Women poets and scholars

I am very excited about two African women poets, Micere Mugo and Eve Nyemba, who happen to double up as university based scholars and feminists. The first one is elderly and also a fierce Marxist.

The second one is much younger and exciting all the same, because she is still finding her way through poetry, scholarship and feminism. Put together, their work shows the development of feminist literature amongst female scholars of African descent.
Through her scholarship and poetry, you quickly see that Micere Githae Mugo is an avowed Marxist, feminist and nationalist. Her position is informed by a nuanced understanding of African women in the context of history. Talking to Adeola James in 1986, she says,

“The kind of writer that I have a lot of time and respect for is a writer like Alex La Guma. I admire the fact that his writing was not only talking about struggle, but he was part and parcel of the struggle in South Africa. I admire somebody like Ngugi Wa Thiongo, whose example and position in life has demonstrated his commitment to the struggle of the Kenyan people. This kind of writer I want to identify with.”

About women and feminism, Mugo says, “The African woman occupies the lowest rung of the ladder.” She clearly states that women in Africa are oppressed by both African patriarchy and colonialism.

To her, they bear the double yoke. Mugo says as feminists, we must know that not all women are oppressed because some women are part of the oppressive capitalist class because of their own historical positions and race.

“There is nothing wrong in singing about women but I think we must be careful to define and specify which women we are singing about…” Mugo says.

In her collection of poems called My Mother’s Poem and Other Songs, Micere Mugo comes across as a very conscious and deliberate poet. She is not lost in poetry for its emotional sake but she is involved in a very pointed mode of poetry that sees the feminist struggle as part of the human struggle.

Her poetry though feminist, identifies with the African landscape and culture and claims that positive African culture has always been intrinsically feminist. In her first poem, she writes a feminist nationalist rhetoric:

“The beautiful ones
were born
in the land of Me Katilili
the home of Koitalel arap Samoei
on the soil of Muthoni waKirima
the birthright of kimathi wa Wachiuri.”

Probably Micere Mugo’s most energetic and dazzling poem in this collection is called “To be a Feminist is.” Her critical message is that while the work of African feminists is about encouraging equity between men and women, feminism should transcend that and crave for the same sense of belonging that all the masses crave for in Africa regardless of their gender.

For her, to be feminist “is to celebrate my birth as a girl, to ululate that my gender is female. It is to make contact with my being.” She struggles against patriarchy and western imperialism in the same breath:

“For me
to be feminist is
to denounce patriarchy
and the caging of women
it is to wipe the fuzziness
of colonial hangovers
to uproot the weeds
of neo-colonial pestilence.

For me
to be feminist is
to hurl through the cannon
of my exploding
righteous fury
the cannibal
named capitalism
it is to pronounce death sentence
on the ogre
named imperialism.”

Mugo’s feminism in the poem called “The woman’s poem” imagines women of the world standing together regardless of the boundaries of their countries so that together they “explode defrosted and refrigerated woman-hood pestled and mortared over time.”

It means that Mugo imagines a time when womanhood was a perfect place and that space was only defiled by the struggles to dominate other people and other lands.

Mugo’s feminism gives in to the desire to create united national and international vision of people in Africa and the third world. She tends to think that feminism tends to have capitalist traits and would be ameliorated with a dose of Marxist-nationalist thought.

You see this in poems like “We will rise and build a nation.” She thinks that the divisions between man and woman are a project that can easily be dealt with compared to the chasm between the rich and the poor or that between the North and the South:

“For me to be feminist is to have dialogue with my father and my brother to invite their partnership as fellow guerrilla it is to march with them to the war torn zone of Afrikana survival it is  to jointly raise with them the victory salute.”

In the preface to this collection, Mugo admits that she has had a continous dialogue with Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel The beautiful Ones are Not yet Born and agrees with him that “the neo colonial ruling class is made up of ugly creatures of prey, but insisting that even in the midst of all this ugliness, beautiful human beings have been born.”

This means that Mugo finds Armah pessimistic about the future of an independent Africa. Mugo believes that the African personality can start to be reworked towards beauty once more because initially Africans are born amidst beautiful lands with people with beautiful relations. They must find regeneration from that idea. The beast in us has to be defeated so that the angel in us is born:

“The beautiful ones were born in the lowlands of despair through valleys of elusive hope across ridges of obstinate resistance on the highlands of mounting optimism.”

Micere Githae Mugo, born Madeleine Micere Githae in 1942, is a playwright, author, activist, instructor and poet from Kenya. She is a literary critic and professor of literature in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University.

She was forced into exile in 1982 from Kenya during the Daniel arap Moi dictatorship for activism and moved to teach in Zimbabwe, and later the United States.

