This is the seventh in a series of long-form interviews by Patron Makhosazana Xaba to be hosted on The JRB, which focus on contemporary collections by Black women and non-binary poets. The first, with Maneo Refiloe Mohale, can be found here; the second, with Katleho Kano Shoro, here; the third, with Sarah Lubala, here; the forth, with vangile gantsho, here; the fifth, with danai mupotsa, here; and the sixth, with Busisiwe Mahlangu, here.
In opening up a space for wide-ranging, erudite and graceful conversations, Xaba aims to correct the misdeeds of the past by engaging black women and non-binary poets seriously on their ideas and on their work.
Two previous long-form interviews, with Mthunzikazi A Mbungwana on her isiXhosa volume Unam Wena, and with Athambile Masola on her debut collection Ilifa, were published in New Coin in 2022.
Makhosazana Xaba (MX): I first encountered your 2019 debut collection Agringada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner (Modjaji Books) at the Rosebank branch of Exclusive Books. I spent so much time trying to read the two words on the cover, the ones in a small black font. After numerous failed attempts I decided I would use my magnifying glass when I got back home. It was in that moment that I realised: Oh, they are using the very cover to give me the visceral experience of what I am about to read! Then I thought: Effective! Smart! I love it! I am buying this book! Please tell us about the process that led to this cover design, which I believe is by Megan Ross. To what extent were you involved?
Tariro Ndoro (TN): Thank you! Though, this is quite ironic, you’re the first person to point that out, and I guess that’s the magic of a book—someone will always find something new to observe. It may have been something Megan did on purpose, but we never discussed it. I think Colleen [Higgs], my publisher, gave Megan a copy of my manuscript, and this cover was the first option I got from her. I was happy with it, so we went forward with it—although there may have been a conversation about colour and contrast in relation to the readability of the title. One interesting thing Megan said to me was that she was inspired by the motif of snakes in the book, which was odd because that wasn’t something I’d written about intentionally.
MX: Well, Megan succeeded in making me feel like a foreigner through some words on the front cover of a book. That was a first. Talk about impactful design!
After this epiphany, I walked to the tills, while reading the back of the book. As I read ‘a BSc in Microbiology and an MA in Creative Writing’ my mind asked: who are you? This is such an exciting combination of disciplines. When I was preparing for this interview, I read somewhere that you find the shift from scientific writing to poetry frustrating. The question, then, is: how do you handle this frustration? Have you found a useful method you could share?
TN: Yes, throughout my undergraduate years I was the science kid who hung out with humanities students. I always found their discourse interesting. The issue is that when I was in high school, history and literature were my favourite subjects, but my parents discouraged all the humanities careers I’d envisioned for myself. I also happened to be quite good at biology and chemistry, so I decided to pursue a scientific career and keep reading and writing as hobbies. I was very happy to hear I could do the MACW [Masters in Creative Writing] at the University Currently Known as Rhodes without a background in English or Literary Studies.
I do find switching between my science brain and my writing brain frustrating. The scientific community values brevity and precision. If you are speaking about a pandemic, for instance, you must always call it a pandemic and never an epidemic, because a pandemic and an epidemic are two completely different things. However, the literary community values abstraction and metaphor and fancy, so I find that if I’ve been working on a writing project, it takes a while to return to rigidity. I also find it difficult to be playful with language if I’ve been working on a scientific project for a while.
My favourite trick is immersion. I try to lump all my science reading and writing on the same days and my creative reading and writing on different days, for instance. So I’ll either write in the evenings, when I’ve put my work away, or read on the weekend to remind myself what literary writing looks like.
MX: Two follow-up questions: how does microbiology find its way into your poetry and vice versa? To what extent is your creative writing self separate from your scientist self? Please write a poem that responds to these questions.
TN: I’m always asked this question, and I always struggle to answer it, because I don’t quite think about it as I’m writing. But a few people who have reviewed my work (Katleho Shoro may be one of them) have said that my poetry has a scientific precision to it, so perhaps that is a transferable skill that carries over to my writing. Another friend compared the sharp edges in my work to Damon Galgut’s style, but I’ll have to read his work to confirm or deny that.
two halves, no whole
two spirits, split soul
split atom
lone proton
magnetic centre
attracting/repelling—
tension
MX: I was still in the queue at the bookshop when I read the contents page, and I began to smile, because Tongues of their Mothers—my second poetry collection—is also divided into four sections using the names of seasons. In your book, there are eleven poems in Winter, fifteen in Summer, three in Spring and thirteen in Autumn. How would you describe your relationship to each of the seasons? How did you decide on the sequencing of the seasons, and what influenced or guided your decisions about where to position the poems?
TN: When I first envisioned this collection, I was thinking a lot about dislocation and dis-ease. I first wrote poems about migration and exile in 2015. At the time, I was reading a lot of literature about the migrant experience, and you’ll remember in 2015 there was a great deal of noise about xenophobia and Operation Fiela.
