Writers and their love lives

As you read William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, or any of his other love stories, there are these moments of rich pining for love and unforgettable romantic moments and expressions.

That is why Romeo and Juliet is often called a tragic love story and is based on real characters from Verona. And often, you are drawn to wonder how Shakespeare himself fared in love relationships. It is just unavoidable.

Romeo and Juliet are forbidden to love one another due to an ancient grudge between their families. Romeo has an unrequited infatuation for a girl named Rosaline, a niece of Lord Capulet’s.

Persuaded by Benvolio, Romeo attends the ball at the Capulet house in the hope of meeting Rosaline. But it is not Rosaline who sweeps him off his feet – it is the fair Juliet!

After the ball, in Act 2 Scene 2, Romeo sneaks into the Capulet courtyard and overhears Juliet on her balcony vowing her love to him in spite of her family’s hatred for his family.

Not aware that Romeo is actually in the vicinity, Juliet pours out her wish that Romeo was not in the wrong family and forbidden. She is infatuated by him. It is one rare moment in literature when a woman pines for a man: “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”

In that line and the others that follow after it, Juliet is not asking where Romeo is. She is actually asking why he has to be Romeo, a Montague. Juliet has already discovered Romeo’s identity by talking to the nurse earlier in the play.

She tries to come to terms with the fact that the man she loves is part of her family’s most hated rival clan. On Romeo’s part, hiding in the Capulet orchard after the feast, he sees Juliet leaning out of a high window. Though it is late at night, Juliet’s surpassing beauty makes Romeo imagine that she is the sun, transforming the darkness into daylight.

Then you start to wonder how Shakespeare’s own love life and marriage were like! That kind of curiosity can actually be overwhelming and you start to look for the details…

It is said that William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in November 1582 and they remained married until Shakespeare’s death. At the time of their marriage Shakespeare was 18, while Anne was 26—and pregnant with their first child. This means that Shakespeare fell for a lady older than him! He must have been richly in love…

The average age of marriage was 26 years of age, so it is said that Anne would have been an eligible young lady of her time. William, on the other hand, was still a minor in the eyes of the law! This means that it required permission from Anne’s father to marry Anne. Shakespeare’s early marriage also meant that he wouldn’t legally be able to complete an apprenticeship.

To avoid any scandal surrounding Anne’s pregnancy, it is said that Shakespeare sped up proceedings by applying to the Bishop’s Court in Worcester. But people go on to ask how much Shakespeare loved Anne, seeing how he described love himself!

There is no available specific answer to that. William Shakespeare signed his will on 25 March 1616. In the will, he leaves his second-best bed to Anne; the document reads, ‘Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed with the furniture’ (furniture is used to refer to the curtains and bedcover which formed part of the complete bed).

Some have read this as a slight against Anne; but the second-best bed would have been their marriage bed, since the best bed was typically reserved for guests.

Under medieval common law in England a widow was entitled to one third of her late husband’s estate for her life (or widowhood) even though it was not specifically mentioned in the will.

In practice however, most wives were mentioned, usually in terms of affection and trust, and were frequently made executrix of the will.

The bequest of the second best bed is not in itself unusual, and wills were not places for the expression of personal feelings. The best bed, or indeed best of any type of item was usually regarded as an heirloom to be passed to the major heir, his daughter Susanna.

When you move over to the great singer, Miriam Makeba, you have another amazing love life. According to Ewens Graeme in an obituary of November 2008, Miriam Zenzi Makeba, singer and activist, who was born in March 4 1932 and died on November 10, 2008, was married a record five times!

It is said that in 1949, Makeba married James Kubay, a policeman in training, with whom she had her only child, Bongi Makeba, in 1950.

Makeba was about 17 when Bongi was born. Her husband, who is on record of not having a harmonious relationship with her was said to have left her shortly afterwards, after a two-year marriage.

In 1959, Makeba settled in the US. A second marriage is reported to have occurred in 1959 and was also short-lived. In 1960 she was denied re-entry into South Africa, and she lived in exile for three decades thereafter.

Her second marriage was short-lived because in 1964, Hugh Masekela, the South African trumpeter, became Makeba’s third husband. They went to perform in Algeria and at the OAU conference in Accra, Ghana. Although the couple divorced two years later, they maintained a close professional relationship.

In 1967, while in Guinea, she met the Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael who became her next husband the following year.

Carmichael is said to have changed his name to Kwame Touré and she returned with him to his own place of exile in Guinea, the West African Marxist state whose leader, Sekou Touré, gave sanctuary to enemies of the capitalist west.

After that fourth marriage ended in divorce in 1978, it is recorded that she turned down a proposal by the president, but two years later married an airline executive and moved to Brussels.

