Title: A Fine Madness
Author: Mashingaidze Gomo

ISBN: 978-0-9562401-4-9

Publisher: Ayebia Clarke

A New Negritude?
LS Mensah diagnoses A Fine Madness, written by Mashingaidze Gomo

Mashingaidze Gomo’s A Fine Madness, prefaced by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, is a collection that structures its narratives around a series of thirty four (mostly) long prose poems. Through these, the reader is given glimpses of the poet-narrator as he immerses himself in the day to day business of war - a grind for most of the time. The poems attempt to draw parallels between the long running conflict in the Democratic Republic Of Congo (DRC) and others across the continent. 'In Divine Abstraction' the longest, he diagnoses the causes of the war as resulting from:

The story of civilisation regressing to neo-colonial barbarism
Sponsored gunmen and armed children roaming the land, wire-locked to a mode of self-destruction .

To a certain extent Gomo's totalising vision of African history is one which aligns his work with the negritude of an earlier generation of African poets, presenting a vision of a pastoral landscape wrecked and disrupted by the White Other:

And virgin Africa had unintentionally defied Europe and
America to love her
And now she lay sprawled on her back … raped by
exploiters from the West
And they took turns on her …
The whole lot of them  …
And now she lays hurting and grieving, with no one to console her.

He parts ways with the earlier writers however when he lets go the mask of artistic disguise so that at times one cannot differentiate between writer and narrator. Something else that strikes the reader is the looseness of diction. Lines, stanzas, even whole poems come to an end without a full stop. The conjunctive ‘and’ is perhaps the most used word in the collection. This gives the reader an impression of the poems starting and ending in media res, mirroring in my view the condition of the African as constantly lurching from crisis to crisis with no end at sight.

The impotence of the African is a running theme throughout this collection. Consider the impotence of men who, caught up in the fighting without their rifles, appear pathetic and grotesque:

And then there was a rattle …
An AK 47 on automatic! … And the men stopped too
And listened
And they looked at each other
And they looked stupid without rifles
And it had not seemed necessary

Then there is the impotence of an alcoholic Zimbabwean soldier, who though facing possible ruin back home, cannot find the moral courage to wean himself from drink:

And I saw in him an Africa alone, at its own crossroads
of self determination and suicidal dependence
Women and children most of all are affected by this powerlessness:
And there were more such children around … some
seated, some dancing around, watching their mothers
catching men … their bottoms being pinched and slapped
randomly by armed men
And they were the soft targets of a wrenching apart of
human civilization …

Across the spectrum of these poems the Congo's plight is only a corollary; rather it is Zimbabwe's encounter with colonial rule, its struggle for independence and the tensions between its black and white populations that is the real subject of this book and the narrator is at pains to link the histories of Zimbabwe, the Congo, and by extension all African countries:

Saga after saga
The Second Chimurenga
The Mozambican campaign
Operation Sovereign Legitimacy … And he spoke of ill equipped ZANLA and ZIPRA
guerrillas pitted against a colonial war machine perfected
for deed of malevolence … prejudiced to see only white victims in the carnage that a bigoted Ian Smith had institutionalized

There are other reasons to read this book. The narrator’s duties as a helicopter technician means that he spends a considerable amount of time flying. This gives him a unique point of view, and allows him to see things from the air, things denied to others. It also gives him the chance to write a genre of poetry not very common in African writing – the airplane / helicopter poem. In ‘The horizon’ we see:

Burnt down homes, some still smouldering
Deserted villages running to seed
And then occasionally …
Only very occasionally you would see a man …
A man casting furtive glances at the bird of war
In ‘Jungle Drama’ we are allowed to take off ‘ through the afternoon sky’ with
Two Alouettes alone above the equatorial jungle
A red spear thrown into the troubled great lakes by
African people of the south

Other examples of the airplane/helicopter poem include ‘The spot with rash,’ ‘The concept of time’ and ‘Rear guard action’ among others.

What we witness in this book is the African's inhumanity to his fellow African. The Congo's problems are as much the result of external forces as the greed and corruption of its politicians. It also lets us into the tragedy of war, and how war, the longer it continues, reduces everyone to shadows of themselves, striving only to survive from moment to moment, and to accept situations and live under conditions they would never tolerate in peace time.

Most of all, this is a book that lets us into the world of the soldier who fights our wars. Even with the considerable number of poems and collections about the subject of war in Africa, most of these were written by poets as observers looking in from a distance. Gomo's A Fine Madness attempts to fill this gap.


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