Writers and Their Special Readers
People are perhaps tired of hearing that I started writing at the age of 13 (It's in my most commonly quoted bio); but I did, and my main influence was Aaron Chiundura Moyo, whose novel Ziva Kwawakabva we were reading at school. We even performed it in inter-schoolscompetitions; it was amazing to know that the stories we were enjoying were actually written by people like us, so I decided to write my own novel, Sara Nepurezha, which was set in my village, Mototi. What drew me to the story was the familiarity of what I created, the anchoring of the story in a specific place. It was magical to send my characters to Runde to bathe, or to let them climb Chisiya and Chigorira hills. But most importantly, writing about my school, Mototi Primary helped me visualize the characters, give them roles that were relatable to me and to people in other villages and beyond. I knew the story had touched my heart, following all the places I had visited, such as Zvishavane, Masvingo and Harare.
In fact, the main character was fashioned out of someone I knew, who had grown up poor, but hardworking, who then had found an opportunity to go to the city to find a job, make money and lead a happy life; yet, consistent with what I had read in my idol's novels, I had to make the protagonist forget about the village and decide not to return home for a while, but when he does return, it is too late: his father already died a long time ago, and now he faces the funeral of his mother. End of story.
I remember deciding though, at the age of 13, to not moralize too much, but to make the story end where it chose to, with the message that while Peter (I think that was his name) was transformed at last by his circumstances, and while he experienced some tragedies, his will for success was not taken away, that no force of fate dealt a blow on his individuality. I didn't want to use a didactic ending, although at the time I didn't know the word. "My stories end differently," I told my friends, and they seemed to like the artistic innovation.
When I wrote the first draft of Sara Nepurezha, my only reader or listener was a friend named Moulta from Magetsi village. He was supposed to be writing along too, since we decided to do this together, but he ended up not doing it, preferring, instead, to read what I wrote. He encouraged me to keep going, told me I had talent. Once I discovered the satisfaction you can get out of crafting words, you may never be able to stop, and since 1983, I haven't been able to stop; even where I said "I'm now stopping," I still came back to the blank page, if not for anything, to scribble, to fill it with meaningful sentences, sentences that made me laugh.
Then when I had finished writing the novel I talked about it to my Grade 7 classmates, and I had decided to stop at that, to be satisfied by the announcement and to move on to the next novel, but the teacher, Mr. Nduna, found me in the act of "not sitting down" and asked me why and before I could answer another student told him that I had written a book, "See, he's holding it." The teacher took the book, looked at it, was silent for a while, flipping through the pages of the composition exercise book. Then he walked to his desk in the front of the class and sat down. I would like to say that he read the book to the whole class, but I also want to think that he told us to do something while he finished doing something (that is, reading my novel). …No…he read it to the whole class; I can even see him right now, sitting up there, reading to a very quiet class. This was a story about Mototi, mentioning all the familiar landscape features: Runde River, Gwen'ombe River, VhaZhure Township, the hills, the mountains, the baobab trees, and the rivers again; then, off to Harare.
I had visited Harare for the first time in 1982, shortly after the city had stopped being called Salisbury. One of my brothers had invited me to come along with his family, and once there, I would see for myself all the cars and the tall buildings that the place was famous for, not to forget the anticipation to actually SEE white people doing things that white people did then. That first visit to Harare, where I stayed for four weeks, mostly in Mabvuku and Glen View, would leave an indelible mark in my imagination; and the novel Sara Nepurezha would capture that very well, sending my classmates, most of whom had never been to a town or city, on imaginary expeditions. The day my teacher read Sara Nepurezha to the rest of the class was the best day of my life, the day I discovered my first special readership. The reading took only thirty minutes, because what I thought was a long novel was actually a short piece of work, but it was a satisfying story, it covered all the elements that needed to be covered, it told the whole story.
From that day on, my classmates would demand that I write more stories, and I complied. One main reason for that was I knew I had available readers waiting for each finished page. We would sit under a tree during recess and they would listen as I read. They never tried to tell me what they thought I should write on the next page; it's as if they wanted to be in suspense until the next section was written. I loved it, the attention. I felt accomplished. That's when I started living a writer's life, a life of always being aware that I was a writer, whether we were swimming at the river, or we were at home eating mutakura or shelling peanuts; I was shelling peanuts yes, but I was shelling them with the fingers of a writer. Writing would permeate every aspect of my life throughout secondary school at Gwavachemai, and when, after Form 4, I went to school in Harare in High Field, I was still doing so as a writer. There too all my friends, all my classmates, would know (immediately) that I was a writer. I had quite a collection of full composition exercise books that I called novels and plays.
But the readers or listeners at High field high school were not as patient or accepting endeavors as those at Mototi Primary and Gwavachemai High had been. They listened to me talking about what novel I was writing, and those in my inner circle were supportive, and sometimes asked for a few pages to read in their spare time. But I managed to pin down at least two reader-listeners who would sit with me a whole lunch hour (at places like Machipisa) or on school grounds, listening to me read just another chapter. One of them was named Tendai (not real name…but how would you know?). Poor Tendai, he suffered through some of those poorly written pages. Looking back at some of those pages, it's hard to understand why I ever thought I was writing seriously, but when you read them, you see the seed of the story, and sections of the story that are well rendered; those are the ones that made listeners like Tendai and Enias (not the real name) found interesting. I would read and stop to allow them to die with laughter, and as I resumed, I would also die with laughter. Knowing that I wrote things that people found interesting was satisfactory.
