We are delighted to be joined by Memory Bhunu in this introduction to their pamphlet ‘Memory Flowers’, which is available for preorder here.
These poems form a choir of observations, echoes and recollection, where the retellings of the testament reframe the holy experience whilst also asking “would even Jesus be a disappointment to his immigrant parents?”
‘Memory Flowers’ is a sermon to language, to mother tongues and to mothers. This is poetry as revolution, as incantations and elegy – at every turn urgently challenging what we know of home, God and where we fit into the gaps between memories.
-In a few words, can you talk us through what ‘Memory Flowers’ is about?
It’s about me. It’s about my family.
It’s about being a black woman. It’s about being a first gen immigrant.
It’s about Zim.
It’s about the UK.
It’s about mental health and grief and love.
It’s about God
and sometimes the absence of one.
-How did you decide on your title?
The title was a spiral.
In the early phases of putting it together, I was working on it when Tkay Maidza’s ‘My Flowers’ came on my speaker. ‘Give me my flowers’ came to my mind then.
I liked the audacity of it – the bitterness of it. It resonated with the black woman in me. The black women I know are bitter and sometimes rightly so and sometimes so bold in their expression of it, but I was unsure.
Following conversations with creatives I really respect, I decided against it. The last poem ended up being called ‘the summer when Memory flowers’.
One thing people had been jokingly saying, sometimes seriously, was to use a name pun. I’m not punny, but I am sentimental. It matched the first urge I’d had, but with a different energy behind it.
These poems are my flowers and I am giving them to the readers.
-You write a lot in translation, could you talk about this process and how it felt to weave the languages together?
The Shona was an accident. It started out with just a few words and then escalated beyond my control.
It was the editing process that did it. I tend to speak my poems as I write them and I have a lot of other people’s voices in my pamphlet. Reading them back always felt off because it wouldn’t sound like them.
I’d push myself to better express their voice and I’d find myself sometimes using Shona. Sometimes Shonglish. Especially my mom – the phrases would come out my mouth and I’d know it was her voice in my mind. It was things I’d heard her say before.
It was a challenge because I used to be illiterate in Shona and mostly only ever listened to it. But through journeys on Shona alphabet blogs, a few conversations with my mom and big sister and the occasional Google translate, I got there. My Shona has actually really improved through this pamphlet and it’s one reason these poems are so special to me.
Translating it for others was difficult and a whole other thing.
Saying what it meant in English wasn’t hard – it was presenting that information on the page. I didn’t want to put all the translations after each line because that disrupted the flow and the Shona was too long to go the glossary route. Footnotes occasionally worked but could be quite clunky visually.
Scarlett and I had some good conversations about it and now it’s a mixture of things.
‘The women in my family have stories’ was the most challenging to translate. It’s Shonglish, so choosing where to add context and where to just let the Shona speak for itself was tough.
There are some phrases and words that are not translated at all, not in the following line or in the footnotes and I kind of like that. Those who know will know. Those who are curious will google, but everyone will still understand the meaning of the poem.
-If you could describe your poems in 5 words what would they be?
Bitter. Needy. Sentimental. Honest. Hopeful.
-What is the emotion that you’d like your readers to walk away from your book with?
I don’t know to be honest. When writing, I’m quite selfish. I just go off how I want to be left feeling at the end of the poem.
Usually, I want to feel like I’ve expressed something perfectly – whether that feeling is negative or positive.
I aim for the poems to feel real and honest.
I guess that I want my readers to leave and feel like they understand me, understand my feelings, my experiences.
It would be lovely if they could relate and find something of themselves in there. It’d be nice to leave them feeling less lonely.
But honestly, it doesn’t matter what emotion they leave with to me – it would mean so much for them to just feel anything, it doesn’t really matter what.
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