However, I later read Safia Elhillo’s January Children and I realised my dis-ease did not begin in 2011 when I first moved to South Africa. My dis-ease began when I was a little girl, experiencing what you would call Model C schooling in Botswana, and that was when my first brushes with xenophobia occurred, in the early two-thousands. Because there were so many different threads to this dis-ease and dislocation, I decided to separate them into four chapters. The chapter addressing the early two-thousands had to be ‘Summer’, because Zimbabwe was experiencing a drought and famine, so I associated that period with heat. The chapter that details my time in Makhanda became ‘Autumn’, because the Eastern Cape is extremely cold. I think the first section was ‘Winter’ in reference to emotional coldness, because that was when I was first separated from my mother. The last section is ‘Spring’, which is my default, and because it also speaks to some very early memories in my life.
MX: On the back cover of your collection, Shoro, who you mentioned earlier (and who I interviewed for The JRB here), ends her endorsement with the words: ‘Agringada speaks life into things that suffocate those who are too afraid to name them.’ What is your reading of Shoro’s response to your work?
TN: I was happy to read that. I think it articulated something I was trying to do but wasn’t fully able to verbalise. I also wasn’t confident I would be able to achieve it, when I began the project.
MX: Congratulations for winning Zimbabwe’s inaugural National Arts Merit Award for an ‘Outstanding Poetry Book’! And Agringada is your debut collection. How did it feel? Please write a poem about winning.
TN: Thank you! I may have cried one or two tears of joy. The bigger surprise was finding my book in the poetry category. I’d initially thought it would be entered in the First Creative Work category, but when the shortlist came out, it was in the poetry category, and naturally I was confused. Later that day I read a tweet by Petinah Gappah in which she commended the National Arts Council for separating the prose and poetry categories, because traditionally you’d have a poetry collection competing in the same category as a novel, which is probably difficult to judge. It was only after I’d won that my sister pointed out that by winning the inaugural award, I had made history, and I was simply in disbelief (and cried more tears of joy).
disbelief:
I dedicate this to my younger selves
who believed more than I do
MX: This collection is the product of your MA Creative Writing thesis, and was originally titled The Smell Hits You First. Please take us through the process that led to the change in title, and any changes to the content.
TN: In Agringada, there are two poems, what was a cycle of poems: ‘Harari’ and ‘Mbare City Heights’. Both are about my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born. After doing an exercise in ekphrastic writing with Kobus Moolman, I was looking at photographs of my grandfather, and decided to write poems from the snatches of conversation I’d overheard about him, filling in the gaps with creative license and what I know of history. There was a third poem in that cycle, ‘Matapi’, which was in my MA thesis but didn’t make it into the poetry collection. The line ‘The smell hits you first’ was the first line of ‘Matapi’, and Robert Berold, who was my co-supervisor, thought it would be a punchy title. I hardly ever choose titles for my creative works, I struggle with that for some reason. For added context, my grandfather was a factory labourer living in Mbare (then Harari) in the seventies, and Matapi is a very specific part of that location.
Now how did my book morph into Agringada? Well, my thesis collection had a few poems about my time in Makhanda and a little about my family history, but it was still plain in terms of form and style, and I felt something was missing. So after moving on from the MACW, I carried on reading and trying to sharpen my craft. At this point, Robert Berold had introduced me to Sandra Cisneros’s short story collection The House on Mango Street, and that seemed to articulate something about both the bicultural experience and the immigrant experience that resonated with me. So I fell down a rabbit hole: Julia Alvarez, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, and other Latinx writers. Then I started reading academic papers on their work, and in the midst of all this I came across an article about immigrant assimilation. I can’t for the life of me remember who wrote it, but it included a quotation by someone who was interviewed about moving to the US and adopting Anglicised mannerisms, and feeling a rejection from her family members because they considered her mannerisms to be ‘agriganda’ (like a white woman, like a foreigner). In other words, in her home country she had become a ‘gringa’ (foreigner). This spoke to both of my feelings of dis-ease, first about receiving a very Anglicised education in the hope of getting better employment opportunities, but feeling othered by other Shona because I’d gone too far into so-called coconut territory, and second, literally living in a different country and being reminded by different circumstances that I do not belong. Earlier you asked about the four sections of my book, well, each of them begin with a Spanish descriptor—‘agringada’ (like a foreigner), ‘con aguantar’ (with suffering), ‘alegremente’ (with joy), ‘con desilusión’ (with disillusionment)—and my editor, Francine Simon, thought the descriptor for the first section summed up the book.
MX: What were your takeaways from being edited by Francine Simon?
