Habits of inspiration

Young writers often ask me the startling question: where do you get what you write about? Inspiration, I answer, looking the interlocutor in the eyes. But I know that this is not enough of an answer. Inspiration – that ghetto blaster of a word! Is it the state of feeling like you want to crush the sky? Is it a feeling akin to wanting to go on top of a hill to shout and cry? What inspires a writer to write? Writing comes from calculated, cultivated, measured and allowed ‘habits of the writer.’ The habits of writing poems (bad or good ones) is human and if you do not have them, there could be a thread you are missing in your fast waning writing career. If you care to know, your very own life is one big poem or story waiting to be written. Recall the many outstanding happenings in your life, one after the other, and bring them closer to you with their dust and dirt and brood over them. For instance, very close people have died in your life. Pick one death that occurred in the family and write lines about what it felt like to see a loved one’s casket being covered up with subsequent thudding shovel loads of red earth in the fast disappearing cloud of a June evening. You need to stop breathing and mix the earth with the waning light of day and the emotion of the moment. You will meet its equivalent in Chenjerai Hove’s ‘Death of a Soldier’: “Sure he died, no doubt Graveless, ditched he went But full of grave pure hate He dies to haunt the soulless And to cleanse the land he manured Praising the living…” You could also consider the day you graduated into a new social phase and write about the excitement of the experience. I fondly recall the day I got my national identity card. ‘So I am old enough now,’ I sang, ‘So I can actually vote for a government,’ I raved. I actually remember waking up in the middle of the night to just gaze at the I.D. and enthuse, ‘I am a man! A man who can own goats, cattle, sheep, hens. A man who can vote!’ Or you can even decide to capture, in poetry, that sweet – painful moment in your life at discovering that your once bare pubic area was now growing brilliant little black hairs! You remember how many times you rushed to the boys’ toilet just to gaze at that little bush? Indeed, one’s life can be one’s raw material. You only need to be simple and truthful to whatever emotion you intend to mine and relive. You can pick on all these moments and their varied emotions; your first love, your first job, the day that you received your first love letter from a boy, the day you paid lobola, your first day in the city, the day you tried to ride a bike, the day… There is another ‘genre’ of inspiration that you might find even more interesting. These are ‘farcical’ activities that you catch occurring even in as short a time as five seconds and they cause sparks of thoughts and messages (lines) in you. You are in a fast moving bus towards your home town and as you cross the last river bridge, you see people bathing naked on the river bed, yelling at the bus and diving into the water to hide their brilliant nakedness which you have already seen! Such a short sharp experience could kick start you into writing a poem. You could capture the mischievous child-like ‘things’ returning to the source. A raw revelation. A poem can arise out of seeing a baboon sitting majestically, on a peak, in the morning. One ends up writing the classical ‘Bongwi the baboon,’ by Kingsley Fairbridge, which everyone who went to school in the 1970s could not fail to identify with. You can imagine the singular incident of seeing a bird in the sky in 1877 that made Gerard Hopkins write: “I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing…”   Imagine what Shakespeare was going through or had seen or heard or dreamt, for him to write that alluring sonnet that says, “To me, my friend, you can never be old….” Even casual statements made by people as they go about their daily business can start trains of thought whose resting-place can be a short story. Statements that people casually utter could inspire whole novels. Once upon a time, I stumbled onto two ‘learned’ chaps exchanging words, and at the height of it, one of them said to the other, ‘I am not your friend, my friend.’ There I was! A paradoxical statement which I lived to celebrate. Later, I wrote a poem about the fiery competitions which genuine friends engage in sometimes. Statements, commands, reprimands, sermons and even working chants that you hear on the spur of the moment can be powerful enough to move you. They ignite in the poet other half buried, half-realised poetic lines. Poets need to keep their ears open even in the hubbub of the railway station or a busy dip tank yard. You will definitely agree with me that Shaka’s utterances during his assassination: “The swallows have won and you will not rule this land!” have inspired many novels, plays and poems in Kwa Zulu Natal and beyond. If you nurture the habit, you reach a point where you begin to pick powerful statements, unconsciously, only to have them come forward when your head hits the pillow at the end of a busy day. The statements recur as echoes and when you pick your pen, you trace a path in the long dark passage of blank paper and write lines that read as well thought out as a prosecutor’s court narrative. Try it. You could also use the landscape to give you material for poems. If you go up a hill and look down into the valley, allow yourself to be wooed, to be an insect ‘pinned and sprawling on a pin.’ You could come up with, as in the case of Malawian poet, Antony Nazombe: “Circles of hills Stand Like possessed dances Riding the ecstasy Of drums.” Or, like G.W. Manzini you can go: “Below and above Something is unknown Below and above Is a multitude of creation My thought wanders Gathering the laurels The intermediate I Comprehend Below and above In this effulgence…” In my own case, it is/was the relations between me and the range of mountains (Mavhuradonha) in my home area that produced a series of poems that became my first publication. You see, those mountains are mischievous and ambivalent too. If I was herding cattle and the grass was green and I felt good and sang a little song, the hills would look like they were excited too. But if a heifer or a cow strayed away and I ran around looking for it in great desperation, I felt that the hills were sad and crying with me, too. To this day, those mountains have a way of reflecting my emotions. This is an experience that has stayed with me and in that meandering poem, I tried (I think) to get to the bottom of that relationship with the mountains. I feel better now, I think. On the same note, I feel pricked by the shadowy kopjes along the main road between Rusape and Nyanga. I have often wandered, sitting on the bus, how people of that area manage to survive amidst such breath-taking beauty. When I saw Walvis Bay in Namibia for the first time, I cried out loudly as if I were taking a cold shower in May? Watching that city as it sprawled towards the sea, I thought the world had come down and the stars were right on the ground! Or, after sojourning through the hilly Mwanza District on your way to Blantyre from Mozambique, don’t you feel like wailing when you suddenly get to the endless flatness and straightness of the pencil-like road to Blantyre? Landscapes have many poems to give; only you don’t see with your eyes and listen with your ears! Then there is music! The everyday songs we hear. You could have realised by now, that some lines of a song can generate an emotion in you that needs describing. At a party you see a friend, in the throes of music, with an ear glued against a full-volume radio speaker, singing along, drunkenly, of course. Music. If they are not the words in a song, maybe it could be the combinations of instruments that draw pictures on your mind. In my case, Hugh Masekela’s horn makes me want to write a poem about this new big mad bull that is always jumping over the cattle-pen, going after the neighbour’s cows until you begin to notice a breed of calves with speckled foreheads in the neighbourhood. There is an old fellow in my village who cries real tears when he hears Oliver Mutukudzi’s old song called Amai ndiri bofu’ (Mother I am too blind to the ways of the world). If you were that fellow in my village, what poem would you write? About groping in this darkness called life? In July 2002, Zimbabwean poet, Musaemura Zimunya told me (in an ordinary conversation) that nothing is more delicious than listening to mbira out in the countryside, particularly at dawn. He said that the extreme silence of a dewy dawn, gives mbira (and the accompanying rattles) that sound akin to river water falling from a very high ledge. It immediately occurred to me that Zimunya must have written about this spectral experience, somewhere. You also need to read other writers in order to be a real writer! You will recall Marechera saying,How can you write as if you have never read?’ Indeed, how can you? It is when you go over and over other people’s verses and stanzas that the storm seizes you too. It can be contagious like some shameful disease. There is what is called, by technical people, Apprenticeship. You begin like someone you admire then, subsequently, and inevitably, fall into your own groove and swing. My first contact with Achebe’s Okonkwo was like a road-to-Damascus experience. Here it is: “Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements…” The contagion does not really happen immediately. It is like receiving a fairly old garment from a beloved elder brother. It comes when least expected. One evening after a satisfactory meal, I made a big mistake. I picked Edward Braithewaite’s The Arrivants, thinking – he will help me to go to sleep. The section called ‘Right of passage’ proved an ordinary bumpy ride. ‘Masks’ was something else. ‘Islands’ is spiritual and riddled with eddies. The bug got me and I pulled out Braithewaite’s other book of poems – Mother Poem. It was a bigger mistake! The lines, with their staccato style, produced echoes in my ears. All the people I have known in my life merged and began to shout and cheer at me as if I was on the track, running the race of my life. I dropped the book and started writing a long poem about echoes speaking back to echoes and got lost in the din. When I stopped, it was well over two in the morning! Echoes. Yes, you need to read other poets. Who do you think you are? Preachers get better through listening to other preachers’ sermons. Boys who become great footballers keenly observe the great stars from the way they tie their boots to the way they lazily run onto the pitch. Boy footballers watch all these antics of beloved great stars until they get to know about how not to take a spot kick, how to shoot whilst in flight, how to feign injury… It is like following a river until you reach the sea. My reading of Braithewaite, a Caribbean poet, taught me to manage echoes and eddies. Mordekai Hamutyinei taught me to play with words the way boys spin coins in the back yards. Thomas Hardy taught me to transpose experience. Charles Mungoshi taught me to ambush an image and approach the subject of a poem as if one is going up a steep slope. Chenjerai Hove taught me to cook an emotion until you begin to see tears on the paper on which the poem is printed. You gather here a trick and there a hint from more experienced poets. Southern Africa has many good and great poets. You sit in a library, gazing at the many varied books and your eyes land on the poetry anthologies and a bell rings questions in the ears of your mind: Just where do poets get what they write about? Dreams, maybe? But then, does every poet dream poetic dreams every time he goes to bed? Miriam Makeba, Oliver Mtukudzi, Flora Nwapa, Denis Brutus, Musaemura Zimunya, Jack Mapanje… how do they… Memory Chirere