Origins of this Blogging: a Rediscovery of an old Logging
Yesterday, while shredding old papers in the garage, I came across an exercise book that contains notes I wrote in 1990 (in Harare and Mazvihwa). I ended up getting distructed, amazed to find out why I like blogging, because I have always written (journaled) about anything, from the music playing on the radio to my thoughts about writing and publishing. I remember that the dual life between Harare and Mazvihwa always brought many opportunities to write, but as the 1990 notes in the exercise book show, I was satisfied just writing the thoughts, without worrying about what they would amount to. The book is a wealth of ideas.
Here is an entry I made at 10:10 pm on April 11, 1990:
Concerning Typing: it is very expensive. Great expenses. There are a lot of typing specialists in Harare City, but most charge $5.00 per page. This means that if I'm going to have Zvinonditadzisa Kuzvara typed, the expenses will go up to $1670.00. You see! Which means that even a 32-page story can cost $160.00! Well, this is what is meant by life....
For many pages, the writing shows that my main concern in 1990 was to find a typist. I had all these Shona novels and English poems I wanted typed, but there were these expenses. With most having been returned by publishers, including one that had been returned by a Harare publisher two days after I submitted it, I then decided not to submit anything until it was typed, following the advice of an author who believed in me, Vitalis Nyawaranda. I actively started looking for a typewriter, and I bought a used Remington, after someone said Marechera had used a Remington.
I can see that I would have appreciated blogging much earlier, because writing about anything seemed to excite me, and each moment of my life was always interpreted through writing. Anyway, I am glad I found this excercise book,pages yellow with age, and there are quite a few good ideas about stories.
Reflecting on Zvinonditadzisa Kuzvara: I still have the handwritten manuscript somewhere in the house. I remember it is told from the point of view of an eighteen-year-old man who suffers at the hands of a pregnant sister-in-law. In the book I was experimenting with stream-of-consciousness and a chapter division similar to the one used by William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury. The book deals to some extent with the Zimbabwe Diaspora,since the sister-in-law has relatives in the United States, who she brags about each time she regrets her decision to marry into the narrator's family.
The novel luxuriantly deals with the theme of poligamy, showing the complications of life it causes, but veers to the theme of children in a Shona context; touches too on bride price and infertility. All in the kind of Shona Chiundura Moyo was using, but at some point in the writing, perhaps after page 300, I switched to English. I felt good,calling it an experiment,which my mentor, Nyawaranda, first praised, but later discouraged when I mentioned that I wanted the book published by any of them: the Literature Bureau, Longman, College Press, and others, whose doors I knocked frequently then. The manuscript was never published and life went on....
About the typewriter: I became famous for owning it in my Glen View neighbourhood, where a young woman paid me $2.00 per page to type letters to her man somewhere in Norway.[Beginning of the fictional phase of this entry] Those letters, private emotion made public, were a prelude to what would become of Zimbabwe and its Diaspora. Those letters, they were tears seeking an audience. Of the typewriter's keys, whose very clucking was like the sound of the tears dropping on the compost of memory. She wanted him to write back, to see that, see, she was paying someone to type the letters that contained the most private of her feelings: I don't sleep thinking about you. Yesterday a car almost hit me as I walked, picturing us both in Olso. We were walking arm-in-arm, waving like celebrities at all the people there. Snow was all over, and we were talking about how we had never seen snow back home. Then when you waved at another woman, a blond, who smiled back at you...and you were beginning to walk away from me, the horn of a car startled me and woke me up from my reverie. The curses from the driver, whose words were all the "B's" and the "F's" that leave your ears bleeding, are now bruises on my heart, reminding me that life would be better were we together there....
So anyway, this exercise book, this early logging of mine, is a gem.
Here is an entry I made at 10:10 pm on April 11, 1990:
Concerning Typing: it is very expensive. Great expenses. There are a lot of typing specialists in Harare City, but most charge $5.00 per page. This means that if I'm going to have Zvinonditadzisa Kuzvara typed, the expenses will go up to $1670.00. You see! Which means that even a 32-page story can cost $160.00! Well, this is what is meant by life....
For many pages, the writing shows that my main concern in 1990 was to find a typist. I had all these Shona novels and English poems I wanted typed, but there were these expenses. With most having been returned by publishers, including one that had been returned by a Harare publisher two days after I submitted it, I then decided not to submit anything until it was typed, following the advice of an author who believed in me, Vitalis Nyawaranda. I actively started looking for a typewriter, and I bought a used Remington, after someone said Marechera had used a Remington.
I can see that I would have appreciated blogging much earlier, because writing about anything seemed to excite me, and each moment of my life was always interpreted through writing. Anyway, I am glad I found this excercise book,pages yellow with age, and there are quite a few good ideas about stories.
Reflecting on Zvinonditadzisa Kuzvara: I still have the handwritten manuscript somewhere in the house. I remember it is told from the point of view of an eighteen-year-old man who suffers at the hands of a pregnant sister-in-law. In the book I was experimenting with stream-of-consciousness and a chapter division similar to the one used by William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury. The book deals to some extent with the Zimbabwe Diaspora,since the sister-in-law has relatives in the United States, who she brags about each time she regrets her decision to marry into the narrator's family.
The novel luxuriantly deals with the theme of poligamy, showing the complications of life it causes, but veers to the theme of children in a Shona context; touches too on bride price and infertility. All in the kind of Shona Chiundura Moyo was using, but at some point in the writing, perhaps after page 300, I switched to English. I felt good,calling it an experiment,which my mentor, Nyawaranda, first praised, but later discouraged when I mentioned that I wanted the book published by any of them: the Literature Bureau, Longman, College Press, and others, whose doors I knocked frequently then. The manuscript was never published and life went on....
About the typewriter: I became famous for owning it in my Glen View neighbourhood, where a young woman paid me $2.00 per page to type letters to her man somewhere in Norway.[Beginning of the fictional phase of this entry] Those letters, private emotion made public, were a prelude to what would become of Zimbabwe and its Diaspora. Those letters, they were tears seeking an audience. Of the typewriter's keys, whose very clucking was like the sound of the tears dropping on the compost of memory. She wanted him to write back, to see that, see, she was paying someone to type the letters that contained the most private of her feelings: I don't sleep thinking about you. Yesterday a car almost hit me as I walked, picturing us both in Olso. We were walking arm-in-arm, waving like celebrities at all the people there. Snow was all over, and we were talking about how we had never seen snow back home. Then when you waved at another woman, a blond, who smiled back at you...and you were beginning to walk away from me, the horn of a car startled me and woke me up from my reverie. The curses from the driver, whose words were all the "B's" and the "F's" that leave your ears bleeding, are now bruises on my heart, reminding me that life would be better were we together there....
So anyway, this exercise book, this early logging of mine, is a gem.
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