Shaping Up is more personal and intimate than the author's previous works. The poems and images reflect a period while he was living outside of Zimbabwe, in South Africa. The immigrant experience gives the work a more personal, closed, abstracted feel driven by loneliness of the exilitic condition. Living in the element, uninhibited and careless can help deal with confounding, controversial issues more easily, this theme can be dissected from the drawings to do with sex, sexuality and gender issues. The line breaks, whirls, thins out, sometimes is bold, sometimes is barely there, thus the drawings straddle the tenuousness of time and life.
“To say he loved her, or that he loves his parents, don’t get him anywhere closer to how he felt about her. He felt he was a part of her. He came from her. He wouldn’t know how not to love her. He doesn’t even use the term; “I love myself”, to describe the way he feels about himself. “I love myself”, could only be a polarity of, “I don’t love myself”. How he feels about himself can’t be put into words. How he loved his mother couldn’t be put into words like, “Oh yeh, I love her”. But that’s all that he could only say to estimate how he felt. She was his home.” Home is a place in ourselves where we are happy with ourselves, where we find peace with ourselves, where we are satisfied, fulfilled... The important theme coursing through all the stories in the novel, Finding a way home, is that we have to make the journey to find our homes, we have to find the path, and start walking in that path.
Pearls of Awareness contains poems of lyrical pleasure and spiritual upliftment. Its themes of ego-less awareness and awakening wisdom borrows from Buddhist mythical and mysterious teachings, African traditions and Christian Biblical teachings about the interconnectedness of all life, transcending boundaries of self and other, human, tree or animal, the living, the (un)placeable, the dead. The speaker's lyrical insights are comforting, even when mysterious, and because of their tone of tranquility and faith, eventually the listener will reach full understanding. Its strengths are its assured pacing of the poems, luminous imagery and wise insights, which brings clarity without explaining, making it work both as a spiritual message and enjoyable lyric.
Revolutionary as a way of solving problems bedevilling our place under the sun, revolutions we witnessed in The Middle East, revolutionary in writing, text, textiness of text, the poetic genre, attitude of mind, ideas, living. Poems in Revolution take the experimental approach as they deal with the above struggle issues and many others. They go further in bringing into focus how our revolutions have not delivered us across the line, and how to get across the line.
This book comprises 19 creative non-fiction pieces and essays centred around the topics of language, thought, art and existence seen through the prism of practising artist in contemporary Africa. The collection continues with Zimbabwe’s Tendai Mwanaka’s creative non-fiction ideology of presenting non-fiction in a creative, fresh, easy reading, simple language. With most of the essays driven by personal stories, the author ably renders them accessible to a wide spectrum of readers from the scholarly to the journalistic and the general. The pieces are grouped according to the topics, with the language essays starting the book, followed by thought, existential, and art essays. In tune with the adage the personal is political, Mwanaka lets the personal drive these essays as he tries to investigate and conversationally navigate his thoughts, beliefs, feelings and experience on language, existence and art. This is an invaluable contribution to the academic establishment, social theorists, linguists, literary theorists, journalists, activists and the general readership.
The Blame Game is a cycle of creative non-fiction pieces, pulling the readers through the politics of modern day Zimbabwe. Like in any game, there are players in this game, opposing each other. The game is told through the eyes of one of the players, thus it is subjective. It centres on truthfully trying to find who to blame for Zimbabwe's problems, and how to undo all these problems. Finding who to blame should be the beginning for the search of solutions. It encourages talking to each other, maybe about the wrongs we have done to each other, and genuinely trying to embrace and forgive each other. In trying to undo the problems in Zimbabwe, it also offers insight or solutions on a larger platform - Africa: particularly South Africa; that it might learn from other African countries that have imploded before it, how to solve its own problems.