In the early days of my writing, I didn't think much about publishing. It was not urgent: I had readers, I had listeners; and they told me all the good things. They seemed to enjoy what I wrote. The beauty of this is that the work had been written with them in mind, so it was bound to satisfy them. Idiscovered back then the importance of a specific audience, the power of the special readers who enjoyed what I enjoyed.
In fact, the main character was fashioned out of someone I knew, who had grown up poor, but hardworking, who then had found an opportunity to go to the city to find a job, make money and lead a happy life; yet, consistent with what I had read in my idol's novels, I had to make the protagonist forget about the village and decide not to return home for a while, but when he does return, it is too late: his father already died a long time ago, and now he faces the funeral of his mother. End of story.
I remember deciding though, at the age of 13, to not moralize too much, but to make the story end where it chose to, with the message that while Peter (I think that was his name) was transformed at last by his circumstances, and while he experienced some tragedies, his will for success was not taken away, that no force of fate dealt a blow on his individuality. I didn't want to use a didactic ending, although at the time I didn't know the word. "My stories end differently," I told my friends, and they seemed to like the artistic innovation.
When I wrote the first draft of Sara Nepurezha, my only reader or listener was a friend named Moulta from Magetsi village. He was supposed to be writing along too, since we decided to do this together, but he ended up not doing it, preferring, instead, to read what I wrote. He encouraged me to keep going, told me I had talent. Once I discovered the satisfaction you can get out of crafting words, you may never be able to stop, and since 1983, I haven't been able to stop; even where I said "I'm now stopping," I still came back to the blank page, if not for anything, to scribble, to fill it with meaningful sentences, sentences that made me laugh.
Then when I had finished writing the novel I talked about it to my Grade 7 classmates, and I had decided to stop at that, to be satisfied by the announcement and to move on to the next novel, but the teacher, Mr. Nduna, found me in the act of "not sitting down" and asked me why and before I could answer another student told him that I had written a book, "See, he's holding it." The teacher took the book, looked at it, was silent for a while, flipping through the pages of the composition exercise book. Then he walked to his desk in the front of the class and sat down. I would like to say that he read the book to the whole class, but I also want to think that he told us to do something while he finished doing something (that is, reading my novel). …No…he read it to the whole class; I can even see him right now, sitting up there, reading to a very quiet class. This was a story about Mototi, mentioning all the familiar landscape features: Runde River, Gwen'ombe River, VhaZhure Township, the hills, the mountains, the baobab trees, and the rivers again; then, off to Harare.
I had visited Harare for the first time in 1982, shortly after the city had stopped being called Salisbury. One of my brothers had invited me to come along with his family, and once there, I would see for myself all the cars and the tall buildings that the place was famous for, not to forget the anticipation to actually SEE white people doing things that white people did then. That first visit to Harare, where I stayed for four weeks, mostly in Mabvuku and Glen View, would leave an indelible mark in my imagination; and the novel Sara Nepurezha would capture that very well, sending my classmates, most of whom had never been to a town or city, on imaginary expeditions. The day my teacher read Sara Nepurezha to the rest of the class was the best day of my life, the day I discovered my first special readership. The reading took only thirty minutes, because what I thought was a long novel was actually a short piece of work, but it was a satisfying story, it covered all the elements that needed to be covered, it told the whole story.
From that day on, my classmates would demand that I write more stories, and I complied. One main reason for that was I knew I had available readers waiting for each finished page. We would sit under a tree during recess and they would listen as I read. They never tried to tell me what they thought I should write on the next page; it's as if they wanted to be in suspense until the next section was written. I loved it, the attention. I felt accomplished. That's when I started living a writer's life, a life of always being aware that I was a writer, whether we were swimming at the river, or we were at home eating mutakura or shelling peanuts; I was shelling peanuts yes, but I was shelling them with the fingers of a writer. Writing would permeate every aspect of my life throughout secondary school at Gwavachemai, and when, after Form 4, I went to school in Harare in High Field, I was still doing so as a writer. There too all my friends, all my classmates, would know (immediately) that I was a writer. I had quite a collection of full composition exercise books that I called novels and plays.
But the readers or listeners at High field high school were not as patient or accepting endeavors as those at Mototi Primary and Gwavachemai High had been. They listened to me talking about what novel I was writing, and those in my inner circle were supportive, and sometimes asked for a few pages to read in their spare time. But I managed to pin down at least two reader-listeners who would sit with me a whole lunch hour (at places like Machipisa) or on school grounds, listening to me read just another chapter. One of them was named Tendai (not real name…but how would you know?). Poor Tendai, he suffered through some of those poorly written pages. Looking back at some of those pages, it's hard to understand why I ever thought I was writing seriously, but when you read them, you see the seed of the story, and sections of the story that are well rendered; those are the ones that made listeners like Tendai and Enias (not the real name) found interesting. I would read and stop to allow them to die with laughter, and as I resumed, I would also die with laughter. Knowing that I wrote things that people found interesting was satisfactory.
In the early days of my writing, I didn't think much about publishing. It was not urgent: I had readers, I had listeners; and they told me all the good things. They seemed to enjoy what I wrote. The beauty of this is that the work had been written with them in mind, so it was bound to satisfy them. Idiscovered back then the importance of a specific audience, the power of the special readers who enjoyed what I enjoyed.
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Everything makes me want to write, everything.