Poetry
Country Dawns and City Lights
Musaemura Zimunya · 1985
Synopsis
The collection moves from the villages to the urban outskirts: it refuses to idealise rural life and speaks of the hardships of those who live in the city. In “A Long Journey”, the road that begins with the arrival of the British in 1890 passes through the bicycle, the motor car and the bus as far as the capital; there, amid urban luxury, the speaker remains haunted by the mud-and-grass huts of his childhood, by the witch doctors he thought he was escaping and by a presence that joins him from the dark periphery.
Context
The collection appeared in Harare from Longman Zimbabwe in 1985, three years after two books of poems issued in 1982, one carried by a generation that colonisation had pushed aside, the other turned towards love and nature. This one takes a more disenchanted turn than its elders. Its longest poem, which covers nearly a century of the country's history, has been taken up by Poetry International and is the subject of explanations in online study guides.
Who it is for
In English, short and direct poems, easy to approach; knowing the colonial history since 1890 sheds light on the longest of them.
Prizes and reception
Poetry International describes it as a caustic look at the idealisation of rural life; “A Long Journey” is often studied in it.
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