Zimbabwe: The Urgency of Now, is a follow-up creative non-fiction book to Zimbabwe: The Blame Game. It goes further than The Blame Game and focuses on Zimbabwe in the GNU entity, the 2013 elections, post elections and post GNU Zimbabwe, and Now. They are a myriad number of problems, issues, limitations that still unbundles Zimbabwes push towards multiparty democracy, social justice, economic sanity and growth, and The Urgency of Now focuses on the solutions to these. It also tackles the land reform in South Africa, how this could be its biggest problem going forward. It goes further and tackles the larger Africa problem toward democracy, growth, stability and unity, and why the progress towards the United States of Africa has been moribund.
Poems in Revolution Recollected and New Struggle Poems deal with, among other issues, the North African uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and intersects into the Middle East conflicts in Syria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the never ending conflict between Israel and Palestine. These poems previously came out under Revolution: Struggle Poems, published in 2015, and the rest of the poems are from my latest poetry collection I am currently working on entitled Disobedience Poems. Tendai Rinos Mwanaka is a Zimbabwean publisher, editor, mentor, thinker, literary artist, visual artist and musical artist with over 40 books published. He writes in English and Shona.
Poetry is fragments of music thrown into the air. The primary job and aim of a poet is to create these musical notes, to play these musical notes, and the wind will take these fragment notes, sounds, musics into the ears of listeners. Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology, Volume 2 is one of those winds among many others. As we all are aware of, when the wind travels it has no boundaries, it collects, it deposits, it mixes things up; you never know where that leaf you see the wind carrying will eventually be deposited, is there another wind, another element that is going to move that leaf to another place... We firmly believe it is a good wind. It will be able to push our poetry making in Zimbabwe into other frontiers. Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology, Volume 2 continues from where we left off with the first Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology we created in 2016. In this Volume 2, we have 77 poems from 30 poets and translators, which include among others; experienced poets, academic poets, street poets, emergent poets, beginning poets, all telling stories associated with what all these poets refer to as home, that is, Zimbabwe. It is an ongoing debate on what is Zimbabwe, what we want our Zimbabwe to be socially, culturally, politically…, thus we allowed every opinion space in this anthology, whether us editors agree with them or not. We have poets tackling issues to do with poetry, writing in general, art, place, identity, tradition, struggle, culture, gender, collective understanding, religion, individual, human rights and love, among others.
When Escape Becomes the only Lover is a continuation and crystallization of issues dealt with in A Portrait of Defiance. The poet deals with a broad subject matter, love in all its forms, spirituality; this spirituality is individual it is the artist’s spiritual world. He deals with dreams, voice, word, numbers, poet’s vocation, wars, language, etc… He is the prophet of his dreams, his world, his future… There is strong experimentation and innovativeness in the writing, in the text, in form, in style, in content matter, the writer is a discoverer, every horizon is a life horizon. There is the dissecting of that space where art criticism meets art mimesis, and this space is offered as the future of art criticism. The storyteller refuses to die thus the collection proffers escape as the ultimate lover who can help us deal with the insanities of our time.
Tendai Rinos Mwanaka wrote letters to Robert Mugabe, Constantine Chiwenga, Morgan Tsvangirai, The Zimbabweans, Emerson Mnangagwa, Nelson Chamisa, The Police, and in between infused the letters with deeply literary and psychoanalytic essays on the motivations of political players in Zimbabwe. Using this nonfiction literary form, the letter writing form, to protest against Robert Mugabe and the Mugabeism the letters were initially written to protest against Mugabe's continuing clinging to power, the collection has been expanded to include other issues related to Zimbabwe society. As the country moves towards a better multiparty democracy if there is change in thinking in these very important facets shaping Zimbabwe such as constitutionalism and rule of law, change and devolution of government, developmental agenda, and freedom of expression and association.
