Those who have read her work will remember her debut poetry collection, Destiny in Her Hands, and the award-winning book Auxillia Chimusoro: The Unsung Heroine. She has also been active in the Harare poetry scene, performing on stages that have featured poets like Musaemura Zimunya, Batsirai Chigama, Memory Chirere and others. She is a dynamic literary voice from Zimbabwe. Primrose C. Dzenga debuts in Munyori with the captivating story “Blood,” set in Zimbabwe’s informal diamond fields.

She describes it as her first attempt at fiction, and as to what inspired the story, she had this to say, “[It] was inspired by many women who didn’t only go to the diamond fields ,but to South Africa , to Botswana to shop for their families, to work and to look for greener pastures but often met up with tragedy at the hands of those who were supposed to protect them. This is the story of many Zimbabwean women not just one; all I did was lend them my voice.”  So, a voice for the victim, but she also represents the voice of the aggressor, lending voice “to the conscience of those who hurt others not out of choice but out of circumstances. At the end of the day, you have two victims, the [victimized]aggressor and his victim.”

And as for her fiction plans? “Fiction is an area I’m most tentative on as narrative doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m a poet but I’m trying to put together a collection of short stories and expand on the characters my poetry delivers in compacted form.”

Here is the beginning of the story:

The woman had run to him in tears, her light-skinned face looking pale like a lost child. Long after he was done he clung to her, silently begging, as if her silent tears might cleanse him, yet their salt only made the blood congeal. He couldn’t get away from it; it was everywhere.

The woman’s basket with salt and sugar for sale was tossed and vandalized about the little tin shack. One packet had been torn and it lay open mouthed as if to mock him, asking him questions he either had no answers for, or wished not to contemplate, or could not contemplate, questions ferocious as the dogs he handled. In slow  motion, he watched his sanity like a thread, slowly and purposefully, even disdainfully, walking away, abandoning him. He tried to cling to it, to beat it into subjugation. No sooner had he pounded and destroyed one face did another emerge.

READ the whole story here.