WEALTH OF IDEAS

This is a regional poetry festival, covering the countries of Southern Africa. It is one of the most important poetry events in the world. This year the poets meet in Gaborone, Botswana. Last year they met in Windoek, Namibia. I happy that this festival continues to grow.

I always knew it, that those chickens along Mukuvisi river were up to no good. Now having read Wonder Guchu's "The Black Hen", a little, mysterious story about 1990s Harare high density life, I can't help revisiting all those sightings of Mukuvisi chicken. It didn't matter where you were along Mukuvisi when you saw them--whether you were crossing from High Field to Waterfalls, or you were taking a nature-admiring stroll into Bonongwe forest, just outside of Glen View, or you had left maFlats in Glen Norah and were taking pictures of maLizards because you had to use your camera somehow, imagining that one day you would be a popular photo journalist, because then you had just started A-Level, and did not know that you would become, first, a temporary teacher, then, a university student, before life took you thousands of miles away, to become, first, many things, then a teacher again, a teacher with a camera, when by then everyone around you also had a camera, before...

Artsinitiates, the Zimbabwe online literary update, has launched its first poetry collection and plans to publish more like it every month. The first publication features works by Richmore Tera, a regular feature on the website. The anthology was designed by Tendai Karumazondo who is now in Namibia. The anthology will be available in Zimbabwe at the end of February 2009. The second anthology, entitled Munotitadzisa Kunamata, will also be available at the same time as the first anthology. This Shona anthology will carry Memory Chirere's 10poems. Chirere is the Nama winner for the best children book with his short story anthology titled Tudikidiki and has published an anthology in English called Somewhere in this Country. His other works have been published in various anthologies in Zimbabwe and outside. He teaches at the University of Zimbabwe. The third or March anthology will be Ndebele poems by Jerry Zondo, another UZ lecturer. Last year artsinitiates unveiled plans to publish p...

Zimbo Jam has reported that Nominations for the 2009 NAMA awards have been made. Wonder Guchu, Chris Mlalazi, Ignatius Mabasa, Jane Morris are competing in the Literature category. The awards will be given next week. NAMA stands for National Arts Merit Awards and is run by the National Arts Council of Zimbabwe.

Perhaps there is something happening in Zimbabwean literature that can be called an event. This sentence echoes Jacques Derrida's first sentence of "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", which I have read quite a few times and enjoyed. Since Derrida raised the application of the word "event" to be understood as a rupture , a "redoubling", I use it here to apply to the unstoppable expansion, explosion, if you will, of Zimbabwean literature. Notice that it is easy not to realize that this is happening, because the world's eyes are focusing on the more urgent matters, the cholera, the rotting politics, but the literary EVENT (made up of many developments we can call events) is happening. I use the word to show how much I enjoy talking about this growth, this rich promise of a literature finally breaking free and freeing, recentering and decentering (a positive thing) itself. But on a more serious note, there are many good t...