Notes from a Modern Chimurenga is an extensive collection of Zimbabwes political struggle short stories. It covers: the modern Chimurenga period from the formation of tribal trust lands (The Tortoise); the liberation wars (Zanzibar, Eating Whilst Running); the Gukurahundi massacre (Gukurahundi); the late 1990s democratic struggles pitting ZANUPF against the MDC (The List, Mbuya Chitungwiza, Operation Murambatsvina, Notes from Mai Mujurus Breast, Breaking the Silence); the individual struggle within this democratic struggle (Mushazhike, Nyadzonya); the resultant migration and exilitic stories (Limpopo Bones, Germinston 1401); the corruption (Nyakasikana, Tree of the Year); the mismanagement of the country, the beatings and killings (Leonard, Karidza, Raising A Cain again); and the continuing democratic struggles.
Best New African Poets 2016 Anthology has 251 pieces from 131 poets and artists in 7 languages (English, Portuguese, French, Afrikaans, Shona, Yoruba and Kiswahili) from 24 African countries and Diasporas, with South African and Angolan poets dominating the list. We also have a healthy number of poets from Uganda, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Moçambique, Ghana, and Nigeria. The nationalist sense is the one that most predominates with its pink, blue and gray tints that are expressed in parallel with existentialist perspectives that in turn go hand in hand with love, desire, hankering, joy, sensuality that transports us to epic, lyrical, utopian contexts without being lost in fantasy, they are artistic lines sometimes with traditional and sometimes more innovative touches. However, in contrast and to a lesser extent, almost as if there were resistant and with restraint we also find desolation, pain, negation that can be so sweet or so bitter that it allows the imagination to stop in a lament or end in resignation.
When Escape Becomes the only Lover is a continuation and crystallization of issues dealt with in A Portrait of Defiance. The poet deals with a broad subject matter, love in all its forms, spirituality; this spirituality is individual it is the artist’s spiritual world. He deals with dreams, voice, word, numbers, poet’s vocation, wars, language, etc… He is the prophet of his dreams, his world, his future… There is strong experimentation and innovativeness in the writing, in the text, in form, in style, in content matter, the writer is a discoverer, every horizon is a life horizon. There is the dissecting of that space where art criticism meets art mimesis, and this space is offered as the future of art criticism. The storyteller refuses to die thus the collection proffers escape as the ultimate lover who can help us deal with the insanities of our time.
From 2015 to 2023 we have been able to issue out, yearly, an anthology of Africa poets, through 9 years of publishing this beautiful anthology of the best contemporary African poets and in the process we have published and archived over 1000 African poets. And this year without fail we offer you Best New African Poets 2023 Anthology which comprises several dozens of African poets from the Portuguese, English and French speaking African countries. We expect the anthology to continue into another decade but also to seed into other forms of poetic expressions starting from next year. We intend to work on Best New African Poets International Festival of the Arts, an event that will bring together all these poets we have been able to publish the last 9 years to showcase their talent in a week of festivities in Harare, Zimbabwe. This year's anthology has poems that cover the usual gamut of issues: love, unrequited feelings, relationships, death, poetry making, politics, and we were excited to see Mashigo tackling the ongoing Israel/Hamas war, and the ill-treatment of the Palestinian people for generations under the Israeli government; culture, religion, spirituality, identity, belonging, memory, individuality and all sorts of other existential dilemmas that the young African poets deal with day to day.
Poetry is fragments of music thrown into the air. The primary job and aim of a poet is to create these musical notes, to play these musical notes, and the wind will take these fragment notes, sounds, musics into the ears of listeners. Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology, Volume 2 is one of those winds among many others. As we all are aware of, when the wind travels it has no boundaries, it collects, it deposits, it mixes things up; you never know where that leaf you see the wind carrying will eventually be deposited, is there another wind, another element that is going to move that leaf to another place... We firmly believe it is a good wind. It will be able to push our poetry making in Zimbabwe into other frontiers. Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology, Volume 2 continues from where we left off with the first Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology we created in 2016. In this Volume 2, we have 77 poems from 30 poets and translators, which include among others; experienced poets, academic poets, street poets, emergent poets, beginning poets, all telling stories associated with what all these poets refer to as home, that is, Zimbabwe. It is an ongoing debate on what is Zimbabwe, what we want our Zimbabwe to be socially, culturally, politically, thus we allowed every opinion space in this anthology, whether us editors agree with them or not. We have poets tackling issues to do with poetry, writing in general, art, place, identity, tradition, struggle, culture, gender, collective understanding, religion, individual, human rights and love, among others.
