From the archive: So many questions, so few answers

So many questions, so few answers (published in Art South Africa, August 2010)

Fronted by Watkin Tudor Jones of Max Normal fame, Die Antwoord has caused ripples locally and internationally (just google it) and have signed with Interscope (Lady Gaga, Blackeyed Peas, 50Cent), or are on the verge of signing with them. One can’t be sure: it’s the internet, Die Antwoord, and there are conflicting reports.

Jones’s present incarnation is Ninja, a hardegat, working-class white Afrikaans man who either has truck, or wishes he had truck, with hardegat ‘coloured’ gangsters. Ninja sports gold caps and tattoos in prison fonts, some of them icons of number gangs (but no actual number) and some of them phrases from gang lexicons, like “Pretty Wise”.

With Ninja is Yo-landi Vi$$er, Jones’s partner in real life. Dressed often in skimpy clothing, she raps with Ninja and provides the visual attraction which finds approval with most adolescent heterosexual men. Completing the core of Die Antwoord is DJ Hi-Tek, who provides ‘next level’ beats with a genealogy stretching back from the crazy techno beats pumping from some taxies on the Cape Flats line to 80s pop.

The band celebrates and/or ironises ‘zef’. A white Afrikaans slang term, ‘zef’ describes and impugns working-class culture otherwise known as ‘bad taste’: fur on the dashboard, plastic on the settee, ducks to the wall. In other countries where such middle-class snobbishness obtains, it might be called ‘redneck’ or ‘chav’ culture. Die Antwoord also cultivates a hardegat ‘fuck you’ attitude to any disapproval of their zef ‘roots’. Within the conceit of Die Antwoord – which requires a suspension of disbelief that erases Jones and Visser’s real life in a high-rent Cape Town neighbourhood – the invented persona, Ninja, does not care what you think of him and his zef aesthetic.

Ninja lives a fluid racial identity and displays it also through his ‘next level’ verbal dexterity, flitting among several working-class dialects in both English and Afrikaans. Lyrics, Facebook updates and what-what are filled with phrases like ‘my blaar’ (literally ‘my leaf’, figuratively ‘my friend’) and the sexism of  ‘Never make a pretty woman your wife’ (a song lyric from the 80s and a bon mot one might find tattooed on a gangster). Ninja then becomes a symbol of a particular masculine form of a South African hybrid identity, and critics and fans are excited that this hybrid identity is on the verge of mass consumption the world over.

The band has caused an internet storm, leading to the talks with Interscope and to mild hysteria among critics over the appeal of a hybrid South African identity to international audiences. WhoIs statistics provide modulation: the top origins of hits on the band’s site are: South Africa (37%), USA (21%), Germany (9%), UK and Netherlands (6% each), and Russia (3%) (checked 12 April 2010). Consider a South African diaspora and one wonders how many of their 60 000 monthly visitors (average over 3 months) constitute the mass international audience who are ready to consume this hybrid South African symbol.

Naturally, questions around cultural appropriation have been raised by some critics, myself included (http://is.gd/bqPET). One wishes that one could consider Die Antwoord as ‘just a band’ on the verge of international success, and therefore to be celebrated as a South African cultural achievement, as well as a celebration of Waddy Jones’s chameleon genius. But the band itself foregrounds issues of race – in lyrics and in interviews Jones/Ninja wants to ‘discover his inner coloured’. It is thus not unusual to consider questions of appropriation, considering also the real life distance between Waddy Jones and Ninja (a white, Afrikaans, working-class character), and Ninja and his own influences.

That Ninja sports gang-style tattoos but not an actual number shows that Jones is aware of the issues that surround cultural appropriation. Or, the gangs’ defence of symbols makes concrete such issues. Jones knows he can get into real life trouble if he sports a number without being a member of the relevant gang. In other words, he knows that he is close to stepping over a boundary and thus uses only what he can get away with. And so Jones’s cleverness lies in the cover Ninja provides to critical commentary. In the end criticism can be deflected by insisting on Ninja as artistic invention.

Song lyrics mirror this awareness of boundaries. “Dagga Puff Puff” is 99% stoner celebration, but reframed, unconvincingly, as moral tale at the end with “rook te veel dagga en dink oor jou lewe” (Smoke too much marijuana and think on your life). “Scopie” celebrates macho sexual fantasy, in appropriately vulgar language, but ends on the fade out with “I am the one/ the one wat fokkol poes vanaand gaan kry” to undercut the macho stance (I am the one/ the one who’ll get fuckall pussy tonight). Is this Waddy Jones stepping in to prevent Ninja overstepping?

