South African Mzi Mahola, selfless poet, gifted confidante, writer, author, had a lot to be proud of in my books. He knew and understood first-hand the difficulties, challenges and hardships that a poet has to live up to and face. During his life, he rose above that, with grace, poetic vision and the drive of a Russian composer.
He spent a lifetime writing poetry. No small feat, that’s according to me. We corresponded via email and letters, spoke telephonically for many years. Since his tragic passing I have felt his loss deeply. We talk about one of our main passions, music. We communicated on an almost spiritual level. We talked about suffering, Christianity, and had intellectual discussions about God, and debated on an almost spiritual level.
These days I have mellowed. We spent our time discussing our shared spiritual outlook, our faith, Christianity. I told him I no longer move with fear in the world. Yesterday, I confessed my burdens to him as it rained in a poem on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
In life, he displayed an inner confidence and as a poet. He nourished and fed my imagination and creativity as a poet. I am a poet who was born, raised and still lives in South Africa, in my childhood home. Mzi Mahola made a home for himself in New Brighton. To read his work is to know humanity.
I asked once about the roles faith and prayer played in his life, what his views on religion, meditation, spirituality were? In response, he was always seer, sage and muse.
I told him that he is a source of inspiration to me. A well, a fountain, the exit out of this clinical depression, this cloud of negativity that hovers. I continually thank God that he was set on my path, on this journey with me.
It’s the last day of October. It’s a Thursday. The housekeeper is vacuuming. It’s a Spring day. My mother has gone to the shops. I read emails filled with Mahola’s wisdom and profound commentary on life. His insights are soulful and breathtaking.
Over the years I have dedicated a number of poems to Mzi Mahola, the poet, the man. He has had a major influence on my writing, my style and technique of writing and my poetic vision. Bessie Head and Virginia Woolf influenced the short stories I’ve written and some of my other literary work like the novels I embarked upon. Yes, to me he is in that league of leagues.
Mzi Mahola was born on 12 February 1949, in Claremont near Durban.He grew up between Lushington near Seymour and Port Elizabeth, in the Eastern Cape. He was “ranked as one of the most seasoned and poetic voices at work” in contemporary South Africa.
I have had the miracle of his guidance for so long now that this man became like family to me, this relationship, his creative talent, his poetic voice, vision and drive has sustained me through what American author William Styron described as “darkness visible”. He and his poetry have been my life-force when depression becomes a hindrance in my life and threatens to sabotage me. I have learned from him that life itself is a miracle, that in every human experience we find the shapes of consolation, that it is not heartbreak and pain that will break us but the human condition, the human face of suffering. In his poetry, I see broken images, a vision of my mother, the sea’s uncharted territory. I have come to trust the instrument of writing, the almost divine instructions that come with it.
Mzi Mahola has shown me the way in, the way out, taught me about cementing the vision I have, encouraged the development of crafting each line and wording and he has helped me in achieving my goal of becoming a published novelist. Once it was only a possibility, now it is a reality. I turn to poetry now, to poets Finuala Dowling, Silke Heiss, Alan Finlay, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Joan Metelerkamp, Robert Berold, Brian Walter, and the late and great poetics of Mzi Mahola to remind me how to live. Sylvia Plath, Dennis Brutus, Arthur Nortje, Victor Wessels, Adam Small. There is something these poets have in common. Humanity, and the fact that they are all, and some were, those that have passed on from the living to eternity, visionary in their outlook. Their life work, the poet’s life, the writing life, the work is truly inspirational and a motivating factor in my life, the fact is that they continued to write, continue to write throughout difficulty, struggle and hardship on their own terms, against the odds. I turn to Mzi Mahola’s words.
These poets offer a kind of sanctuary of hope and kindness for me, they embrace me whenever I feel depressed. Mzi Mahola has reminded me that God is the way, the truth and the life. I am a fragile object driven like so many these days by social media but Mzi Mahola knew and understood the art of survival and writing with overflowing passion.
Mzi Mahola was a pioneer and a warrior of sorts. I would go as far to say, a spiritual warrior. I have coined a phrase, the Mzi Mahola Effect. Comparisons are easily done and at best when they are thought through they help us become more self-aware. The Mzi Mahola Effect is defined by me as the following. When a poem makes us aware of our humanity in an authentic and unique way by describing human suffering, the human condition.
Mzi Mahola has destroyed inequality in his poetry for this generation of thinkers and intellectuals in much the same way as James Baldwin did for his. He is an intellectual, a philosopher with the superpowers of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I am reminded of the Zimbabwean-born poet Michelle McGrane in the cadence of Mzi Mahola’s poetric lines, Anna Akhmatova’s poem Memory of sun when I read his poem He came down the street. There is an ending, a beginning, a new chapter, and civilisation functioning with revolutionary tenderness in his literary work. When I think of Mzi Mahola I think of the quiet dedication of the American poet Li-Young Lee, the unwavering devotion to creative pursuit of South African filmmaker, novelist, poet, fine artist Aryan Kaganof and the German-American poet, novelist and short story writer Charles Bukowski in amidst extreme conditions placed on the totality of their being, disorder being one of them, limitations and disconnections being others.
Mzi Mahola has taught me many lessons but I want to leave you with this one that has stayed with me throughout all this time since the start of our correspondence. For faith to be restored there must always be courage and that when life shrinks back from what it cannot endure, courage expands. He took a country of stones and built a Jerusalem. The meaning of Jerusalem for those who don’t know is “city of peace”. I salute you, my friend, stalwart, veteran. Rest in peace, comrade. Thank you for what you did for this country.
