Zhuwao
Ghosting, Literary Archives & Tracing A LifeTinashe Mushakavanhu
My first encounter with Phillip Zhuwao was on campus, at Midlands State University,
in a quad we called Hunger Square, perhaps a hint to Marechera’s magnus opum.
At any given time, students sprawled on the green grass in between classes, or sat in groups arguing, or discussing assignments, or ‘eating airpies’ as our government loans were delayed,
again. I may have been walking towards the library when I heard my name being called. At first, I ignored the shouting voice. In Zimbabwe, the name Tinashe
is ubiquitous in that you only respond until someone taps you on the shoulder, otherwise you just keep walking. And that is what I did. I minded my own business, head straight. The voice became more frantic, and eventually caught up with me, breathing heavily. It was Patrick from History. He had seen me in ‘today’s paper’
as Edwin Hama sang in his popular hit of the 90s. Me, I said, in shock.
Patrick would later bring me a copy of Southern Times--a newspaper venture between Namibia and Zimbabwe. There was a centre spread piece on ‘Marecheramania and Zimbabwean Literature’ written by University of Zimbabwe don, Memory Chirere. There was a picture of me taken from a now deleted Myspace or Hi5 page; skinny, smiling, and with tinted glasses. Here I was, Marechera’s youngest disciple, standing in front of a bougainvillea. Through this unexpected media feature, I acquired a new status on campus as a writer. I recognised the other faces too in the newspaper article, circling a larger and familiar black-and-white portrait of Marechera; my big brothers, the other disciples, Robert Muponde, Nhamo Anthony Mhiripiri, Ignatius Mabasa, and Ruzvidzo Stanley Mupfudza (now late). But as I read the essay, deep inside its long rambling text, there was a name I had never heard of: Phillip Zhuwao. Who was this missing disciple? I started searching for him, in the university library, bookshops, on the Internet, everywhere. He was nowhere to be found, and felt like a completely made up person, entirely invented. How could this be? A Google search always brings up Patrick Zhuwao, a nephew of Robert Mugabe, but they are not directly related. I found an obscure mention of him from the South African publisher, Robert Berold, on a now deactivated blog that became the sliver of hope. I wrote to him. And slowly, the phantom of Phillip Zhuwao started morphing into shapes. The draft of his book, Sunrise Poison, was in my inbox. And much later, I would read his archive, which his family passed on to Berold as an instruction from Zhuwao himself on his deathbed. Phillip Zhuwao lives. But in that archival abyss, basic facts remain shrouded in mystery. There are hints of his biography in the fragments of paper he left behind and that does not burnish the legend of this ever elusive literary figure. One has to hew to the evidence and ferret out whatever rare nugget about Zhuwao’s life. As it turns out, his work is heavily autobiographical too, as if it was very important for him to write himself, to make permanent the fact that such a soul as him was once part of this earthly world. Biographical details are slippery things in Zhuwao’s life story. In fact, not much is known about him. I have yet to see even a photograph of him. Some reports suggest he died in 1994 at the age of 23, others indicate he died in 1997 at the age of 27. It is as if he never existed or if he did he remains a mythical figure. And that is compounded by the sometimes bleak, sometimes haunting poetry he wrote. It is a series of recordings of premonitions of his own death. Zhuwao was born in 1971 to immigrant parents. His father was originally from Zambia, while his mother's family came from Mozambique. And he was born in Zimbabwe. His life was a crossroad of cultures. This contributed to his disorientation. He felt within himself a number of different identities and it was the tension between these that he mined to such good effect. The challenge of Zhuwao’s archive is that it is scant – prominent in neither Higher Education, nor transnational sites of public memory, nor even in family records. This means that Zhuwao must be found via historical traces in the social sphere and recomposed using the local knowledges of key participants in his life and career. His death is now a faraway event, even for those who knew him, he has receded from view. But that some archive exists at all, even incomplete and unformed, disrupts social records, a stubborn reminder from Zhuwao himself that he must not be forgotten. Zhuwao and his family’s quest shows that people’s own knowledge of themselves is often historically-fragile, but it is nevertheless equally valuable to the formal knowledge infrastructure of the academy. Ten years after knowing about Zhuwao and his writings, and after many persuasions, Robert Berold, finally decided to release Sunrise Poison under his Deep South imprint in 2018. I