Poetry Collection of Tendai R. Mwanaka

 

The Tunisian revolution.

 

It started with Mohamed Bouziz, gunning an unstoppable bullet with his death. He was 26, married with children. Had a university degree but couldn’t find employment. Had a market place, was a hawker, selling. Had his things confiscated by a woman police. He protested and she slapped him, the humiliation of it all! An Arab woman slapping an Arab man, is unthinkable? He tried to pursue the case with the authorities but they ignored his complaints. He committed suicide by electrocuting himself, the speaking protest, a tidy rhythm. This suicide started humming like winter metal. Tunisia exploded and Bennali was kicked out, creating debate leaf-shaped points across the Arab world....The Arab world: is now a boiling pot... One country after another, each, a long Moor’s hour from unriboning decades of dictatorships.

 

 

The Egyptian revolution

 

 

Young babies, young children, young people out welling, youngling, unwarping. Christians and Muslims taking us to the edge of intention and showing us what lies beyond doubt? Old men down warping, fathers and mothers. The Israeli press called them stray dogs. But the figures kept ballooning. It started with tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions... Cairo is bustling; a mass mortality horizon, Alexandria and Monsouri city are swamped. Tahrir, the liberation square is the hub of this monsoon chanting

 

“the nation wants the ouster of the regime.”

 

The day’s song is a lament drawn out like a final breath lost in the stars. Its millions wearing the country’s flag as if the pharaohs have thumped every other country at the CAF African nation’s cup to win it again. Jubilant, passionate, angry... It is a carnival atmosphere. It is a nation raising its bread, the symbol of its suffering and hunger. It is a nation crucifying effigies of its napoleon. It is a nation waving placards written with the fine point of their anger and pain

 

“Mubarak go to hell”

“America butt out”

“Tel Aviv is mourning”

“Mubarak leave-

we want to live.”

 

They name the forms of control, youths screaming for an open road to somewhere. Over 30 years of mis-governance, human rights abuses, curfews..., suffering. It is over 30 years in which America and Israel ruled by robot controlling Mubarak. Giving the top brass of army and security the loot of the 2 billion dollars, American taxpayer’s money: just to protect Israel. Israel would joke

 

”we have one person controlling 80 plus millions of enemies”

 

Now they have to face the 80 plus million enemies across its borders. Israel is a bubbling “spoilt” child, afraid, scared....

 

 

The Libyan war

 

 

Before even the first protest was drawn out, there were the killings for years and years. Gadaffi, the giraffe, that fringed phylactory-bound, son of a prophet has now taken the whole country into ransom, pelting his people with bullets, bombing whole towns into rubble, his needles of bullets pointing eastwards.

 

For many years he had guts and beauty, an intellect that despised the humanist pretensions of the west, its white-skinned predacity. He could smell the corruptions of empires, the annihilations of naked creatures. He was brother man to the revolutions, but now he is now being absorbed by his own medicine, the sulphuric acid melting into him. 

 

Praying for light and air- a darkness approaching he had never sensed before, he has developed a white finger. Now his western fingers, his white friends, are in the war, against him. Such ill-conceived wars are just what they usually need for the roar of that unreasonable action.

 

East is revolutionary, the uprising, the wars for towns, adding to strategic places? NATO( rather the: Not Asked To Overstay, organisation), the de-facto UN of the west, is at its games again, curving their own cake in Libya. They want the ouster of Gadaffi, bombing, as usual, innocent people and towns into rubble or collateral damage, that clever American coinage of terms...

 

Even though I don’t subscribe to NATO’s ulterior motives of invading other countries without a by-your -leave but 41 years under one dictator is far worse than NATO’s games minus those stupid killings. At least NATO won’t stay (overstay) for that long. It told us so! And we are always so stupid to believe?

 

But Gadaffi has to realise as soon as possible that a man who lacks the means to an end is headed towards a shapeless wilderness. That if you are a king, never undresses your minors. He should ask Mubarak, Bennali..? Now the modern pharaoh is bedridden, facing a death penalty, creating beautiful soap for us whilst Bennali enjoys Saudi’s banquets. Too bad!

 

Gadaffi should know that too often self-induced addictions to grand delusions cause a man to plot his own undoing. Ask the British, Soviet Union, Byzantine became Ottoman Turkey, Alexander the fool, and now America…

 

But NATO or Gadaffi answers, both are not the answers to Libya. The revolutionaries (NTC) might be the way to the answer. But, for most of us, the liberty to interpret, to think about it all is frightening. Is this new baby (NTC) a darling or a stranger?

 

The answer is: It should always be about the people….

 

 

The Ivory Coast war

 

Quattara and Gagbgo are the fighting gods. It’s the Ivorian phenomena, again and again. It’s the geometry found in the shape of their living. It happened in year 2000 and now it’s back again. It’s the fate they have always chosen and live in even though they know it could 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. After all, its one’s self that constructs the place he inhabits.

 

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 so sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick....

 

 

Tendai R. Mwanaka was born in Zimbabwe, in the remote eastern highlands district of Nyanga, in Mapfurira village. Left Nyanga for Chitungwiza city in 1994, and Tendai started exploring writing that year, when Tendai was barely twenty. My first book to be published, Voices from exile, a collection of poetry on Zimbabwe’s political situation and exile in South Africa, by Lapwing publications, Ireland, 2010. KEYS IN THE RIVER: Notes from a Modern Chimurenga, a novel of interlinked stories that deals with life in modern day Zimbabwe was published by Savant books and publications, USA 2012, found here; http://www.savantbooksandpublications.com/9780985250621.php. A book of creative non-fiction pieces, THE BLAME GAME, will be published by Langaa RPCIG( Cameroon 2013), a novel entitled, A DARK ENERGY will be published by Aignos publishing company( USA). Tendai was nominated for the Pushcart twice, 2008, 2010, commended for the Dalro prize 2008, Tendai was nominated and attended Caine African writing workshop, 2012. Published over  250 pieces of short stories, essays, memoirs, poems and visual art in over 150 magazines, journals, and anthologies in the following countries,  the USA , UK , Canada , South Africa, Zimbabwe, India , Mexico, Kenya, Cameroon, Italy , Ghana, Uganda, France , Zambia, Nigeria, Spain , Romania, Cyprus, Australia and New Zealand.