Poetry Africa Biographies - page 6 of 6
Back to Poetry Africa 2003
 Edwin Thumboo (Singapore)
Timothy Wangusa (Uganda)
Musa Zimunya (Zimbabwe)
Abdallah Zrika (Morocco)
Edwin Thumboo ( Singapore)
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 ‘Poetry can create a dialect for the tribe, touch life and contacts in a multiracial society, and try articulate history in the moment.’
Born and raised in Singapore, Edwin Thumboo (1933) is hailed as one of the foremost poets in English in Southeast Asia and has won several awards. Thumboo started writing poetry as an undergraduate student in the 1950s, a time when the writing of free verse was held up as ‘modern’. However, his efforts at spontaneity did not mar the skills learned from his study of modernist poets, which led him to ‘explore and express experience through metaphor’.
He has published several volumes of poetry, which critics, local and international, have acknowledged as significant milestones in the literary history of Singapore.
While Singapore began its long arduous journey of political independence and nationhood from the 1960s, Thumboo declared in the 1970s that poets should steer clear of political affinities: ‘I have always thought the poet is an individual aware of, if not actually guarding his freedom […] We should be surprised if he were not wise enough to avoid dealing with National Identity.’
Love is central to Thumboo’s poetry. In his poems, love is not just romantic and idyllic, but also associated with hesitance, sense of loss, denials, postponements, separation, even with the sense of death. Critical opinion on this deep and complex poet is varied and controversial. The truest test of his poetic powers lies however, in the fact that his poems continue to fascinate newer and younger critics and continue to influence a whole new generation of poets from Southeast Asia.
Currently Thumboo is the Chairman Director of The Centre for the Arts, at the National University in Singapore, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and was made Emeritus Professor in 1997.
Publications:
Rib of Earth, Singapore: L. Fernando, 1956
Child’s Delight: Book 1, Federal Publications (Singapore), 1972
Child’s Delight: Book 2, Federal Publications (Singapore), 1972
Gods Can Die, Heinemann Educational Books (Asia), 1977
Ulysses by the Merlion, Heinemann Educational Books (Asia), 1979
A Third Map: New and Selected Poems, UniPress (Singapore), 1993
Crossing
Suddenly the old man felt a stare,
Collective, sharp with many eyes,
Intensify the noon’s unbending glare,
As he dodged the impatient cries
Of Warring mopeds, buses, cars.
Doubled by the burden of his load,
He touched asphalt, wished for stars,
For the patient dragon of the road.
poem cc E Thumboo
Timothy Wangusa ( Uganda )
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 ‘Poetry is an expression of wonderment, an exercise in attempting to solve the quadratic equation of self, and a critical commentary on my complex environment’
Born in eastern Uganda, Timothy Wangusa (1942) is both novelist and well published poet with favourite themes and subjects being nature, history, politics and the spiritual arena. ‘The need deep in my inside to put into words as rhythmic and concise and rich as possible, some moments of personal wonderment and the poignant experiences within my social context, made me become a poet.’
After studying at Makerere University College and The University of Leeds Wangusa took appointment at Makerere University 1969, was promoted to Full Professor in 1981, and also served as Head of Department of Literature and Dean of Faculty of Arts. His public roles include that of Minister of Education in the Ugandan Government, 1985-6; Member of Parliament, 1989-96; and currently those of Literary Advisor to the Head of State, and Vice Chancellor of Kumi University in eastern Uganda.
"What is so special about poetry for me is that - unlike prose fiction, which chiefly employs narration; and drama, which chiefly employs dialogue - by use of precise, colourful and rhythmic language, poetry is the most memorable and most feelingly expressed of all imaginative verbal compositions," says Wangusa.
" The importance of poetry is that whereas with language in general humankind names the world and becomes its master, with literature we imaginatively re-create that world in order to relate more meaningfully to it; and with poetry in particular, the soul celebrates in song and picture language the uniqueness of the human being in that world.’
Publications:
Salutations, EALB (Nairobi), 1977
Upon this mountain, Heinemann (Oxford), 1989
A Pattern of Dust, Fountain (Kampala), 1994
Anthem for Africa, La Rosa (Turin), 1995
Forthcoming: African Epiphanies
The African Elephant
Listen to the blare of annunciation
Of the African elephant, tetrarch of the jungle!
Behold what slow, majestic progress on the hoof
Of matriarchs, their young and their one bull
As they head for the waterhole.
Observe what tenderness of the mother for its infant,
Standing guard to let it first drink its fill,
Together rolling in protective, glorious mud,
Then signaling the way back
To the daily routine
Of reducing tropical forest to grassland.
Mark the pliable, multi-purpose trunk:
Its digging tool and harvest knife,
Its conduit for water and weapon in battle,
Its organ for smelling and sizing the world.
