By Givemore Manyenga/ NUST
You don’t need to be told who the light-skinned young man sitting on a chair outside a Journalism Department office, a computer in his lap, is. His white t-shirt broadcasts the cover of Survivor’s Café, the poetry book that landed him a National Arts Merit Award (NAMA) for Outstanding Fiction Book in 2018.
As he notices this writer come towards him, Stanley stretches his hand and wryly smiles while making sure his laptop does not fall from his lap.
“I forgot my office keys home,” he gives an excuse before I even ask why he is sitting outside.
“We have to find a place downstairs to sit and chat,” he advises.
We head downstairs into the garden near the Commerce Building and find a spot to sit. It is just after midday and just a day after the place was blessed with some showers. With winter approaching, the weather outside is not that friendly.
However, we ignore it and get to business. Apart from the chilly weather, ants that survive on chunks of food dropped by picnickers in the garden sense the invasion of their territory and take no time registering their distaste for us, climbing all over us. We talk on, wiping them away from our shoes and trousers every now and then.
As I am about to say something, I am interrupted by my interviewee’s phone, which vibrates vigorously before he puts away the call.
“That’s my pastor. I hope he did not pick up news of a scandal about me,” he says and we both laugh. At least that is something to take note of from his social life.
Today, I am spending some time with Stanely Mushava, the award-winning author and journalist who now calls himself Onai. He also works as a tutorial assistant in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies while studying for a master’s degree in the same field.
Stanely is a 28-year-old writer, although he constantly refers to himself as an artist, from Chiwara, in Gutu, Masvingo Province.
“There isn’t much to tell outside writing, really. This is what I have been doing since I was 13,” he says when I ask him to tell me about himself.
Indeed, from just spending a few minutes with him, you find that, apart from literature, there is not much to talk about from his life. He is all is about the art form, and in other words, a literature whiz.
“Well, I wouldn’t mind being called that. An ungenerous picture forms of a guy in some basement surrounded by books, an old-school nerd if you like, but really that’s how I am living right now,” he says with a brief laugh.
“What I am doing, I am trying to invent new things as far as literature is concerned. It takes some kind of isolation, some kind of Bohemian sacrifice. I will come out of here when things start working out for me, when I think I have built something new that I want you to see. Maybe we can do extroverted at that point. For now, it’s just literature,” he ends with a smile which looks like an assurance that my stay is welcome.
As you spend more time with him, you discover that despite admitting to being antisocial as is typical of many authors, Stanely enjoys talking as much as he enjoys writing. He is one person whom if you do not ask them to stop talking can go on and on just like what he does with his long poems.
Although he is a self-confessed introvert, Stanley is a devout Christian, and a member of the Redeemed Christian Church of God.
“Man, I am all about Jesus. That’s one third of the message of Survivors Café. How do I deal with this position in an art age where it sounds dated to be Christian, where faith and modern are put out as incompatible extremes? That’s interesting for me because I consider myself to be on the cutting edge of things intellectually and culturally,” he boasts.
“I flirt with ideas, Marxism, postmodernism, these tendencies of the Left. Sometimes when I trace those ideas to the end, Guy Debord, who is a major influence of mine, for example, they lead me to a deep sense of pessimism sometimes. I am a dark writer lately; Rhyme and Resistance is probably the darkest book written in Zimbabwe this year.
“When you talk about Jesus, that’s an insistence on optimism for me, not just the sigh of the oppressed Marx writes about but also a prophetic incentive to actually fight injustice,” he adds on what seems to be his favourite subject too.
On answering the question of whether he is in a relationship or not, Stanley does not admit or deny, but from his answer, it is clear that what matters for him now is not the social side of his life but his writing and the pursuit of an artistic legacy.
“I am building on what I am really in touch with. At this point, that’s just my writing,” he says after explaining structures and ideas that sound far from the question, showing that this is all he has to share about that part of his social life.
I quickly realise that we have talked much about the social part of his life and decide it is time we get back to what he enjoys talking about the most, that is, literature.
With respect to influence, Stanley, a writer, unusually attributes most of it to music, which he says is an art form that easily blends with poetry.
“Talk about representing the underclass, a lot of that is sungura teaches me.” Unsurprisingly, his publishing label is called Underclass Books and Films, a theme that runs through his work. He has also published big names like journalist Tichaona Zindoga and musician Michael Lannas on this label.