TN: I think the word that comes to mind is precision. If you’ve read any of Francine’s work (her book Thungachi was published by uHlanga Press in 2017), which I highly recommend, you’ll find she achieves a great deal with a shocking economy of words. The editorial process with her felt a lot like carving, pruning and tightening. I am grateful to her for saving my work from being prosaic, because she knew precisely where to cut or sharpen. I guess that’s my biggest takeaway—more words don’t equate more meaning.
MX: Oh yes, I read Thungachi, and two years later I read Shark (uHlanga Press, 2019).
What are your enduring lessons from being at Rhodes University for your MA?
TN: I have a list of five lessons that we had to write down before our last seminar, here it is:
- Separating the voice of the writer and the voice of the character and allow each character to tell their own story—Kobus Moolman
- Narrate your story the way actual people speak—Lesego Rampolokeng
- Reading as a writer, look for ways to tell a story as opposed to just reading a book to get to the end.
- Always keep secrets from your reader to maintain tension—Anton Krueger
- Observe your surroundings more.
And, as a bonus, the most important lesson I learned about visual poetry from Joan Metelerkamp: a written poem is like a sheet of music. Punctuation is your only score. People will read your work how you wrote it and not how you meant it.
MX: Are there reasons you didn’t attach names to point three and five above?
TN: I’ve forgotten precisely where I picked them up. They may have been from a writing instructor or a book on craft, or just from the process of being asked to produce creative work on a weekly basis, and also from constantly discussing our work during readings, in which I would pick up certain themes and meanings and my peers would pick up something different. It challenged me to push further into the observation of texts and my lived experience.
MX: On the acknowledgements page of Agringada you mention the names of five members of your ‘Zimbabwean poetry group’. Please describe the group’s organisational methods and your poetry reading and writing processes. Is everyone in the group a published poet? If yes, please share their book titles.
TN: I had to go back to my acknowledgements to remember, because we’ve since disbanded in a way. In 2017, I took part in an artist exchange funded by the British Council. Chelsy Maumbe, Tanatsei Gambura, Cynthia Marangwanda, Samantha Mukuwaya and I were participants, and Batsirai Chigama was our mentor and facilitator. When the programme was concluded, we kept up a WhatsApp group and shared opportunities and poems we liked. It was a good community to have at the time, because it exposed me to opportunities and gave me different perspectives about writing and approaching my craft. I think the group died a natural death—that is to say, in time everyone got busy or moved, and we stopped checking in. Batsirai has two poetry collections, Gather the Children and For Women Trying to Breathe and Failing, Tanatsei published Things I Have Forgotten Before with Bad Betty Press a few years ago, and Cynthia recently republished her debut novella, Shards.
Since then, I’ve been attending a poetry reading group run by Robert Berold and Mangaliso Buzani, but it’s been a while since I joined. I’m a prodigal child.
MX: What is the most important lesson you took away from being a member of a poetry group?
TN: That my way of writing and reading and seeing the world is not the only way. Other group members always bring a new perspective that makes me think, ‘Wow, I never thought of it that way.’ That reminds me of a Baldwin quote, which may be on topic or off topic: ‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.’
MX: You also list nine people who have ‘supported my literary endeavours in various ways’, without listing the specific manifestations of this support. Please share what you consider to be the unique forms of support provided by the people listed.
TN: Oh, wow, the manifestations are plentiful, but let me touch on a few. I met Dr James Arnett when he was a Fulbright Scholar teaching literature in Bulawayo. At the time I was an early career writer in every sense of the word, and I didn’t have a name, social capital, yet. We met at the launch of Moving On and Other Zimbabwean Stories, which was published by Jane Morris, who also happens to be on that list. Anyway, James and I kept in touch, and he provided an entrée for me to various audiences. First, in 2018, when the American Space in Bulawayo invited Walidah Imarisha, an American writer and scholar, to give a public lecture on speculative fiction, James asked me to open or her. When Agringada was published, he was teaching at the University of Tennessee, and he made my book one of his class setworks. In March of 2020, he organised a US book tour, in which I was supposed to visit five universities in the States and talk about my writing. Covid blocked that, but I was still able to speak about my writing at a virtual symposium that Rutgers University hosted, which was great. I realise a lot of these examples are about things he did after my book was published, but honestly, he had the same energy for my writing even before I was published. When I think of James I think of the words Lady Gaga kept saying about Bradley Cooper during the press tour for A Star is Born, ‘There could be ten people in a room and only one person believes in you and that’s the only person you need.’ I’ve probably paraphrased that grossly but you get the gist.
Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a good friend who had an important conversation with me when I was just starting out. I think he said something like, ‘You should decide what type of writer you want to be.’ That was a revolutionary thing to hear, because all my life I’d been told that African authors have to write literary fiction and must always foreground social issues. Having that conversation with Tinashe gave me permission to be more playful with language and uninhibited in my approach. I would say Togara Muzanenhamo’s poem ‘The Chronicles’ gave me permission to write outside the box of what I felt Zimbabwean poetry should be and, like James, he extended several opportunities to me when I was still starting out, such as getting my poetry featured on the Poetry International website. My friends Fouad and JoAnn I mentioned because they’ve had the misfortune of reading some of my first drafts and provided honest and helpful feedback. I’d guess the other three are similar—reading my work, discussing literature, basically being my literary community.
