There is a difficult place in Malawian literature. A
seat that can pass for a hot one – literally and literary. That, of a critic.
To start with, Malawian literature is just a
difficult place for anyone. For the writer, it is a space riddled with a dying
publishing market, a less (actually non)
paying market and of course a shrinking pool of opportunities for writers.
For the reader, it is a place where original and
refreshing literature is unavailable. A place where you really have to dig hard
and harder to find something appealing; when you do find it, it is hardly
affordable – the price!
However, much as the two groups face those
challenges, none can be equated to the agonies of a critic. The critic of
Malawian literature lives in a place not enviable.
It is worse if that critic, at some point in time,
was also attempting to write. It means that all one is left with is criticising
friends’ work. And, no one takes criticism worse than a Malawian writer. There
are few, countable with half of the fingers of one hand, who are open to
criticism. The rest either personalise the criticism and take personal offence
or personalise their response and intend to offend. So, to criticise Malawian
literature is to burn bridges. To make enemies out of pretentious friends.
At the same time, Malawian literature has come to be
treated with kid gloves. Any outsider peering into Malawian literature comes
with a certain kindness, a certain sympathy. It is understandable. Outside the
exploits of Stanley Kenani, Muthi Nhlema, Shadreck Chikoti, Beaton Galafa, Q
Malewezi and a few others, there is hardly anything to celebrate about Malawian
literature on the global or regional scale. In a way, it is as if Malawian
literature does not exist.
So, for anybody patient enough to accidentally land
on something like literature from Malawi, they feel that obligation to nurture
it. In the end, in appreciating Malawian literature, we do not appreciate the
beauty or the skill, we sympathise with the passion. We want to nurture the
hard work with the hope that, miraculously, it will mutate into something we
can be proud of.
In the end, really, honest (and add: brutal) criticism
for Malawian literature lacks.
I am writing this having finished reading a so-called
poetry anthology by the Poetry Association of Malawi (PAM). It is beautifully
titled A letter for Gumbi town and other
poems.
The time I read on social media that Poetry
Association of Malawi was calling for poems to compile an anthology, I was
thrilled. I thought: finally, we would be able to have a feel of what current Malawian
written poetry is; because, now what serves as poetry is mostly either performed or
recited.
More than once, some mischievous feeling kept tempting me to submit
mine but when I remembered that the best I have ever gotten from poetry is misunderstanding
it, I told myself to keep calm, let ‘poets’ own the stage and not embarrass
myself like the last time I contributed something-like-poetry I do not want to
be associated with for some anthology.
But…I should have sent in mine.
From what I have seen in the anthology, everything
that anybody wrote passed as poetry for that anthology. I am not hallucinating.
Actually, in the foreword, the editor just falls short of congratulating
himself for including every nonsense he
received into what had to be a heartbeat of current Malawian poetry.
Of course, the editor mostly knowing that what he was
doing was traversing the sacred path of literature, he quickly disclaims: Defining Malawian poetry can go a long way to the numerous
examples in this book and other collections. As such, we cannot agree
completely on what should constitute a good poem. As far as poetry is
concerned, we shall accept all the definitions including those that are
self-contradictory.
It is a safe claim, you would really think. However, for
anyone who pays keen attention to art and literature, that claim is as vain as
it is unsatisfying. It is, in a way, a similar excuse a paedophile would use to
justify his perversion: 'that love (like it is even love) sees no age; it is
incomprehensible'. Useless!
It is just a lame excuse that, as one of the sources I
interviewed in my newspaper days once said, is used by men playing football
(using their feet, head, chest and everything but hands) on a netball court yet
still insisting that what they are playing is netball – not football! Anybody,
really, would see the funny composition of such an argument. I am really
surprised how a whole Vice President of a Poetry body would make such an
outrageous claim which, if it is to be paraphrased, basically reads: everything
you feel like poetry, it is poetry. We would laugh were such a claim not
outrageous.
However, in line with that conviction that poetry is
anything, including what would just pass for gutter sentences before serious
people who know that poetry has a definition and any variance brings such
adjectives as dub and spoken word before the noun ‘poetry’,
the PAM anthology really carries everything. It is a dustbin of mutilated
sentences, abused language and attempting-to-be-suave thoughts.
