beyond their poetic-singed about beauty and the hollowed hauntings of those rainbow colours results in one colour ultimately playing the god-insect function."
- May 1, 2011

Tendai Mwanaka, is a creative writer, worldly anthologized poet, short story writer and non fiction writer. At publication time for Voices from Exile, he was a Zimbabwean citizen staying in South Africa on temporary visas. Though he has had poetry published in over 50 countries, this is his collection about political exile in South Africa. His political exile.

Beginning his writing career when he was twenty years old, Tendai has had his work published in the USA, UK, Southern Africa, India, Italy, France, Spain, New Zealand and Australia. He is also a songwriter.

"Brutal Times," leads the collection by introducing the reader to one of the dark sides of being a political prisoner.

"Brutal Times

The arrest and slammed doors

In a cell, in Harare

The beatings, gorging, chopping

In the throes of a shape-shift

The walls of my cell in Chikurubi

Maximum prison.

Slanting backwards with weights

Of a cracked head, gorged flesh and chopped

Limbs of my own body.

And my steady howling and gnashing cries.

"The CIO's beatings, questions,

Sexual and psychological abuse

Trying to bleed answers from me.

Also from my next cell's occupant.

Talk, talk, talk the insistent hammer

Of those words repeated again and again.

Where are your handlers? Where are the weapons?

What was the plan...that I never had?

That I never knew of, and in the next cell

The green bombers rage at the cell's occupant..."

From The Brutal Times, Voices from Exile, page 7.

The poems are plenty and run a gamut of emotion. Perhaps one of the most touching poems is one entitled "That Child," which describes the horror of coming of age in a war-riddled place and searching for meaning from the sad conditions.

The words here paint pictures that the reader can touch. Some good pictures and some not so good pictures:

"They hit me with those sticks, gun butts, belts, etc, on my stomach. The child I was carrying broke to pieces inside my stomach. The baby girl died inside me. Though my husband died that night, it was God's desire that I did not die too.

"It was at the hospital that the child was born afterwards. The doctors had to cut my stomach to remove those pieces. A head alone, then a leg, an arm, the body, piece by piece."

--Breaking the Silence, Voices from Exile, Pg 12

This book will be enjoyed by poetry lovers and anyone wondering about what has been going on for the people in certain parts of Africa. Though the countries are war torn and seem a mystery to those of us lucky enough to be somewhere else, Tendai furnishes us with a portrait of the place he calls home.

एन्त्र्यफ्री contest

2011-08-15T02:01:00.000-07:00

CONSEQUENCE PRIZE IN POETRY
http://www.consequencemagazine.org/poetrycontest.html
---
NO ENTRY FEE
The prize recognizes exceptional work addressing the
consequences of armed conflict or social injustice. The
award for best poem includes a cash prize of $200. The
winning poet and three finalists will have their work
published in the Spring 2012 issue of CONSEQUENCE Magazine.
Please submit no more than three poems of any length.
Deadline October 1, 2011.

व्रितिंग fellowship

2011-08-10T03:46:00.000-07:00

Position Summary: The Hodder Fellowship
Princeton University, Lewis Center for the Arts
Website: http://www.princeton.edu/arts/fellows
The Hodder Fellowship will be given to writers of exceptional promise to pursue independent projects at Princeton University during the 2012-2013 academic year. Hodder Fellows may be poets, playwrights, novelists, creative nonfiction writers, translators, or other artists and humanists who have "much more than ordinarily intellectual and literary gifts" and who are selected "for promise rather than performance." Given the strengths of our applicant pool, most successful Fellows have published a first book and are undertaking significant new work that might not be possible without the "studious leisure" afforded by this fellowship. Hodder Fellows spend an academic year at Princeton pursuing independent projects. Fellowships cannot fund work leading to the Ph.D. You need not be a U.S. citizen to apply. Submit a resume, sample of previous work (10 pages maximum, not returnable), and a project proposal of 2-3 pages.
Guidelines available on website. Princeton University is an equal opportunity employer and complies with applicable EEO and affirmative action regulations. Apply online at http://jobs.princeton.edu.
Deadline: November 1, 2011
Stipend: $65,800.
Essential Qualifications: Writers of exceptional promise needed to pursue independent projects
Education Required: Other-see essential qualifications

Application Information

Contact:
Lewis Center for the Arts - 185
Princeton University

Online App. Form:
https://jobs.princeton.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=61135&jtsrc=www.hig heredjobs.com&jtrfr=www.peopleadmin.com&adorig=PA

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

केस इन थे RIVER

2011-07-23T03:10:00.000-07:00

Keys in the River
by Tendai Mwanaka
ISBN Pending
Anticipated March 2012 Release

Keys in the river is a collection of short stories that take a look at the beginnings and ends of relationships and the world in between.

इवोरी कास्ट WAR

2011-06-02T02:07:00.000-07:00

Quattara and Gbabgo are the fighting gods now. It’s the Ivorian phenomenon again. It happened in the 90s and now it’s back again. It’s the fate they always choose and live in even though they know it would kill them. There is a question I have always wanted to ask. Why are francophone countries always raked by civil wars, and are so poor? Could one point the finger at the French? Remember Rwanda, Burundi, DRC, Central African Republic and the list is endless. I am out of line here. Abidjan is now littered with corpses rotting, and little kids, kid soldiers are stepping on these corpses as they rush to a killing, diving into this reef of confusion. Grandmothers and mothers oyed and oy-veyed at the little ones playing big soldier mentality in the battle consumed streets. It’s sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick.......

Laughings of the Mad Dog

2011-05-14T05:16:00.000-07:00

Laughings of the Mad Dog

RANTINGS OF A RAVING PEN

2011-05-01T03:44:00.000-07:00

RANTINGS OF A RAVING PEN

Don’t suppose this trend only occurs in an undemocratic society... It is so wrong to assume that. An apology, a favourite story, a heartfelt confessions....I would have to start this way.
Even in a society where there are “three legs of the iron-pot”, and if any one of the legs of the iron pot is longer than the other two: It would have powers to make redundant the other two legs, powers to control the other two legs, powers to build a Napoleon behind that shimmering label of democracy... Maybe that’s why my grandmother and those before her had decided to have clay pots that didn’t have legs.

Sometimes the beautiful colours of the rainbow myth are a pointer telling you to look beyond their poetic-singed about beauty and the hollowed hauntings of those rainbow colours results in one colour ultimately playing the god-insect function.

But not even a single one of those savages had the right to claim legitimate authorship to the start of that anarchic situation. No, no, no... It’s so stupid and naïve to think that a powerless individual could do that. No! It must have started somewhere there..., where a single individual, vested with all the powers that begat power, randomly distributed tools of anarchy... such as weaponry, total disregard of governing rules, open and conceited manipulation of all the mirrors of a society and naked provocation for violence by a small group controlled by that single individual.
What followed was total anathema.

There is this trend..., maybe a pattern, I said a pattern... patterns to aid to my augment! I have to start here.
Single purposes! Single purpose is usually the trait of the lunatic..., or is it the fanatic and then things start to take shape? When you try to look at those patterns, when you try to study those patterns, when you try to unlock their frozen meanings.
Single purpose individuals plan for every of their moves; every word, every nod, every silence..., everything becomes, (disguised) planned and patterned events. And there is another pattern?

He knows that if he sits on his laurels and waits for things to follow their undisturbed course he will become history.
That he will vanish into the gossamer’s web of time. So he has to refuse to step aside..., and how? There are some things we will never really be able to control; no matter how good we are at controlling things, even when we are non-paralleled at that. We can only harness them. We can only channel them. We have to avoid blocking them..., freedom? Freedom gives some people the right to rule over others and it is only a few of us who are totally alien to this sweet call, and the quest for it can never really be controlled but maybe harnessed towards a truly altruistic goal.
No one can overcome the need to constantly change and re-invent one’s self. My apologies to change for calling it a necessity here but barriers against change can gobble up continents, alienate the whole population, swallow ideas and limit future expressionisms.

But what else would people need?
We know they want to be free, but let us offer them something else..., not in exchange, off course not!
You tell them it’s the only way towards prosperity, towards freedom. But it’s a delaying or diverting tactic for you and you instil into the minds of these people the importance of this need at the sad demise of the other need. Emotionalise this offer (put all the spices that you can think of): Indians, my Grandma once told me that they were so good at doing that. Putting spices into food..., umm, it smells great..., putting spices into things too.

All right they have two things..., needs, competing favourably...and unfavourably too. But what would people need most?
Not freedom, no, not this one on its own, no!
People need a state of happiness and happiness results from a sense of security and inorder to be secure you need to have something that you can see, feel, touch, taste..., at least in your mind..., I mean something that you can singularly own to yourself.
I will offer them land!

And how did I come to this pedantic interpretation of events..., and that seer couldn’t refrain from assigning it into the narrative convenience dustbin? But, of course, accumulated observation of a countless historical examples: Palestine, Egypt, USA..., suffices enough. And how can we offer this land...? And please do it this way and I am so sorry it is the pedant’s sweet call again but don’t hate me, at least not too offensively for this lazy indulgence.
Sometimes we just can’t help it, being pedantic, I mean.

