ARE WE SANE?

a chapbook of social commentary

 2844 St Martins Cres, Hatfield Harare
Email: gwenambiranathaniel@gmail.com
Mobile: +263 713 417 818 | +263 775 987 119

ARE WE SANE

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 77921 - 300 - 6

First Published in 2021

Copyright © 2021 Nate Gwenambira

Publisher: Nate Gwenambira

Editor: Tinashe Mutsengiwa
Proof Reader: Curt Masango
Typesetting & Design: Nesbert .T. Gotekote

Cover Design: Tadiwanashe Chisasa

Cover Art: Kudzanai Mavhura

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

distributed or transmitted in any form by any means, including photocopying,
recording or other electronic methods without the prior written permission
of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews
and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
 acknowledgements
i am grateful to the Lord, my family and everyone else who has ever believed
in me, you brought this book to life.
for my son, zayn mufaro
Contents page
preface................................................................................................................. i
Praise for Are We Sane?................................................................................... ii
Rhodesia nights.................................................................................................. 1
bloodprints on the wall..................................................................................... 2
why we make war............................................................................................... 3
not until we die.................................................................................................. 4
stains of war....................................................................................................... 5
limbs for freedom.............................................................................................. 6
whose pound of flesh?...................................................................................... 7
even the walls bled............................................................................................. 8
limb from limb................................................................................................... 9
why the wind stinks........................................................................................... 10
how to die........................................................................................................... 11
six years too long............................................................................................... 12
unkempt.............................................................................................................. 13
threadbare........................................................................................................... 14
a dog’s breakfast................................................................................................. 15
when death spat................................................................................................. 16
must i wear the scarlet letter?........................................................................... 17
at the mayor’s...................................................................................................... 18
blindfolded.......................................................................................................... 19
must we be numb?............................................................................................. 20
suicide note......................................................................................................... 21
who soiled our church clothes?....................................................................... 22
lost foreigners..................................................................................................... 23
we bleed red........................................................................................................ 24
we are scattered.................................................................................................. 25
freedom of patriotism...................................................................................... 26
no euphemisms.................................................................................................. 27
what are we?....................................................................................................... 28
the gods have weaned us?................................................................................. 29
a daydream.......................................................................................................... 30
our pasts.............................................................................................................. 31
rag dolls............................................................................................................... 32
Phyllis.................................................................................................................. 33
we need more donors....................................................................................... 34
death eavesdrops?.............................................................................................. 35
the purge............................................................................................................. 36
how much is too much?.................................................................................... 37
somebodies......................................................................................................... 38
whispers are this loud?...................................................................................... 39
are lies this good to hear?................................................................................. 40
who knew public toilets aren’t free................................................................. 41
we spoke in whispers......................................................................................... 42
a wounded patriot.............................................................................................. 43
when out of earshot.......................................................................................... 44
has the sun set?.................................................................................................. 45
preface
it was a profound yet challenging experience putting this collection together
and self publishing on a shoestring budget. amidst this raging pandemic,
writing has kept me sane and has helped to undress the ugly, relentless
shadows that haunt me. shadows from whose tentacles i need to break free.
finding my poetic voice as an independent writer has been a surreal and
liberating endeavor which allowed me to paint, in the raw, the social realities
surrounding us. in hindsight, this book recounts our nation’s coming-of-age
story from our colonial past to the post-war aftermath.
i sincerely hope this will be an insightful read.

Nate Gwenambira

I
Praise for Are We Sane?