That collection carries lame unartistic sentences that
simply metamorphose into poetry because they have been chopped midway for them
to start on the other line or paragraph. They lack any tools or style that
would really pass for poetry. For them, it is enough that they flow in
something you would forgivably call a stanza yet the metaphorical approach of
presenting issues lacks.
I will just present examples, randomly selected and
advance my case (this does not mean these are the only worst ones or the very
worst, just random selection):
This silence;
is not stupidity
does not announce death.
There is plenty of breath.
In all honesty, what strengths can one pick in the above to
say it is a poem? Wait, I will help you around that question. It is because
there is a misguided rhyming pattern in the last two lines, because the
sentences have been chopped off and some articles have been left out, because
it has been arranged in what appears to be a stanza – it is those ‘qualities’
that earned it a place in an anthology that is meant to reflect what poets in
this country are. It is a shame, if we are to be honest.
But that ‘Poet’ is not alone in simply butchering lines and
then shove them down our throats as poetry. Actually, I can argue that if we
can just take out four if not five poems out of the 45 somethings that make the
anthology, the book is just a collection of sentences ‘surguried’ by a bush
doctor with no skill, no training, no anesthesia whatsoever.
Consider this:
Look and see
Look and be
Look and feel
Look or flee
Look, it’s free
I do not know really what this thing is communicating. The
only thing I am sure of is that the person who scribbled those lines has
excellently failed at being sophisticated. You know what they say about poetry:
it should be sophisticated. There, you have it. Your poetry. Sophisticated and
rhyming. Worthy publication in an anthology.
They say love is blind
But I disagree to
this saying
Love has got ears
It hears
Love has got eyes
It sees
Love has goat
heart
It cares
If you agree with me that Jesus is love
And love is Jesus
You will also agree with me
That love is not blind
Allow that joke, in the last four lines, to go 'un-commented'.
It is not worthy any serious attention. Read it and laugh with a glass of water
nearby. You may choke. Let me, however, take you to the words I have
underlined, as picked directly from the anthology. What is that, really?
Is it
not a shame that a mistake as huge as love has GOAT heart would pass
unnoticed and be published in an anthology by a body that claims to be an
umbrella for all poets in Malawi?
I will leave you to judge.
A bitter bite but still on a bended knee,
Ones pride on a swallow against all odds,
Instant despair then indignation,
Suspicion, excited, mortals start to murmur in ugly stares,
In a scene of picking up pieces of love.
Ask the owner of the lines above what is poetry. I can bet
they will go by the new ironically-named ‘Poetry’ Association of Malawi
definition that Malawian poetry (as though Malawian is some genre) cannot be
defined. Or, most likely, they will say it is just re-arranging of words in a
sentence to make them as confusing as they are senseless; that the sentence swallow one’s pride against all odds does
not qualify to be a line in a poem until the poet – in all his skill – confuses
those words and comes up with something unintelligible like Ones (there should have had been an
apostrophe of course between one and s but in Malawian poetry who cares?) pride on a swallow against all odds.
That one, is not alone. Here is another set of confused
words:
Transparent our shrouds are
Our faces beam with deceit
We open to speak when conversations in us with evil thoughts
are
A people we talk but divided we sit
Promises we share: trying to conceal the only truth not afar
Hearts we break as with hurt we hit: closing the love jar
Once again, this was laughable were it not disastrous! But
the disasters are many in the anthology.
This is how far the road has taken us
By far the wealth has led us
The intelligence has guided as to
This is by far our mistakes have made us
Like they are tools fixing our lives
This is how far the food has kept us
What is happening above if not just a meaningless play of
words? I tried to bring two stanzas to maybe create an impression that the
future of the thing is clear but, nay, it is not really. The whole of that
thing, any poet writing poetry with a stable and proper definition, would
condense into two lines and communicate whatever the thought behind those words
wanted to communicate – effectively!
I could have picked many but they hardly are deserving of
the space and time that it would take me to dissect them all and leave the
reader to decide what is not poetry in them. Somewhere, here, I should stop.
I will stop with lines stolen from Felix Mnthali’s short story, Fragments,
which appears in the anthology, The Unsung Song:
I returned to the desert
to embrace the miracle
dancing in the whirlwind
and perhaps to stumble
on the memento of millennium that was
when I discovered to my joy
a butterfly conversing with the sun
There, I think, you have managed to dilute the raw hard
stuff I have subjected you to with some real poetry. There, for aspiring Poets,
I hope you can learn the art – not from the shame that PAM is serving us as
poetry.
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