Just tell someone you want to offer him land. Tell someone you want to take his land away. Tell someone that this person owns more land than that one. Tell them that, that land must be taken and be given to them. You are on a dangerously perilous emotional drive.
All right, let’s drive through and see what would become of this.
Spices..., Indians..., It’s a traversing of centuries and centuries..., of good food-spices-eating-fighting-living, of being, and all the hordes are all up in arms, their laughter..., and their sweet, sweet anger! Talk about the wars that were fought for this land. Talk about the sacrifices, the slaughtering, and those mass killing fields...
The madness! My apologies: may those who have died be patient with the way my memories have faded, the way I am recalling some.
O, those internecine mass killing fields in lands beyond still littered with unburied bones and unassigned anger.
Here you are inclosing hollow worlds in words and I am sorry for the great question of life for these small answers.
Talk the argument back, back, further..., and further to the caves...
Here you are disclosing hollow words into whole worlds.
Talk about the injustices that this people suffered before they took up arms.

The Serbs do that to their children.
They talk of 1938; they talk of the battle of Kosovo in 1938 against the all-conquering ottoman Turks.
Here, I am talking about that hot, hot spot they call the Balkans and you can understand why the Balkans has always been a restless spot that it has been.
The Irish talk about the battle of Boyne: and the Palestinians do the same thing to their children.
1948! 1948! 1948!
The loss of the Palestinian state and the subsequent birth of the Zionist state. For goodness sake I am not a Palestinian neither am I an Israeli but the bloody hell why did they ever got sucked into this game: land?
Here, we are talking of that powder keg they call the Middle East.
It is a devastating game that they have perfected out there; the bones, the bullets, the dust and those biological invasions mixes with anger, rage and revenge and it is within this fund that we draw upon haunting cries of the wounded and the dying.

And the morals of these stories are...
Nothing should be forgiven. One day make them pay. Now we have an excuse, don’t we?
We enforce this excuse and everything else can now be sidelined. Nothing now, I mean absolutely nothing..., I said nothing, is more important than this.
But we were only emotionalising our needs!
And there is also this pattern: You are a disguised despot working behind those colours of the rainbow myth that we have talked of before, about colours of the rainbow? What would be the best way of offering that over emotionalised thing so that it won’t appear as if we were belittling the other need, and also remember that throughout that process we want to appear democratic to a people who are already sadly seeing some glimpses of our undemocratic tendencies.
But who really are we? Someone said that if you give name to something, you will unconsciously empower it, and with that in mind, let’s give ourselves a name and let’s call it an act of self-empowerment, indigenisation?

Maybe an institutional name would do fine..., not that we revere it, no, not institutions, no.
Executive! Executive! Executive...
They seem to be a nice ring to the rhyme of this word.
Ok executive..., and remember the three legs of the iron pot?
You have to involve the other two legs and suppose the Law-makers can be whipped into line..., after all, there are all controlled by us since they are mostly from the party that we rule..., and implicit here, I am saying that they are from the party we own, and do you know what you can do with a thing that you own?
Some sage said, (well, I can’t remember his name), but he was this man of mountain wisdom..., not Solomon no, off course not.
He said that the best way to harness the unbridled potentiality of a radical element is to offer and deny two or more important things at the same time.
Here and if I were you, I wouldn’t rule out threats, punishments and killings. You know about the survival patterns?
The Nazi holocaust had collaborators. Idi Amin and Bokassa re-invented the Nazi’s boxing up things (putting (things) into boxes) mentality in Africa and in the same vein created collaborators too.

We can now control the Law- makers and whilst we still have an upper hand we craft some piece of paper, bill, legislature, name it whatever you want to but run it through the now gagged Law-makers, so we are now rolling, and who else can stop us now..., who really can stop us now? Let’s encompass this tin pot bill into the whole hog-wash and in so doing let’s change the whole law into something that would make us untouchables. By the other things we have done, by uncontrollable things like freedom, by our failures and follies and it’s easy to do that: you search around for people who can do that for you.
People who still believe in you. People who are your followers. People who are afraid of you. People who want to selfishly enrich themselves. People who are painfully dying to do you a service. People who are...
It’s a people, people, people landscape that you will create, but it’s also a power base you will recreate.
Expect insanity. Expect dangerous thoughts and extremities. Expect anything that can be done under the sun. Expect stupidity at its unprecedented showing.

Sing like a parrot; inaccessible songs are dreams that never get away. Dance like a parrot; it feels like the music can be heard around the world, dance to its rhythm. Talk like a parrot. Here you will recreate a lower grade-class going through its P.E class.
Moi (that fella who once ruled that little black water country called Kenya) was in this lower class-grade for some time and he sang unabashedly, with a beautiful boy’s tenor voice, the songs he was taught to sing by the enormous bass voice of the Uhuru himself. He sang songs that were readable in the language of a fading or lost generation and his music in self-conscious superposition, breathing through his mouth.
Never was there ever such a beautiful boy and for some long unforgotten winters he tantalized us with his genius but one day he woke up with a sore mind and a dead voice.
Sadly for us fellows who had fallen in love with his songs.

Whilst we are still at this, and word of advice fellows: don’t ever include people who will do you a de-service.
Find a way to exclude them..., by the way don’t just extrude them, but if anything, extinguish them!
Since you have all the powers that begat you, this wouldn’t be such a terribly blowing headache for you to do. But you want to appear democratic isn’t it? Go back to the people!
For other disguises, ask for people’s opinions on this tin-pot bill that we have drafted, and this would be another opportunity for you, the executive, to white-wash them by overly repeating..., incessantly..., I said incessantly, how important it is for this very important thing to be valued importantly by everyone.
They have to eat breakfast on it, elevenses on it, lunch on it...
Supper, breath, drink and sleep on it..., they even have to dream on it, dance to it..., dancing like they were dancing to those songs of autumn nights, nights of carousal.

We manoeuvre everything else in the constitution to suite our needs by enshrining well this very important element (need).
We architect a bogus constitution..., one that could have protected us in the future. We consult with the people and in so doing we enhance our public relations with this people.
Do you think he made a mistake by doing all that?
Anyone could be excused for being polemical here, for in human terms, evidence alone without judgments is pretty inadequate.
Ok; let’s try to map the landscape of his thinking. Don’t you think it was all a manoeuvre and it showed him some home truths? People showed him how capable they were at determining what was right from what was wrong. They showed him they were not the gullible sorts he thought they were. They knew what they had been doing all along, have always known, would always know, wouldn’t be blackmailed anymore..., and could see through this deceitful plan.
They reject it!
I said they rejected it..., so resolutely.
Here, much would depend on how you would interpret those results.
People, people..., people...
On a scale of 0 to 1 where 0 rates the less thinking, I would have to give them 1 or any number closer to 1 on this one.

But as I have already told you that suppression of the incompatible is his greatest trait, that he has the Orwellian big brother mentality, the Nazi storm trooper mentality, the terrifying invader mentality, the Idi Amin occultist’s edge.
His other hand; that which is out of sights of the people is sinisterly moving things beyond everyone’s entranced eyes... moving that land of risk into being again.
People have now forgotten that single purposes individuals don’t like to have their plans disturbed or else they would go into permanent disarray, but with this one it’s a different tune altogether.
Tunes! Songs! The Parrots! He is not into Bach, Brahms..., and neither into Beethoven’s ninth symphony. Their viola and violin creates musical colours that are both bright and expressive but also melancholic and volatile..., their music dripping like rain from their thin fingers..., no? They make a philosophical sound that allows you some distances to ponder about the earth and the sky at long ranges so that they have the ability to reach and evoke the arena of timelessness and it is for this that they are not his cup of coffee.
He would rather they were momentous tunes, like pop music, like dancing to pop music, popping upto its curled up dimensions too.
So he makes his own tunes and let others dance to them...
Oh wise man make proverbs and fools repeat them and whilst we are still at this proverbial parallelisms, apply this nonsense to songs too, and you have just discovered him mortals!
Best wishes mortals!

Before his songs were confused, disturbed, I mean his plans..., he was already breaking new ground and looking at those disturbed songs from dry ground emotionally...and unemotionally too. His feelings, emotions and moods are nothing seen before. They tower beyond dreams, myths, imaginations and explanations. They are smooth when he is under terrible obstructions like the river when it empties into the sea yet they soar dangerously, rage formidably, and soar violently when he is not under obstructions. He likes obstructions and he doesn’t like them in one and the same breath. He can be complete opposites in room enough to change invariably from one form to another, or even being contrasts at the same time.
Ahhh..., can’t we speak silently, and be silent at the same time?
Happy and sad?
Beautiful and ugly..., at the same moment, and why not...What is beauty? Is this that we disagree about or it is about what ugly is? Greening around the core, no..., not greening no, but maybe greying or decaying in the core and exuding strengths all around the outer edges. A pail of words which although pretty archaic aren’t bad at all, are they?
Isn’t that a terrible beauty; is it ugly?
Maybe both...and I said at the same moment and there are lives within him which he couldn’t keep under check.
He exudes dimensions, edges, bottoms and depths beyond multiple understanding for he is now a brute force of nature unleashed with medieval anger on the entire human dissent.
Ok, I would have to go back to the beginnings to find the wellsprings of these ravings. Would you please let me go back a little bit with my ravings? I know I am asking too much from you, but please would you lend me about two or three years. Ok, I know I am being too self-indulgent but if you would allow for that just this moment then I would start on it. I would allow groups to form..., after all, isn’t that always so beautiful watching them growing. I would allow groups to form whatever are their intentions and I would let them evolve and wield some stupid powers over me. Obviously they would be demanding for something as a smock screen to their actual (veiled) intentions.
Don’t give them anything out rightly! A little bit of sweat is good here and let it all come closer to their extremities but not beyond such that they would almost dream that getting what they want is heaven-status or anything as closer to that as is possible, just like some traveller in an endlessly ice-capped land could dream of, and at the same shiver, equate heaven-status to any kind of warmth.