MX: Interesting: ‘because all my life I’d been told that African authors have to write literary fiction and must always foreground social issues’. Implied in your response is that Tinashe would have experienced the same, and he decided to be deliberate about breaking away, finding his own voice. How was this told to you? And, by whom?
TN: I think I was in my second year of high school when one of the English teachers realised I was interested in writing. We were having a conversation about writing, and he pointed to his copy of Charles Mungoshi’s Waiting for the Rain and told me, ‘You can be a good author writing anything, but if you want to be great, you must be like Mungoshi and write on social issues.’ I realise now that his well-meaning advice had more to do with the publishing machine than actual greatness. The Zimbabwean literary sector has been struggling for quite a while, and now I understand that he meant that if I engaged with social issues I would win literary awards and my work would become prescribed texts in Zimbabwean schools. Traditionally, this is how the old guard gained respect and financial success. Looking at authors such as your Shimmer Chinodya, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Charles Mungoshi, they managed to become household names and move large volumes of work precisely because their works were prescribed texts. Now that I’m older, and I’ve experienced the publishing industry, I feel my definition of success is in flux. Would I like to make money? Sure, but I’ve realised that only three per cent of writers will ever make Dan Brown money off their books. I’ve had to start asking myself hard questions around what my own version of literary success looks like and what sort of legacy I would be comfortable with.
And yes, Tinashe is someone who has also walked that line. We’ve had many discussions during which he’s told me all the things he wanted to do, starting out, and all the ways in which people have told him that it can’t or couldn’t be done. I believe he’s succeeded out of sheer stubbornness (the good kind) and that opens the door for others to do the same.
MX: Thank you for introducing me to Walidah Imarisha. I have learned about ‘visionary fiction’. Also new to me are Charlemagne, George Abraham, Sherman Alexie and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. I had to look them up. When I googled Theresa Hyak Kyung Cha I ended up finding Nonki Motahane’s PhD thesis on migrants, migration and migrancy, which I read and felt enriched by. Motahane’s deep analysis of your poem ‘Instructional’ taught me a lot. I will look for poems by Abraham and Alexie. I also need to buy Splinters of a Mirage Dawn: An Anthology of Migrant Poetry of South Africa. How does it feel to have your work analysed in a PhD thesis?
TN: It feels good, incredibly good. I mean, after being advised by my parents to run away from a career in the humanities, it feels somehow validating that my creative work contributes to some discourse.
MX: You have a website where you feature reviews and interviews—my interest right now. I am curious about your own approach to reviewing poetry collections and interviewing poets. Please share.
TN: I think I’m genuinely curious about other writers’ processes and approaches, and I like to ask the sort of deep and penetrating questions that I would like to be asked. A writer friend of mine used to complain about journalists interviewing her without first reading her book and asking generic questions such as ‘how old were you when you started writing?’ and so on. I decided then that I would ask deeper questions and engage with the work as well as the writer.
MX: Reading Gabriel Bámgbóṣé’s article made me smile, as I read about your Shonglish, because it speaks to my Zunglish. I often wonder, though, whether it is possible to erase our mother tongues completely from the second, third and fourth languages we learn to speak. It is one thing to be deliberate—as you say, ‘In my poetry I am subverting the usage of English’—it is another to be so at one with one’s mother tongue that the ‘whatever-nglish’ becomes the eternal-and-all-encompassing default. This is the case with my Zunglish. Do you do any subverting when you write in other genres?
TN: Yes, that is quite true. I think once you’re bilingual or a polyglot, it changes your mind, because you always think of things in the language that articulates them best. If I am speaking in English and I feel a Shona word articulates my thoughts best, I might reach for the Shona word rather than finishing my sentence in English. I do this a lot with fiction too. However, in science or business settings I feel frustrated, because I know I don’t have as much leeway to weave in and out of languages. So there is that feeling of having to force oneself into one linguistic space. I guess sometimes I fall into direct translations, as many bilingual people do.
MX: I smiled again when I read that you studied epidemiology, because I studied it as well, at the certificate level, and I really enjoyed what I learnt in that year. It made me value the everydayness of numbers in our lives. How does epidemiology live with poetry in your life?
