October Mourning

October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard by Leslea Newman  111 pp.

In October of 1998 Matthew Shepard, a young, gay, college student was beaten nearly to death and left hanging on a fence in Wyoming for 18 hours before he was discovered. The killers admitted they did it because he was gay (one later boasted in prison "I'm the one that killed that fag"). Shepard died five days after being found without regaining consciousness. Leslea Newman, award winning author of books like Heather Has Two Mommies, was the scheduled speaker for the opening of the University of Wyoming's Gay Awareness Week on the night before Matthew died. She arrived to a campus and community in shock. Ten years later she began writing this anthology of poems related to Matthew Shepard's death. The collection includes a variety of poetic styles from all different points of view of animate and inanimate objects including the fence he was hung on, the doe that lay nearby as if to comfort him when the police arrived, the perpetrators, the lawyers and judge at the trial, a doctor, parents, and others. This is a poignant book, full of emotion as it should be. Two that affected me most were on facing pages. One was told from the point of view of a tree that is happy to be cut down to be made into something special, never dreaming that it would be a box to hold the ashes of a boy. The other, titled "Class Photo: Me in the Middle OR 'What Will You Be When You Grow Up?'" is an alphabetical list of possible occupations that children might say with the one in the center of the list being "martyr." Following the poems is a brief account of Newman's experience in Wyoming when she gave her speech and notes on the poems and the quotations that accompany many of them.

The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe by Peter Godwin

The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe by Peter Godwin, 371 pages, History.
Godwin, a journalist and former lawyer, starts this account of the history of Zimbabwe with some personal notes. He was born there when it was Rhodesia, and spent his childhood and adolescence there. His mother, now resigned to her life in some sort of retirement home in London, had been a practicing physician in Zimbabwe for many years, and (as we were to find out) was fondly remembered by many nurses in that country. Godwin, for the most part, skips over the causes of the civil war that ended with Rhodesia becoming Zimbabwe, except where there is a personal note related to someone he is talking to or about in the book or where the war intersected with the career of Robert Mugabe.
Mugabe has been the elected leader of Zimbabwe since its founding in 1980. Not all of those elections have been above-board, and those who voted for the opposing candidates often suffered reprisals. The beatings, torture, arrests, and killings that were precipitated by the recent 2008 elections were the worst by far. Godwin does a good job documenting the abuses, travelling around the land with his sister, a former Zimbabwean news reporter, and talking to people in the areas that voted strongly for the opposition (the Movement for Democratic Change or MDC). They visit victims in their burnt out villages, in exile in neighboring South Africa, and in lots and lots of hospitals and clinics around Zimbabwe.
Godwin also gets to spend time with some of the MDC leaders, Tendai Biti, Roy Bennett, and the eventual Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, learning from them how desperate the situation has become for all Zimbabweans.
What starts out a little unevenly, relying too much on information about Godwin, becomes a compelling story of a country that was once the shining example of a successful post-colonial democracy, but has now lost direction in its policies and politics, humanity among its leaders, and hope for its starving and beaten people.