1. “The poems constitute a visceral howl about Zimbabwe, past and present.
Gwenambira sustains a remarkable level of intensity throughout.” — Brian
Chikwava, author of Harare North

2. “Gwenambira’s poetry remembers the brutality of guerilla war that led to In-
dependence and Black-majority rule for Zimbabwe, and vividly portrays the
disillusionment and despair and more brutality which followed that victory
and a short-lived euphoria. Every line represents layers of meanings, which
reveal themselves with each new reading. Pick up this book, and you will see
what I mean.” — Masimba Musodza, novelist

3. “Blood, sweat and tears freely mingle in this brilliant and evocative collection
of poems. Through hard-punching verse, the poet earnestly searches for the
lost soul and conscience of the Zimbabwean nation.” — Clement Chihota,
Writer and Lecturer of Applied Linguistics

4. “Gwenambira’s chapbook provides a searing commentary on the cumulative

violences of Zimbabwe’s colonial past, transitional war of independence and
its post-colonial present, where hope has been hounded out repeatedly by
betrayal and neglect. The poems are often understandably charged with anger
– their raw physical imagery used to expose the crudity and cruelty of heart-
less leadership in different contexts – yet they are driven by a deep sensitivity.
Ultimately, the horrors they speak of and against, and the tough questions
they insistently pose – not least about one’s sanity in the face of so much vio-
lence and pain – are a powerful form of protest that necessarily refuses death
and reaffirms life.” — Amanda Hammar, Poet and Professor of African
Studies, University of Copenhagen.

5. “Nate Gwenambira’s “Are We Sane?” relentlessly confronts the reader with

a visceral experience of the horrors of colonialism, war, and the persistently
raw wounds of the past that continue to haunt the present. Gwenambira’s
poems are fraught with palpable anger, pain, and despair, forcing the reader
to question his/her own sanity and the sanity of humanity as a whole.” —
Tendai Machingaidze, Mosi oa tunya literary review

II
Rhodesia nights
last night a landmine blew our mother’s
insides out before she could
run off
her intestines spilled out like loose
shoestrings.

in the morning we
choked on gunpowder
as we stood in the
nude armed with our
childish innocence

and they skinned us!

1
bloodprints on the wall
we were jailbirds with
ruffled feathers, chained by a regime of
sadists;

a lecturer was beheaded for asking

one question too
many. a Rhodie’s unforgiving dog gnawed at
our teacher’s flesh and
made off with his limb,
he bled crimson on the threadbare
dishcloth we bandaged him with.
the Rhodie’s daughter looked on
with bloodshot eyes and
an over dressed rag doll under
her arm.

we were stifled, in hell’s

bowels
hoping to breathe.
we even spoke in whispers in our
holding cells,
silently listening to the gun’s
dry cough before it
bellowed at us, belching stray
bullets.

2
why we make war
we make war because;
the wind blew into our ears
the ugly truth our
MP whispers on his phone.
our eyes saw the manifesto
for the tissue of lies that it was.
and our Mayor’s speech was blatant
hogwash written in good
English.

when we chose to make war,

why then was it called
madness?

3
not until we die
they rained in torrents stray
bullets on the news
bulletin triggered by a gun’s
paranoia.

a gun barrel exhaled black

smoke
as a hapless minor cowered beneath
a bridge hiding from the
crosshairs of a gunman.

4
stains of war
there are no ugly slogans in
combat
neither are there kind ones,
that’s the old dictum
we once lived by.

our eyes were blighted by the

stains of war,
walking on barefoot,
we stumbled after the impact of a
ricochet and remembered how
our abdomens were
marred by the bayonets of the
bush war.

now the unkind mirror stares

at our minds getting lost in the
psychedelic images of our desperate
pasts clinging to us.

pasts we fail to untether ourselves

from.

5
limbs for freedom
we want to trade off our
limbs for a freedom we were
promised
but freedom’s humongous forearms
are forever raised,
ready to pummel us,
lest our voices become too loud.

6
whose pound of flesh?
we were naïve enough to sell our
souls in droves
for a freedom that never came.
the euphoria ran high and a deluge of
tasteless rhetoric came
but the colonial shackles never
came off.
they are still clinging to our thin ankles!

every fifth year we memorise a new

manifesto
hoping we could one day
breathe the African air we had envisaged,
one that is unpolluted by the
stench from the blood of one of our
own.
now whose pound of flesh must
we give away to get our freedom back?

