Includes essay: 'Disobedient Poetics - Translating the Third Space' by Tariro Ndoro Includes bibliographic references (pages 267-268).
Summary:
"Tesserae is a unique celebration of Zimbabwean womanhood in all its diversity, its richness of voice and theme and narrative. The contributors include traditional page poets and underground poets, students and grandmothers, visual poets and spoken word artists, established writers and emerging talents, from within Zimbabwe and from the diaspora. In their poetry they explore wide-ranging themes, including challenging or traditionally taboo subjects. Domestic abuse, xenophobia, queerness, illicit relationships, sexual fantasy, menstruation, and suicidal ideation all feature within these pages. There are tender portrayals of family, friendships and parenthood; narratives of loss and despair; humorous poems; socio-political commentaries; transcendent allegories and lyrical descriptions, inter-woven with pulsing natural energy. Scents, sounds, tastes and visual images of Zimbabwe form an ever-present backdrop, at times overtly, at times indirectly. Voices resonate in vibrant harmony; poems engage each other in subliminal conversation. In her essay Disobedient Poetics - Translating the Third Space, Tariro Ndoro reflects eloquently on how language and our sense of identity are intertwined. Language is the instrument of poetry. As such it is many-layered, its music weaving internalised rhythms and cadences of the culture, oral traditions, memories and experiences that have formed us. It is surely no coincidence that several poems in this anthology touch on the complex relationship between language, identity, and 'home'." -- Amazon.com
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