Pilgrimage of poems: Choose laughing over fighting

For National Poetry Month today, we’re going to Harare, where members of Zimbabwe Poets for Human Rights reached out to voters in last year’s elections through their poems.

I posted on this rather astonishing form of electioneering last summer, after hearing the story reported by NPR’s Ofeibia Quist-Arcton. You should really listen to the story, to hear the poets recite their poems, but here are a couple that were included.

Taste the similarities of the call from slam poets Robson Isaac Shoes Lambada and Michael Mabwe. In the use of repetition and the shaping of the sounds, they both remind me of Gertrude Stein, most of whose stuff you really need to hear rather than read. These poems are meant for performance.

First Mabwe:

What shall we say and do when

Politics is no longer the pattern of ideas

But the conquering of masters

Who control the greatest number of thugs

What shall we say and do when

The dead are more than the living

On the voters roll?

What shall we say and do when

Politicians have become hyenas

Devastating our communities?

And now Shoes Lambada:

What should the youth say and do

when they let them lie to the ah-bodda-bigga-boon?

Wibbly, wobbly walking in a grotesque parody of motion,

with worn out emotions,

and hopeless like skeletons of prehistoric animals.

Voting is the beginning of the ending of complaining.

And abstaining is donating your right to choosing.

I choose to choose by voting

and choose laughing over fighting,

voting over sloganeering and voting over fighting.

Mugabe and his Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front party won that election. Sometimes brute force and chicanery trump poetry in the short term.