Tendai Mwanaka – författare

Weaving stories has been primarily women’s domain since time immemorial.When women write, they speak from their hearts; emotion flows and carries the readers with the powerful currents. Women directly bear the brunt of family life fall outs, be it oppressive family and social rulesand confinement or physical abuse when they don’t comply and submit. Even if they remain silent, submissive, their very existence makes them get intimidated. This volume, Writing Woman Anthology: Personal Essays and Short Stories, Volume 3, has exceptional stories from 13 African andAsian writers that brings together the diverse themes that humans struggle with in order to reconcile with emotions and conditions, which are depicted with realistic verve. Each story has a compelling narrationof women’s pain and suffering.

The stars are in alignment. Her dramatists and scholars have spoken on the tapestry of these pages as a testament to the powers that be and the knowledge of the ancients. The language and the expertise involved will speak to your heart in praise of Africa. These word artists, these scholars and dramatists bring their life experience to the book, a noblekind of variety, an energy, their particular aura, the juxtaposition ofthe effervescent flux of ideas, ideals, innovation and ideology. The narrative in the essays and plays is based on reality and non-reality, the substance of dream killers in some very captivating and enticing lines, it is Africa’s time to shine. This volume is anchored to a dream,and tethered to a goal. Since ancient times there have been generational curses in the bloodline and strongholds that are determinednot to let us go. Terrain that in a nutshell has been deposited in our genetic code, but now it is time for the divine awakening of our ancestors and for divine wisdom and new insights to prevail. We owe our ancestors that much. There is truth that speaks to power on these pages.

From 2015 to 2023 we have been able to issue out, yearly, an anthology of Africa poets, through 9 years of publishing this beautiful anthology of the best contemporary African poets and in the process we have published and archived over 1000 African poets. And this year without fail we offer you Best New African Poets 2023 Anthology which comprises several dozens of African poets from the Portuguese, English and French speaking African countries. We expect the anthology to continue into another decade but also to seed into other forms of poetic expressions starting from next year. We intend to work on Best New African Poets International Festival of the Arts, an event that will bring together all these poets we have been able to publish the last 9 years to showcase their talent in a week of festivities in Harare, Zimbabwe. This year''s anthology has poems that cover the usual gamut of issues: love, unrequited feelings, relationships, death, poetry making, politics, and we were excited to see Mashigo tackling the ongoing Israel/Hamas war, and the ill-treatment of the Palestinian people for generations under the Israeli government; culture, religion, spirituality, identity, belonging, memory, individuality and all sorts of other existential dilemmas that the young African poets deal with day to day.

Despite the current economic and political situation in our country, poets, writers, artists, and other creatives have defied the odds and continued to churn their works and submit to produce this marvelous anthology. This eighth installment continues the tradition of giving new writers the platform to shine and to the seasoned writers, a shebeen to meet again and prolong the tradition. We hope you continue to read and follon the Zimbolicious anthology series.

Peace of the Senses: How to Fight the FAGS is a collection of interlinked photographs that deals with the human story in several existential perspectives, especially how we find joy and happiness in difficult circumstances in life. Thus the images in this book celebrate human life, makes funny of difficult situations we go through. There is an element of the comedian in the photos, and it sometimes would create huge howls of laughter, sometimes chuckles and smiles. We go with the adage laughter is the best medicine in this work, and I believe this creates the peace of the senses, as the title presupposes. A set of common themes and philosophical questions permeates the book, bringing the narrative together as an author’s self-interrogation through invented others. Detecting the thematic threads whilst paying attention to the differences requires one to experience the book both horizontally and vertically, following a narrative that seems as much widening as deepening.

Best New African Poets 2016 Anthology has 251 pieces from 131 poets and artists in 7 languages (English, Portuguese, French, Afrikaans, Shona, Yoruba and Kiswahili) from 24 African countries and Diasporas, with South African and Angolan poets dominating the list. We also have a healthy number of poets from Uganda, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Moçambique, Ghana, and Nigeria. The nationalist sense is the one that most predominates with its pink, blue and gray tints that are expressed in parallel with existentialist perspectives that in turn go hand in hand with love, desire, hankering, joy, sensuality that transports us to epic, lyrical, utopian contexts without being lost in fantasy, they are artistic lines sometimes with traditional and sometimes more innovative touches. However, in contrast and to a lesser extent, almost as if there were resistant and with restraint we also find desolation, pain, negation that can be so sweet or so bitter that it allows the imagination to stop in a lament or end in resignation.

This collection has 60 poems that tackle spirituality from different perspectives as they also tackle day- to-day activities of the protagonists, from love, truth and lies, what is right or wrong, politics, death, existence, growing up stories, memories, gender and sexuality, what beauty is, etc. And in all these poems there is the search for our beginning (where we came from) to find the path to here (where we are) and what this here represents. A conscious thread runs through and weaves these worlds into some form of religion, an individual spirituality.