It certainly shows an indulgence with sexual fantasy and the vulgar, but can’t let that stand. The ending on the fade out then reveals an ambivalence. The moral of the story is there, but hardly audible. Ninja has apparent free reign, but Jones is there to chide him. You can have your answer and answer it.

This shows Jones’s own awareness of what he is flirting with, and thus questions about that flirtation and cultural appropriation remain. Is it Ninja that wants to save the song from its adolescence by providing a moral ending, or is it Waddy Jones? Is it Ninja who feels he shouldn’t tattoo a ‘27’ or ‘28’ on his chest, or is it Waddy Jones? For all these answers, why?

The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims – Review

Achmat Davids, The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims (From 1815 to 1915), eds. Hein Willemse and Suleman E. Dangor, Protea Book House, 2011, ISBN 978-1-86919-236-5

Since the 1950s, linguists working on the history of Afrikaans have known that the earliest written and printed Afrikaans documents – a language recognisably distinct from Dutch – were written in “Arabic-Afrikaans” in the 1800s. That is, Arabic script was used to “spell out” and produce the sounds of the language that was then developing in the colony known as the Cape. The most well-known of these is Bayān al-Dīn (loosely, “Exposition of the Faith”) by the Kurdish scholar, Abubakr Effendi, who apparently came to SA, via complicated Ottoman allegiances to the British Empire, to teach Islam to the Muslims at the Cape. While Bayān al-Dīn was completed in 1869 and published in then Constantinople in 1877, Effendi makes reference to an earlier work of the same kind. For a foreigner to move here and learn how to write in this form must mean that there was an already established tradition of such writing, as Achmat Davids indeed claims.

Documents (student notebooks) from as early as 1845 have been found, pointing, obviously, to Muslim writers who were literate in at least Arabic and writing for an audience that could ‘read’ Arabic. And while most of these texts are of a religious nature (for the purposes of Islamic instruction), there are also secular ‘texts’, like a tailor’s shopping list.

It’s a fascinating area of language study, and it’s not exclusive to South Africa and Afrikaans. Languages survive because they can be bent and shaped to a range of local conditions, and there is a well established tradition of “ajami” writing – using Arabic with which to write in a local language – in other parts of Africa where Islam had spread print-literacy in Arabic.

As Achmat Davids (1939-1998) points out, however, research on the social and historical aspects of these Arabic-Afrikaans texts is at best patchy. This posthumous book, his 1992 M.A. thesis, is then one step in renewing the interest in these documents, and it is a fascinating read, albeit at times quite technical.

Davids’s main aim is technical: he lays the ground for a standardised system of transcribing the Arabic-Afrikaans into Afrikaans in Roman script. This requires an extensive discussion on the mechanics of Arabic. But this allows Davids to claim that these manuscripts are virtual audio recordings of what Afrikaans at the Cape at that time would have sounded like. Anyone who has wondered why some older people in Cape Town say “gaseg” (“gesig”/ face) and “karrag” (“krag”/ power) will find some answers here. Arabic has fewer vowels than Afrikaans and these writers used whatever was available in Arabic phonetics to produce sounds as closely as possible to the Afrikaans vowels. Arabic also avoids consonant clusters – the k and r pronounced as one sound in “krag”, so when scripted in Arabic, the word becomes “k’rag”.

Davids paints these writers as creative innovators, which they certainly were. And while they adhered to a rather strict Arabic linguistic science (which their audience of course uses to ‘decode’ as they read), they nevertheless found ways in which they could bend Arabic into sounding out a Germanic language. As Muslims generally think of Arabic as a sacred language, I find it remarkable that religious writers back then were actually re-shaping Arabic, in a manner of speaking.

Notwithstanding the technical nature of the book, Davids is also concerned with the social and cultural context in which this literature was produced. Past studies, he claims, have focussed too narrowly on the linguistics itself, thereby ironically making errors about the linguistic development of Afrikaans itself. Central to this is whether the Afrikaans of the Muslims at the Cape then should be considered a de-limited dialect of Afrikaans or whether this Afrikaans was more widespread. Davids would like to think the latter, although his argument in support of this relies on one early 20th-century grammarian’s assertion.

