| Charles Mungoshi (Photo: goodreads.com) |
Book: The Milkman Doesn’t Only Deliver Milk
Author: Charles Mungoshi
Publisher: Baobab Book (1998)
ISBN: 1-77909-006-4
Poetry is the most obscure stroke on Charles Mungoshi’s life-size canvas.
The accomplished artist’s poetry anthology, “The Milkman Doesn’t Only Deliver Milk,” has not matched his prose and drama in popular reception.
However, one may say poetry runs the thread of the Mungoshi’s rendering of the human condition across genres.
The conversations of dislocation in his novels are the work of an elevated poetic consciousness.
His only poetry anthology, therefore, can well be the “director’s cut” to enable a peek into the materials which feed beauty and potency into his prose.
Not that the anthology does not stand on its own but it might be just as interesting to process the parts in terms of the whole.
While anthology features a varied range, most of poems converge around the absurdity of power games, the demise of the connected family, the finitude of time and the ultimate futility of everything.
Perhaps, Mungoshi’s principal attribute as a poet is an eye for the commonplace as materials for articulating the ironies of life.
While poetry is potentially the most personal literary statement, Mungoshi detaches himself from his personae and lets them roam at eccentric tangents.
He does not come across as the ideological interventionist, at least in the direct sense, although some of his messages are just as tapered.
“Letter to a Son,” for example, involves the reader in an intensely articulated case for family connectivity.
The poem is classic Mungoshi, the purveyor of family values, deployed with a verbal facility uniquely his own.
It is set in a conversational key in which a mother empties her heart to a son whom the city has swallowed from the orbit of family commitments.
The letter to a son who turns his back on his ailing father and helpless family in their time of utmost need is moving both for its desperation.
The uneasy relationship between parents and son, which goes by hesitant euphemisms, is evocative of Lucifer Mandengu in the earlier novel “Waiting for the Rain.”
“The Horn-player” succinctly asserts the autonomy of the artist, who unlike others morphing dispensations and dynasties with industrial implements and campaign rhetoric has apparently nothing to offer to “the cause” except the words in his heart.
That ushers us back to the fashionable debate as to where the artist should stand in the ideological scheme of things.
There is a danger in assigning artists roles in a political cause in that they may never pull their weight beyond the flaws of a particular movement, thereby ceding posterity for immediacy and compromising integrity for conformity.
By standing apart, Mungoshi’s horn-player can process the whole from the outside, rather than blend into a singular strand and seeing the world from one ideological prism.
The transcendent function of art here suggested recalls Yeats’s “Fiddler of Dooney” at the gate of heaven: “When we come at the end of time,/ To Peter sitting in state,/ He will smile on the three old spirits,/ But call me first through the gate.”
“Christmas,” set in neon-lit First Street as festive rites are flaring up, reveals something of the poet’s spiritual strivings. Mungoshi, for his indigenous mystical wiring, struggles to process Christmas imagery, like the voice of the Magi in “Ariel Poems.”
He anticipates Christ reproving scepticism on Judgement, “I came but you did not recognise me,” but cannot understand why the divine must be draped in the foreign imagery of “imitation fir trees/ snow-sledge-pulling reindeer/ silent feather-weight bells/ heavily laden/ heavily clothed cheerfully bearded Santa Claus.”
The apparent conflict between cultural nationalism and Christianity is a recurrent concern in African literature, with erroneous racial profiling and cold scorn often trained on the latter.
Of course, it will always be pertinent to weigh into perspective the historical fact that Christ’s universal claims antedate racial modification and imperialist manipulation.
The precise setting of the reproof cited by Mungoshi, “I came but you did not recognise me,” is not Christmas festivities but daily encounters with the hungry, rejected, disabled, oppressed and least esteemed for our communities because love not ceremony, and mercy not sacrifice, is the language of Christ.
In “Sitting on the Balcony,” Mungoshi has apparently arrived to the future and found nothing. From the balcony, a vantage point to the strivings of those whom age allows the benefit of optimism.
Nihilistic Mungoshi says of a little boy tracking the future: “I am afraid the stars say/ your road leads to another/ balcony, just like this one: where you will sit/ fingering a bottle you have bought/ without any intention to drink.”
The pessimistic outlook flows into the next poem, “Two Photographs.” The snapshots of time contrast an optimistic teenager eager to experience life beyond limiting structures and a thirty-year old who is “beginning to settle uncomfortably into the torn landscape of these times.”
“Location Miracle” is a sweet and sour story about Liza, a girl who loses an eye in a childhood accident and worries herself to “beyond the point it is legal to worry anymore.” A disabled young man comes along, tagging her into a friendship jam-packed with stories and laughter.
By his side, she gathers herself into the former whole, by his side, and learns to “shake down lots of stars from the sky” with her laughter. Alas, one day she leaves the young man who ushered her back to herself to entice another man with her star-shaking laugh!
Beyond the rediscovery and betrayal, though, Mungoshi shares the story of life – life that springs forth from the inside to refresh and empower the outside.
Who still begrudges the new generation of motivational writers their mantle, with so many downcast, waiting for that word to unplug the dormant spring of life, that passcode to the life of the soul?
“The Lonely People” suggests that the higher one goes, the colder it becomes. It is a poem about the lonely people who have the loudest laugh in the crowd, throw frequent parties, are chairmen more than one organisation and wave to other people from high balconies.
It is a poem about the laboured displays which must be sustained when essential connectivity is lost.
“Remember Who Your Enemy Is” is another fascinating study of power. To collect subordinates into a fistful, the boss plays his workers each against the other and retreats to his comfort zone.
“Satisfied that each of us/ watched over his neighbour/ with suspicion and hate/ enough to kill,/ the boss withdrew into his god-like remoteness./ Where he controls our smiles/ with the amount of our cheques, and reigns over two dozen enemies. Fighting under the same banner.”
After Ben Jonson’s classic tragedy, “Sejanus: His Fall” the poem is an astute account of mediocre political and industrial institutions where whispering and eavesdropping are greater requirements for survival than talent and integrity.
“What Are You Going to Do Now, Virginia?” aims a diss at a prostitute with whom age is finally is catching up. Instead of aging gracefully, she becomes an awkward patchwork of cosmetics and becomes the object of mockery for the women whose husbands she routinely snatched in her heyday.
“You have become/ a public monument, Virginia/ Your mysteries have been forwarded/ to the local marketplace. You have become/ public property, Virginia,” the persona mocks the expired seductress.
The poem, with Capleton’s “Good in Her Clothes” for the flipside, is a reminder for the sisters out there that dignity is royalty. Those who desacralise the exclusively marital rite of sex, downgrading it to a public spectacle, set themselves up for cruel days.
The poetry anthology is among a host of local gems which went out of circulation with the folding of Baobab Books, plunging a whole generation of Zimbabwean literature into an extinction phase.
Far South asks local publishers for the umpteenth time to retrieve endangered texts into formats of the day. Zimbabwe’s cultural strivings are priceless.