In one interview Makeba addresses directly the issue of her constant marriages. The explanation appears linked to exile and her hard schedule as an international artist. Speaking to Leigh Behrens of Chicago Tribune of March 20, 1988, she says:

“Singing is the only way I know how to take care of myself. And I can’t sing in one place. I have to go around the world, which I have. And sometimes things go wrong that way….It’s sad. But each time you marry, you say, maybe this is it. And when it doesn’t happen, I am the kind of person who feels I’m not going to make anybody else miserable, and I don’t want them to make me miserable. So if it doesn’t work, we part, and we are good friends. And there’s no fighting. I do have somebody, but he’s in Guinea. In Africa they say that when you are elderly, you have to be married to have respect. I’m married. But I’m not with my husband. I’m never there.”

Mariama Ba’s love life is also worth noting. The Senegalese writer’s iconic novel called So Long a Letter is the most vicious attack on polygamy that I have ever read. It is written in the voice of a depressed Muslim woman, Ramatoulaye, who is a school teacher in Senegal. It is a series of letters addressed to her friend called Aissatou, who lives in America. Assatou has long rebelled and left.

Ramatoulaye gradually and objectively reflects on her marriage to Modou, from beginning to end. She tries but she cannot fully understand what leads a man to lose interest in his wife of 25 years and marry his daughter’s best friend, a young school girl called Binetou. Ramatoulaye cannot understand why men even think about taking a second wife.

“Was it madness, weakness, irresistible love? What inner confusion led Madou Fall to marry Binetou?” Ramatoulaye pines.
She goes on: “And to think that I loved this man passionately, to think that I gave him 30 years of my life, to think that twelve times over, I carried his child….In loving someone else, he burned his past, both morally and materially…”

The more she tries, the more Ramatoulaye fails to understand why men go for second wives.

Ba’s family was a powerful one. Her father was a government official, and she enjoyed the best education available to an African woman of the day, attending and excelling in French-language schools. In 1947 she became a teacher. She married the Senegalese politician Obeye Diop and had nine children by him; the rigors of raising such a large family took their toll on her health, and she was forced to give up her teaching post. Later divorced from Diop, she worked as a secretary and as a school inspector.

Many of Ba’s experiences found their way into her works. Her So Long a Letter is a psychological quest on the sins of African men, the changes they go through as they move from one point to the other in life. At some point, Ramatoulaye realises that it is very possible, and even normal that her husband’s love and passion for her had naturally died: “I no longer interested Modou, and I knew it. I was abandoned: a fluttering leaf that no hand dares to pick up, as my grandmother would have said. I faced up the situation bravely…” But the more she registers this, the more she comes to terms with who she is.

Zimbabwe’s revered writer, Dambudzo Marechera’s life comes into the open when her friend turned lover, Flora Veit Wild, confesses of their affair in an essay in Wasafiri issue 69 March 2012. This has become Marechera’s most widely documented love affair. Initially it was a sensational story because when they met, Flora was already married. All the same, she moved on with Marechera.

Flora had first met Marechera in a fellow writer’s, Charles Mungoshi’s office in one of the publishing houses in Harare in the 1980’s when Marechera was riding on the success of his prize winning book, House of Hunger.

Flora writes about their first meeting, “‘Hey, have a seat,’ he said, pulling a chair for me at Mungoshi’s desk. His open face was looking at me expectantly, and Charles – not a natural speaker – gladly left his guest to his eloquent colleague. So that is him, I remember thinking, so accessible, charming and boyish, clad in denims and a faded light blue T-shirt — incredibly young.”

In that narrative, Marechera appears to fall all over Flora, a sure sign that he is very attracted to her, “He was thirty-one years old, I was thirty-six. I was wearing sandals, a pink blouse and wide, softly flowing trousers with a striking flower pattern. Looking me up and down, he said: ‘Oh, my lawd, your garments cannot be from here. You would rather expect them in a Bloomsbury setting than in prissy old Salisbury.’

Soon they start dating. Soon they are gradually becoming intimate: “We sit in the dark by the UZ swimming pool. We tumble about in the grass. It feels playful, joyful, frivolous. Yet back in the car, he starts pressurising me. I want to drive home. He urges me to stay. He pulls my hand into his lap and, angrily, provocatively, he says: ‘You see what you are doing to me, you can’t leave me like THIS.’

Flora confesses that she also fell for Marechera and that she was the kind of man she was attracted to: “Did I have any idea what I was getting into? I had always had a longing for the wondrous, the fantastic, the outlandish. Dambudzo appealed to the clownish, melancholic, poetic part of me, which was menacingly dark and colourfully bright at the same time.

I had never suppressed it, lived it out in pantomime or in romance, but had always been pragmatic enough to know that, for ‘real life’, I had to make rational choices. Dambudzo more than anyone before embodied this ‘other’ side in me, he led me through many closed doors, he fostered my infatuation with the mad side of life, the ‘Coin of Moonshine.”

The few cases above are amazing in that; the men and women who sing or write about people in relationships also have relationships of their own like all of us, the mere mortals!

Memory Chirere