Poetry
A Storm Is Brewing
Kristina Rungano · 1984
Synopsis
Written for the most part around the age of eighteen, these poems move from mourning a loved one to the life of a student in London and to anger at the lot of women. Several tell of the liberation war from the accounts of relatives back from the fighting; others, such as "Statistics" and "City Dweller", criticise the new state. The poet often speaks through imagined voices.
Context
The collection appeared in 1984 in Harare, with the Zimbabwe Publishing House, when its author was twenty-one, and made her the country's first published woman poet. It deals with the condition of women, love, loneliness, alienation and war. Long out of print, it remained her only book until 2004; several of its poems have been taken up in anthologies of African poetry. It has not been translated into French.
Who it is for
To read the first female voice of Zimbabwean poetry, in the aftermath of independence.
Prizes and reception
The critic Rino Zhuwarara reads in it a poetry driven by injustice done to women and the poor, and by love.