BY SILISIWE MABALEKA AWARD-WINNING author and journalist Onai Mushava has said he would soon be releasing an anthology titled Electronic Ladylady and a science fiction novel titled Empty String in celebration of his poetry career.
Mushava told NewsDay Life & Style that the forthcoming books address issues of the millennial psyche characterised by how the world has become amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
He said Electronic Ladylady would be a summation of his poems from 2007 to 2022, heavily centred on technology and theorisation themes.
“We are at a point where the internet is common as people do work, schoolwork and politics via it. It is also a capitalist-extractive site and geopolitical turf where a lot of the dark stuff is going on. Therefore, we ought to realise that the pandemic is a digital plumb-line and we should not overlook how immersed we are in this,” he said.
“I have spent time in the game, but I have been just into the writing, to showcase the development of a style that can be identified as Mushava, rather than the market logic.”
“With this new poetry book, I am making a statement to say I am here, I am at a place where I have to make all the right moves industry-wise, so the time left is just for business decisions instead of writing.”
Mushava said he intervened along the lines of cloud noir and focused on global communism, and tried to unpack the unhealthy effects of the internet which his poems seek to explore.
He said sentiment around his books, Survivors Cafe and Rhyme and Resistance makes him envisage putting his work on the map.
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“In the beginning, I could afford to feel sorry for myself and my poetry folks pushing a book industry that is quite not there,” he said.
“There may be no systems to look up to, but we have to plot things smarter and internationalise the craft because there is a world out there that will respond.”
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