ZIM POETS CONCERNED WITH MENTAL HEALTH

Winzim Online

 

Every year October 10 is observed as World Mental Health Day which aims ‘to raise awareness of mental health issues around the world and to mobilize efforts in support of mental health’. This year, the theme was ‘Mental Health is a Universal Human Right’. As the world recognized this day through various events, World Health Organization’s 2022 World Mental Health Report rebounds with a sad note that mental health conditions are increasing worldwide.

The pressure of daily modern life has plunged men, women, teenagers and youths, into a dungeon of depression, drug abuse, suicide, anxiety, in fact all the filthiness usurping the human mind.  There’s hardly a family that has not been affected by any of the mental health issues topping the agendas at world medical and health conferences. Governments and NGOs have woken up to the call of addressing mental health in an attempt to save the future generations.

Dictionaries define mental health as a ‘psychological state of someone who is functioning at a satisfactory level of emotional and behavioral adjustment’ and mental disorder as ‘a psychological disorder of thought or emotion.’

Mental disorder is a more neutral term than mental illness. There are many a different meaning and cause, some rational and others irrational, attached to the words ‘mental health’ or ‘mental disorder’ or ‘mental illness’.

Psychologists or psychiatrists have their take while personal development coaches, traditionalists (spiritual and cultural), and others, have their own viewpoints (and biases) too.

Yet even as threatening as it is, mental health awareness can be raised through the literary arts also; hence we have poets or writers vigorously writing about the subject.

Seven  Zimbabwean poets concerned with the rising statistics of problems to do with mental health came together and hatched ten poems each to produce a wonderful anthology called Not Forgotten: Remembered with Love (2023, Ruvarashe Creative Writes).

The anthology editor, Morset Billie, notes that the poets’ aim ‘to dispel the stigma associated with mental health challenges….’

If you read the anthology quietly, listening with mind (not ears) to the voices of the personae, you realize mental health is not something to take for granted. You witness a sad realm of individuals burdened by pain, suicide ideation, regret, self-pity, drug addiction, guilt and loneliness.

It is a relief that the book is not totally sad but it comforts. You rejoice when victims become victors. The poems are a conglomeration of survivors’ voices and the witnesses’ voices, a poetic choir of hope.

  There is a time when even the sufferer discovers the root cause of his/her suffering as depicted in Ruth Mutana’s poems. A homeless grown man in ‘An Image of a Street Man’ sees his childhood reflected in a nearby poor, wailing boy who’s being ignored by his busy parents.  Like the boy, the man ‘always waited to be loved and cared for…’ but he was cast out of home because he ‘started talking and laughing’ to himself’.

In marriage, some partners scarcely accept their weaknesses; the result is marital friction as in another of Mutana’s poems ‘The Gas Lighter’. The woman cries:

 

…When I expressed my feelings honestly

He called me a liar

When I explained his shortcomings to me

He called me delusional

Until I began to question my sanity

 

 

Courage E Karuma pleads with the busy world, especially family members, to give an ear to those trapped in drugs or suicide thoughts, those crying out for help. His poems often address the brother, sister, mother. For example, in ‘Welcome to my World’ a voice pleads:

 

Why won’t you listen?

I called last week; you were busy

At that time, I went searching for death

 

In the poem ‘Mother, I am Scared’, you wish you could attend to the voice of possibly a youth who is under the influence of drugs, alone in his room seeing awkward visions, calling out to his mother who is not there for him.

Tabeth Manyonga, the anthology publisher, also contributed pieces that largely touch on the worker’s plight. She shows how the workplace can inflict worst wounds in the mind. When one fails to live up to the bosses’ expectations, is segregated and gets treated like a slave, the mind is easily pressured to give in to depression.

For example, the persona is her poem ‘The Stairs’ has feelings of regret and after failing to be like the others, says:

 

I lost my sanity trying to keep up

 

The poets Onward Mutapurwa and Ruvimbo Martha Jeche are voices of comfort, echoing the anthology’s mantra that ‘it’s ok not to be okay’. 

It is mentioned in his brief biography that 23-year old poet Alison Tinashe Muzite is ‘an author also notable for distinctively writing, drawing and painting using both hands simultaneously’.

When reading his poems, especially the first two titled ‘Alone’ and ‘Lonely’ set side by side, something suspiciously exciting moves between your eyes: the poems are like a painter’s brief, quick strokes made by both hands at the same time, yet capturing different meanings.

     Tanaka Mercy Murwira, an aspiring poet, also echoes the psychological wailings of people in different storms of life. 

Not Forgotten carries poems in simple but inherently soulful language; that is the good of it.  It’s a timeless, helpful book.  Reading Not Forgotten is therapeutic. This anthology surely must be made part of rehabilitation or treatment programs for people with mental health problems. 

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