7
even the walls bled
hordes of overzealous ‘patriots’ ransacked his
penthouse and
ripped his spouse apart,
limb from limb.
he shat himself after being
rammed into the wall
and was left hunched over
in the nude,
shivering in the blistering heat.

8
limb from limb
we are a world of
contradictions
with delusions of freedom.

so be mindful of your speech

lest you will be found dumped in a ditch
with your anus stitched up
or
strangled by a violent grip
or
your eye sockets gouged out with a toothpick
or
your vagina plowed by a gun’s
erection (not a euphemism)
or
find your toddler’s beheaded rag dolls
on your corridor floor
to remind you of the mirage
that freedom is.

9
why the wind stinks
what’s stinking up the wind’s
breath?
is it the smell of our
threadbare bedsheets?
which unclothe our shredded
dignity?
or
our discoloured denim shorts?
stained by the blood from
our festering anuses?
or
the bad odour from last week’s vomit?

10
how to die
we slept in a disused
pool,
braving the bitter cold
our young throats coughed out
bad breath, making bystanders
cringe.

our weary jaws got exhausted from

begging to feed our famished bodies
until breath evaded our
lungs and our souls broke free
leaving the shadows of our corpses,
wrung and spent.

11
six years too long
huddled in a cocoon
my breath has gone stale
the remnants of my
dignity have been wrung violently
to dry on the communal wash line.
any semblance of my unimportant
pride was burnt to
a cinder
and now a threadbare loinskin barely
conceals my overused orifice.
i was married for six years too long
and now the ravages of being inherited have
left me struggling to clothe my
ashen buttocks or my son’s.

12
unkempt
we wore our unpolished blemishes to
school
our overfed insecurities tucked in
our trousers’ waists
we concealed our threadbare underwears
beneath our very long skirts,
our anxieties hidden behind
spirited conversations
our wounds fester
but we refuse to become
the numbness we endure
each day.

13
threadbare
your bare backs were bent
double as your old hands scraped
a living from the barren
earth, only to reap
dried-up husks for one season
too many.
the stubborn soil was
too disinterested to bear any
fruit for us.

vivid memories of the off colour

t-shirts we wore are etched in
my mind
and how our secondhand clothes shrunk
with disgust
as we tried them on.
but in the end, we still
came out whole and
unscathed.

14
a dog’s breakfast
ours is a comedy of errors,
from being smothered by the stubborn
darkness
to stumbling through life with
confusion.

think of the strangeness of

fasting oneself to death becoming
commonplace like an ugly clichè,
or our withered buttocks sitting through
an uninteresting Sunday service
and braving an old lady’s mangled words giving
a rehearsed testimony
for the fourth Sunday in a row,
or being reminded of how we
owe the man of cloth for
one miracle too many to question
his moral standing for
ogling our spouses
or fondling our offspring.

must we learn to look away

and ignore his waning godliness?

15
when death spat
when death spat us out,
our sour breaths were still
reeking of fear and we had to
wear back the humanness that had
deserted us and made off before the
looming shadow could smother us
again.

16
must i wear the scarlet letter?
i went from kneeling in church fifty-two
sundays a year to enduring
an unflattering pattern of
humongous arms groping me
being fed on large
erections big enough to have
a life of their own.

one after the other,

they pound away at my frigid orifice,
but each night i get to
relive another madman’s fetish.

now i still have knee lesions from

last Sunday’s rendezvous,
but who cares?

17
at the mayor’s
our unwashed armpits stank up the
corridors of the council
offices where we lined up to enter
only to be told the esteemed
Mayor we elected was too busy to
attend to us.

18
blindfolded
we were told
not to reveal too much teeth when
we smile.

we were told to hold our

farts in till our black buttocks become
numb.

we were disallowed to
breast feed in public, lest we arouse
the other gender.

we were taught not to

see too much,
we had been blindfolded for too long and
we believed we were blind.

