Blessing’s HIFA Diary - Day 3, ambiguity, finding God & poverty

April 30, 2010 by Blessing Musariri ·
Filed under: Entertainment, Arts & Culture

29 April, Thursday
Stanbic Bank day

“A country that’s going through some ambiguous moments.” - Maria Wilson – HIFA Executive Director, talking about Zimbabwe.

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Day two without electricity – I think this qualifies as one of those ambiguous moments. I am not home all day so I haven’t really felt it too badly yet except for the unfairness of driving past lit suburbs all the way home after midnight only to reach ours that is in complete darkness. Thank God for the full moon otherwise it would be an untenable situation.

After leaving the press room way past the time of the first show I was supposed to see, I picked up an artist friend who is performing tonight. She wanted to go shopping for a shiny, purple, body hugging, short jacket with long sleeves. In Harare! I thought the flea market in Avondale would be the best place and also convenient as it was also the location for my next show. We didn’t find the jacket, of course – in Harare! – BUT I was very surprised at the wide selection on clothes available there and if there was a purple jacket of that particular description to be found anywhere in Harare, it would be here I think. We went on to the show.

Overheard in the dark before Step Afrika began: “Are those all your Smarties?” ( A little girl behind me. ) It was asked as if it was the most important question she would ever ask in her life and I thought of how simple life is when you are three years old. Then the show began. Stomping- gum-boot-tap-hip hop dancing-body percussion-high energy exhilaration. That is stepping among other things. A great show.

I moved on to my next show which I have to confess, completely took me by surprise. I watched it thinking it was telling me the story we are always hearing and I kept waiting for them to get to the inevitable parts, but they didn’t. It was the history of the story that has been the story of Zimbabwe for the last ten years and it was surprising because it is not a story people usually want to tell, certainly not the explanation anyone gives for how things came this pass. It was also a story about how love can turn to hate and the circumstances in life that can cause this to happen. I sat there in the dark wrapped in my expectation of the inevitable turn of the story to election violence, farm invasions asking myself these questions: am I an idealist, a realist, an artist, a lover of artistic expression or just a person who sometimes doesn’t quite know what is going on? Am I a person who expects one thing and always seems to get another? I learnt one thing for sure, the greatest fiction is in our minds everyday when we believe something to be happening that actually isn’t. It’s a tug of war between, expectation, what we have come to know as the norm, what we have learnt to be good, what we have learnt to be bad and the no man’s land in between.

Someone in the play declared, “He has found God now.” Where does one find God? Where does poverty come from? How far is too far and who has been there? Do we remember with our hearts or with our minds? What lies on the other side, but the other side? Who knew that in the dark, thinking I am watching something that is not what I think it is, I would be so besieged by all these questions that I would be moved to write blindly so as not to forget. It was an unexpectedly honest moment.

I think the person sitting beside me expected the same thing because at some turning point in the play he issued a great big sigh and it immediately made me think of Fermina Daza in “Love in the Time of Cholera”, sighing out loud in the cinema proclaiming, “This is as long as sorrow!” (Which the play wasn’t but I thought it would be if it was ever to get to the inevitable moments). Incidentally, I was most annoyed by the story of that book – well the way it ended at any rate. It is certainly not my favourite of Gabriela Garcia Marquez’s work.

It’s not a day at HIFA without lunch on the Green and so that is where I went. I didn’t make any new best friends this time around – or maybe I did – ambiguous moments. In any event, I did meet two people I didn’t know before and heard a really funny story about red wine that knocked everybody out after some function, to the point that nature called a few of those people but they didn’t answer and so nature did as nature does. I was also treated to an interesting description of Korean food: “It tastes like food that someone with an Indian mother and an African father would cook if they were cooking Chinese food.” Great! I would look forward to a meal like that – I think.

I was feeling a little HIFAd-out all day, what with having jumped around on the Green at DJ Le Roux’s party the night before but I survived until Moto and jumped around again until a little after 11pm. I wonder if I’ll make it to Sunday.

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