CHIPASULA, Frank (Mkalawile)

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Nationality: Malawian. Born: Luanshya, Zambia, 16 October 1949. Education: University of Malawi, 1970–73; University of Zambia, B.A. 1976; Brown University, M.A. in creative writing 1980; Yale University, M.A. in Afro-American Literature 1982. Family: Married Stella Patricia Banda in 1976; one son. Career: Freelance broadcaster, Malawi Broadcasting Corporation, Blantyre, 1971–73; English editor, National Educational Company of Zambia, 1976–78. Since 1964 writer. First organizer of Writers' Group, Chancellor College, University of Malawi, 1970–73. Awards: Fulbright travel grant, 1978–80; Noma award honorable mention, African Book Publishing Record, 1985, for O Earth, Wait for Me.Address: Department of English, Brown University, Box 1852, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Visions and Reflections. Lusaka, National Educational Company of Zambia, 1972.

O Earth, Wait for Me. Athens, Ohio University Press, 1984.

Nightwatcher, Nightsong. Peterborough, Paul Green, 1986.

Whispers in the Wings: Poems. London and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Heinemann, 1991.

Other

Editor, A Decade of Poetry. Lusaka, National Educational Company of Zambia, 1980.

Editor, When My Brothers Come Home: Poems from Central and Southern Africa. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1985.

Editor, A Decade in Poetry. Lusaka, Kenneth Kaunda Foundation 1991.

Editor, with Stella Chipasula, Heinemann Book of African Women's Poetry. Oxford, Heinemann, 1995.

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Critical Studies: "Singing in the Dark Rain" by James Gibbs, in Index on Censorship (London, England), 17(2), February 1988; "Poetry and Liberation in Central and Southern Africa" by Anthony Nazmobe, in Literature, Language and the Nation, edited by Emmanuel Ngara and Andrew Morrison, Harare, Atoll and Baobab Books, 1989.

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The Malawian Frank Chipasula is a major voice in the new generation of African poets. After his early education at Chancellor College at the University of Malawi and at the University of Zambia, where he was awarded a B.A. degree, he received an M.A. in creative writing from Brown University. While he was at Chancellor College, he was a founding member of the Writers' Group, which included the well-known Malawian poets Jack Mapanje, Lupenga Mphande, and Steve Chimombo. Chipasula's volumes of poetry include Visions and Reflections (1972) and Whispers in the Wings (1991). His poems also appear in, among other books, When My Brothers Come Home: Poems from Central and Southern Africa (1985), which he edited, and the Heinemann Book of African Poetry in English (1990).

Highly conscious of the artist's role in society, Chipasula assumes the responsibility of truth, which he bluntly portrays in "Manifesto on Ars Poetica":

I will not clean the poem to impress the tyrant;
I will not bend my verses into the bow of a praise song.
I will put the symbols of murder hidden in high offices
In the centre of my crude lines of accusations.
I will undress our land and expose her wounds.

Whether he writes in Malawi or elsewhere, Chipasula's poetry is centered on his home country, the small southeastern African nation that was ruled for more than three decades by the autocratic Hastings Kamuzu Banda, who unleashed a reign of terror upon his people. In his poetry, most of which has been written in exile, Chipasula affirms his love of his homeland, as in "A Love Poem for My Country," and exposes the cruelty of Banda. He laments a beautiful land that has become "stale" and "ravaged" and whose "flowers" are mangled. He uses copious images of violence and torture, including "burning calyx of sorrow," "bullet-riddled stalks," "chipped genitals," and "merciless knife." He accuses the sadistic and neurotic Banda of putting stones in prison for failing to sing his praises, and he accuses the colonizers of complicity in setting precedents for Banda, who learned from their violent repression of Africans, as shown by the Portuguese atrocities in "Wiriyamu" and "Nhazonia." In Whispers in the Wings he draws parallels between what has happened in Malawi and in countries such as Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Africa, Sudan, and Uganda. In "Shrapnel" and other poems he portrays violence as a worldwide phenomenon that needs to be eradicated wherever it rears its head.

Chipasula's poems about his American experiences mainly reflect on his situation as an exile. He compares what is happening in his homeland with the historical antecedents of slavery, past atrocities in the West Indies committed by Europeans, and the humiliation of black peoples like the Congolese Pygmy in the Bronx Zoo and the Hottentot Venus, whose experiences he shares.

While graphically presenting evil, the poet is hopeful of positive change at home and elsewhere. He intends to "resurrect the gaunt sun from its sickbed/And scatter this darkness with one flaming sword of light." He is confident of happier times; hence, "I know a day will come and wash away my pain/And I will emerge from the night breaking into song/Like the sun, blowing out these evil stars." The poet confronts evil wherever he sees it and expects through struggle that things will change for the better.

Chipasula uses highly descriptive language to convey the evil perpetrated in Malawi and elsewhere. Many of his images are symbolic, and the irony and paradox of his language helps to undermine the perpetrators of evil. In some of his early poems he experiments with traditional African poetic styles. Because he is constantly accusing dictators and cataloguing their atrocities, his voice is often maudlin and rarely varied. As has been noted, his "bluntness shocks the reader into a realization of the ugly reality of his brutalized homeland. He is the memory of his society and is faithful to the experience of the Banda era of Malawi's history." Without doubt Chipasula's poetry carries perhaps the strongest exilic voice in contemporary verse, and despite the nightmarish experiences he portrays, the hope he envisions has been vindicated in the improved state of present-day Malawi.

—Tanure Ojaide