Then ponder the paradoxical curse
Of its twin tusks:
From time immemorial
The substance of immortal ornaments;
Ever since the dawn of the imperial plunder
Of Africa for export of human souls -
Ivory -
The damnation of the African elephant -
To provide exotic cultures
With piano keys and billiard balls.
poem cc T Wangusa
Musa Zimunya (Zimbabwe)
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 The poetry of Musaemura Zimunya (1949), one of Zimbabwe’s most published poets, first appeared in journals and anthologies when he was still a student at school and university. While revealing an imaginative appreciation of the beauty of nature, his poetry also represents the feelings of a generation that felt marginalized and deracinated by colonialism. The poetry he wrote after 1980 is ‘about the search for cultural sites, and the myths that underpin the lives of people who are either confounded by, or marooned in, Western modernity, or who are contending with the post-colonial condition in Zimbabwe’.
In Country Dawns and City Lights, Zimunya demonstrates that ‘he is the poet of cultural migration and the inhabiting of liminal cultural spaces.’ He writes about childbirth, love potions, randy sisters-in-law, mangy dogs, superstitions, avenging spirits, and the first sexual encounters of the young. His later books, Perfect Poise and Selected Poems, are collections that contain both the lyricism of his earlier work and the sardonic biting perspective of the critic. Musa Zimunya has published diverse articles on the literature and the music of Zimbabwe and received numerous awards, among them the National Arts Council Poetry Award in 1993. He has also published a collection of short stories, Nightshift, and a volume of literary criticism. Zimunya taught literature at the University of Zimbabwe before relocating to the College of Arts and Sciences, Virginia Tech Institute and State University, USA, where he is Director and Visiting Professor in the Black Studies Program.
Publications
Thought Tracks, Longman, 1982
Kingfisher, and Jikinya and other poems, Longman, 1982
Country Dawns and City Lights, Longman, 1985
Perfect Poise, College Press, 1993
Nightshift, (short stories), Longman, 1993
Selected Poems, Longman, 1995
A Long Journey
We have fled from the witches and wizards
On a long long road to the city
But behind the halo of tower lights
I hear the cry from human blood
And wicked bones rattling around me
We moved into the lights
But from the dark periphery behind
An almighty hand reaches for our shirts.
poem CC M Zimunya
Abdallah Zrika ( Morocco )
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' This is not a pen, but a pickaxe to demolish the poet who tyrannizes me.'
One night in December 1953, lightning tore the Casablanca sky, greeting the birth of a poet, "the craziest, the most brilliant Arab poet of these times", somebody later wrote about Abdallah Zrika. Probably also the most tormented: "This is not a pen, but a pickaxe to demolish the poet who tyrannizes me", he wrote himself.
Abdallah Zrika grew up in a poor quarter, the central quarries of Casablanca, the biggest shanty town in Morocco, but his childhood there was a happy one. "I had a link with the earth, the plants, the birds…", he recounts. "My imagination was always awake".
Conversely, Zrika finds the city too tidy, too neat, "too white"… like its inhabitants; kind, but flat characters, lacking texture, whereas he could see texture everywhere. The slightest piece of wasteland, the slightest trash dump – and they were many – would project him into endless imaginary spirals.
Objects have always inspired Abdallah, often appearing to him more human than people. As a child he was struck by a blue velvet notebook cover in which his elder sister carefully kept her letters. From this Zrika drew conviction for the rest of his life, that "words are a precious thing, everything can live in them… and especially poetry, the ultimate threshold of words." And they can be precious to the point that they become dangerous to handle, as Zrika experienced when he was sentenced to prison for two years for "poetry offence".
Zrika’s poems seek to break with the dominant concept of poetry as high culture and instead integrate the language of everyday life into literature. His poetry is non-programmatic, untrammeled associative speech with a spontaneity unsurpassed in modern Arabic literature. ‘I fear the table because those who gather there to eat gather there to kill’
For the Moroccan youth, the hugely popular Abdallah Zrika represents an ideal, the freedom to live and to tell.
Publications
Dance of the head and the rose, 1977
Rires de l’arbre à palabres, l’Harmattan, 1982
Black Candles; La Différence (Paris), 1998
Petites Proses, L’Escampette, 1998
Echelles de la Métaphysique, L’Escampette, 2000
The Colour of Distance; ed. Stefan Weidner, Beck Verlag, 2000
Black candles
II
Give me a glass
To sip this emptiness
And an arm
To measure this separation
Prepare for me a bed
Of glass
So that my nightmares slip on
I don't want to read letters
Which do not stand before me
Like nails
I am going to give my hand to this dog
Coming to cut some of its fingers
I will leave a lot of blanks in my writings
So that this prostitute can saunter
As she pleases
(This is not a pen
But a pickaxe to destroy the poet
Who tyrannizes me)
Ants will walk behind my funeral
And I will leave my grave to someone
Who found nowhere to sleep
I will leave a lot of blanks in my writings
To lighten the darkness
Coming with the night of the words
I will leave a blank
For the day of your wedding
poem cc A Zrika
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