A Critical History of Shona Poetry.

Gibbs, James

African writing in African languages has received comparatively little sustained critical attention, and Emmanuel M. Chiwome's study, coming at a time when authors are under some pressure to write in African languages, is particularly welcome. He looks at a substantial body of work, that, encouraged by missionary presses and the Rhodesia Literature Bureau, has appeared over the last forty years.

The book is divided into twelve chapters, four of which examine features of Shona poetry - imagery, rhythm, functions, and motifs (all in some thirty pages) - and seven of which consider historical phases, from the "Pioneer Poetry" of the Colonial Period (Herbert Chitepo, 1956) to the "New Voices in Poetry (1994)." This section covers about 100 pages. Chiwome brings to the analysis impressive credentials: he is a senior lecturer in the Department of African Languages and Literatures at the University of Zimbabwe, and a poet who has coedited anthologies of Shona poetry and riddles. However, and somewhat disconcertingly, he does not list his published work in the bibliography - which is, admittedly, described as "select."

As the book's preface makes clear, part of the inspiration for Chiwome's approach comes from the conviction that "Shona poetry makes more sense when it is studied against the background of the socio-historical theory of literature." Albert Memmi's book The Coloniser and the Colonised is used to provide theoretical underpinning for much of the material in the section - though that work is not selected for inclusion in the bibliography either. Toward the end - in the "Conclusion" - a new guru, Stephen Spender, is somewhat surprisingly invoked. Chiwome writes: "The varieties of Shona poetry are reminiscent of the three types of writers identified by Stephen Spender." Since the source for these "types' is an article by Emmanuel Ngara, it is not entirely surprising that Spender is not in the "Selected Bibliography." It is always a pity when critics rely on intermediaries.

The suggestion of theoretical promiscuity given by the shift from Memmi to Spender does not confuse the study as a whole, for Chiwome is generally content with a descriptive paragraph or two per poem and a brief attempt to provide a "socio-historical" context. Since the focus is on published poetry - that is to say, work that received the imprimatur of a mission press or the Literature Bureau - much of the work referred to is compromised, and the flaws are easily apparent from the perspective of a university department in postindependence Zimbabwe. One of the most damning judgments Chiwome passes is: "His ideological stance is not clear."

Many readers outside Zimbabwe will be dependent on Chiwome's translations of Shona. These are presented without comment, as if he had never experienced a struggle to convey a layer of meaning, or as if the source language shared all its qualities with the target language. Confidence in the translations is eroded by confusing references to "donor and source languages" (36), and it is hard to believe that the originals were as turgid as some of the renderings into English provided. These include: "Urban centres are destroying the family structure / Even traditional religion is being neglected."

The style in which critical opinions are offered and arguments conducted is also often objectionable. Books can be written without using sentences such as "The ethno-centric relativity of essences is at the centre of such Manichean perceptions," and without the use of words such as "routinisation." The reader is entitled to more "nuanced" assertions than "Obesity is a sign of overfeeding," and to greater clarity than is provoked by the statement that - there is a myth to the effect that - women are "by nature more sensational than men."

I suspect that this critical work will be followed by others, possibly from the hands of more sensitive critics, translators, and writers. They will draw on Chiwome when he is at his best - when he is commenting, for example, on the associations or the provenance of individual Shona words.

James Gibbs University of the West of England