When people fail to realize their ambitions they inflict pain on themselves and ultimately on that that has been denying them such fulfilment. Now allow them to demonstrate some of their anger and vapid power before they get to a dangerously volatile condition.
You all along have been denying them things, ...and all of a sudden, and at the flicker of a second, you are accepting all their grievances..., so apologetically, so regrettably, so genuinely, ...and offer more of whatever they had been demanding.
You will leave them in dangerous disarray and in confusion too because at the moment they are now bloating themselves on the Captain’s right to booty that you have just awarded them.
In the same vein, at the same time, they have forgotten all their other interests, but the loot, of-course only the loot!
Sadly they now permanently equate everything to a monetary value.

With unequalled speed and whilst everyone is celebrating..., this people and that group, and I said with speed..., immeasurable! You throw the spanners at work.
All of them are yours..., and I said all of them. So this group owes you a favour?
I remember something and some philosophy...
There is this old Chinese philosophy that says if you save someone from death, that someone you have saved would now belong to you and it would now be your obligation to look after them, their lives, their loves and their happiness too.
You can ask for anything and they would simply have to give it to you, whatever it is that you have asked for. And they would also shout on top of the mountains saying that they were not occupiers of the farms but land redistributors and nation builders for you. They would do that for you.
Do you see the things that you can do with things that you own!

I said you throw all the spanners at work. You throw this group onto the people. All the seven hells and all the fires! I said all the seven hells and all the fires. Oh, I can hear someone whispering about eight hells...yes, even that and don’t forget the fires, the fires. It burns, let it burn, let it burn, let it burn!
I would target an element of this people and unearth that emotional (never to forgive) concept once again, striking all the way back to those tiny-tiny cellular beginnings. But why is it that we do not want to forget?
The Fools! The past! Forgiveness..., forgetting,
It’s a full spectrum of the impossible tribalistic tendencies that are brought forth for us to share in ...so foul, and so full of the ages. Maybe there is always security with the ages..., and the past too.
You know everything because someone once experienced it and expressed it and someone also kept it in their tribal memories, thus in yours too. It’s quite different with the future because there is not knowing what the unknown would turn out to be. Maybe that’s why people prefer living in the past, or maybe it’s because they fear what they don’t even fear which is not fear itself but maybe the reason for fear..., which is, “being there.”

But he should have known that it is a fool’s myth to believe in the use of the sword as the basic instrument of governance.
He should have known that a sword can only lock a person into a predictable pattern of behaviour, that the sword would incite heroism from the oppressed.
Hitler tried it on the Jews and Europe and it exploded.
The Soviets tried it and it rotted in Moscow’s gutters. London tried it on the colonies, and it burned to ashes in Africa.
History is replete with many other examples but whilst we are still interpreting these results let’s muse... by maybe estimating the possibilities of this historical agency.
Just a little bit.

Zimbabwean Short Stories by Tendai R. Mwanaka

2011-04-09T07:20:00.000-07:00

Zimbabwean Short Stories by Tendai R. Mwanaka

२७ जून 2008

2011-03-18T05:07:00.000-07:00

27JUNE 2008 When I arrived at the voting station at Zengeza 7 primary school for the ward seven where I was a registered voter I was told I had to first of all go to a Zanupf village headman by a gang of Zanupf youths stationed at the gates to the school। I asked them whether they were now village headmen in towns and he told me yes there were now village headmen for the cities as well।

They told me that for me to be on the safe side I had to go there. They told me that the ZANUPF militias, the headman, and the ZANUPF youths were going to do a reconciliation of all those who would have voted for the opposition party against the details that they now had. They also threatened they would also carry out a reconciliation of all those who wouldn’t have voted so that everyone had to vote whether they liked it or not. They pointed for me where I had to go. It was at the home of the local Zanupf head, a certain Mr Jena who stayed in Dovi Street. The place was just a street away from the voting station, in sight of even the presiding officers of this polling station, some of whom were even stationed at the gates where those Zanupf youths were turning people away from the station to Mr. Jena residence. When I arrived at Mr. Jena’s residence there was this very long queue of people registering their details and so I followed the queue of those registering their details. When I got to the front of the queue they asked for my details, that is my full name, address, telephone number and identity numbers, and then this village headman had given me a blank piece of paper which I was told I had to fill in with the serial number of my ballot’s paper.

At the voting station I voted the normal way but I also wrote down my serial number on that blank piece of paper when I was behind the booth and then I took that piece of paper to the village headman who recorded that serial number against my details. It meant that whether I liked it or not I had to vote for Mugabe
It was in the afternoon, at about 3 o clock when the headman and the militias were arrested, but most of the people had been forced to participate in this shame election and to think that it was happening all over Harare, and also that most of the presiding officers knew about it, especially those in my ward where the voting station was a stone’s throw away, in sight of this headman’s residencies, left a lot to be desired.But this is how we elected our president who is the president of Zimbabwe now, on 27 June 2008

थे लन्गुअगे ऑफ़ love

2011-02-21T01:28:00.000-08:00

the language of love

Engaged by the resonances of the language of love. Relying on the tricks of your mind getting you home. You have bought into this marriage thing. For the two years you have been seeing the other. Your mind has spread out; away from you. Has no more plain symbols. Charts or helpful indexes. The last summer lumbered to its inevitable end. The way a song modulates from minor to major chords. Achieving dissonance, consonance, and harmony. Then dies in the listener’s ears. She like the previous summer has already left, without your noticing it. She has no more plans for you this winter. But you have continued to believe in your love for her. Even when her perfume has wafted into the thin blue air. And the magic has died down? Unless you know the quality of your soil: these seeds of your errors can creep upon the path of your feelings. Your small stories already wondering away. And the only story could be the one that lies ahead, of all these small stories of yours.

goodbye yesterday

2011-02-12T02:36:00.000-08:00

goodbye yesterday

ZEN

2011-02-01T02:05:00.000-08:00

Zen

How could I store this material…
On this page, freezing myself from
Unknown meaning maps?

Zen has a corner market
On human nature’s relation
To human mind, the human
Mind that prickles perks at
Some things, you have salvaged
Through a haphazard life.

Since you are conscious of
Yourself as a distinct moment
Then appearance is no different
Than desire and
Intuition is more valuable
Than knowledge.

These human truths are only
Shadows of the real truths
That human nature knows what
It doesn’t know
And it doesn’t know
What it knows
And how can that harm you
Even if it’s not true?

You know you are now the captain of
Your own body, a well lived
Body, learning from the sharp
Cuts and jags you are just
Coming to sad manhood.

Calm now, the universe
Assembles itself
If you ask me
It’s you who is really lost.

Sluices of meanings shows
Balm of naked honesty
Painful with words that make
No meanings, information is
The only key component in
This language game.

NAZI ISRAEL

2011-01-15T02:15:00.000-08:00

NAZI ISRAEL

KISSING

2010-12-18T03:46:00.000-08:00

KISSING

multi-tasking

2010-11-27T01:45:00.000-08:00

multi-tasking

That Child - Memoir (and)

2010-11-19T03:32:00.000-08:00

That Child - Memoir (and)

VOICES FROM EXILE

2010-11-19T02:50:00.000-08:00

VOICES FROM EXILE

2010-10-08T03:39:00.001-07:00

Tendai Rinos Mwanaka Below is the link to my collection of poems on Zimbabwe and life in exile entitled VOICES FROM EXILE. You can also make orders through the Google editions link below, or you can contact me directly on this Facebook profile.

http://books.google.co.za/books?id=vaVnGAtSvz0C&lpg=PP1&ots=-RGKRTDY4c&dq=tendai+mwanaka&pg=PP1#v...

Voices from Exile

books.google.co.za

my street

2010-09-25T03:23:00.000-07:00

cholera republic

2010-08-19T03:41:00.001-07:00

मद बोब REPUBLIC

2010-08-05T05:36:00.000-07:00

वोइसस फ्रॉम वित्हीं US

2010-08-05T05:15:00.000-07:00

VOICES FROM WITHIN US

“A chapbook of love poetry”

TENDAI र MWANAKA

PATHS OF LOVE

Like wild raging seas
rough are love’s paths

But a speck in the middle-
of this vast surging mass

In its paths to find,
claim and conquer

Of sunshine and honey
a paradise yonder

Love’s paths are rough
like little mountain lines.

FIRST TOUCH

I had assumed this,
would stay our first touch.
And I had hoped that,
we would hold through.

The blue and yellow butterflies dancing,
in September’s sunlight.
is the susurrus breaking up of the bubbles,
a short-lived awareness?

And like the winter’s pool on the dry,
we keep loosing our waters.
Always flying in the paths of our angers-
the eagle’s talons!

THE WOMAN IN ME

On a sunny lovely May-morning.
I found a rose red brightly blooming.
Besides the road, under a shade Baobab tree.
Oval features implanted so craftily!
Upon such a lovely shape and face.
Soft red-lips, spring of such a voice!
Doubtlessly sweet, fresh and promising.
I will suckle her lips like a bee on honeysuckle.

“Oh, you are so sweet like honey!”
Can I posses you, can I be possessed?
Fix you, fire you, cradle you, case you.
Come on, come nearer, I will reach you.
Breathe the same air that I am breathing.
I will circle you in my arms like ivy on a tree.
My lips on your lips, your heart on my heart!
Sating this awesome yearning, this thirst too!

