The Wag n’ Bietjie Warrior

How does a poet like John Eppel survive in Zimbabwe? In a country with inflation of over 11,000,000 per cent and an unemployment rate of 80 per cent, he is lucky to be employed. As a schoolteacher, he earns about fifteen Australian dollars a month. Until recently he earned a further seventy dollars as a lecturer in creative writing at the world’s largest distance education university in South Africa. They haven’t paid him for over two years.

It is only thanks to the kindness of his old friend Fred Simpson, a general practitioner now living in New Zealand, that he is able to stay in Zimbabwe. They grew up together in a tiny mining town in south-western Zimbabwe and both feature as characters in each other’s writing: Fred uses John as inspiration for the character Jack in his play Cyril’s Moon and he himself features as a character in many of John’s stories, novels and poems. It is Fred who sends John enough money to live on each month.

When asked why he hasn’t fled Zimbabwe like over three million others in the diaspora, Eppel said:

“In some ways deciding to stay on in this country, not as a fortune-making wheeler dealer, but as an ordinary tax-paying, poorly remunerated citizen has been good for me as a writer. I think going into exile would seriously have harmed my creativity; but of course, I can’t be sure. As Rowland Molony has recently said of me, ‘down the ages clever, bitter satirists are hurt into poetry by this world’.”

Zimbabwe, in general, and Matabeleland, in particular, has always been John’s muse. It is when he is writing about the ancient Matopo hills outside Bulawayo, or the landscape of Matabeleland that he writes his most beautiful and moving poetry. The poems which appeared in November’s Quadrant have been born out of a deep hurt, his “recent outburst inspired by a loss created by the Mugabe regime”. It is this loss which I describe in a recent poem of mine, “Perfect Place”, as “the blanket … being ripped off, and he weeps poetry”.

His tears have produced his harrowing story “Of the Fist”, which is based on actual events in the horror that is modern Zimbabwe.

Eppel courageously stays on in Zimbabwe where, “at times like this the poems pour out of me with almost no editing”. Although poems pour out of him, there are so few receptacles to pour into! His poems, short stories and novels are well known in southern Africa and parts of Europe, particularly in Scandinavia, but not elsewhere. He was recently invited to a literary festival in Sweden on the strength of one of his short stories. They paid all his expenses, but unfortunately his suitcase was lost en route and he spent the first four days in the same clothes (a Zimbabwean teacher’s salary would not stretch to a pair of underpants, let alone the cheapest Swedish outfit). He had to go for long walks in the frequent rain to wash his clothes.

An award-winning poet and author in Zimbabwe, John Eppel has, in recent years, found it difficult to get published. This is partially explained by the introduction to his Selected Poems 1965–1995, where Dan Wylie, a much awarded Zimbabwean poet himself, says:

“John Eppel is a craftsman of high order; a poet and novelist who savages complacency with deft ironies; and a man who is faithful to the complexities of his rootedness. In Southern Africa we struggle with the narrow-eyed exigencies of local politics at cross purposes with the daffy and half-understood pressures of global postmodernism. The former produces vacuous sloganeering masquerading as poetry. The latter produces vacuous ‘free verse’ masquerading as intellectual liberation. The former produces sad mimicry from new minorities manipulating outdated notions of ‘the people’. The latter produces a sad individualism from other minorities courting obscurity as a means of escaping ‘the crowd’. The former is hostile to the strangeness of other voices; the latter is hostile to study of tradition and craft.

“Eppel’s poetry fights both these trends. In many ways he reminds me of the scope and generosity of the Nobel Prize-winning Caribbean poet Derek Walcott. Walcott refuses to succumb to the tunnel-vision of hate and opportunism—the easy hatred of the scorched past, the opportunistic use of slackly fashionable slogans. Like Walcott, Eppel intensively studies, apprentices himself to, and grows beyond all the traditions he finds to hand, both African and international. He is learned without pretension; to read him is to grow intellectually, not merely to emote, or to have one’s prejudices pampered or one’s ignorance calmed. He fights to find a new voice authentic to both himself and his place. Just as Walcott is no less ‘Caribbean’ for using the motifs of Homer’s Odyssey, Eppel is no less Zimbabwean for using Miltonic line. Paradoxically he becomes more so.”

John Eppel has struggled recently against narrow ideas, critics and editors in southern Africa. His poems in Quadrant speak for themselves, consisting of, as Wylie says about earlier poems, “impeccable decasyllabics and rhyming couplets which lose any stiffness to the exuberant enjambments and the varied syntax”. And he is:

“often riskily experimental. He is constantly aware of the limits of language. He never settles comfortably into a single vision. All visions, all views, are necessarily minority views; Eppel’s satirical edge demonstrates his awareness of this. He laughs at himself and his kind, in order to avoid demagoguery. At the same time language is treated with utmost seriousness. Language is a craft, and it is only craft that communicates. Content can bind only those small groups who agree with it. Only devotion to craft leaps the barriers between the sundry, riven, local usages and modes. Eppel invites us to learn craft along with him, to forge new languages for the turbulence of our times. Very few poets in the region have done as much to do this over so sustained a period of time, as John Eppel.”

His “Yet Another Flower Poem” is evidence of this innovation. The two ten-line stanzas of fifteen-syllable lines, where the end word of each line is repeated in order in the next stanza, is a form which he told me he thought he had invented. He is a craftsman and innovator. Read his poems and you will see the truth of this.

In an interview with Ambrose Musiyiwa on the internet in February 2007 he was asked what his main concerns as a writer were: 

“My main concern in my poetry is to find a voice which merges British form (prosody) with African content (mostly nature) so that, if not in my life in my art, I can find an identity which is not binary, not black/white, African/European, colonised/ coloniser. My main concern in my prose is to ridicule greed, cruelty, self-righteousness and related vices … I am of course under no illusion that my satires will make the slightest bit of difference, but nobody, not even those who are ashamed of nothing, likes to be laughed at. I am acutely aware that satirists are themselves prone to self-righteousness and I keep before me the words of Jesus: ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone’.

“[I face] the same challenges most Zimbabweans do … how to pay the bills, how to put food on the table; how to stay alive as long as possible because it is too expensive to get sick and die. There is no social welfare left in this country, the extended family system has collapsed; pension and other funds and savings have been looted by people with huge bellies and wallets of flesh on their necks.

“Zimbabwe is a de facto police state. It is routine for people to be beaten up in prison, whether or not they have been charged. People live in fear as well as hunger and illness. People are depressed. Those who can’t get out turn their faces to the wall. There is no culture of maintenance, there is no accountability, there will always be someone else to blame. Like the Jews in history, the whites, and to a lesser extent, the Indians, have become scapegoats. When these marginalised groups have gone it will be the turn of the Ndebeles … You ask me why all this is happening. It’s simple. It’s because of a megalomaniac who refuses to relinquish power.”

Long may John Eppel live to pursue his art. He will not leave his beloved country and will not have to—thanks to Fred Simpson. He will stay and be a wag n’ bietjie in the flesh of all who deserve its savage hook! For those who have left, he wrote in the 1970s:

Like shrapnel from an old bomb we scatter

to other lands, delivering reasons.

On our elbows and our knees, a season’s

grass burns. On the backs of our hands, faces

and necks—the first traces of skin cancer.

Yes, we’re Rhodesians. Does it matter?

For John Eppel it does!

Derek Fenton now lives in Perth. Some of his poetry has appeared in Quadrant this year. A wag n’ bietjie (Afrikaans for “wait a bit”) is a thorny tree that hooks onto the unwary.