Issues

For this special issue of Ipikai, I received many-many wonderful poems. However, and this is crucial; I kept on recalling that it was going to be a special issue for the great late Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera. The poems and the few vignettes selected for this issue had to be relevant one way or the other.

Zimbabwe always enters a new year with a feeling of physical and seasonal rebirth. Rebirth can also apply to life situations—a first love after heartbreak, a first job after years of searching, the shooting of a bamboo plant after five years of watering. The list goes on.

In Ipikai’s third issue, Zimbabwe’s poets engage with issues of work, rest, and the meaning of Fridays. After all, we have reached the end of the year and it is customary to break from the rigours of nine to five living. Many of our poets have described the hopeless monotony of the hustle and some even shed light on their working conditions.

For a long time, the theme of home and belonging has been the focus of a lot of Zimbabwean literature, and it seemed a broad enough topic that Zimbabweans from any walk of life could speak on. However, as I was reading the entries for this month, my mind was not turned towards Zimbabwe’s wordsmiths but to its bards.

For this issue, we asked writers to craft poems about the duality of life. This is a pertinent topic as the pandemic has shown us the extremes of life — the grief of death, the comfort of solidarity. While some of our poets have chosen to speak about the ongoing pandemic, many more have examined mortality from a philosphical standpoint...