Eppel sprang to
prominence with his satirical schoolboy novella DGG Berry’s Great North Road, and with his first substantial volume
of poetry, Spoils of War (1989). Most
of his work is locally set in or near Bulawayo’s suburbs or school environs, so
familiar to Eppel; and most is acidically satirical in nature, a feature almost
designed to marginalise him. Satire generally has not been a prominent or
easily assimilable mode in Zimbabwe’s literary traditions. Eppel’s coruscating
portrayal of his ‘own’ white settler society has not always endeared him to his
peers; and subsequently ZANU-PF’s cultural commissars have narrowly misconstrued
as racist his satirical take on all Zimbabwe’s groups, from political leaders
to suburban madams to NGOs.
His poetry, while generally less bitingly or lewdly satirical
than the stories, has also incorporated two ‘traditional’ elements which have
not been kindly received by Zimbabwean commentators and the occasional post-colonial
scholar. The first is the consistent if varied use of traditional English stanzaic
forms, as well as the sonnet, sestina and villanelle; the second is a high degree
of concentration on the poet’s relation to the natural world. Both of these
have laid Eppel open to accusations of an anachronistic adherence to foreign,
imported models of poeticisation, especially the English Romantics. While Eppel
acknowledges his indebtedness to the Romantics, and insists on the primacy of
crafted form as a vital element in good poetry, to confine a reading of him to
these elements alone is, I believe, to do the work a considerable disservice.
Most recently, Eppel has responded to current events in two ways, one by writing
more trenchant and undisguised gripes about politics, Mugabe’s autocracy, and
municipal failings; secondly by collaborating with other Zimbabwean writers,
notably Together (with the late Julius
Chingono, 2011), and Textures (with the
young, highly intellectual poet Togara Muzanenhamo, 2014). They make for
interesting conversations across racial, cultural and age categories, and
signal an increasingly wide acceptance across former divisions, including
amongst academics.
O Suburbia, now out
from Weaver Press, revisits many of the themes and motifs of earlier
collections; indeed, to judge by the dates attached to some of the poems, they
may be resurrections or rewrites of poems written decades ago. But Eppel also
brings us up to date, as in one poem alluding to the deaths of civilians during
last year’s ‘coup’. (Events overtake us so fast, as of course there has been
another flurry of repressive violence in Zimbabwe this past week. Anyway, it’s ‘situation
normal’, only more so – securing the ongoing relevance of the poetry despite
its topical references.)
The collection, indeed, is a bit of a rattle-bag, with no
discernible order: childhood memories jostle with political satires, haikus
with villanelles, gentle love-poems with hard-edged critiques. A poem about a
dog-meat vendor rubs up against a meditation on teaching King Lear; something scatological up against a light-hearted philosophical
squib. Some readers might enjoy this anarchic feel; others might wish that some
sort of shape had been imposed on the whole. If there is a common thread, it
may be that Eppel just revels in language itself – we live inside language, as
he says in one poem – and he wields his linguistic and literary resources with
both glee and precision.
Where ‘shape’ continues to be prominent is, as ever, at the
level of the individual poem. Eppel is truly gifted at constructing a
finely-tuned machine of a poem, rigorous in rhyme and even syllable-count,
while maintaining so fluid and chatty an air that the mechanism is all but
invisible, especially when read aloud. This is less so with the several
villanelles included, which are intrinsically rather more stark in their
repetitions-with-minor-variations. Villanelles are clever, fun to construct in
the manner of good crosswords, but I find them less satisfying than some of the
many sonnets, a favourite form of Eppel’s.
To give you a taste, here is one especially beautiful yet playful one, “Waxbills”
(he has of late very often written about birds):
Like my
safari-suit, same powder blue;
like the
plumbago (Cecil’s favourite
flower) that
hedges me in; like the few
remaining stills
of my father’s eyes; bit
by bit,
little by little, hippityhopping
from place
to place; pecking at shame,
at stubble,
at grains of time; frequently
splashing
your chums in the bath; far too tame
for your own
good (my cat is on a quest);
like
Bulawayo skies… you absorb me.
My home sits
also near a hornets’ nest:
will they
impound it? Will they let me be?
Underneath
the thorns, you pick and you choose;
your tremolo gets me singing the blues.
As always, Eppel is intimately observant of the natural
world around him, as here in “Tracks I Remember”:
Paths with
banks of tick-heavy grass tilting
to caress
the thigh; roads where dipping
hornbills
lead the way, mopani scrub on
either side;
tok-tokkies doing headstands,
their fused
wings harder than fingernails, taptapping
messages of
love; antlion
larvae
(doodlebugs) crafting pits of death
where the
critical angle of repose
slides
crawling insects to their doom;
stink of
formic acid, of resin, of
crushed locusts, wings in threatening display.
But Eppel is
no displaced Wordsworth-like Romantic just revelling in natural diversity or
beauty (though he does that, too): the second stanza of this poem is about
human violence, warmongers and soldiers dying and laying their own death-traps.
And at times, the natural is deployed to political ends, as in “Winds behaving
badly”, where the final bombshell line reveals that the image of the wind has
been symbolic all along:
The clouds
descend, the firmament grows grey,
a churning
wind, bone-cold, assaults the trees,
blowing
petals and little girls away
before
relaxing to a shirtless breeze.
Again it
rises flapping doeks and scarves,
banging
casements, matrons, widows, wives...
whistling
through cracks, keyholes, while it carves
that look in
daddy’s eyes. Run for your lives.
The clouds
ascend, the firmament blows blue,
the rising
wind lifts skirts and lashes hair –
what’s true
is false, my child, what’s false is true –
the white
sheets shaking, raking underwear.
Behaving-badly-winds
will not subside
till you, my dears, commit tyrannicide.
This kind of observation is, for some in the decolonising camp, hard to stomach, coming from a
white “settler” – a word Eppel still uses to describe his status in Zimbabwe.
But he seems to have reached a point in his life where he is defiant about
this, as in “A Settler’s Taunt”:
You can deny
me
my birth
status but
you cannot
deny
me my death
status:
death will
fix me in
the soil forever.
Eppel knows –
and as this collection shows – he has written with a wry humanity about members
of all sectors of Zimbabwean society, has sent up the pretensions of all
groups, not least his own – and not least himself: he is willingly satirical
about his own “will-to-form”, for example. He has, in some exemplary ways,
transcended a narrow ‘settler-dom’.
It is
impossible here to really exemplify the full richness and variety of this collection,
which at times shows off Eppel at the height of his humane powers, at other points
descends unabashedly into bathos and brief whimsies. It is substantial, at over
80 pages, and as welcome on the subcontinent as anything Eppel has ever
written.
******
Thank you, Dan.
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