Commonword Blogs

Its been 9 weeks, 2 days, 8 hours, 37 minutes and 18 seconds since my last blog. I have NOT been on holiday. It’s been 4 weeks, 1 day, 2 hours, 3 minutes and 23 seconds since the last Speakeasy. 6 weeks, 3 days, 1 hours, 32 minutes and 5 seconds since I walked into the first session of Ben Mellor’s ‘Performance vs Content’ workshop one hour late intent on improving my performance skills in time for the Speakeasy stage.

There must have been about 3 or 4 of 'em. Maybe even 5. I cant really remember. Dont... really - want to remember.. But Anyway, I must, O Blog Master, oh horror of horrors. How can I say this? Second time on the stage & I forgot my lines. There, its out. Its taken me 2 weeks.
I'd spent all morning memorizing. Didn't really have to; I mean, it was my latest poem, therefore it was my best poem. I even went to the Urbis event without my sheets. I'd memorized not one but two poems! After all, Segun had said seven minutes...

A Sample...

It pleases me that the poetry reading is in a library. I imagine a small audience and when I walk into the room on time to find only fellow poet Nabila and her family, the emptiness lends an air of confidence to the soul. It hovers, expands. 30 minutes later the same soul has shrunk at the sight of the growing audience. The event begins and Anjum introduces Nabila. Beside me sit Kervin Charles and Tachia Newall, both experienced poets. I watch her as she stands up, smiles, reads. I hear nothing of the poetry I normally enjoy.

I base the novel on fact. Little boys and girls forced to watch the rapes of their mothers, sisters and grandmothers by soldiers of a new African government. The questions: What is the psychological effect of this on these boys? How does this affect their future relationships with not only women but also their own penises? I dig deeper: Why do soldiers in conflict resort to rape in the first place? Is this just an army-taught tactic or the result of Me Tarzan you jane social engineering? If it is then does it have to be an endless cycle? If not then who will put a stop to it?

My Mother died in 1995. I was very young.
Months later, I sat in a classroom trying to describe the scene. My first attempt at independent creative writing.
Fast Forward to May, 2008. I’m in London, reaching for my vibrating phone. The message pops up on the screen before fading into the background: Yahoo Email. Anjum Malik. Usual niceties. Point: Poetry Reading in Rochdale. Pete said you dabble. Interested?

And that was the first lesson I learnt in Novel writing. Apparently, you have 3 minutes. Probably less. In that time the words on the first page of your first chapter need to have reached out, grabbed the reader by the collar and shook the life out of them. Beat them. Spat on them. Raped them. Abused them. Or lured them with the promise of… anything that isn’t normal. It seems people are less willing to spend fictional time with normal people, let alone fork out £7.99 to do so.
All first drafts are excrement said Hemmingway.

The Novel starts in 2002 after a chance encounter with a stolen Marechera.
Almost every Zimbabwean writer of my generation has either worshipped or imitated Marechera at any one point. I was one of them. I was 16, reeling from the discovery of the dark foundations underpinning my relationship with the world. 16 and shocked by my place in the mother country - African at best, Zimbabwean at worst. I6; fresh out of the Zimbabwean school curriculum, free to read as I pleased: