John Eppel’s garden
in Bulawayo is looking devastated. This
evening is the first time in months that even a sniff of rain has clouded the
sky; even in winter I don’t remember being able to see through his usually
riotous shrubbery into neighbours’ properties.
The russet dust and siftings of yellow grass don’t deter Bismarck, the
Border collie, who as always immediately presents a tooth-marked ball for
throwing, as if I’ve been doing it for him all my life. Ivan the unridged Ridgeback-Dachshund cross
bounces about, apparently in a constant state of irrepressible confusion.
John is his usual,
welcoming, tall, slightly grizzled, humorous self. “Make this your home,” and he gives me a key
to the cottage, newly ceilinged with some glittery Chinese pseudo-tiles, oddly
out of character with the dishevelled rural-farm feel of the rest of the
place. He reminds me that that the lock
of the house door is upside-down – that he has never tried to fix this anomaly
is perhaps indicative of his slightly contrarian character and writing.
He offers me
fruit-juice, cracks open another can of beer for himself. “I’ve already started,” he says, half
apologetic, half boastful; “I’m a functional alky! I’ll cut back when school starts – which is
tomorrow”. He does carry an air of
slightly fuzzy, introverted loneliness; his post-marital solitude, at least,
gives him quite a bit of time to write.
And he has been turning it out, all right: Textures, a volume of poems shared with Togara Muzenanhamo
(published by Bulawayo’s AmaBooks, one of the few in the country still
publishing so-called ‘creative’ work); the novella Absent: The English Teacher, both drawing on and satirising his
real-life job and place); and most recently another novella, Traffickings (published by adventurous
new outfit, InkSword in Kimberley, who will soon be bringing out yet another, The Boy who Loved Camping).
I’ve just finished Traffickings, which John thinks his
best, or at least most uninhibited novella yet.
Where his earlier works, from D G
G Berry’s Great North Road to The
Curse of the Ripe Tomato, focussed on satirising his own postneocolonial
white Rhodimbabwean society, in Traffickings
“everyone gets it,” he chuckles – Marxist neoliberal whites, government
officials, conservationists, NGOs, poets, the lot. A brave, perhaps reckless little book. I have to say John’s peculiar sense of humour,
laced with schoolboyish ribaldry and obvious gross puns, doesn’t appeal to my
taste particularly, for all that I admire the lancing accuracy with which he
probes the nation’s many societal boils.
Perhaps because he’d primed me last year to expect a prison story, I
found the book a bit unbalanced – much diversionary humour about the collapse
of the protagonist’s hotel, Nehanda Hollows, in the first part, and then rather
too short a section on how Khami prison becomes a tourist resort, potentially the
more interesting venue, in the second.
It’s all just a little too
self-consciously satirical, almost allegorical, doesn’t quite play along the
edge of compassion as, say, Jane Smiley does in Moo (see my Blog.11). Not
that one necessarily expects a satirist to be compassionate, I suppose. And now he says to me, “Did you pick up the
allusions to The Great Gatsby? It’s full of them.” I hadn’t, shamefully, though there are plenty
of other allusions: John’s work is always something of a literary education; he
can’t keep the teacher in him quiet.
I have always
preferred his poetry, which I count as amongst the finest Zimbabwe has
produced: varied in mood, rich in references, often touching, always supremely
crafted. He talks about people saying he
is “reactionary” because he writes in Euro-derived “forms” – sonnets,
villanelles, Keatsian stanzas and the like – “But I say to them it’s fucking
hard to write sonnets, it’s hard. And I say you find the greatest freedom
working within the set format. Form is
content – something that’s missing from so much so-called free verse these
days. You might as well write
prose. I can’t really write free verse,
it just starts to sprawl, it’s harder for the poem to find itself.”
We discuss Togara
Muzanenhamo, Carcanet-published whizz-kid, and his cerebral, shape-on-the-page
formats – but that’s not really “form”, in John’s view, because it’s not
organically tied to content. Thomas
Hardy is one of his poetic models here, as Dickens and Rabelais are for his
fiction – though in my head I align John as much with the scatological side of
Swift, or the raunchy, teeming cartoons of Gillray. Most recently, John has found a way of
reaching a different audience, accompanying wonderful landscape photographs by
André van Rooyen on a Matopos calendar – unlike most poetry, whose production
involves the poet in financial loss, sales from the first calendar earned John
enough to buy himself a new car!
Over supper – his
characteristic one-pot stew, as rich and tasty as one of his poems – John regales me with stories of institutional
backbiting and rejection. Here a certain
poet made overtures, then spurned him because he (the poet) was ‘left-wing’ and
John had just been published by a ‘right-wing’ press; there an editor
encouraged submissions then rejected them; here a publisher failed to have
John’s book ready for a launch and launched his own instead. These are his “enemies” now – he ticks them
off on his fingers – and he seems to me
to take a certain pleasure in delineating these antagonisms; it confirms his
marginal, maverick status. He claims to
be neglected, but he can tell plenty of stories of being invited to this or
that festival or interview – more than many of us, I’d say. And he took deep umbrage when David McDermott
Hughes accused him, in his book Whiteness
in Zimbabwe, of “fetishising crocuses”, apparently immune to John’s sharply
self-aware ironies.
“But I don’t hold
grudges,” he says. “They haven’t left
your mind, either,” I chide, laughing.
“Oh, but that doesn’t count, they’ve got to be down on paper!” He claims to be hated also by the nationalist-orientated
establishment at the University of Zimbabwe, with some justice – though he got
a glowing recommendation from older stalwart Kizito Muchemwa for Traffickings. And some younger black academics, less
trapped in outmoded racialistic rhetorics and inhibitions, are paying him more
attention (I’ve had more than one Zimbabwean PhD student approach me for input
on John’s work). He’s pleased about
that, even as he grumbles about their occasional misreadings.
After pecan-nut pies and coffee, it’s to bed with us. I am weary after a long day’s drive, he will
have to be up at the crack of dawn to get to school, accompanied by the dry
ratchet sounds of the Crested barbets – a drought bird if ever there was one. Appropriately, the poem the January 2016
page, closing last year’s Matopos calendar, is entitled “Our Last Hot Spell”:
...
Memories turn
like
falling leaves, to smoulder and burn.
This is our
last hot spell for, let me see,
a moment,
three seasons, and eternity.
***
Dear Dan Wylie:
ReplyDeleteIt distresses me that John Eppel should dwell, years later, on my particular reading of his poem. Please inform of the apology I published in this essay:
Hughes, D.M. 2015. “To lump or to split: perils of portraying Zimbabwe’s whites.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 33(2):300-304.
Since the piece responds to your review of "Whiteness in Zimbabwe," you might also find it interesting.
Best wishes,
David
David McDermott Hughes
Rutgers University