Abstract

This paper explores Chenjerai Hove’s poetry stretching over different historical periods. First, the colonial era poetry is analysed that operates at the critical realist level, which registers discontent with different levels of segregation, especially in Red Hills of Home and some poems in And now the Poets Speak. It then moves on to the analysis of conflict in the Rhodesian socially stratified society. It seems the disgruntlement intensifies into a full-scale war typified in Up in Arms where heavy imagery creates a vivid mental picture of this struggle for total emancipation. This, therefore, implies that such poetry operates at socialist realist level. It moves on to focus on the author’s post-colonial poetry that is mainly celebratory in the heydays of independence (in And Now the Poets Speak and Patterns of Poetry in Zimbabwe), as opposed to neo-colonial tendencies and dictatorship lambasted in Rainbows in the Dust. The Afro-centric nature of the poems is expounded, making it clear that Hove’s audience is than the black Rhodesian in the earlier anthologies and the denigrated “independent” black Zimbabwean in the latter works. Howbeit, the research shows that Hove throws in love poetry as comic relief in the otherwise ‘serious’ poetry that aims at societal overhaul. Finally, the paper questions the poet’s pessimism throughout these different historical periods concluding that literary artists have a calling to police their societies against excesses regardless of the race of the perpetrator. The vision of the poet is to see a tolerant democratic society that provides equal opportunities to all regardless of race, sex or tribe.

Key words: Afro-centric literary approach, conscientisation, hegemony, Marxist literary theory, transliteration.