Think of her as the Woman in me.
Let me mould my Eve, Sculpture her for you.
Let her candid doleful eyes seek yours,
And her sweet-song voice calls for you.
Let her footsteps as she comes and goes
Be like bird-markings appearing faintly-still,
After a full day’s disturbances and winds.
And she will dwell in you like the Woman in me.

I find in her eyes, an innocent heart-truthful.
No pencil can sketch her picture truthfully.
Neither the poet, not a song can sing a true song.
No words, not even thoughts can express her so.
She touches sympathies that are too deeper for words,
Too deeper for my thoughts and feelings.
And to my visions, dreams, hopes and heart,
She bestows life, strength, beauty and light.

She is as fresh as the sun awakening.
She makes us aware of our hearts.
That we have them, they are now timbering.
Awakened to the love they see lustring.
Welcoming this joyousness into our lives.
She fills a void in our spiritual being.
We are ourselves, we are now over-brimming-
In happiness, life and laughter.

She is nurse to wounds still painful,
A prescription the doctor ordered for.
She is stem to sprouting green leaves.
Against the Sun, winds, colds, and rains-
She nourishes and shoulders my heart tender!
And lets her love like the sunset surround me
Stirs feelings no other woman has ever.
Deeper sources no other woman ever sounded,

“O”, the sensations, I can sigh over them.
Pity me, despise me, laugh at me!
I will confess it with outmost humility.
I love her, “O”, how I love her!
I will be her wall against the suns, winds, colds, rains
Her faithful shield against all wrongs, trusting!
I will guide her through life’s shoals, rocks and thorns.
Living and loving, “O”, being loved too!

IS IT

is it your warmth
is it your beauty
is it your courage
is it your sweetness
what is it?

it must be your breath
it must be your voice
it must be your laughter
it must be your smile
what is it?

is it when you breathe
is it when you talk
is it when you laugh
is it when you smile
what is it?

is it husky
is it sassy
is it soft
is it sweet
what is it?

is it because
i am in love with you
what is आईटी?

IF YOU ARE GOING

If you are going
Linger a little while
Like the setting sun’s rays
Touching the coming night
If you are going
Touch the coming night

If you are going
Linger a little while
Kiss me good night
Hold me for the last time
If you are going
Hold me for the last time

If you are going
Linger a little while
Say you cared a little
Come for good-bye
If you are going
Come for a good-bye

COME BACK LILLI

Arise!
My darling,
My beautiful Lilli,
And come.

Behold!
The winter is lasting.
“The cold is over and gone.”
Flowers appear on the Lea.
The season of singing has come.
Let me sing that love song once more.

Show your face-
Let me hear your voice.
Come, my darling,
My beautiful Lilli,
Arise!

You went away,
Without saying goodbye.

A painful morning.
A hurtful morning.
A sorrowful morning-
So many years ago.

Did I hurt you?
Wound you,
Disappoint you,
I wonder!

What did I say?
What did I do?
What did you hear?
That made you walk out.

You left,
Without saying goodbye.
You just went away Lilli,
Without a goodbye.

You left a deep void in my heart,
Return for the wound to heal.

All of my life,
I will never find someone.

To compare with you-
My love,
My Lilli,
My angel.

You are as fair as the Moon.
As brighter as the Sun.
As majestic as stars in procession.

As sweet as honey, with your delights,
“Oh love....!”

You helped me when I was down and low.
You helped me get through all depressions.

All moods and all moments.
All sorrows and all pains.
All joys and all agonies.
All passions and all desires.

With you,
I always want to live.

Without you,
Life has never been the same.

You, without-
Life will never be the same.

Life is so sad,
Signifying nothing-
A shadow so lone!
How loveless lies this heart full once of love?

Come back Lilli.
Come my love,
Come my darling.

Memories of one day,
One cherish,
One life.
Floods me like holy waters of the fountain of love.

When I was so much heartbroken,
Discouraged,
Depressed.

From failures in love,
In life,
In myself.
Suffering from the darkest depths of hurt and pain

Shadows, dark,
Frightening...., fiery
Over me, surging!

Want of light;
To guide me through this dark mine.
I could die from all these,
Unending troubles.

“Oh, Mother Venus!”
You took me into your arms.
Like the young Mother embracing her tot.

Warm, quite,
Peaceful Lilli!
Your arms Lilli!

Softly breathing,
Like the sigh of an Angel.
Your heart tingling,
Like bell tolls afar.

Could it be so?
It must be so.
That,
I still feel the tingle in my heart

Your voice Lilli-
A faint whisper,
Lovelier, soulful...
Caressing.
You said,

That you will always love me?
That you will always love me Lilli.
Love me Lilli!

“So much for love in this mortal sphere.”
Never was there a worry for tomorrow.

A day full of love!
A day full of happiness!
A day full of wonder!

Do you still want me?
Like I do.

Do you still need me?
Why did you leave?

Do you still love me?
Where is the love Lilli?

Come,
Come my love,
Come my darling.

The day you left the world collapsed.
The basis of my life and soul lapsed.
It touched the cavity of my heart,
Where birds of heaven lived-
A nestle of addled eggs.

Everything came crashing down,
With nowhere to go.
A world forgotten,
God forsaken,
Faith lost!

An endless circle,
In the desert,
So desolate!

As a desert plain,
As level.

A ceaseless painful treading,
Your feet so hurtful.
Sweet agonies;
When I think of you I want to cry-

Tears from this heart,
Tears from this soul,
Tears for my care,
Oh, tears for my love!

Distrust;
A disappointment here-
A failure there!

But hope like an echo is faint,
Yet it grows.
Like a thought un-spelt,
It feeds and shows.
Like the moss grows on top of the mountain’s stone.
Like the cactus defies the suns and sand.

As light with its brightness-
Lights up,
Dark nights.
As old give way to new-

I tried it with Cecilia,
With Lana,
With Norma.

Always in their faces,
I saw you.

Always in their voices,
I heard you.

Always in their touches,
I felt you.

“Oh, where is the Woman who used to carry this light for me?”

Second,
Minute,
Hour,
It’s just a godforsaken pattern.

Day,
Week,
Month,
A journey never reached.

Summer’s rains all through winter’s colds,
And with bloom-
Eliding into spring’s greens.

Year after year.
“Oh no, the years!”
Year after year,
The years...
Rolling away.

Yet there you are.
Always shinning so bright.
And it seems like yesterday,
That you were here.

Oh, hearts are victors!
Shinning so bright.

What are you doing?
Where are you?

Away from love,
In a land so far.

What are you doing?
As I cry for you?

What are you thinking of,
As I wait for you?

Bring back the light of your loving
Bring back all those happy memories

Do you still remember those happy times?
Do you remember them?
Like I do?

When tomorrow was there
Timeless..., always

When yesterday was tomorrow,
Forever...., was today.

Those carefree..., loving,
Flying happy days.

Let me be happy,
Just once more Lilli.

Come back Lilli.
Come my love,
Come my darling.

NEED SOMEONE?

You have let them come.
You have let them go.
When there was no reason
To hold onto them anymore.
You have walked all alone.
And it’s now a lifetime-
For you without meaning.

You are not free Caitlin.
You have condemned yourself.
To a life of solitary confinement.
You keep wanting to hide,
Behind that thick wall
That you have built around you.

You will never benefit.
Not from this lonely walk
You will never benefit,
Not from them.
If you can’t let someone
Stay for a little while.

You will never be free.
If you can’t let someone-
Take care of you
You will never be free.
If you can’t learn,
To love them in return.

Don’t you ever need
Need someone Caitlin?
To love and trust,
For you to really live your life.
To the fullest.

अ पोएट'स MIMESIS

2010-07-12T05:39:00.000-07:00

A POET’S MIMESIS:

Magnification

I was a small bit of blood in my mother’s heart and womb
I was not larger than a cherry plum but look at me now
I was born a poem.

Perpetual genesis

I can form a composite of genetic suggestions of me.
I can form a new kind of mimesis----,
I can form a poet’s something else sloughing away from me---,
which could have been something.
I can form a sum of all the things that I might have been.

Biological invention

Only faint vague shapes, which were once human,
remain on this collapsed foaming greyness.
A bit of red streaked bone, bones holding the form of checks and brows-
Very poor material to shape a new poem.

The sun of understanding

I am the middle of my own poem looking inwards because I know where it is that I live
I am the middle of my own poem looking in ways no inner eye,
no inner voice cannot see and cannot say.
I am the middle of my own poem looking in ways I cannot share.

Now I am this

The only thing that I truly understand is that I know who I am
and what I was, for once I was a child----, and now I am this.
And all the rest has been lost in shadows of memories, hidden,
all gone away.

I believe

There is no ceiling over me but only an open sky so full of changes.
And my moistures are channelled into this sky.
This sky is now an opposing synchrony that threatens me with turmoil

I am a mirror image

But the outlines of me are still there because I have always diverged.
I have never had concurrent points but echoes of bones and joints.
See my shapes, see my curves, and see my insides-
For I am shinning through your eyes.

My Mortal immortality

I have denied myself form so that I would remain formless,
hiding but not finding myself.
My life is now dominated by mystical caprices-
that relentlessly consigns me to a speculative realm.

The scattering

But I still have a connection here
if can only find my scattered bits before others have found them.
But I would let them scatter, run and hide anywhere.
Even in a poem of their own choice.

