Mankhokwe...

Sometimes, grief feels numb. Like when you wipe the roof of your mouth with your tongue. Other times, grief burns. And, it’s raw. It bites. Like the feeling you have when there is a blister in your nasal cavities. I might be wrong. May be there are no moments when grief feels numb. Perhaps it is all a performance – that numbness – just to aid us live and survive through daily toils. It might be that each time grief is fire, carried in a knapsack. That when we lose, and grieve, we are forced to carry fire. As is every other fire, sometimes it warms us. Other times, it burns us. Unlike most fires, it does not consume us. Or, perhaps, it consumes us little by little. Maybe it nibbles at us in quiet gradual ways. Our souls disintegrate, it might be, at the pace of natural soil formation. Or, more aptly, at the rate of continental drift. In 2014, in December, I had texted with a friend late in the night. She was hospitalised. It had been a brief illness. Almost as if it was...

The Giddes Chalamanda you meet in the early hours of a Monday, seated on one of the couches of Scallas Café, is not the same one you saw moments ago on the stage. For now, on this couch, Giddes is that octogenarian. With a face that presents him as one nursing the worries or the pleasures of old age. He is – if his face can be used as a mirror into his soul – lost in a world of his own. As a few besotted fans come, sit next him, for a selfie, he can neither smile nor frown into the camera. He just exists in his space. The young fans are invaders. Neither unwelcome nor welcome. The look on his face communicates none of that.  Yet, minutes before – in the late hours of 16 December, a Sunday – Giddes had forgotten himself on stage. But, forgotten is not the word. Remembered must be. The time he walked on stage, welcomed by Davis Njobvu of the Edgar and Davis Band, Giddess had remembered himself. His passion.  It had been a long night. The promise of Giddes Chal...

We are living in perilous times. The streets are no longer safe. The paths are leading into jungles where forests of irrationality connive with beasts of fanaticism. The only sane thing that we are witnessing, today, is shouting. We, Malawians, are voting next year and, again, the chaos of politics is upon us. We are political people, of course, but in years or months and days preceding the election, our affinity to politics becomes huge. And, with it, reason escapes. There have been a few issues so far on the table that have called us to posit and defend our political fortresses. I, being human and Malawian, have failed to hold the peace I had told myself I will hold in the run-up to these elections. It was an accident, trust me, my commenting on the politics. I had told myself that this year and the election coming after it, I should keep quiet. I had learnt, from 2014, that nobody gets moved by the comments on social media. That, if anything, social media just ruins benefici...

Five, let us say seven, songs in Lawi’s latest release, Sunset in the sky, are not just laced with poetry. They are delivered in varying fusions, resonating natural sounds, a kind and careful tone, yet beyond – or perhaps underneath – that eclecticism comes a huge theme in modern literature: poverty-porn. When I met with Lawi, on a drizzling evening last year where he had come with that simplicity of a commoner yet the mind of an artist who understands his trade, I charged that he has metamorphosed into an artist who celebrates poverty. I was, in a way, echoing an opinion long highlighted by the University of Malawi academic, Emmanuel Ngwira, who writing on Lawi’s previous release specifically singled out Life is beautiful as a celebration of a distant life. A ‘poverty porn’ of sort. “It is not a celebration of poverty per se,” Lawi argued. Thereafter, he went into a sermon:   on happiness – almost philosophical and intellectual in its packaging. Yet, in brief, he wa...