Peace of the Senses: How to Fight the FAGS is a collection of interlinked photographs that deals with the human story in several existential perspectives, especially how we find joy and happiness in difficult circumstances in life. Thus the images in this book celebrate human life, makes funny of difficult situations we go through. There is an element of the comedian in the photos, and it sometimes would create huge howls of laughter, sometimes chuckles and smiles. We go with the adage laughter is the best medicine in this work, and I believe this creates the peace of the senses, as the title presupposes. A set of common themes and philosophical questions permeates the book, bringing the narrative together as an author’s self-interrogation through invented others. Detecting the thematic threads whilst paying attention to the differences requires one to experience the book both horizontally and vertically, following a narrative that seems as much widening as deepening.
The first thing you will meet in this collection is experimentation and innovativeness in the writing. Poets should be scientists by experimenting with forms, styles, with subject matter too, they should continuously try to find new ways of writing, to problematicise what we have always taken for granted. The second issue is how we understand and critically dissect that point where art criticism and actual art can meet in the poetic form. The third issue is how irreverently the poet treates issues to do with the meaning of words, what words are, how he creates new words, what numbers are, the state of voice, language, thoughts, dreams, perspectives, life, race, death, dreams, spirituality, love etc… The fourth issue is the storytelling tradition that is strong in this collection; the poet is saying poets are also storytellers, who tell a story in condensed form with depth of thought and feeling. The fifth important aspect is defiance. The poet refuses to settle on anything, to accept anything, he is a literary rebel with language, no subject is taboo. A Portfolio of Defiance defiantly looks at the world before voice and the world after voice, and the worlds in between. What will human beings be without voice? Even nothingness has a voice!
Logbook written by a drifter, is a cycle of interlinked poems that deal with life, spirituality, language, philosophy, love and relationships. A main theme are relationships which have changed the character. Those which the character doesn’t know how to deal with; which have make the character into a wreck, emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually: he is in a small space. This collection encourages us to keep those spaces, spaces of the drift, until we have faced our challenges, after all sometimes drifting is all we can do!
Despite the current economic and political situation in our country, poets, writers, artists, and other creatives have defied the odds and continued to churn their works and submit to produce this marvelous anthology. This eighth installment continues the tradition of giving new writers the platform to shine and to the seasoned writers, a shebeen to meet again and prolong the tradition. We hope you continue to read and follon the Zimbolicious anthology series.
Keys in the River: New and Collected Stories, is a cycle of stories about life, love and spirituality, told as if the reader were sitting and listening to neighbors and friends talking about life. Some stories are tender, even comic; in others, tragedy and outrage lurk. The stories share a common thread, a noble stance in the struggle to find love, freedom, completeness, humanness and satisfaction.
My work takes the nature of interactive, collaborative and multidisciplinary. I work across several art fields, including among others literary (fictions, novels, essays poetry, play, short stories, songs...), musical (composition, singing, reciting, mbira, marimba, keyboards, a little guitar...), and visual (drawings, paintings, photography, collages, mixed media, installation etc...) I am interested in connection, convergence, community and cooperation, following disparate sometimes disfigured experiences, seeing how they can come together or shy away from each other to create new wholes. The baobab trees are ancient trees, some might be thousands years old, imagine the people who have stayed in these dwellings, who have ate the fruits of these trees, who have used its leaves as relish(we create mashed okra relish with baobab leaves), the ailments treated by its buck....every part of this succulent tree is useful. In this photo journey I learned a lot more about these beautiful souls: they have a tendency to create musical lines, mostly linear, it's like one tone starting it, fading and letting the next tone to take over and this will fade and let another tone to take over, such that you can see the lines, how they conjoin to create music beyond human understanding. And most of the Baobabs, I realized, inhabit the same place in numbers, and usually they are on high grounds, like Gods who love elevated dwellings, and they look down upon other small humans (small trees, humans etc...), but there are also some singular baobabs that inhabit lower grounds and most of these are solitary and from my memory growing up here, these don't bear fruits. And whilst I was photographing the Baobabs several story strands in my head converged around one far much more important issue, the issue of Climate Change and Global Warming. In Registers of Loss I encourage working together as human beings to arrest Global warming and climate change the way the baobabs work together to communicate in linear notes, or in community thoughts.