Micere Githae Mugo is an internationally known world speaker recognised for her literary works, essays and writings which she has used as a platform to advocate for social justice and human rights in Africa especially Kenya.

She has been described by most of her colleagues as a teacher and a woman of virtue, integrity, principle, and benevolence. As an educator, she likes to challenge her students to think beyond what they learn in the books and what they hear.

She has written various plays, her most well known having been jointly authored with Ngugi Wa Thiongo called The Trial of Dedan Kimathi. Her first collection of plays called Daughter of My People sing.

On the other hand, Eve Nyemba’s poems in Look Within represent another version of feminism different from Micere Mugo’s. Eve Nyemba’s poems ring with an unmistakable vitality of youth, searing passions and sweet-sad meditation.

Of all known women’s poetry of Zimbabwe, Eve Nyemba comes closest to Kristina Rungano especially in A Storm Is Brewing.

These poems are about love; as a woman searches for it or as she gets to know the colour of its brutal insides. These poems are about what love does to a woman if she does not look too closely before she jumps.

These poems are about passionate and difficult men too. These poems are an attempt by the individual to look deeply into herself and take stock of how her mind works or not work. When you are there, you are in Kristina Rungano territory. There is that ability here, to pause and think about the small bricks that make up the huge fabric.

The driving force to these poems is Nyemba’s forceful use of the repetition at the beginning of every line. This enacts the vigour of protest and the instincts of the African praise singer where simple phrase reaches very hypnotic levels, as in the public poets of South Africa in the dark days of apartheid.

The diction here as in Freedom Nyamubaya’s poetry is very simple, making these poems very accessible to the reader.

In ‘When Silence speaks’ you find a tattered woman who has had the worst of the ‘man’s world’. Abused, is the word. Deep pain, is her situation. She suffers in silence, and that disturbs. Eve Nyemba uses a dark shade to give the woman a Christ-like figure because as she suffers in silence, there are depths in her that the external blows cannot reach.

She comes across like many of Yvone Vera’s victim women, especially the sisters in the novel ‘The Stone Virgins’. Their mere presence, in spite of what they have gone through, leaves a discerning reader in awe.

But women need not be victims especially if they learn to ‘look within and find faith’. The poet invites the woman not to go beyond herself ‘out in the pounding rain’ for salvation. But the African woman is beautiful too with her hair ‘the colour of the dusty earth’ and should leave alone the body modifications from the West like plastic surgery.

But Nyemba can snoop well into the world of menfolk and see the other reality of men in the Third World. It is a ‘man’s world’ but how many men own that world? Sometimes, as in ‘Manchild’ men are also victims of various social forces that even they can lose control and cut very lonely, little and saddened images:

His shoulders are hunched
His steps falter
The load on his head
Drains him for reason

This is a man who becomes a father when he does not have the means. He is a castrated fellow, a fatherless father! Sometimes it is the women who give one another a very raw deal. In ‘you think’ a woman boasts of how she can take over another woman’s man. In Zimbabwe this husband stealer is known as ‘small house’.

So the husband stealer boasts about how the poor man will always run away from the mansion to have a nice time with the small house in the ‘single quarters’.

But if one is looking for the Eve Nyemba philosophy, ‘The secret places’ is the poem:
The secret places of my heart
Exist in the corridors of love.
The secret places of my love
Lives in you.

Indeed, you and me. The secret that the world fails to uncover is Love. Of course, different forms of Love. ‘We need to love and love properly’ is an idea that runs through these poems. But sometimes, in these poems Love is a tempest, ‘a ravaging vortex of a dust devil’ and when it fails to be consummated as in Consumed the desire for the other becomes very overwhelming.

Eve Nyemba has ability to stray into territory that other leading Zimbabwean women poets in English like Lillian Masitera and Megan Allardice only allude to and ‘run’ from. Above all, Eve Nyemba has hope for both the girl child and Africa.

They both need to be given ‘a chance’, she writes. Africa is ‘an image of precious stones’ even ‘an emerging giant’. This is a collection for those who look for poetry that talks from the soul. Those who look for the secrets that only poets tend to see in every community

Eve Zichanzi Nyemba is a lecturer in political science at the University of Zimbabwe. She is married and has two children. She worked as an accountant at C.P.B Hiring Services from December 1999 up to August 2000. In 2003 she joined the Impact Development Associates as a Professional Assistant up to December 2004.

She then became the Head of Research and Development at LASOF Leadership Institute from March 2010 to January 2011. She has a number of publications which include Paradise stories which is a children’s story book and Look Within (2008) an anthology of poems. She is also a Pan Africanist inspired by Robert Mugabe, Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta.

Memory Chirere