was in Grahamstown/Makhanda as a writer in residence at Rhodes University for the occasion. Berold with a few others started the popular creative writing programme in the late 1990s. The day the books were delivered from the printers, I waited with a small group of young writers at the St Peter’s building on campus. It turns out the only place in the world Zhuwao is well known, and a staple on the curriculum, is Grahamstown/Makhanda, where he has been taught by Berold and a cohort of creative writing teachers since the mid 90s. While I was there students cited him as an influence. In this town, formerly named after Lieutenant-Colonel John Graham, a Scottish soldier and administrator credited for founding the settlement of Grahamstown in the Cape Colony in 1812, Zhuwao is a very present figure. We had the launch of Sunrise Poison upstairs in a bar whose name I don’t remember: there was a sizable audience, half of them students of the creative writing programme, and the other half, the local literati. There was an inevitable question waiting for the publisher, how much of this book was really Zhuwao as it was being released after twenty years since his death? Berold insisted the book had originally been prepared in consultation with Zhuwao himself. A year before his passing, in 1996, Zhuwao had spent a month at Berold’s farm at the outskirts of Grahamstown/Makhanda, and another few months living with the poet Alan Finlay in Honeydew, Johannesburg. The trip, his only long distance journey by train, was his last lap, which has since fortified his place in literary history. After returning to Harare, Zhuwao struggled with paranoia and depression, induced by alcoholism and addiction to morphine, and he was soon dead. Some of the edits of these early first drafts between Zhuwao and Berold are now deposited at the Amazwi South African Museum of Literature. Zhuwao, who is mostly anthologised across the Limpopo, is a more South African poet than he is a Zimbabwean poet. I was asked to DJ afterwards, and being a novice on the decks, there was no method or system to my sampling, I just played all the Zimbabwean music accumulated on my computer and when the audience grew restless, I introduced my trove of Marechera audio and videos that I have acquired in the years I have been researching Marechera, he who led me to Zhuwao, and that material elicited more excitement and engagement. Zhuwao and Marechera never met, but somehow, we have all met, and we were bound to meet. In a drunken stupor, someone walked over to me, and said, what is it about you and these literary ghosts? I did not set out to look for them. It happened gradually when I started digging into archives in every city I have lived in, on three continents. I meet these characters who lead me to other characters and their stories are too fantastical to ignore. But, Marechera has been central to this quest of knowing and unknowing. It is his archive, partially hidden in Berlin, that taught me to start wrangling with the gatekeepers and knowledge appropriators. In Zimbabwe, Marechera is a cultural monument of almost incalculable influence, and my mission into the life of this omnipresent national figure has equipped me with skills to build narrative archival profiles of other literary figures from Zimbabwe. Marechera may be an unreliable witness, but wherever he leads me, there is always sure to be worthwhile drama. So far Zhuwao has been insulated from the extravagant fancies that have led many Marechera starry eyed chroniclers astray. Zhuwao is hardly known in his home country, let alone elsewhere, apart from Grahamstown/Makhanda. His only published book, Sunrise Poison, has not sold well but is remarkably collected in many libraries across the world. Plans to publish another four volumes are currently shelved. For his story to capture others, we have to address substantively the source that accounts for his appeal. We have to infuse the sparseness of the historical record with the creative possibilities of literary analysis. When copies of Sunrise Poison were at the brink of being pulped at a commercial warehouse in Cape Town, because the book was not selling at all, I bought them all, hundreds and hundreds of them. The boxes are now stacked in a corner at my sister’s flat in Johannesburg because in my quest to meet Phillip Zhuwao, he has now recruited me to spread his message too. Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a Junior Research Fellow in African & Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Kent. Since 2016 he has been a researcher for readingzimbabwe.com a digital archive collecting, cataloguing, digitizing and making available information on books about Zimbabwe from the 1950s to the present. He is working on book/archival projects on literary figures from Zimbabwe such as Dambudzo Marechera, Derek Huggins, Ndabaningi Sithole and Yvonne Vera.
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