Don is the only child of a happy family full of love, but it does not last. At 6 years old Don’s parents are burned in a fire through arson, and suspects his father’s brother is the culprit. As the family fights over his father's wealth nobody wants anything to do with Don, particularly the Uncle whom he suspects of arson and ends up taking most of his father’s wealth. After a difficult upbringing in orphanages and living with an abusive old man Don starts working as an agent in Central Investigations Organisation, Zimbabwe’s security intelligence organisation. Despite this apparent success Don never deals with the existential dilemmas he has as a result of his childhood. He becomes a loner, he doesn't believe in love, marriage, or happiness... until he meets Lilian. Soon after he is called into the president’s office to cover up an extramarital affair. When a political rival of the president, the corrupt defence minister, ‘bones’ gets wind of the cover up and unsuccessfully tries to blackmail Don something terrible happens and Don becomes thrown back into the darkness. Straddling literary genres this novel explores themes related to family, love, politics, life and existence. It is the story of a man pushed to breaking point and how that, inevitably, impacts society.
A Conversation, A Contact has 22 fiction pieces around themes to do with political struggle, love relationships, heartbreaks and the resulting breakdowns, dreams, folklores, life, spirituality, anger, hate, grief, and all sorts of other human breaths.
This collection has 60 poems that tackle spirituality from different perspectives as they also tackle day- to-day activities of the protagonists, from love, truth and lies, what is right or wrong, politics, death, existence, growing up stories, memories, gender and sexuality, what beauty is, etc. And in all these poems there is the search for our beginning (where we came from) to find the path to here (where we are) and what this here represents. A conscious thread runs through and weaves these worlds into some form of religion, an individual spirituality.
Shaping Up is more personal and intimate than the author's previous works. The poems and images reflect a period while he was living outside of Zimbabwe, in South Africa. The immigrant experience gives the work a more personal, closed, abstracted feel driven by loneliness of the exilitic condition. Living in the element, uninhibited and careless can help deal with confounding, controversial issues more easily, this theme can be dissected from the drawings to do with sex, sexuality and gender issues. The line breaks, whirls, thins out, sometimes is bold, sometimes is barely there, thus the drawings straddle the tenuousness of time and life.
It Is Not About Me: Diaries 2010-2011, is not about the diarist, but provides snapshots of life in Zimbabwe over the 2010-2011 period and during the early years of the Government of National Unity of Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T), Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF government and the smaller MDC-N of Welshman Ncube. 90 incisive diaries cover a full year of grappling with Zimbabwe's slippery politics: the broken economy, the changing social landscape, a moribund culture, spiritual and physical poverty, unrequited love, reading, writing, the condition of the artist and the art of diarizing.
Vote rigging, voter apathy, intimidations, biased reporting, hubristic political leaders, political gerrymandering, a confused world, and a tired and timid electorate: add to this the decay or death of every governance system or structure in Zimbabwe alongside an economy that is all but dead. These are the issues addressed in this poetry collection Mad Bob Republic. Is there an end to Zimbabwes problems? The poet contributes to ongoing discourses on the country.
This book comprises 19 creative non-fiction pieces and essays centred around the topics of language, thought, art and existence seen through the prism of practising artist in contemporary Africa. The collection continues with Zimbabwe’s Tendai Mwanaka’s creative non-fiction ideology of presenting non-fiction in a creative, fresh, easy reading, simple language. With most of the essays driven by personal stories, the author ably renders them accessible to a wide spectrum of readers from the scholarly to the journalistic and the general. The pieces are grouped according to the topics, with the language essays starting the book, followed by thought, existential, and art essays. In tune with the adage the personal is political, Mwanaka lets the personal drive these essays as he tries to investigate and conversationally navigate his thoughts, beliefs, feelings and experience on language, existence and art. This is an invaluable contribution to the academic establishment, social theorists, linguists, literary theorists, journalists, activists and the general readership.
The first thing you will meet in this collection is experimentation and innovativeness in the writing. Poets should be scientists by experimenting with forms, styles, with subject matter too, they should continuously try to find new ways of writing, to problematicise what we have always taken for granted. The second issue is how we understand and critically dissect that point where art criticism and actual art can meet in the poetic form. The third issue is how irreverently the poet treates issues to do with the meaning of words, what words are, how he creates new words, what numbers are, the state of voice, language, thoughts, dreams, perspectives, life, race, death, dreams, spirituality, love etc… The fourth issue is the storytelling tradition that is strong in this collection; the poet is saying poets are also storytellers, who tell a story in condensed form with depth of thought and feeling. The fifth important aspect is defiance. The poet refuses to settle on anything, to accept anything, he is a literary rebel with language, no subject is taboo. A Portfolio of Defiance defiantly looks at the world before voice and the world after voice, and the worlds in between. What will human beings be without voice? Even nothingness has a voice!
The Blame Game is a cycle of creative non-fiction pieces, pulling the readers through the politics of modern day Zimbabwe. Like in any game, there are players in this game, opposing each other. The game is told through the eyes of one of the players, thus it is subjective. It centres on truthfully trying to find who to blame for Zimbabwes problems, and how to undo all these problems. Finding who to blame should be the beginning for the search of solutions. It encourages talking to each other, maybe about the wrongs we have done to each other, and genuinely trying to embrace and forgive each other. In trying to undo the problems in Zimbabwe, it also offers insight or solutions on a larger platform Africa: particularly South Africa; that it might learn from other African countries that have imploded before it, how to solve its own problems.
Notes from a Modern Chimurenga is an extensive collection of Zimbabwes political struggle short stories. It covers: the modern Chimurenga period from the formation of tribal trust lands (The Tortoise); the liberation wars (Zanzibar, Eating Whilst Running); the Gukurahundi massacre (Gukurahundi); the late 1990s democratic struggles pitting ZANUPF against the MDC (The List, Mbuya Chitungwiza, Operation Murambatsvina, Notes from Mai Mujurus Breast, Breaking the Silence); the individual struggle within this democratic struggle (Mushazhike, Nyadzonya); the resultant migration and exilitic stories (Limpopo Bones, Germinston 1401); the corruption (Nyakasikana, Tree of the Year); the mismanagement of the country, the beatings and killings (Leonard, Karidza, Raising A Cain again); and the continuing democratic struggles.
THE TRICK IS TO KEEP BREATHING: Covid 19 Stories From African and North American Writers, Vol 3, features 2 essays, 5 stories and 64 poems from 32 poets, writers and academicians from North America and Africa, writers residing in these among other countries; The USA, Canada, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, The Gambia, Ghana, Malawi.., surrounding the grate, telling stories of resilience and triumph as they dealt with Covid 19 and its several mutations over the past 3 years. Humans are connection beings and one of the most fulfilling ways they do so is through sharing stories. It's time we surround the fire, warming ourselves as we tell the stories of our humanness and resilience, stories of triumph, stories to release unrequited pain, anger and grief, stories of loss, stories that will act as continuing breath....
Despite the current economic and political situation in our country, poets, writers, artists, and other creatives have defied the odds and continued to churn their works and submit to produce this marvelous anthology. This eighth installment continues the tradition of giving new writers the platform to shine and to the seasoned writers, a shebeen to meet again and prolong the tradition. We hope you continue to read and follon the Zimbolicious anthology series.
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