19
must we be numb?
must we be numb to their
insatiable taste for our offspring?
and to their hands groping our daughter’s
unripe breasts?
must we be numb when we are being abandoned like
destuffed rag dolls?

must we sit our asses on

smoldering embers to be spat on
and
blown away like chaff ?

we rummage through dustbins

for morsels to
feed our famished offspring.

so much for being free.

20
suicide note
i often obsessed about
death, being run over by a convoy
or dying at the hands of gold
panners with a guillotine’s lust for
human blood
or being butchered by a machete
and running off with missing limbs.
each time i saw the devil’s face
gloating like the sadist he is,
beckoning me to his bosom.

21
who soiled our church clothes?
a moment ago they were
unstained and we looked less
sinful in them,
they made us appear
celestial.
now what shall we wear
to cover ourselves up?

22
lost foreigners
we fed on chimney soot in a
deserted woodshed and our blankets were
tattered
like strands of biltong bundled together,
the wind breathed violent breaths
and its menacing presence
made our hairs stand on
end.

these harrowing images keep

limping towards us,
a reminder of our misshaped past.

23
we bleed red
we fled to a land where the
stench of our foreignness
never wears off,
it carries itself under our hollow armpits
between our buttocks
and in our thin strands of hair

a place where
our blackness or our two cents’ worth
will have you holed up in a
congested cell or hacked up by a
machete and left for dead with
a scarred abdomen.

a country where a mother gasps for

breath as her son holds on to
her severed limb.
the child blinks premonitions to life,
visions of the horrors that lie ahead
waiting to ambush him, an unflattering
reminder that he is an outsider.

we survive in a land where

a foreigner’s fart must be respectful
lest he stinks up the air that is not his.

by drowning our voices

we are reminded that,
this is not our home.

24
we are scattered
they spat at
us and we got tired of
being tossed about by
one of our own,
so we made off to a safe haven only to realise
that; the people there are
preparing to leave too for a
safer haven.

25
son of a gun
this son of a gun banished some
words from his speech and
spoke with a patriot’s vocabulary
hoping for free lunch.
he is the kind to wipe anybody’s
ass with his shirtsleeve for a
handout.
he even coughs with feigned patriotism.
he chokes on his necktie in the
searing heat, speaking with
an exaggerated accent.
it makes him sound
more honourable but we are
nobody’s fool.

26
no euphemisms
just spare us a lifetime of
revolutions by ending this lunacy,
stop picking your ugly teeth
after speaking needless rhetoric to us
because your fondness for lying makes
your words a mirage that abandons
us in the blink of an
eye.

27
what are we?
we are a congregation of sorts
to whom the seer is very fond of
giving mangled prophecies.
he is a spiritual jester with the serpent’s
charm who feeds off our
blind faith.

28
the gods have weaned us
our displeased gods
struck us with lightning.
now a goblin has molested our
daughters in their sleep.
our sons have lost their young tongues
for mocking the witchdoctor’s limp.

who tempered with the

gods?

29
a dream within another
a housefly is drowning in
my beer as hordes of demons try to
smother me in my sleep
so i wake up in my
nudity being strangled by
my mistress’ chiffon
i choke on her grip and break
free a few throbbing heartbeats later
to look in the mirror and realise
an ugly goblin has smeared
my face with cowdung
i rinse off the mirror and
a grotesque figure is standing behind
me with its eyes gouged out

shit, i just overslept!

30
our pasts
we made toy cows from clay,
wheeled disused tyres with bruised hands,
we later assumed character as child
soldiers armed with toy
guns,
played house inside the fat
baobab

these charred remains of our pasts

still remain alive in our minds
long after we experienced them.