“I am sungura poet; you easily get that part of me from my latest book. I can’t begin to tell you how proud I am to bask in my heritage as artist. But I have also been soaking up inspiration from other genres. Lately, it’s been hip hop. I consider Nas and Kendrick Lamar two of my most important writing influences from any period or art form,” he illuminates.
At 27, Stanley won a NAMA for Outstanding Fiction Book and also got nominated in the Outstanding Print Journalist category. As a cultural journalist, he has written for several Zimbabwean and regional newspapers, including The Herald, The Standard, This Is Africa and Southern Times.
He does not shy away from the fact that his art is an expression of his life struggles and those of others who may be in his position. The alienated millennial is a recurring figure in Survivors Café but Rhyme and Resistance (also Nama-nominated) is a broader take on the class struggle and a deep dive into the relationship between poverty and mental health.
“Survivor’s Café,” he poses a little bit, probably to breathe in as he prepares to give a lengthy lecture on how the book came about.
“I guess the title just sounded dope at the time but looking back I see that basic survival is all that occupied my mind when I was writing the book. It was late 2016. I had this romantic impulse to leave the newsroom find myself as a journalist and writer without the creative control that I felt was slowing me at the moment. That turned out to be a bad decision financially. The book came out of the self-inflicted hunger of those days,” he chimes.
He admits going political in most of the poems in Survivor’s Café and almost all of Rhyme and Resistance and has a love-hate relationship with this transition. While more people have easily identified with the protest poems, he feels he should go back to the more private themes.
Some of the more discussed poems from the first book include “Blue-Roof Freestyle”, “No Country for Young Men”, “Postcard to Santa” and “Coffee with the Pope”.
In the poem, “Blue-Roof Freestyle”, he sarcastically impersonates former president Robert Mugabe. Part of the poem reads:
If you think Karma is a bitch, better know Bob is her pimp;
Half-literate placards in the street can only scare a wimp,
Already sceptical of the new dispensation during the November 2017 euphoria, he closes the poem in the grumpy voice of the outgoing president:
If the worship of man doesn’t follow me to waterless plains,
A Frankenstein will uncage before journalists say ‘Amen.’
History will remain a rosary with a bead for each liberator
And a cross reserved for the Leviathan in the incubator.
As you read Stanley’s poems, you easily notice his class bias.
“Yea, naturally I am out here for the underdog. I write from my own social position,” he says as his eyes show that this is indeed a sensitive issue but one he will proudly expound on.
“When you look at how things are arranged, newspapers, publishing, the academy, the church, institutions that might have been a prophetic reply to power, they are micro-managed by the same people who have something to hide or something to sell,” Stanley says, his voice give away emotion.
“Art, for me, becomes the one form of expression for which I do not answer to any hierarchy. It is where I possess my soul,” he boasts.
“You are told you don’t have the vocabulary, you don’t have the qualification to talk about the economy yet when I go to my one room who am I sharing it with everyday if not the economy?” he articulates with a sardonic smile.
Asked about the role played by late writers the likes Charles Mungoshi, Dambudzo Marechera and Chenjerai Hove in Zimbabwean culture, Stanley is all praises, though he wishes their work had been better rewarded.
He names Charles Mungoshi as having been unfairly passed over for the national hero status. “The labour of love, the pioneering achievements are there for all to see. What these dudes did for Zimbabwe, few people from any walk of life, including politics, will ever come close,” says Stanley, betraying unvoiced signs of concern that he will also be forgotten.
It is easy to notice that Stanley has more to share with the world, not just through poetry but also through word of mouth. Before I realised it, it’s already evening and time to bid farewell to one of Zimbabwe’s literary rookies as he says of himself.
Stanley talks just as much as he writes. Apart from that, he also laughs a lot, though his laugh does not last for long, as if something instantly reminds him when he starts laughing that he is wasting time on useless things.
Besides finding critical acclaim with his two poetry collections, Stanley shows no signs of stopping. He is currently writing a poetry collection, Black Romantic, a novel, Halfway House, which he calls a surrealist psychological thriller, and an essay collection, What We Talk about When We Talk about the System.
For Stanley, writing seems to be daily bread. During my conversation with him, I had to constantly remind him that the purpose of my visit was not to talk about books but to get up-close and personal with him. However, writing and Stanley seem inseparable.
To say he is antisocial, though he pleads guilty to the charge himself, is surely ungenerous because he loves to talk, besides keeping up with his audiences on social media.
Adapted from an April 2019 National University of Science and Technology assignment by Givemore Manyenga
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