Daily Archives: August 10, 2007

The following piece was published by the organization The Power of Culture on the website http://www.powerofculture.nl/uk/current/2007/august/bookcafe.html . I like the writer’s observation that the current situation in Zimbabwe is a source of inspiration for a lot of young writers. In fact, I see of wave of significant writings coming out of the Zimbabwean present, linking to the past, and anticipating the future.

Harare Book Café the hub of Zimbabwe’s cultural life

The terrible conditions in today’s Zimbabwe only feed the desire of young artists to express themselves, but this is becoming more and more difficult for them. The Book Café is an initiative by the Pemberi Trust, which plays a central role in the cultural life of the capital, Harare. “The situation in Zimbabwe has deteriorated alarmingly and terribly within a few weeks,” says the trust’s Artistic Director, Paul Brickhill, one of the driving forces behind the success of the café. “Our general manager has been threatened with arrest. There are long power cuts every day. Food and water are in increasingly short supply. This weekend we will go hunting and gathering for food supplies for Book Café kitchens.”

The repression in Zimbabwe is encouraging artistic quests. The younger generation, in particular, is exploring its identity, heritage and the possibility of making statements through artistic expressions with a political edge. Many young people are active in the theatre and music, but poetry is especially popular. Humour and satire are widely used stylistic devices. In addition to a strong urge to innovate, we are witnessing a revival of more traditional forms: in music, Afro jazz and fusion are flourishing, and the mbira, a kind of thumb piano, is again being played by many young people. The revival is particularly remarkable because a lot of talented musicians have left the country. Four million of Zimbabwe’s 14 million people have fled in the past seven years. Many others have died of Aids. The cultural climate here is now being shaped mainly by the young.”

The Book Café has existed in its current form for the past ten years. It is a place where cultural entrepreneurship goes hand in hand with expansion. There are at least 500 performances a year, plus facilities to support artists. “We work a lot through partnerships,” says Brickhill. “And we have a fierce marketing policy. Performers are paid out of their box-office receipts, whilst salaries, rent and overheads are financed from sales of food and drink. Activities like workshops and readings are paid for through fundraising, which provides a fifth of our budget. Because we have been doing this for so long, we have managed to strike a good balance between presenting art honestly and operating as a business. But it’s a daily struggle to keep going.”

Jos Schuring

Anyone who cares about the preservation of ideas should capture them before they escpape. It’s like the way people are supposed to remember their dreams, that is, how they have to record them in order to revisit them later. But how many people really enjoy recording dreams? The experience of remembering one or two good, or bad dreams, forces us to records them in the journal of our memory. But ideas are different. Writers of many documents rely on ideas; we are often rated based on the originality of our, although this might be considered oxymoronic by some. If there is no systematic recording of some of the most important ideas that come to you, chances are you might end up in the pile of bandwagonish ideas, so we end up sounding all alike, like our ways of idea-production come from the same template.

Welcome, everbody to my new blog. Here I am going to be a bit playful; I want people to join in the discussions that will occur here. I am going to look for interesting topics on the web and elsewhere. Some topics I will take seriously, like the one that I read in Time magazine today about, let’s see, about how OCD is a sign of madness, something of that nature, or how every brain is just a few inches away from madness. The writer went on to argue that doubt yourself if you are in the habit of checking if your doors are locked – checking them two to three times, just to make sure. Oh, they were talking about depression, some deadly condition that can be diagnosed clinically and is treatable (was this the problem?). They were saying there are new improvements in the phychiatry field of utilizing some genetic study to find ways of easing the treament of the condition. Some serious breakthrough, and so on…

Sometimes I just prefer browsing Physchology today which offers indepth coverage of topics like who talks too much, men or women. In a recent issue I think they were say it’s fifty-fifty, or that women use 500 more words, which they discounted because it’s such an insignificant difference. As far as they are concerned, it’s blah blah blah all the way, whether you are woman or a man. You see, such coverage, such depth, such rigor (same thing), that’s what I get out of a specialized magazine. Time is still okay.

But seriously, good writing comes from the careful recording of all ideas, so that when writing time comes, then you know you will choose the best of the best. Ideas, grow ideas like vegetables, tend to them, let them become leafy, rich, collard-greenish.