Tendai Rinos Mwanaka

A Portfolio of Defiance Tendai Rinos Mwanaka

The first thing you will meet in this collection is experimentation and innovativeness in the writing. Poets should be scientists by experimenting with forms, styles, with subject matter too, they should continuously try to find new ways of writing, to problematicise what we have always taken for granted. The second issue is how we understand and critically dissect that point where art criticism and actual art can meet in the poetic form. The third issue is how irreverently the poet treates issues to do with the meaning of words, what words are, how he creates new words, what numbers are, the state of voice, language, thoughts, dreams, perspectives, life, race, death, dreams, spirituality, love etc... The fourth issue is the storytelling tradition that is strong in this collection; the poet is saying poets are also storytellers, who tell a story in condensed form with depth of thought and feeling. The fifth important aspect is defiance. The poet refuses to settle on anything, to accept anything, he is a literary rebel with language, no subject is taboo. A Portrait of Defiance defiantly looks at the world before voice and the world after voice, and the worlds in between. What will human beings be without voice? Even nothingness has a voice!