TN: Yes, it is an engaging discipline. I find it interesting that we can come up with equations for illnesses and outcomes. I’ve always tried to keep the science separate from my creative space, but sometimes they surprise me by bleeding into each other. For instance, the other day I was looking up definitions of certain illnesses, and somehow my brain started thinking beyond the numbers and personalising illness, and I came up with this poem:
Multimorbidity: alternate case definitions from those approved by ICD-11
Hypertension is a silent disease, but my people carry it stoically. Watch out for hypotension too. Father’s wife dropped down one day at the age of 45, young and in her prime. Though it may be silent, there are many signs, like when grandmother shouts in a tizzy and her face breaks into a hot sweat
Diabetes runs in the family, for example, at each funeral your aunts bring packets of medicine, one for nighttime and one for morning and sometimes when your tete yells at you, all she needs is a little sugar
Depression does not run in the family. AT ALL. And even if it did, we would cast that spirit out back to the hell it came from, in Jesus’ mighty name. We do not speak of cousin Chido who tried to hang herself at age 15 with the cord of a cassette tape because the rainbow was enuf or Cousin Gloria whose coffin was thrown into the dondo and at whose funeral we mourned dry eyed because she did the unthinkable. Such things have never happened in any good upstanding righteous family
Stroke is touch and go, how quickly it kills one person but leaves another disabled. Now I must remember my uncle, how he was once agile and proud like any other man but one artery cut him down and he must learn simple things again: to eat, to talk, to walk, to stand and sometimes reflect these are things his grandchildren are learning too
Tuberculosis. As a child of divorce, my memories of paternal grandmother are sparse and hazy but what I hate most is the WHO Guideline that says children under 12 cannot enter the TB Ward. I imagine a more intimate goodbye that what the mycobacterium stole from me
HIV is a disease that nobody had until everybody had it and I am glad that I was too young to attend funerals in 2003. That is all I will say about HIV
Asthma is the vice strangling my child-self from within and the wintertime honey and lemon and bronchodilator and the midnight bouts of whooping cough
COPD. All I will say is that I hated the X-rays and the antibiotics and the hard rattle of my lungs when I tried to breathe, but the paediatrician’s scrubs had the coolest animals.
Multimorbidity … defined as having more than one at a time, like my diabetic uncle who is learning to walk and to eat but must somehow remember to inject his insulin.
MX: In one of your responses to Bámgbóṣé you say:
I read […] Under the Tongue by Yvonne Vera (1996), and I had a clear understanding that poetry is not only in the words we put on the page, but also in the words we leave out and the words we erase. I found this style to be useful to portray the Zimbabwean condition because, indeed, there are traumas we don’t speak of, and leaving spaces or redacting them is a way of translating them to the page, the way a film director might instruct an actor to sigh.
There seems to be a hierarchy in ways and methods of erasure in your collection. There is the block, the ●, and then the crossing over words. Three poems, ‘The People in My Pelt’, ‘Detention Excerpt’ and ‘Hyssop’, have the block over some words. I counted seventeen poems that have the ●, and when I searched for a pattern, I noticed that it’s the letter ‘d’ that is erased, and only in text that is in italics. Here is an example from the poem ‘Ramakgwebana Sketches’:
I’ve been ●oing this for ages
I’ve been aroun● here often
This is how you ●o it
How to lie to bor●er officials
Of the seventeen poems, seven—‘Cecelia’, ‘Self Portrait at Nine’, ‘Mbare City Heights’, ‘Forecast’, ‘Media’, ‘October 22nd’ and ‘The Dance of the Mustang’—have only one of these d erasures. And ‘Good [Shona] Women’ has the highest number of these: eleven. The last stanza alone contains ten.
the theogony is wrong—
atlas ●oes not hol● the weight of the worl● on his shoul●ers
else us females woul●n’t have to be strong
woul●n’t be crushe● un●er the heavy weight of boul●ers
The final stanza was a surprise to me, and it also carries so many historical references and meanings.
I have many questions about these three categories of intentional deletions. I will attempt to hold them all in one request: please share the creative logic that led to these methods of managing the traumas you mention in the quote above.
TN: First, let’s go back to George Abraham, Safia Elhillo and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. These three writers profoundly influenced my work with their use of punctuation and visual poetry to communicate beyond just their words.
The block deletion represents silencing in its most absolute form. That affectation speaks to moments of voicelessness. The strikethrough is more sarcastic and speaks to moments of spun narratives. So for instance, in the poem ‘Swept Away’ the mention of ‘deportation repatriation fields’ is posing a question as to whether there was a deportation exercise occurring or a repatriation exercise occurring. In ‘Fragments: Weekend Mythos’, ‘mermaids menfish’ is a nod to a childish misunderstanding and a clash of cultures. The Shona word ‘njuzu’ would literally translate to mermaid, but six-year-old me thought mermaids were benevolent creatures after watching Disney’s The Little Mermaid. However, in this context, the njuzu referred to is a more sinister creature, closer to mami wata perhaps, which Dambudzo Marechera called a ‘manfish’ in House of Hunger. Later on, the word ‘zviziviso’ is struck through and replaced with ‘announcements of births and deaths’, which is a reference to the poem ‘Detention Excerpt’ and the erasure of so-called vernacular languages in private schools.
