Logbook Written By A Drifter

Logbook written by a drifter, is a cycle of interlinked poems that deal with life, spirituality, language, philosophy, love and relationships. A main theme are relationships which have changed the character. Those which the character doesn’t know how to deal with; which have make the character into a wreck, emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually: he is in a small space. This collection encourages us to keep those spaces, spaces of the drift, until we have faced our challenges, after all sometimes drifting is all we can do!

Logbook written by a drifter, is a cycle of interlinked poems that deal with life, spirituality, language, philosophy, love and relationships. A main theme are relationships which have changed the character. Those which the character doesnt know how to deal with; which have make the character into a wreck, emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually: he is in a small space. This collection encourages us to keep those spaces, spaces of the drift, until we have faced our challenges, afterall sometimes drifting is all we can do!

Zimbolicious Anthology: An Anthology of Zimbabwean Literature and Arts is the 6th yearly volume of Zimbabwean Literature and the arts. This year's anthology is extra-special in that we feature Zimbabwe's upcoming young visual artists who recently won or got highly recommended and exhibited their artworks through the National Art Gallery, in a competition sponsored by Morgan & Co and in association of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. These artworks varies from installation, mixed media, drawings, paintings and tackled the issue of being "Masked", resultant of Covid 19 pandemic. These artworks are accompanied by Tinashe Muchuri's illuminating critical reception essay. Chrispah Munyoro's artworks are personal and are of struggle, and Tendai Rinos Mwanaka's artworks deal with a number of issues such as US racism, the issue of Jihad terrorism, climate change and global warming. The poetry section tackles a gamut of issues from governance, spirituality, environmentalism, love, relationships, etc... and the fiction section has 4 bittersweet short stories dealing with illegal mining mob deaths (Mathew T Chikono), coming of age love story (Christopher Kudyahakudadirwe), a slice of bus travelogue (Nicole Kazembe), writing mother's body (Oscar Gwiriri). The nonfiction has two essays; Chipo Martha Bute deals with a personal journey to discovery and worthiness and Tendai Rinos Mwanaka deals with Zimbabwe's politics.

The latest Zimbolicious offering, Zimbolicious Anthology: An Anthology of Zimbabwean Literature and Arts, Vol 4, has nonfiction, poetry, an interview, fiction and incisive visual art. Works were received from regular contributors and relatively new artists. The poets with their collective audacious eye keenly observe society and reveal the pimples, warts and all that is afflicting the society; talk about the dying, already dead and decaying Zimbabwean currency or nonexistent currency, the emancipation of women, the grinding poverty and the political challenges Zimbabwe faces. Others deal with spirituality and religion, love, growing up without a father figure. Nonfiction work leaves one under a barrage of questions: What it means to be a Zimbabwean, the defining and dissecting of Zimbabwes literature, writing, self-publishing are put under serious scrutiny. Some delicious slices of the scenic Zimbabwean landscape are featured and a continuation in investigating what home is in a selection of visual art pieces The fiction is speculative, bittersweet and stays on your mind like a memory of that long, long forgotten summer of love as each fictionist deal with issues related to relationships, love, the lack of, the impermanence of which is an ever recurring leitmotiv in these works, thus therefore, this Zimbolicious is a must read, robust, incisive collection of Zimbabwean Literature and the arts.

The first thing you will meet in this collection is experimentation and innovativeness in the writing. Poets should be scientists by experimenting with forms, styles, with subject matter too, they should continuously try to find new ways of writing, to problematicise what we have always taken for granted. The second issue is how we understand and critically dissect that point where art criticism and actual art can meet in the poetic form. The third issue is how irreverently the poet treates issues to do with the meaning of words, what words are, how he creates new words, what numbers are, the state of voice, language, thoughts, dreams, perspectives, life, race, death, dreams, spirituality, love etc… The fourth issue is the storytelling tradition that is strong in this collection; the poet is saying poets are also storytellers, who tell a story in condensed form with depth of thought and feeling. The fifth important aspect is defiance. The poet refuses to settle on anything, to accept anything, he is a literary rebel with language, no subject is taboo. A Portfolio of Defiance defiantly looks at the world before voice and the world after voice, and the worlds in between. What will human beings be without voice? Even nothingness has a voice!

