TANAKA CHIDORA, YES SADNESS IS BEAUTIFUL!

BIODATA OF TANAKA CHIDORA

Tanaka Chidora is a literary scholar with a PhD in Literature from the University of the Free State in South Africa (2018). He taught at the University of Zimbabwe in the Department of English from 2014 to May, 2021 before joining Goethe University as a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow researching on violence, memory and literature in Zimbabwe. Additionally, Chidora is a published poet and short story writer whose first poetry collection, Because Sadness is Beautiful? (2019) was published in Zimbabwe by Mwanaka Media and Publishing. He has also finished working on his first novel.

POEMS BY TANAKA CHIDORA

THE ANATOMY OF SADNESS

I used to think of sadness as:
the cold crawling
under the tattered
blanket of the
madman who sleeps in the alley
and stopping
momentarily to listen
to the splatter of a
drunkard’s urine
escaping in bursts
from a syphilitic penis
and landing on the
outstretched and
emaciated arm of the
madman;

or
the cadaver of
a pregnant woman
swinging from a
drought-worn tree
around which the
shimmering heat
creates apparitions
that scare off
the woman’s people
who stand afar
as voyeurs of apocalyptic
injustices;

or
two children walking

into the country’s dark tummy
and disappearing into
the slime of its
intestines to be seen
no more
and to be remembered
no more because
memory is too
famished to keep them
as souvenirs of a past
life lived.

but now I know,
I know that sadness is 2020
and the events that
cling to its dark
underbelly.

HARARE

Harare’s shrivelled breast has run out of milk
but millions of her children continue to suckle unabated
eager to outwit each other in this mad scramble.
they suckle, drawing blood, drawing nothing,
the caterpillar wheels of their wretchedness
reducing to stains the few surviving worms of conscience
that are wriggling on the slimy floors of their hearts.

A WOMAN DRINKING

‘do you think I have had enough?’ she asks.
‘drink on,’ I reply. ‘who knows what tomorrow holds?’
‘there is no tomorrow. every day is today.’
her words stand before me, in the haze of my cigarette smoke,
swaying like eucalyptus in the wind.
I drag on the cigarette and puff in the words’ faces;
I want them to stand aside because I am sure
tomorrow is huddling somewhere behind them.
when the words disperse like protesters fleeing from tear gas
there is no tomorrow to see,
except the woman, the beer and the dirty walls with flaking paint.

she rises to go to the bathroom but, ravaged by drunkenness,
collapses heavily to the floor.
I rise to help her, but she stops me.
‘I am fine,’ she slurs. ‘it’s always like this when I drink.’
a momentary silence. then she looks at me and asks,
‘it’s always like this on this earth, isn’t it?’
I don’t know what ‘it’ refers to; I’m too drunk to think.

when she finally shambles to the bathroom
I pick a piece of paper that she has left on the floor.

it’s her pay slip.