The dotted d, on the other hand, remains a mystery. I noticed it in my author’s copies, and we had to do a second print run, but there are a few people who have copies with dots. You probably bought yours soon after the book was published. This reminds me of an odd anecdote. I was working with an acquaintance to translate some of my poems into French and Italian and he asked me the same question. When I told him about the error, he told me about how he is fascinated with such printing imperfections, and how the penultimate poem in Agringada, ‘The Dance of the Mustang’, ends as ‘they run with the win●’, which for him was a higher note than the original ‘they run with the wind’.
MX: Then there is the poem ‘Breaking a Bronco’, which has the letter A centred above and below it. The A above is upside down. I have never seen this before. Please help me understand the meaning.
TN: This was more of an aesthetic decision than a contextual one. ‘Breaking a Bronco’ and ‘Mustang’ are both shorter poems, so it was decided that we should add As as a way to fill the empty spaces.
MX: In the first section, ‘Winter’, the form of the poem ‘Fragments: Weekend Mythos’ fascinated me. It is fragmented, yet inside are repetitions that seem to hold the messy fragmentation, almost like a cupped hand holding numerous objects. The phrase ‘pick a smell’ repeats four times, ‘pick a colour’ repeats three times, and ‘pick a sound’ repeats twice. And then ‘pick a sight’ shows up just once, I suspect because as readers we see these fragments all through the poem. I am curious about your writing process here. I found reading the poem challenging. Maybe the process was easy and fun? Please walk us through it.
TN: I love this poem deeply, it is currently my favourite in the collection, but it took the longest time to write because I could never get the form right. The first several drafts were quite lyrical and not fragmented at all, but I found them boring. I was partly raised by my maternal grandmother, and I wanted to pay some form of tribute to my time with her, because compared to being elsewhere my time in Rusape had a rustic charm. This could also just be nostalgia, as I was quite young. However, I landed on this particular format because writing the book forced me to remember forgotten aspects of my childhood, and the early memories particularly were always associated with a sensory feeling. For example, when I remember certain places, I remember how they sounded, and when I remember certain people I can smell the food they liked to cook. In fact, I read somewhere that certain sensory perceptions can aid memory. So I wrote the poem that way. The spaces exist in the poem because memories from such an age tend to be disjointed, with many gaps in between.
MX: The unexpected, heart-wrenching end to ‘Fragments: Weekend Mythos’ reads: ‘wherein lies the last image of a long-dead / grandfather last seen alive in the summer of seventy six / cause of death: unknown’. I read the poem over and over again, thinking what did I miss? What is the story behind this poem?
TN: Initially, I wasn’t going to end the poem that way at all. Then I wrote ‘in seventy-six’, and realised I could make that connection. It has a lot to do with my grandmother. Growing up, I felt she was slightly morbid, because she would sit by her battery-powered radio in the evening and listen to death notices. She also keeps a box of obituaries. My cousins and I never really understood this practice, but as I age, I realise it was possibly the trauma of being widowed at thirty-six in the middle of a war. It is also possible that she is an archivist, an aspect of her no one has really fully appreciated. I’m not sure if that answers your question?
MX: Yes, you have answered it, thank you. That box of obituaries is such a fascinating story!
The poem ‘in seventy-six’, a more orderly work, follows this fragmented poem. It is a poem of five stanzas, each beginning with an ellipsis. Each stanza ends with bracketed words: (these are facts), (this is hearsay), (this is her testimony), (this is grandma’s testimony) and (this we hardly speak of). The phrase ‘the war was hot in seventy-six’ appears in stanzas one and two and then twice in the fifth stanza. The form of the poem seems to be a nod to military order and precision, which I found intriguing, while I recognise it might be far-fetched. It is a highly impactful poem. I am, again, curious about your writing process, please share.
TN: Yes, I do think I was precise with this poem. In ‘Fragments: Weekend Mythos’ I was looking at the life of a child through a child’s mind, and I allowed the language to be frivolous and playful. I couldn’t do that at all with ‘in seventy-six’. I felt the subject matter held too much gravitas for me to play with language, and it was also my way of telling a heavy story without making it overly lachrymose. In postcolonial Africa we all carry generational trauma, and I feel this poem for me was about generational trauma. Most boomers in Zimbabwe (my parents’ age) lived through a fourteen-year war, and they hardly speak about it but you can tell they are traumatised in certain ways. I suppose this is why there is the constant refrain, ‘(these are facts) (this we hardly speak of) (this is hearsay)’, because there are times when my parents will randomly describe awful, heinous memories from the Chimurenga struggle, and then never say a single thing about it again. Then there are parts of my history that are hearsay, because my cousin told me that her father told her that my grandmother told him that a certain event occurred, so at the end of the day, one doesn’t have a complete understanding of what the Chimurenga was and how it affected the everyman, we all have pieces we must come to terms with. Regarding the format, I was inspired by a piece of writing entitled ‘Erratum’ (I’ve forgotten who the author is) in which a murder has taken place and the author decided to narrate it as a series of incomplete notes written by a detective. Basically, the story is told by repeating the same paragraph several times, but with each repetition a detail is added or omitted, so the reader feels they’ve solved the case along with the detective.
