Becoming The Muse

Coffee With Zim Lit

If you were having coffee with me, I would welcome you to my tangle of words as per usual. Feel at home, put your feet up and grab a book to read.

They say most writers start off as readers and then transition from reading to writing. From my forays into the blogosphere, most bloggers have a history with books and literature… For research purposes, do let me know if you read books as a child and if it contributed or influenced your content creation journey in any way.

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that I was precocious reader and found adventures between the pages of a book. The child in me still has a penchant for epic fantasy with grand narratives while the adult in me wants the fantasy tempered with local lore, myths and traditions. They say if you want to read something and you cant find it you have to write it yourself… which interestingly has been a guiding philosophy to the things I share on my blog.

If you were having coffee with me, I would share with you the brief history of how our first generation of indigenous writers, were educated by missionaries under colonial administration and upon completion of their studies either became priests or teachers. Their experiences are reflected in their bodies of work which tended to have strong themes of morality, good values and preservation of the family unit. Their stories underlined a certain admiration and veneration of the European lifestyle.

One of Zimbabwe’s most iconoclastic authors is Dambudzo Marechera, regarded as a literary mad genius and intellectual anarchist who pushed the literature frontier. Marechera refused to conform to societal and colonial norms and exhibited an unorthodox behaviour; (subsequently orderded to attend counselling but refused to have his mind violated by psychiatry) friction with academic intuitions saw him expelled from local university and Oxford university.

The first and the only African to have won the Guardian Fiction Award in its 33 years of existence. They say the brightest candle burns the shortest and Marechera’s short life and incandescent writing made a profound impact in Zimbabwe’s literature scene with his works still serving in intellectual discourse and continues to posthumously inspire and influence Zimbabwean authors.

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that the history of African literature has many such authors; Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, whose writings were meant to break the shackles of colonialism and instil a sense of Pan-Africanism pride and identity.

African literature has come a long way and there’s a new generation of writers shaped and influenced by a different set of experiences and exposure with the world as a global village. People are opening up to a world of writing books without them having to be protest or social commentary but just a romance story, or just an action story, and a fantasy story…

If I ever write a book it will be just for that, any lessons or themes raised would be purely coincidental.

And on that writing note, if there about 50K words written on my blog; at 300 words per page, then my blog would translate to a 160 paged book… that’s a lot of writing so before you only consider a published author as a writer, consider what you are gatekeeping.

If you were having coffee with me I would tell you of another weird forecast, they say literature is a dying artform since people no longer read…. Well maybe once again we need to take back to the drawing board what we mean by “read”. The amount of social media posts, instant messages and blogs people consume would indicate otherwise, maybe its high time literature gets re-imagined.

Whats been happening in your neck of the woods? Do you think book readers are a dying breed?

~B

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