Moving Beyond Protest Sensibility: Chenjerai Hove’s Love and Other Ghosts (2009)

Abstract

SummaryChenjerai Hove is one of the most prolific writers in Zimbabwe in the English language. Hove has written novels, poetry and some critical essays. He has also written in the Shona language. Although, Hove's creative ouvre has received some important critical evaluation, most of these evaluations are on his novels. However, recently, critics have taken an interest in Hove's poetic works. In 2009, Chenjerai Hove completed a collection of poems called Love and Other Ghosts (2009) which has remained unpublished to date. Sadly, Hove passed away on the 12th of July, 2015 while on self-imposed exile in Norway. This article is a tribute to Hove's poetic ingenuity and an exploration of the poetic shift registered in Hove's poetic creativity from poetry that defines itself as committed to issues of social justice and whose contradictions would be openly resolved through armed, class and gender struggles towards poetry that celebrates life through the trope of love. In Love and Other Ghosts (2009), the poet's voice appears less critical of bad governance as is openly registered in his Blind Moon (2003). This article argues that the subversive power of Love and Other Ghosts (2009) is precisely its refusal to conceive of protest politics in terms of slogans against the ruling elites as one can see in Palaver Finish (2002). Instead, in Love and Other Ghosts, Hove carves out an alternative site where contradictory voices temper with official narratives of Zimbabwe's post-independence dispensation. Hove's Love and Other Ghosts (2009) creates its own fictional and poetic context that shows that even in the most hostile circumstances, ordinary people can still organise their lives around those values that are life-sustaining. Instead of merely protesting against betrayal of the masses, Love and Other Ghosts affirms the inevitability of change through the archetypal image of love.