MX: In the ‘Summer’ section, ‘Repetition’, a poem of one long stanza with numbered sentences, delivers a scenic, calm, almost soothing, juxtaposition of nature and the female body. Blood, dysmenorrhoea and menorrhagia seem to exist inside the orbit of the moon, moving in cycles, dancing as it circles around the earth and repeats its actions in unison with the earth, the sun, the stars and the rain. And then from within this union we hear the speaker commenting, at different points:
We call this a tidal wave
They called it sacrifice
We call this famine
We call this dysmenorrhoea
We call this pain …
The poem is influenced by Sherman Alexie; what of his work inspired this poem?
TN: You’re not the first person to ask this. Especially because since I first read his work he has been cancelled. The actual form or format of the poem is known as an Alexie Sonnet, for example ‘Sonnet, Without Salmon’, ‘Sonnet, With Bird’ or ‘Sonnet, with Tainted Love’. I encountered my first Alexie Sonnet in 2016 or ’17, and I challenged myself to write one. The format is loosely a prose poem with fourteen points, and there must be some repetition of ideas within those points. So, it is a rhyming of ideas in a list rather than a rhyming of words in a ballad. It was quite a difficult form to emulate, because I could only find two or three online before trying my own.
MX: In the ‘Autumn’ section, ‘The Offending Document’, a poem of two stanzas, invites readers to witness two women who ‘might share a camaraderie, a complaining together’, yet their class positions are far apart. Another accomplished poem, where simplicity in the listing of observed details yields profundity in meaning. Did you actually observe these details, or did you imagine them? If the former, was this coincidental or was it a deliberate research step?
TN: I wouldn’t call it a research step as such. My research is that in the early two-thousands my family would travel to Francistown to buy groceries, as many Zimbabwean families did at that time, and after a while I think I got used to ‘border culture’. You know, there’s always the absolutely rich person who is travelling on vacation, the cross-border trader who has travelled with her last dollar, the bus driver who knows all the systems, and so on. Later, when I travelled into South Africa through the Beitbridge border post, I realised that the same characters exist in these liminal spaces. I don’t remember why I wrote ‘The Offending Document’ in particular, but I think it was a class exercise from my MACW year, and as soon as I read it out to my classmates, they all liked it and had something to add about an immigrant they knew. In fact, the line ‘one will head for a bus station in Joburg where she will sleep under a truck for R2 a night until she has enough merchandise to sell at home’ was a detail given to me by Mmatshilo Motsei, who was a classmate of mine at the time.
MX: ‘Instructional’, in the ‘Autumn’ section, is inspired by Allen Ginsberg. Which of Ginsberg’s poems is it responding to or mimicking?
TN: ‘Instructional’ was inspired by Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, which is an ode to hippie culture, the ways in which the hippies and Beat poets sought meaning in an age of gross change, and often committed harm against themselves in moments of desperation. He begins with the famous quote: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked’, and he ends the poem using the word ‘who’ as a refrain: ‘who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes’, ‘who were expelled from the academies’, ‘who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine’. In ‘Instructional’ I use ‘who’ and ‘whose’ as a refrain or at the beginning of each stanza.
MX: Staying with ‘Instructional’, the ‘epiphyte’ simile and the ‘perpetual flame’ metaphor that follows are exquisitely apt. How would you describe your poet-self’s relationship to simile and metaphor?
No one knows you’ve been a migrant before stamping your
passport, like an epiphyte your roots are grounded in no soil, your
homesickness a perpetual flame that knows no quenching
your tongue does not belong to you, it belongs to homesick
brothers
TN: Strangely, I hardly ever read ‘Instructional’ when I give readings, and so reading that particular stanza again hit me hard because it’s been a while since I actually wrote it. I find metaphors difficult. I feel my friends who studied English or Classics and were forced to read all the literary greats create more poetic metaphors, but I try my best. Most of the time, I struggle with a poem, and when I least expect it, a metaphor falls into my head.
MX: The poem ‘Swept Away’ references Operation Restore Order, as I learned from the glossary. It made me think that if I were a historian, I would use Agringada as material for my classes. There are so many entry points to history in this collection! Thank you for the numerous lessons.
TN: Thank you. A while ago, I shared on social media that I had wanted to be in the humanities, and I sometimes wonder what my life trajectory would have been like if I had followed that path. A friend of mine told me she felt my writing accomplishes most of the goals I had, so I guess there is serendipity there.