31
rag dolls
men in their sixties have eloped with
sweet sixteens,
the old weasels stared at
our low necklines craving for our bare cleavage
we were deflowered in the aftermath,
and we lied in a
pool of virgin blood
when our unsuspecting hymens were
torn.

they gangbanged us one too many

times until our
virgin scents wore off,
the stench of their manhood
carried itself on us,
their rough hands
toyed with our crotches
and fondled away the
stubbornness of our loins
to submit to their
erotic whims then tossed us
aside on the battered
couch like destuffed rag dolls.

32
Phyllis
am i not a mere slave?
hopping from one master bedroom to
the next with statesmen,
men of cloth and senile bigwigs nearing
death.
some with hairy chests like
primates foraging in my flowerbed.
in a tug-of-war, grappling for
my overpriced thighs
and worshipping my yawning
orifice in more ways than one.

i guess they are just maniacs high on

lust who fall in love with the
mirage that i am each night.

33
we need more donors
we eke out a living from
gyrating our buttocks for
the donor’s enjoyment and
glorifying his unkempt moustache (which noone envies),
grinning to his tasteless flattery
and ululating in his praise,
what pathetic hero-worshipping!

34
black sins
we sinned black sins
and hibernated behind high walls
to shy away from our desperate past’s
ugly grins.
when our conscience confronted us
we ran out of lies
and sat on our haunches
licking our festering wounds
waiting for our impending
coup de grâce.

35
the purge
when the clouds fart, it
thunders
and the skies shit
hailstones,
so we stand outside
in our nakedness
to be drenched in the
deluge hoping to be cleansed of our
ungodliness.

36
how much is too much?
how much is too much when
someone is wringing my arm
or choking the life out of my
neck?
had i not played dead,
i would have been left lifeless
longing to breathe another
sober breath.

37
somebodies
we are not somebodies,
we limp our way through life,
longing to crawl out of our own
skins.
had we been born with
a patriotic bone in
our bodies,
we could have been somebodies.

38
whispers are this loud?
a voice whispered,
“the chief is too old and ripe for
death.”
but don’t you know we can’t
afford death in this
economy?

39
are lies this good to hear?
“do you have any pain killers for our
hunger pangs?”
they asked.
he stood behind the pulpit
and took a swig of water
hoping to get fresher breath.
he rambled on and on,
speaking with a liar’s accent to the
ears of illiterates whose naïve
eyes failed to see
beyond the grandiose hogwash
he spewed.
in the end
his empty platitudes were not
enough to feed their children with.

40
who knew public toilets aren’t free
our uneducated asses shat behind high
hedges since the public toilets cost
one dollar too much.
the trees in full leaf, looked over as we
squatted
they gyrated in protest
as the smell of human shit wandered
in the air.

41
we spoke in whispers
there was a loudness to the whispers
i heard;
in our drunkenness, we have worn condoms
inside out
but never dared to speak aloud
lest the walls eavesdrop.
the ugly ironies of free speech are—
it comes at a cost
which cannot be bargained for.
for instance;
having your forehead struck by a
rifle butt
or having your scrotum yanked
in your sleep
or your spouse falling off the ledge by
‘accident’
a deep voice bellowed, keep your
loud opinions stuffed in the
pockets of your corduroys before you
are gutted down by the
hungry flames of
‘the law.’

42
a wounded patriot
has he become
another retired patriot?
with overalls that are one size
too big.
scratching an impatient itch between
his buttocks.
a dissatisfied old
chap who forages for food in the
political dustbins,
with folds of wrinkles and yawning
wounds on his forearm.
rumour has it,
he owes three months rent
and often sends his son
to steal from the offering
basket.

43
when out of earshot
we begin muttering;
“had we been born of them,
we wouldn’t be nobodies scattered in
foreign lands.
had we been sired by their loins,
we could have plundered
just as much as they did
or even more.”

44
has the sun set?
the abyss is yawning again,
wider and wider
drowning us in its blackness.
its jutted teeth chewing us until
nothingness remains
why is she so fond of us?
each day we stand
poised
waiting to be swallowed whole.

45