The choices

Let them, but I did not let them,
because I know that they would carry with them the seeds of their own survival.
that would make it impossible for me to find their centre:
Not to forgive.
And I am always fighting against this tide:
Never to forgive.

The time of the stomach

In the time of the stomach the words of my own poem precipitates
into crises unanticipated.
Maybe that’s always the way it should be.
But I always carry with me water when I leave the universe
of my poem-
because out there, there are just some few dewdrops
hanging on damp Acacia- leaves.
Each always a promise of pain.

Destiny

To the east, waits Nyanga Mountain and to the west there is Nyangombe River.
But one foot ahead of another I have always moved as I have.
Not trying to match anyone because I have my own destination.

Perseverance

A plodding perseverance would deliver me-
Thus I would create my own supernatural.
and sensing it at every turn by the sheer power of my own will.

I am a poem

I am a poem, a slanting shadow, a thin rope,
a crumbling bulge!
I am a poem, a tiny lip of rock---, here
And another over there, there.

And when this poem is not long enough then it is not long enough-
and any other way of thinking is not as long as this poem is long.

Climbing the mountain

I am a particle defying gravity, a finger-hold here---, a toehold there----,
clinging to the rock surface.
I have known what it is to be a poem with various, momentous meanings-
Look at me now!

The world of no birds

In a world without birds I have always invented my own poem-
to link one piece of time to another and when I have passed,
I would never be the same poem again.

The world of birds

And In a world of birds everything that I am drops into a no sound,
and I have created a common catastrophe that binds the decorations of my poem together.

Decorations, what are?

Decorations, are how we prepare for our own sacrifices.
Decorations, are how we refuse to reject,
and regret for what cannot be.

They are the decorations in all the poet’s poems,
and all their imitations but they fail to stitch together the essences of a tomorrow.
And all our inventions fail to fuel this tomorrow’s diesel engines.

I was born a poem

But life has made me whole yet I was born a poem-
like a mirror of my own life striking a river.
I would never die the way I came,
Plunging into the mystical and dreams of termination, no!

I was born poetical

And between the usual poem and the unusual poem there is very little space
for my own poem to be immortal.
And it is always poetical to thank yourself for this little space.

My dream, the collective I

A dream inhabited by glimpses of silver-edged things in water-
shimmering in their greying colours like trout,
Igniting an ancient memory of silver-flesh dazzling my appetite,
in a banquets of the uninitiated hungry.

My soul

A spangle of shattered flesh
attempting a butterfly design,
my soul, my poem---
Digesting its own experiences.
Not answers, not questions,
for it is time for conjectures.

The language of If

“If I had only----- “
It is only fools who prefer living in the past or even the present
‘If we can only---“
Immerse ourselves among these fools,
their past and this present.
In a time of pure alternation.

The present and the past

Unless if you are trapped you can’t built your future out of your present---,
a present which is not even existing.
But as if it were rows on rows of eyes with senses lost,
like eyes of a gasping fish squirming in pain.
It is a future furrowed in this present and the past.

I was there

I know-
I was there---, at the instant that has left you.
I want to assure you that it is forever out of your reach.
And that there is no substitute of this instant and time,
Time as an alienating device.

There is no time

There is no time---,
just a little bit of time to shape the edges of the weather-
which always have square meanings that stoutly refuses arrangement.

The patterns

These patterns, this poem in my mind,
conducting the waves downwind.
And the wind of the south hungering for empty spaces.
The wind’s fingers sifting through the clouds---,
driving dark clouds toward me.

Judgement day

That the cloud-darkness of holly judgement might appear?
Silence threatening hearing, and anything-
And everything else is possible.
For it is not silent in my mind and nothing tells you apart from me.
If you were me you would run too.

orientations

2010-07-08T06:36:00.000-07:00

ORIENTATIONS

We are these cells, this soul, this being.

We are the choice of our own awakening.

We are light that pours through the generations.

Innocent little children dancing to the rain song,

For a season of green to atone for our wrongs.

We are a hunter caught in his own snares.

We are a tidal wave in a sea of broken dreams.

We are flickering whimsy - a breath’s laughter.

The sacrificial dove, the hooting owl, the forlorn falcon

“O, those surreptitious angels in their sweet anger!”

Muttering of dreams lost, deep in our own silences.

We are haunts cries in the aftermaths of battle.

We are fine theatre made out of lost relics.

We are a spider’s webs, a tender weave of time.

Over here the wind blows, over there a story told!

We are dry leaves in this intricate whispering.

Augmenting to a morning of silent conversations.

We are this pen conversing to these sentences.

Lighting the threshold to that wordless portent

And if we turn, what do we see, a river or a shiver?

Or had we bitten more dreams than we could chew,

And we are now waiting for someone who never comes?

memories लिखे stones

2010-05-17T03:08:00.000-07:00

MEMORIES LIKE STONES

I count the words in the rain.
Raindrops in which,
A lifetime trembles to take shape.
And we walked that ever-shifting line-
Between the ocean and the land.
Measuring our own fragility-
Against the ways of the tides.

We remain dedicated to this pattern-
That reveals as much as it cancels.
Like nudity that hides inside itself.
Within which a life happened.
Which filled our senses-
Lingering on this beginning.

The days slipped away touched-
By the sun that sinks like a,
Song running through our hearts.
We were a song, yet-
We were trees most of our lives,
Of our necessary self-doms.
Perfection in things always missing.
Out of which we made sacrifices.
On raged-ends of human doubts.

Guide my hand to touch your heart,
Between the scars.
Leaping into tongues!

We entered into each other’s menu.
Savouring sweetness for a living.
The soft shadows of your voice.
The voice you never learned to use.
The unspoken things within words.
We delved into experience and,
Reached for lives furrowed by sorrows.

Memories like stones, like-
Perennials coming back in summer.
Laughter opposes a sad breeze.
Like the way light enters a time.
Lighting our world on fire.

अ वर मेमोरिअल फॉर MUGABE

2010-05-14T03:48:00.000-07:00

i wrote this poem in 2008, and when i wrote it i was so troubled with Mugabe such that even seeing his image on the television was haunting. it was that time when things were unbelievably difficult for Zimbabweans, this poem is part of my collection of poems, VOICES FROM EXILE, that will be published in Ireland, by Lapwing poetry in August---enough of this, please have a loook at the piece and comment, or even pass it on

A WAR MEMORIAL FOR MUGABE

He never touched a gun.
Not even in Mozambique.
He never died in a battle.
Or liberated a prison camp.

He fought the war of leadership.
Killing rivalries-
Chitepo and Tongogara
Are still unclaimed.

He fought with the generals-
Of great respect, short mind.
He fought every adjacent difference.
And the masses he longed for,
But never understanding them,
Despised them.

He fought his own wars-
And there is no medal-
Nor a memorial for such brutalities.
There is not even a suitable court to try him.

How could a single man wipe out millions?
In and outside his country.
And gorge thousands in daylight,
For over three decades-
Whilst the whole world keeps mum.

इ REMEMBER

2010-05-14T03:27:00.000-07:00

i would like you to have a look at this poem. i wrote it when i was 20 years old, in 1994, and i had been missing my rural home and childhood where i grew up

I REMEMBER

I remember I was a child once-
Some years ago I loved one.
Year, times I have been happy.
I remember, weren’t there sweet little
Tappy, a friend, I dearly remember him.

When I look back to those years,
I remember the cheerful old ways.
By break of dawn we are at the river.
So chilly and cold we all shiver.
I remember how serene and silver-
The river was as we fetched water.

The sun brightly shinning over Mozi Mountains.
Spreading his sparkling warm fingers.
Over lush green hills and valleys, lingering-
Bright blue mist sneaking from picturesque banks.
We could hear the birds singing up the sky.
A sweet lovely song from far away.
Was it a song of a young man in love?

I remember sitting under our Mususu tree.
A tree as old as grandma Helen.
So immortal like the rock of ages.
Eating from Grandma’s black clay pots.
Pumpkins, yams, sweet potatoes and nuts.
I remember my sister, a garrulous glutton.
Gire, do you still remember that tonnage,
Of sweet eatings, aha I want to laugh-

At how you would brood over everything.
Like mother hen over her little things.
Jealous of any hands, eyes and mouths-
Directed at your tonne of those full mouths.
I remember me and my brother Bernard-
Gourmands were these two little brats.
Aha, so sweet and funny were the times.

I remember playing in dusty fields and paths.
A game of soccer during late winter days.
Rhaka-rakha, fish-fish, bottle dunhu, till dusk.
Never thinking of anything but play.
And like angels in paradise, who was a girl?
All equal- boys and girls enjoying gaily.
Until we were hot and naught from play.

We all swarm like bees for the river.
All that shrieking, giggling, splattering-
Water flown so far into the sky-high.
I remember playing “Chitsvare” in Nyajezi.
At deep sage green “Tanganda” pool.
Ask our fathers they swarm there past.
I remember diving from high above-
Into the cool sweet waters of Tanganda.

Was it
buttered pumpkin leaves and “Sadza”?
goat’s meat, fresh vegetables and Sadza?
“Rupiza” or “Mutakura” from cowpeas?
I remember eating delicious and tasty meals.
Our stomachs bulging tightly and shiny, like honey-
We washed down with sweet sour “Mahewu”.
Cupfuls of sweet sour down our throats.

“Hwai, hwai huyai”, merry sweet little voices were-
calling on young innocent sheep that we were.
“Tinotya”, what do they fear so clear a night?
A full moon wonderfully probing and bright.
Like distant campfires, stars sparkling untiring.
“Mhomhi”, they are all gone to “Mutare”.
The wolves will never come back, not for us.
Do come please, “Chiuyai henyu”.

Trudging, treading, oh to thunder of flying legs, hello!
Bumping against one another, a tiny blot of humanity.
Here we come-, fast, deftly and cleverly.
Oh thin air here! Aha Josephina is caught.
Until left only was Enia, our revered cat.
But no, she can’t go past us.
Yet those times have gone past.

We change fastly, notice, we never!
Swept along the tide like waters in the river.
With nostalgia we admire youths rover.
What if we could go back, we all ponder?
Do the waters in Nyajezi go back, up the terrain?
Like dark flooding waters, big trunk trees and stones-
They make new pools, ravines, beaches and courses.
These scars we have are notices of changes and times-

Roads, paths and places we have gone through.

इ हवे अचिएवेद ME

2010-05-14T03:20:00.000-07:00

I HAVE ACHIEVED ME

The palimpsest bliss is the green-glimmer of the sun corona.

People in huge---, terribly huge numbers as they dip into shadows

and their meanings are lost.

The colours of those distant rocks: grey, gold--- deep amber!

A line of brown grey, pale-pasted ribbons of rocks

are like hues of an egret’s feathers---, flying past me, the past:

It is like rocks flying on their own fingers.

The faint sound of voices fixing into my memories

and bestowing the inward view to give myself a little rope

to haul inwards.

I know it, I have always known it:

that something is broken inside me.

It is an ancient conceit

to think that there is only one sound in this entire universe

and everything else is just echoes of that sound.

But I will tunnel in like victims always surviving this abuse

by speaking to fish in my own dreams

without even the need to respond to myself.

There is nothing I can do now but don’t ever think

that I am a coward, for once I was in love,

and I loved her so much more--- that wild, wild shore.

And now I am thankful that I have achieved me.

For you are studying me intimately and I am in these tamed records

but you only have a face to measure me by.

But don’t sheath your blade; draw the blood of a finger

and create your own river.

Who owns this river passage?

Not you, none of us, no one is----.

More transparent than these muddied waters

that are the blood waters of our fingers

६टः इयर ऑफ़ ज़िम्बाब्वे TALKS

2010-04-30T06:27:00.001-07:00

6 TH YEAR OF ZIMBABWE TALKS

AU election body : The elections were not free and fair.

AU, Egypt meeting : We all agree that the elections were not free and fair. We now beg his Excellency, comrade president Mugabe to form a government of national unity by engaging MDC within SADC negotiating framework with facilitation from president Mbeki

ONE MONTH LATER

Uncle Bob : what really worries you my prime minister

Chematama : A snare, I think a lovely snare. I can feel the signal

Uncle Bob : But you will be my prime minister

Chematama : With what powers?

Huyakwese : My friend, lets laugh whilst this lasts. Uncle Bob has been very generous to us, don’t you see that. You will be the prime minister, and I will be your vice prime minister with the home affairs portfolio. You don’t have to worry about uncle Bob but rather you should be wary of that old schemer, your other vice prime minister with the defence portfolio. That one is the real snake in the grass and I don’t want him in my council of ministers, infact our council of ministers. But let’s sign this deal before Uncle Bob changes his mind.

Chematama : Don’t you see young fool that it’s a trap, he has sweetened our cakes with stupid posts

Huyakwese : Then cut the cake and lets all celebrate my friend

Chematama : Let me go and think about it and consult with my party
( Chematama exit)

Uncle Bob : I have always told you that he is a sell-out. He is going to consult with that McGee ambassador

Mbeki : (addressing journalist). Our prime minister has asked for some time to consult. I have always told you the best solution would come from the Zimbabweans, and I expect a deal to be signed in the next 24 hours

Zimbabwean : When will they sign that bloody deal. We are so sick and tired of hearing these promises everyday

Zimbabwean : Lets give thanks to our African brother Thabo for he has done a great job to bring them to negotiations. Didn’t you see they even shook hands a couple of weeks ago.

Zimbabwean : What shaking hands! Mbeki is a traitor. He is the old boy’s friend and don’t expect any deal any sooner

Zimbabwean : I wonder where I could find food to eat today? I last ate three days ago. I wish Mad Bob, Chematama, and Huyakwese could be eaten

2 DAYS LATER

Vavi: SADC shouldn’t invite Mad Bob and that ladies lover kanga-man from that small kingdom country. We are going to strike like nobody has ever seen if these dictators come to their SADC talkathon thing. We are going to bring Johannesburg to a standstill.

Malema: Yes comrade! We will kill for Mugabe, but if that white kangaroo human rights organisation refuses us to kill for Mugabe then we might even kill for Mswati.

AT THE SADC MEETING

Mbeki : Gentleman and gentle ladies we have negotiated a settlement for Zimbabwe and what’s left is the signing ceremony. But I want to ask you fellow leaders to force Tsvangirai to sign it
( Mad Bob nodes his head and smiles in agreement with Mbeki).

SADC : You have got to sign this deal or else we wont allow you to stay in southern Africa, or even to visit our countries, infact we will deport you to Britain, like what old- man Mbeki is doing to your fellows here caught in this cyclone negrophobia thing.

Chematama : I will not sign unless if I am given significant executive powers to curb Mad Bob’s excessive irrationalities, and I also do not want to report to Mad Bob, but to parliament for starters.
(He leaves the meeting).

Huyakwese : He wants all the powers for himself so what power-sharing deal would that be if he takes all of good uncle Bob’s powers? Too bad I have to go back to Zimbabwe without anything but for him to take all of Uncle’s powers? No!

Mbeki : I thought he would be pressured to sign but it seems not. That’s the best deal I had negotiated from my best friend Mugabe, It was really a good beginning, but I have to start all over talking to that old wiser again, and its something I don’t want to do again. Tsvangirai should simply have signed, but, maybe he doesn’t know how to sign it, after all the fellow is not educated, but he signed that other hoodwink paper in Harare, didn’t he? The wine is wasting away in that beautiful Harare hotel where I have enjoyed spending the best part of this year in. Such a waste! But, of course----, let’s give him some time to reconsider.

Uncle Bob: Time is not what I have friend. Those Brishit browns and damn American bushes are pounding on my front door, back door, roof and all the windows and very soon they will take me to that damn American security council thing and their crime war court thing, you know!

Mbeki : Don’t worry my friend. Remember we still have our Russian and Chinese friends. You know that with Vietnam and that other poor African country, the five of us will block those imperialist British and Americans until god-knows when.

Uncle Bob : Thanks old boy. I will give you another farm next time you make your frequent visit to my beloved country. You know Zimbabwe is mine forever. I was given that country by our spirit mediums Mbuya Kaguvi and Sekuru Nehanda, no, no, it must be the other way round, that is Sekuru Kaguvi and Mbuya Nehanda. But my friend you can do that lie-thing of yours to those bastard brishit newsman over there. I wish Blair was still there. It had been so easier to out-fox him all these years because he talked too much and didn’t do anything of whatever he could have said. He is like those Blair toilets we have in my country. (They laugh). But with this Brown thing, I am so scared of him, and don’t you see that even the British themselves are as scared of him as I am. (He chuckles). And that warmongering son- of- a- bitch, “Shoes” Bush, noo, no, no ,no I don’t want him on my back, no my friend!

Mbeki : Don’t worry!(Addressing journalist). We will continue negotiating and a deal is very likely in the next day or so, and as I have always told you it must be Zimbabweans who should decide their destiny and the deal they want, so negotiations will be continuing.

Zimbabwean : So what does that mean?

Zimbabwean : I don’t know, maybe it means other 5 years with the old Mad Bob, again?

Zimbabwean : iiii,uhiii,uuu

Zimbabwean :

अक्टूबर moon

2010-04-28T03:47:00.000-07:00

OCTOBER MOON

The October moon is on my door

Like a little ghost

Raw orange zest

And the chaff of the moon fills the valley

With its pale yellowish light

yellow flowers of light

And it’s melting slivers

breathing coolness

The slivers of the bright moon

rocks down the earth

With heat that is warm to touch

Its half rim like the distant fire

burning the horizons

Pushing night into dawn

Dawn into morning

The night’s eluding face

slipping away with a quite

Undressing the moon

Spherical arc in birth emerging naked

Naked and embarrassed

We might as well say we are

yellow-throated

In the moonlight’s pouring cornlight

Listening for our names

In a million-petalled slivers

of the moon’s being

Unbowed by life’s winds

The moon has pulled over us

like a Cyclops’s eye

In the long silence the moon is hiding.

http://mwanakacreativewriter.blogspot.com/

2010-04-28T03:20:00.000-07:00

शोर्ट बिओ DATA

I have had stories and poems published in USA, UK, Italy, South Africa, India, New Zealand, Australia, France, Spain and Canada, in 50 + among other journals, magazines and anthologies; Yellow medicine review, Phoenix review, Wordgathering, The Redwheelbarrow, Pomezia Notizie, Memoirjournal, PoetrySZ, Poetry institute of Africa, Westerly, Penine platform, Eildon tree, RKVRY, Beyond the rainbow, Off-the-coast, New contrast, Earls court, Magna and others. I have also won several prizes and this manuscript was also short listed for the Erberce poetry prize(2009), niminated for a pushcart 2008, and a book of short stories dealing with Zimbabwe 's political situation, MAD BOB REPUBLIC-ECHOES OF AN UNFINISHED CIRCLE, will be published by Lionpress Ltd( UK ), and a book of poems, VOICES IN EXILE, will be published in August by Lapwing poetry, Northern ireland in august 2010

I am a 36 year old man, single, and a full time writer. I write a lot of poems, so also stories, essays, articles, plays, and I am working on a full length novel. Lately I have also been working on as a singer/songwriter. I did my primary, secondary, and high school in Nyanga, Nyatate area and stayed in Mapfurira village in the eastern highlands of Zimbabwe up until 1994. From 1994 to 2008 I stayed in Chitungwiza, south of Harare where I was a security guard, a general hand, tea maker and eventually a vehicle sales administrator at a famous Harare motor vehicle sales dealer. I have a diploma in marketing and I am also a graduate member of the Southern African institute of marketing. I left Zimbabwe in 2008 for South Africa and I have been staying here in Johannesburg and I would say "writing myself to such a standstill!"