MX: Your poems are so varied in style, form, rhythm and more. What I feel is common to all of them is the tangible miniature details you bring to the surface. Reading the poems made me feel held by the hand, as a witness. There is a crystalline clarity across your work that makes being invited to witness feel warm, communal and pleasurable. Your use of so many languages heightens the sense of this invitation, this witnessing, this momentary oneness that reading fosters. And reading about women in many of the poems often made me smile. It is the way you detail them that really resonated with me. Have you always been an intentional observer or has your poetic practice made you one, intensified it?
TN: Thank you. Those are such kind words. I think I was always an observer, but then I think I was always a writer too. When I was in primary school, I wanted to be Roald Dahl. It may also be a symptom of introversion, when I first step into a room, I don’t immediately take centre stage, I sit back and observe. Something Gary Shteyngart said really resonated with me. Apparently when he was in preschool, his teacher told him he was too quiet. To which he responded, ‘I’m not here to participate, I’m only here to observe.’ I felt fully represented and understood in that statement.
MX: I found the glossary very useful. Are you a linguist? In how many languages do you communicate?
TN: This question made me chuckle because when I was still starting to write Agringada I told my friend about the project, and everything I wanted to do with the dictionary entries and so on, and she asked me if I had studied linguistics, which was odd because we went to the same university, and she had studied linguistics, but I was never anywhere near her department. No, I have not studied linguistics formally, but I think I do have an affinity for languages. I like to look up the etymology of words and think about how languages impact each other. For instance, South Africans always joke about how ‘now’, ‘now now’ and ‘just now’ are all temporal descriptors, but it seems no one ever makes the link that it’s probably a direct translation of the isiZulu manje manje.
Strictly speaking I speak English and Shona, but broadly speaking I might sometimes gooi some isiXhosa into my speech. Unfortunately, going back to Zimbabwe after living in the Eastern Cape depleted my isiXhosa bundles. I’ve picked up some Sesotho and Setswana, but I can’t always tell which I’m using. I have the same issue with Ndebele and isiZulu, I understand better than I speak. I think I also have five words of French, six words of Kiswahili, one word of Lingala and some basic Afrikaans in me. At some point I taught myself to speak Spanish, when I was going through my Latin American literature, phase but then I had no one to speak to, so I have maybe ten words of Spanish left in me. My problem is that I start learning and, if no one forces me to continue, I stop learning. But my goal is that one day I’ll be a real polyglot.
MX: How and why does poetry matter to you? Please respond to this question with a poem.
TN: You would think I’d know the answer to this question, but I don’t. I’d like to say poetry gives me a voice, but then I think prose gives me a voice as well. Perhaps I like the freedom and constraints of the formalism in poetry? Perhaps it is the emotional charge of a poem, that in thirty words you can destroy a person with what would take chapters in a novel, which reminds me of a quote by Adrienne Rich, ‘Someone is writing a poem. Words are being set down in a force field. It’s as if the words themselves have magnetic charges; they veer together or in polarity, they swerve against each other.’
Amiri breathes jazz into me &
my dry bones remember to breathe
(inhale)
this is our choreopoem
this is our rage made valid
our words bear testament
this is my ancestral song
speaking to our futures
(exhale)
MX: So, how have your parents responded to your undeniable success as a poet? Do they see it? Do they read your poetry or engage with it in one way or another?
TN: I would say my mother is one of my biggest supporters now, and she is quite proud whenever I go off on a residency or my work is listed for an award. She engages vigorously with my short fiction, but she’s yet to read the copy of Agringada I gave her. I think the opening poem was too much for her. But I do remember she was quite touched when ‘in seventy-six’ was the runner up for the DALRO Poetry Prize.
My father apparently read Agringada in one sitting, which is impressive, because poetry collections are difficult to read sequentially. However, he is still waiting for me to write and publish ‘a proper novel’. He is one of those serious intellectuals who enjoys Walter Rodney and the like, so perhaps my poetry and short fiction present a difficult entry point for him.
MX: Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. If there is a question you expected me to ask and didn’t, please share it and then answer it.
TN: Can’t think of any right now.
MX: Let’s end this interview with the poem of fourteen words that ends Agringada.
Curse is
you will never fit in
Blessing is
you will never want to
~~~
- Makhosazana Xaba is a Patron. Xaba is an author, translator, and poet. She has written four poetry collections, these hands, Tongues of their Mothers, The Alkalinity of Bottled Water and The Art of Waiting for Tales. Her debut short story collection, Running and other stories, was a joint winner of the 2014 South African Literary Awards and Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award. Xaba has edited several books, including Our Word, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000–2015, Queer Africa: Selected Stories (with Karen Martin) and Noni Jabavu: A Stranger at Home (with Athambile Masola). Her latest book is Izimpabanga Zomhlaba, an isiZulu translation of The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon.
