An Interview Rory Kilalea: Film-maker, Playwright and Author of The Arabian Princess - Page 2

Then I began to read local Zimbabwean writers: [Charles] Mungoshi captivated me. He dared to write about and think things that I had not seen written by a black Zimbabwean and in his writing, he was able to show the same struggles, the same hopes as all Zimbabweans, and of course his writing was of such quality that it had a universal appeal. [Shimmer] Chinodya is also another example of a writer daring to say what others feel (or may feel) it is not correct, or politically correct, to record or explore. That is our function as writers - to tell it as we see it. And these writers do.

What are your main concerns as a writer?

The role of an outsider looking in.

In what way are you an outsider? And, when you look in, what do you see?

Hmm … now here is a tough question. Psychoanalysts would say that growing up as a poor white person in a black country may have been part of the reason that I was not part of the normal (whatever that means) white community; that I went to a non-racial school in Bulawayo; that my parents were very Catholic to the extent of praying that I would become their salvation by being a priest. But I tell you when it first occurred to me, I was standing against a mesh gate of our small house in Paddonhurst in Bulawayo and watching a machine tarring the road, splattering pieces of liquid tar into the air, smelling poisonous, but nicely intoxicating. And I refocused and saw a black boy on the other side of the road doing exactly the same as me - I knew (just as I knew in the Zimbabwean writers I read later) that we were on a similar path. We saw similar things — dreamt similar things — but there was fence between me and the boy.

I am looking into a struggle of achieving and understanding our role as Zimbabweans and all of the strange contradictory nature of that. I have left behind the intellectual romantic hopes of togetherness, and now watch with a detachment. As a result, without the anchor of my family’s faith, I have extracted a terrible price for being adrift. Feeling is different from observing and I have been left with the heart of a romantic and the mind of a cynic.

And there is another thing - I do not fulfil the ethic of a Rhodie Rugger bugger. For example, I appreciate male beauty, which of course is anathema to the president in his current situation. As much as I know that most of this rhetoric is politics, it does not ever make the ‘otherness’ go away. Perhaps I have always lived as the secret sharer and want to share that place with my readers.

Article Author: Ambrose Musiyiwa

Ambrose Musiyiwa has worked as a freelance journalist, book reviewer, and a teacher. One of his short stories has been featured in an anthology of contemporary Zimbabwean writing, Writing Now: More Stories from Zimbabwe (Weaver Press, 2005.) He is a regular contributor to OhmyNews International. …

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