#THURSPOETRY: Tanaka Chidora – Some Kinds of Grief (after the passing of Mugabe)

#ThursPoetry makes another return this week with another wordsmith courtesy of the Gourd of Consciousness Poetry.

This week it is the turn of Tanaka Chidora.

Tanaka Chidora is a Creative Writing and Theories of Literature lecturer in the Department of English and Media Studies at the University of Zimbabwe.

His first anthology of poetry titled Because Sadness is Beautiful? has been accepted for publication.

Award-winning author David Mungoshi, describes Tanaka’s poems as vivid, subversive and scatological due to Tanaka’s affinity for metaphors that are located in subterranean regions of the human body to demystify authority.

Chidora is currently working on an auto-fictional novel titled Magamba Hostels which chronicles his growing up in the ghetto of Mbare, Harare.

According to him, this is a no-holds-barred memoir which reflects his intention to bridge the gap between lies and truth, to the point where the memoirist himself is lost in the labyrinth.

His poems have been published in Gourd of Consciousness a weekly poetry column in The Standard Newspaper.

Poem Title: Some kinds of grief (after the passing of R.G Mugabe)

There is grief that feels like lemon juice seeping into lacerations left by life;
Then there is this other grief that tastes like booze whose flow down parched throats is followed by a sigh – an unburdening of sorts, a whole day’s assault finding its end in the nursing of a quart.
There is grief that tastes like raw pepper on nascent tongues, grief that leaves the tongue restless squirming with desperation for a Lazarus drop to quieten the pepper’s unrelenting arrogance;
Then there is grief that tastes like sugar that you lick until your skin glows from the pleasures of the tongue, until sugar becomes the palliative that makes you forget that once upon a meal pepper left your tongue writhing with fiery agony.

*finger snaps*

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