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‘The woman I am missing now is a beautiful woman

An older woman aged in beauty…

A beauty digging in… making a last stand around the

eyes where her smile is still disarming’

Thus begins ‘A
Fine Madness’, by the soldier and poet, Mashingaidze Gomo. Sometimes it
takes a soldier to engage the (mainly) European myth of the cleanliness
of the conscience of a gun. Gomo set about his self assigned task in
this volume with remarkable zeal. He has written an unusual book, an
important book, the kind of book that gets itself noticed because it is
feisty and from the heart. The book is classified as Fiction/Black
Interest by the publisher. It has been severally dubbed prose poetry,
narrative collage and even narrative stream-of-consciousness by others.

The author himself
is not overly particular about generic correlation or generic
expectations. He is writing, as soldiers are wont to write, urgently,
sweepingly and sternly of what his world consists of as a man in the
midst of the substance and transience of war. In this, he is a
pragmatic convert of Harry Garuba, the poet and scholar, who declared
that literature, like land, has to be positively possessed in order not
to be lost. Of course Garuba’s thesis is a nuanced statement of
critical literary jurisprudence but it is charming to find pragmatics
throw their element into its calculus. Gomo is bold. His energy is
infectious and his style is admirable for one making a debut.

Echoes of Senghor

If you have not
heard of Gomo before, don’t worry. His work in this volume is dense, it
will remind you of Leopold Sedar Senghor, Okot p’Bitek, Amilcar Cabral,
the Serbo-Croat poet Vasco Popa (in translation) and even Dambudzo
Marechera. His writing is intimate with violence and the tools of death
but the heart of this soldier-writer is set on love and the rituals of
life: ‘At first there was a single shot/A lone shot whose echo lasted
longer than was necessary…’ ‘And the Alouettes beat on/Two birds of
war, on the trail of a tireless horizon…’

At various
interludes in A Fine Madness, the soldier-writer sifts through the
rubble of African post-colonial history to see what can be salvaged of
the mighty ruins of the continent so effectively pulverised by foreign
treasure-seekers and their internal collaborators. It is interesting
that he does not rely on the Geiger counter for locating mineral
deposits, he relies instead on instinct for locating those trueborn
Africans who will retrieve first the soul of the continent and then the
possessions of which the people have been robbed. His search is
uncompromising, his ambit is wide. He embraces those the society
condemn as prostitute but who possess a quality of soul far purer than
the phallic conscience of the rapists and thieves who have turned these
poor souls into mean beggarly elements. Gomo insists on African
expansiveness of spirit. Africa has never been outdone in giving, will
never be outdone in giving. It is an immortal largeness of spirit which
colonialism can maim but never kill.

Historical bogeymen

But Gomo is too
often bogged down by the bogeymen of history and wonky philosophy. For
instance, he writes: ‘African history must be made by hard old men who
can/withstand colonialist arrogance and demonisation if/Posterity
requires it of them.’

It is one thing to
liberate oneself of the gravitational pull of generic demands but quite
another to argue with a gerontological bias regarding a whole
continent. It is possible that, coming from Zimbabwe and coming into
adulthood in the flush of the liberation struggles, Gomo’s trust in the
virtue of old men has suffered exaggeration. A safer route for all is
the collective wisdom of the people, young and old, male and female. As
Soyinka once observed, there may yet be wisdom in infant gums which
will defeat the set notions of age.

When Gomo sticks
to his main muse, Tinyarei, who is, in reality, mother Africa – he is
capable of presenting the paradoxes of contemporary Africa in the most
illuminating light: a people as willing to enjoy the fruits of the
labour of liberation fighters even as they pillory the liberation
fighters, willing to use modern technology to devastating effect in war
without any willingness to foster qualities of mind to move into their
own organic technologies of peace. Indeed, as the poet explores the
luminous moments in his tour of duty in the Congo, the reader is
brought to a consciousness of how, in essence, all Africa is so
effectively represented in that fratricidal conflict.

Ilyushin’s flight

You do not have to
live through the humid horrors of war in the Democratic Republic of
Congo to identify with the human tragedy unfolding in the region. Read
Gomo’s book. The destruction wrought by ubiquitous small arms and the
occasional helicopter gunship, the fraying of the moral fabric of a
people, turning women into courtesans and men into murderers, the
erasure of vital history and knowledge in a region that once produced
astronomers and poets in numbers. Mashingaidze’s material is strong
meat. The product of eyes that have seen death, nostrils that have
endured its rank stench.

The poetic
personae is not self-righteous. He admits freely to liaisons with all
kinds of elements, male and female, in the theatre of war. He is a
soldier. He has done what soldiers do. A Fine Madness ends on a note
inspired by flight. He ties the aeronautics of an Ilyushin’s flight to
the moral technique African’s must adopt in order to be free. Indeed,
Gomo insists on freedom as a non-negotiable precondition for the
realisation of the African dream. Freedom and a certain faith in the
fighting spirit of Africans, ancestors and the unborn. It is enough to
move one to tears.

This book is a necessary read. In it you will find enough to love
and quarrel with. It will provoke you to contemplate the African
conundrum afresh even as it surprises you with those echoes of the
village chanteuse which a large number of us have lost or never even
heard.