E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Eyewear is just a wee blog, and its editor is not a political scientist.  When we weigh in, here, on world matters, we do so as amateurs.  I have no insider knowledge of Nelson Mandela , the great political visionary who has sadly died.  I can only listen, read, watch, reflect, on what the media tells me.  I first heard of Mandela in the 1980s, via songs by the likes of Simple Minds .  The idea then was to free the man.  Then, when he was freed, there was great joy, and expectation.  The expectation was warranted.  The prisoner, famously became the president, and he was, by all accounts a merciful and kind leader, refusing revenge on his former captors.  Indeed, listening to Dr Rowan Williams today on Radio 4, BBC, it struck me that Mandela, in a quiet way, was the greatest Christian of our era - the person who best embodied Christ's near-impossible dictum, to turn the other cheek.  If only.  So few of us can do it on a crowded tu...

Morgan Harlow   reviews Sunflowers In Your Eyes: Four Zimbabwean Poets edited by   Menna Elfyn Carolyn Forché   has written about the poetry of witness in her ground-breaking "El Salvador: An Aide Mémoire," ( American Poetry Review,   1981)   and most recently in “Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art,” ( Poetry   magazine, May 2011):  “In the poetry of witness, the poem makes present to us the experience of the other, the poem   is   the experience, rather than a symbolic representation. When we read the poem as witness, we are marked by it and become ourselves witnesses to what it has made present before us. Language incises the page, wounding it with testimonial presence, and the reader is marked by encounter with that presence.” To read poems by   Ethel Irene Kabwato ,   Fungai Rufaro Machirori ,   Joice Shereni   and   Blessing Musariri   in   Sunflowers in Your Eyes: Four ...