In Best New African Poets 2021 Anthology there are 18 French speaking African poets from DRC, Congo Brazzaville, Cameroun, Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, Chad, Senegal, Comoros and more... 14 Portuguese speaking poets from Angola, Sao Tome and Principe, Mozambique and 63 English speaking African poets from among other countries, South Africa, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zambia, Tanzania, Ghana, Gambia, Sierra Leone. A full gamut of issues is dissected, from love, marriage, relationships, spirituality, politics, culture, tradition, environmentalism, and the interstellar etc. Included are two collaborations: the first deals with marriage, juxtaposing Monogamy vs Polygamy with the 21th century lived experience; the second imagines humanity living as intergalactic beings. The poets were asked to be imaginative (to be fictional poets), to try to create and imagine human agency in this interstellar civilization approaching. There is also featured 5 group interviews with 5 previous contributors to this series. These interviews were interactive and collaborative, with largely the BNAP groups interviewing a poet, critically engaging with their work and discussing the literary and social aspects the poetry addressed. And lastly 4 reviews of African poetry.

My work takes the nature of interactive, collaborative and multidisciplinary. I work across several art fields, including among others literary (fictions, novels, essays poetry, play, short stories, songs...), musical (composition, singing, reciting, mbira, marimba, keyboards, a little guitar...), and visual (drawings, paintings, photography, collages, mixed media, installation etc...) I am interested in connection, convergence, community and cooperation, following disparate sometimes disfigured experiences, seeing how they can come together or shy away from each other to create new wholes. The baobab trees are ancient trees, some might be thousands years old, imagine the people who have stayed in these dwellings, who have ate the fruits of these trees, who have used its leaves as relish(we create mashed okra relish with baobab leaves), the ailments treated by its buck....every part of this succulent tree is useful. In this photo journey I learned a lot more about these beautiful souls: they have a tendency to create musical lines, mostly linear, it's like one tone starting it, fading and letting the next tone to take over and this will fade and let another tone to take over, such that you can see the lines, how they conjoin to create music beyond human understanding. And most of the Baobabs, I realized, inhabit the same place in numbers, and usually they are on high grounds, like Gods who love elevated dwellings, and they look down upon other small humans (small trees, humans etc...), but there are also some singular baobabs that inhabit lower grounds and most of these are solitary and from my memory growing up here, these don't bear fruits. And whilst I was photographing the Baobabs several story strands in my head converged around one far much more important issue, the issue of Climate Change and Global Warming. In Registers of Loss I encourage working together as human beings to arrest Global warming and climate change the way the baobabs work together to communicate in linear notes, or in community thoughts.

Zimbolicious Anthology: An Anthology of Zimbabwean Literature and Arts, Vol 5 is the fifth in this yearly journal of Zimbabwean literature and the arts as it happens. The poetry covers a range of subjects; love, spirituality, religion, migration, poet's vocation and as usual the political direction or situation in the country. The fiction deals with a wide range issues, from religious contrivance in Gwiriri's story, drug problem and corruption in Mutize's story, the political and economic strife in Tokwe's story, and the personal trauma story in Chikomo's car accident story. In the nonfiction section we have Muchuri's illuminating essay on another Zimbabwe storyteller, Ignatious Mabasa's Shona books, Zvikomborero Kapuya harks back to the land issue as the starting point and catapult to the misunderstandings between Zimbabwe and her erstwhile foreign enemies, Chikono writes his painful life story on shame families carry when a family member has a child out of wedlock, worst when the child is disabled and Mwanaka has a small philosophical vignette essay on choice. The visual section is heralded by Nhevera's iconic brushworks depicting movement and portraiture, and Mwanaka has an array of art pieces from documentary photography, experimental photography, water colour, computer graphic and installation, wrapping up this new offering.