उनिटी government

2010-04-10T03:34:00.000-07:00

UNITY GOVERNMENT

Unity government is a watercolour government
It is a government that’s home to
Ministers and ministries without power
Like coded storylines of untested identity
Within the within is the same, only smaller here
It is its absolute refusal to doubt itself
That hustles us along to our hazardous fringes
Little by little, the big black lies
Strangling the music of our hopes

It is the oppressor’s music ruminating in
The vestiges of our now clogged minds
Stories of false hope bound together
In stoic controversies and contradictions
By two actors seeking out unearned recognition
Leading us astray is this liberal hypocrisy
Just a dialectical change

Hope in Zimbabwe is knit with lives lost
And plaited into a pattern of suffering
Hope afraid of unbraiding the past
Waits for others to undo the knots
The unmaking of our old pains
Whose intricate designs and clever joints
We have mistakenly re-knotted again
Hope acts the fool here, don’t see
Or we don’t want to believe what we are seeing

In Harare north, they still swim in harmless pools
Designing for our dreams
We swim in hunger drenched streets of Chitungwiza
Here they only listen for our voices of dissent
For if they hear us they would kill us with their guns
So we now talk silently like the empty skies
Our very bones hears the sounds of our silent weeping

Each night the empty plates from which we eat
Will be the fields from which you will harvest
New harvests without the words “silent diplomacy.”
And at night we crash into nightmares, thinking
That this deck of misfortune that we have re-created
Would keep shoving us to keep fighting
For the horizons are still ours
But we wish the sun would soften a thousand times over

Unity government is just what it is
Or pieces of what it should be
It is the way you live within it
That makes it unworkable for you
As if it’s a map you can read only once
But feel like you have read it many times
Because you cannot forget it
Whether you want to, or not

It is stinking masks of skeletons full of odour
It is a street-named “government of national unity.”
On a broken down stage called “Zimbabwe.”
It is like bits of old jokes without the laughter
But snarls like jumbled half-bars of remembered music

It is just an illusion, a dilution process
So let’s not shift our minds in reverse
Let’s not fall prey to this new resurrection
A master’s rendition, a repetition of 1987
Just another history waiting to be re-written
Through another trough of empty spaces of time.

links

2010-04-09T05:14:00.000-07:00

thepotomacjournal.com/issue9/tendai_mwanaka.html
www.winningwriters.com/resources/critiques/2007/urc_0710mwanaka.php
www.itch.co.za/?article=17
elevenelevenjournal.com/Poetry/tendai_mwanaka.html
www.languageandculture.net/gallery-summer-fall-2008.html
www.sapc.edu/sapress/carin.php
memoirjournal.squarespace.com/subscribe

Ruins

2010-04-09T04:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.bookrix.com/-mwanaka

लिंक तो ओथेर work

2010-04-09T04:58:00.000-07:00

शोर्ट बिओ DATA

2010-04-09T02:04:00.000-07:00

CURRICULUM VITAE

TENDAI RINOS MWANAKA

24 Svosve road Zengeza 1 Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe. Tel 00263777916113

^Email:mwanaka@yahoo.com or mwanaka13@gmail.com

Personal Details

Nationality Zimbabwean

Date of Birth 13 July 1973

Sex Male

Marital Status Single

Languages English, Shona and Ndebele

ID Number 34-054889-H-34

Most Important Publications-Exhibitions-Performances of the last 5 years

Voices from exile, a collection of poetry on Zimbabwe’s political situation and exile in South Africa was published by Lapwing publications, Northern Ireland in 2010. Keys in the river, a collection of young adult love stories will be published by Savant books, USA in march 2012. I have won several prizes. Logbook written by a drifter, and Voices from exile were both short listed by the Erbecce press poetry prize in 2011, and 2009 respectively, I have been nominated for the pushcart twice, 2008, 2010, commended for the Dalro prize 2008. I have published over 150 pieces of short stories, essays, memoirs, poems and visual art in over 100 magazines, journals, anthologies and websites in the following countries, the USA , UK , Canada , South Africa, Zimbabwe, India , Italy , France , Spain , Cyprus, Australia and New Zealand . Below is the extended list of magazines I have published in, both print and internet magazines ( internet magazines are italics). I am also a songwriter.

USA
Poor magazine, Mobius poetry magazine, Wordgathering, Language and culture, Kota journal, Banwood, Poets.com, Poets.com anthology “Immortal voices”, Noble house anthology, The Potomac journal for poetry and politics, Riversedge, CAIRNS, Beatlick,Winningwriters, Yellow medicine review, Shemom, Off the coast, Memoir and, Dwane, Write me a metaphor, Children, churches and daddies and anthologies, Pacific journal, Eleven eleven journal, RKVRY, Bayou review, Struggle magazine, Letterfounder, Praire wolf press.

UK
Decanto, The Phoenix review poetry magazine, Gold dust, Eireings, Poetrylifeandtimes, Poetrymonthlyinternational, Dawntreader, Numinous spiritual magazine, Presford, Inclement, Neverbuy, Exiled ink magazine, Indigodreams anthology “About last night”, Pennine platform, The red wheelbarrow, Windows project, The Eildon tree, The Delinquent, Essence magazine, Neonhighway

SOUTHERN AFRICA
Newcoin, New contrast, Poetry institute of Africa, Christian poetry anthologies, Itch, Storytime, Poems for Haiti anthology, A Hudson view

AUSTRALIA
Beyond the rainbow, Idiom 123, Curious record, LINQ, Sonnet art, Westerly

CANADA
Earlscourt, Nashwaak, Message in a bottle, Tainted love poems, Poetrysoulasylum, Challenger.

ITALY
Pomezia notizie, Lunar stars and feelings

FRANCE
MGversion

INDIA
Kritya

NEWZEALAND
Poetry SZ

SPAIN
Parrebesso

CYPRUS

SCWI journal

PERSONAL BLOGS

Mwanakacreativewritter.blogspot.com, Facebook profile, twitter, myspace, Bookrix, Victory website, Desi poems, ccpoets

OTHER ATTRIBUTES

1 Hardworking, intelligent and an ability to learn and adapt quickly

2 Highly motivated, positive

3 Can perform to the very best under difficult circumstances

References

Mr D Grieg

LAPWING PUBLICATIONS

c/o ballysillan drive

Belfast BT4 8HQ

EMAIL. lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com

Mr Daniel Janiek

Savant books and publications

2630 kapiolani Blvd 1601

Honolulu, HI 96826

USA

Email: savantbooks@gmail.com

Hugh Hodge

New contrast

C/o South African literary journal

P.O box 44844

Claremont 7735

Cape Town, South Africa

EMAIL. newcontrasted@newcontrast.com

थे सुन एक्सिस्ट इन ITSELF

2010-04-09T02:02:00.000-07:00

THE SUN EXIST IN ITSELF

I take up my subject and let it be--, about religion, and they say, is he capable?
Then my mouth opens up awareness, cursing backwards to a time lost in mystery,
a time without parallels, invoking the licence to dream!

Peering down---down---down, I see people with layers, free-verse eyes in their faces
and I feel so lonely, I cannot pray.
Praying like prayer is a demand for pity in the power of desperation.
Like giving death-waters to death.

Religions like individuals wreck from within and some live lives like mayflies.
I can see their ending in ice but not soon enough as I endure it.
How I hate ice: My body frozen!

I want you to look into this horror---That you are seeing now, without seeing it
or knowing it and if I could, I would shed tears and consider this wish as an act.

This wish would become a miracle and you are as great as any miracle
that you can think of because you speak with your own life.
Speaking directly into your senses, speaking things not cast in words because
you do not need words.

And if I choose good does that make you bad and if you choose bad-
Does that make me good?
Must we always judge: Must we always seek forgiveness?
The sun exists in itself!

When you behold a rainbow what colour do you like most?
Do you think all the other colours would die for want of the colour that you have chosen?
dying like when a thing vanishes and leaves no shadows.

But I can see their shadows and I can see them walking silently and I can feel----
The sour colours of their fears driving inside me like hungry pains, like minutiae of an angry humanity.
Hungry for lost infinity!

But we still carry the detritus with us because we did not separate, scatter out at night, this night-
Or another; Time did not stop for us.
We had the choice everyone has:
To die now or to die later---.

Now live where the fear of being--- and the love of being resides in rooms next to each other.
Now live where the courage of love--- and the faith in life resides in a time that changes the past.
Now live for the quality of activity.

For you are a seed blown in yesterday’s winds and you would be tomorrow’s plume tree.
Where the nightingale nestles its cares, its feathers, its eggs.

