style it ironic

Let us suppose that I am a naturally born ironist. If it is possible that I was not actually born that way, it is surely the direct result of bringing myself up in this mode, rather than having had it inculcated into my life by my parents. My idea as to what concerns the pinnacle of education – that is, what expresses the condition of having been well-educated – is that one has learned to doubt what one thinks one sees on the basis of the first appearance.

I don’t think that one can be brought up during the Rhodesian war (the second Chimurenga) and not have had to revise all of one’s opinions – one’s “first take” of life and its meanings. Perhaps after the second take, a third take and a fourth take are not even enough to satisfy one as the take that is finally the “right take”. Not to be completely sure of one’s perspectives, but to approach them with a relatively measured certainty is the mark of an educated person’s mind. I say it again.

So I want to introduce you to my application of the grotesque. It’s not the grotesqueness of a Marechera that you will find in my poems. He wants to reveal something with his use of the grotesque – some dimension of the way that torture is generally a hidden mode of societal control. My use of the grotesque has a different purpose. Perhaps you think you see all too clearly what I’m getting at in my poetry? I use the term, “race”, so perhaps I am a racist – someone who discriminates between people on the basis of colour? Perhaps I have “issues” concerning gender, and see that there are two genders with one gender distinctly differentiating from the other – since I use language that seems to point things out in this way? Perhaps what I’m saying is all too clear in many ways. I want you to think again.

The language I am using – these ideas – are they really my own? I would like people to consider whether a white girl, a white woman, sits down on any Sunday afternoon and generates out of her imagination, out of the ether that is nothingness, the notion of “race”? Okay! I confess that I didn’t do this. I used the word, “race”, in my poetry, but there’s no way that I generated different races. And, hey, wait a second! I don’t even believe in races! I believe in such a thing as “humanity” – the human race. So I am referring to races, in my poetry. I get in the act  -- except that I don’t actually believe in race. This, then, has now become your puzzle.

It’s the puzzle that all of my poetry presents. In actual fact, it is ironic dealing. The subject matter of my writing is not mine, in the sense that it was entirely produced by me. I am just working with the subject matter that was produced by my history -- and your history, too, if I am not mistaken. This is the black and white history of Zimbabwe (and Rhodesia), which has given us the remarkable and highly dubious gifts of race and gender. I’m not sure about you, but my perspective on these is a revelation of the grotesque!

I’m like Marechera, in that I want to do something to reorganise your vision, using poetry. Unlike our friend Dambudzo, I’m not keen so much to reveal to you the hidden dimensions of everyday existence and what you fail to see. Dambudzo had the sensitivity of a shaman who sees things that few other people do see – as if he looked into the spirit world and saw the dark and estranged aspects of our souls that pulled the mechanisms and pulleys, determining all our fates. His vision was anti-Oedipal and reveals us to ourselves in a way that would allow us to make amends with the past and its historical wrongs. By “anti-Oedipal” I mean that Marechera does not want to bring us under the sway of any new authority or system – whether governed by those of the left or right, white or black.

Marechera’s approach reveals, through gently winding narratives, the complex structures of the mind conditioned by a form of society that make us, Zimbabweans, what we are today. My approach is by contrast a throwing down of the metaphorical gauntlet – a challenge to alter one’s vision by keeping the eyes open as to the way in which we manufacture social and historical grotesques. Can we still face ourselves – albeit ironically – knowing that we tend to manufacture such grotesques? Can we rise above a naturalistic vision, which sees the development of such creations as natural and nothing to balk at, to the point where we rise above this terror that’s entailed in a realistic encounter with ourselves? At that point, we naturally lose our cool.

And really it is no different from the terror that one feels when one first learns to skydive. You manage the terror then, too, by holding the freezing blade close to your breast: in the desperate pleasure of your own icy resolution.