And I feel the satellites of my life-Instruments which plays music;
warming, cooling, addressing. My fears, my angers, my memories.
Memories of myself uncovering the holy city that I see in distances.
So beautiful in the morning light!

And I was like that city once but it was in another life.
In another lifetime---A lifetime which does not have ties with time.
A lifetime that dissolves with contact.

इ ऍम सो सर्री-इ ऍम नो BULLETPROOF

2010-04-09T01:26:00.000-07:00

I AM SO SORRY: I AM NOW BULLET-PROOF

Why did I say those words?
Why did I tell her that it was over between us?
Pulling each of these syllables like as if I was pulling each and every one of the rose’s blossoms and the unfortunate thing was that she had over-lived a definite six months in my life but an unwritten life at that.

Celine, and that was her name and nineteen eighty-nine that was the year and she was my first cut into the treacle world of relationships.
During our form fours at Nyatate secondary school.
We were so much in love!

My adoration for her was like dentistry; she stilled the bombastic, and heartened my heart with a love like a map to a new country.
That’s how I thought of her and felt about it all and she was small and fragile and light in complexion and she came from an adjacent village to ours.
She was true, good, faithful and loved me good!

She was warm, balm, and benediction and loved me with a love so searing, so brave, and so honest. She was each note, tune and every sweet sound in my heart and her love was a tracing around my heart and since praise is a language too difficult to separate from love and when Owls hoot we call this hooting a call for forthcoming grief, I still feel it’s a call for love, and I also felt I loved her but the unfortunate thing was that I had also learned how to speak of love in place and think it was the thing that was in my heart.

When you are in love and closer to your girl, she would try to transmute you to a molecular level, but something must have changed over the time we were in love. Something just didn’t make sense somehow. Sometimes she wanted me to be soft, and sometimes she wanted me to be hard in ways that I didn’t know how to be.
I also knew I could snap easily and drastically to the first sign of contamination

But something must have been telling me that it was time that I move on.
It was like a sensation like something had crossed the river with me, or was this my ego running ahead of this time or I simply had a heart like a squatter camp.
But what was that something?

Did I feel dissatisfied with her? Did I feel undeserving of her love? Was it something said, done? Did it have anything to do with something I can’t really express, something unfathomable yet it had been so instrumental in making me feel the way that I did?

Can I say something to pacify myself of the blame? What can I do to undo the wrong that I might have done her? Can I go all the way back correcting that wrong?
Every relationship is like a window, framed and contained, with its fixed view.

And it all depends on what gives you pleasure, that is if you like to look in through the windows or out through the same windows, that is, looking in through the relationship or out through that same relationship.
I have come to realise that I liked both ways of looking at it.
Once a relationship is over I have liked to look in through that relationship so also out through that relationship so that I would see whether there was still something in or out of that relationship for me.

Even if it seemed like it was some months and a lot of things could have changed between us, but I did go back on that relationship, some five or so months after we had disbanded it and I discovered that what was inside and outside of that relationship couldn’t suffice enough anymore for me, and that her love no longer lied inside those windows and I also made a resolve never to return back to what no longer was mine anymore.
Ok, call it whatever you want to but that’s what I did and was it because I am unlovable, empty and a fantasizer?

Someone must have said those words or they could simply have happened in my mind and I also remember what her younger sister said to me.
That Celine had loved me so much but that I had been a pain-some bastard and that they now view me with so much contempt, that I felt I personally do deserved it.
But I was surprised that that sister of hers accepted my date ever afterwards, though she later on told me she wanted to hurt me the way that I had hurt her sister, and she sure took all the pleasures in making my world such a hell-hole.

This girl hatched for a vengeful relationship straight away and like the sucker for trouble that I have always been I fell badly in love with her. With this one I went all the way like as if I was trying to atone for the wrong that I had done her sister and she liked it, and she became a woman insane, murdering me every moment she could.

She knew everything about me but she still did not show desire to meet me across this bridge I was trying to built as if she was waiting to find something else more about me that she hadn’t known about.
I entered this corner knowingly and its corners that I am now scared of ever-after this. I would rather have them planned and straightened, not curvy, before I enter them afterwards.
But all that I could do then was to push the boat far outer for her.

She became the fist woman to break my heart and I remember the waste of pain that comes with the breakdown of a relationship and loss loomed big like the sun eclipsed by the moon and for years after that it seemed to me like as if there was nothing after that first heartbreak and love.
But from that moment onwards I had started to cut sorrows like shaping a shape that I had learned without knowing it.

It became like you could only watch them, one girl after another, coming into your life and getting carried away by some forces you do not understand and to remember their names becomes difficult for their names would be like names of a crash-test, dummies without nuances or meaning. Entropy would always topple them into fallen beauty.

But I had nothing to apologise to them, neither to her, and very little to her sister because I had been true to myself and that’s what everyone else failed to really understand about it all.
That I shouldn’t have faked on the way that I felt because in the long run it could have helped no one.

But I am now trying to listen to these words and all that I hear in these words are the sounds of the stones that I have struck up in my pathways, now yielding sweet-drink memories.

And I know memories selects its own material like some distant editor would read this story and feel she should cut quite a lot of this crap to make this story appeal to a wider readership, but I won’t stop inventing remembering here if I am going to tell this story of my love of Celine and of her sister Angela, and of what a verdant field our youths are for writing, ruminating, pleasure and pain.

One of my best friend openly told me that I didn’t know what I wanted in life; maybe that I didn’t know what I wanted in love could have been a better summation, that is, in people loving according to the ancient measure, but was he correct?

I could have told my friend that I had known when to accept that limit and that one day I would go beyond it.

I had known what to do then and I also know that I could love someone someday, any day I feel like it, that I am waiting for someone, not that I know her name, yet.
He tells me its all part and parcel of my not knowing what I want in life and I am not trying to excuse myself of the wrong I did to her.

I am saying that’s what I wanted to do and I don’t regret the decision that I took because its how I felt but.

I am saying that I now know that I should live with my heart open to embrace those that I don’t remember anymore and those that nobody remembers anymore and I am also saying that now I breathe with the knowledge that the moment you hold them in your heart is always enough to sustain your heart and mind in the future, but I am also saying.

“I am so sorry.”
I have become the bigger person here.
I have managed to open up these memories and enfold them into paper here, these memories shifting into shapes on a piece of paper.
Burn this paper if you want to, you also burn these memories, but I don’t care anymore because I am now bullet proof.

mwanakacreativewriter

orientations

ORIENTATIONS

And we are now waiting for someone who never comes?

Clockwise Cat: Review of Tendai Mwanaka's Voices in Exile by J.S. Watts

थे डार्क हैरेड GIRL

THE BLAME GAME

Tendai Rinos Mwanakai have just completed my non-fiction book on Zimbabwe, THE BLAME GAME, that i have been working on for some months, so i am starting to contact publishers who might take it, any suggestions?

No court poet for Mugabe: A review of Tendai Mwanaka’s ‘Voices in Exile’ - Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group

Doors

अरेवोलिंग कागे फ्रॉम थे नोवेल, केस इन थे रिवर(मार्च २०१२ रिलीज़)

थे प्रोमिसेस ऑफ़ लव, यौर लव mirror

ठिर meeting

बुक रेविएव वोइसस फ्रॉम EXILE

एन्त्र्यफ्री contest

व्रितिंग fellowship

केस इन थे RIVER

इवोरी कास्ट WAR

Laughings of the Mad Dog

RANTINGS OF A RAVING PEN

Zimbabwean Short Stories by Tendai R. Mwanaka

२७ जून 2008

थे लन्गुअगे ऑफ़ love

goodbye yesterday

ZEN

NAZI ISRAEL

KISSING

multi-tasking

That Child - Memoir (and)

VOICES FROM EXILE

VOICES FROM EXILE

my street

cholera republic

मद बोब REPUBLIC

वोइसस फ्रॉम वित्हीं US

अ पोएट'स MIMESIS

orientations

memories लिखे stones

अ वर मेमोरिअल फॉर MUGABE

इ REMEMBER

इ हवे अचिएवेद ME

६टः इयर ऑफ़ ज़िम्बाब्वे TALKS

अक्टूबर moon

http://mwanakacreativewriter.blogspot.com/

उनिटी government

links

Ruins

लिंक तो ओथेर work

शोर्ट बिओ DATA

CURRICULUM VITAE

TENDAI RINOS MWANAKA

24 Svosve road Zengeza 1 Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe. Tel 00263777916113

Email: mwanaka@yahoo.com or mwanaka13@gmail.com

Personal Details

Most Important Publications-Exhibitions-Performances of the last 5 years

SCWI journalPERSONAL BLOGSMwanakacreativewritter.blogspot.com, Facebook profile, twitter, myspace, Bookrix, Victory website, Desi poems, ccpoets

OTHER ATTRIBUTES

References

थे सुन एक्सिस्ट इन ITSELF

इ ऍम सो सर्री-इ ऍम नो BULLETPROOF

Tendai Rinos Mwanaka
i have just completed my non-fiction book on Zimbabwe, THE BLAME GAME, that i have been working on for some months, so i am starting to contact publishers who might take it, any suggestions?

^Email:mwanaka@yahoo.com or mwanaka13@gmail.com

SCWI journal

PERSONAL BLOGS

Mwanakacreativewritter.blogspot.com, Facebook profile, twitter, myspace, Bookrix, Victory website, Desi poems, ccpoets