Nevertheless, the parts on the history of the speech community at the Cape I find the most fascinating because it provides an insight into the influences languages and cultures had (and have) on each other. The Hindu influence in local Islam can be found, for instance, in “rampies” and “puwasa”. “Puwasa”, generally thought of as a Melayu word and meaning “to fast”, here and still in the Malayan Archipelago, comes from Hindi. A “rampie” is a small pouch of “crinkle paper” (crêpe paper) filled with shredded and perfumed citrus leaves, and doled out to attendees at mosque on Maulid, a celebration of  the prophet Muhammad’s birthday. Apparently this word comes from the Hindu “Rampa”, indicating that the “rampie” may have been adopted, also, as a way of attracting slaves who were Hindu to Islam.

While the book is thus technical in parts and of interest to historians and linguists, I find that there is much in it to recommend it to the general reader who has an interest in local history, culture and language.

Further reading [Update]:

Neville Alexander, “Baanbrekerswerk wortel Afrikaans in bodem van Afrika,” (review of The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims), Slipnet, 26 January 2012.

Gerald Stell, “From Kitaab-Hollandsch to Kitaab-Afrikaans: The evolution of a non-white literary variety at the Cape (1856-1940),” Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 37, 2007, 89-127

Arthur Nortje, A Christmas Mass Message

I’ve been reading some South African poetry from the last 3 decades of the 1900s, re-reading many favourites. I’ve also been working my way through Arthur Nortje’s Anatomy of Dark: Collected Poems (edited by Dirk Klopper, 2000). Nortje was a fascinating poet, weird, strange, feverish. I get the sense, always when reading him, of a level of impenetrability: you can see what’s going on, but there are also major parts of the engine, the pistons, say, that you can hear, throbbing like some diesel engine on a trawler bobbing somewhere on a gentle but significant swell, but which are hidden. But he also liked ‘talking terms’, using words that are a bit too poetic or smart. Anyway, I’ll come back to him, but here’s a likkle sometin’ fram him:

A Christmas Mass Message

Jesus, wave-walker and world-master,
Preacher of patient faith and peace,
Give us the faith to follow faster
Charles Parker’s music and [the] message of Joyce.

Give us upright power of a fish-fin,
Mind-peace that makes peace possible,
Pray, be in our blood when we make the in-
accessible accessible,
When we wrestle with our heart’s thieves.

We adore you Christ, this morning, this day-birth,
And we cannot ignore your being a man,
Your being baptised a man in your blood-bath,
Help us to help in our freedom then
The thieves we must drive from our holy den.

Help freedom’s disciples feed the mass hunger
With the minimum of anger.

Three from Kelwyn Sole, The Blood of Our Silence

The following three poems are from Sole’s debut, The Blood of Our Silence (Ravan, 1987).

SEXUAL POLITICS

Tony, a friend, clinches
many a warm night
with the right phrase from Althusser

and Mohammed munches women
with his monologues
for dinner

and melting hearts
with judicious use
of Cabral and/or Laclau

I get to parts
a stated lust
never would allow

*

Barbara beds those who organise
word uprisings in her kitchen

Trish makes love to unionists
and Mpeo, to a theoretician

their alliances are swift, and follow
Marx’s writhings on class snuggle

when social forces lock, they know
there’s bound to be a struggle

 

PULE

The first time I saw you
your voice was loud
and your dashiki fluttered,
a red and green flag
over old hush puppies

knowing no better
I was impressed, the images
rolling forth in waves
of wheat fields, and black sweat
and the postcards of suffering
you painted for all the white faces
agape below you:

I am, you said, distinctly
a poet of the people:
and I wouldn’t be here
with you white trash
if it wasn’t the people’s
night off.

Now it’s years later.
Your fifth (or is it sixth?)
book is on the shelves.
You’ve finally made it
to the New Revised
Edition of African Poets
put out in London.

Your stomach and Black
Consciousness protrude
further every time
you make words to make
money,
and – yissis! can you talk,
even still

fatcat in your Mercedes
mocking ubugoduka
craftsmen with nothing to say
parasite on the flank of the revolt

: listen to the bumblebee buzz.

 

HEWAT

They say he asks the wrong questions.
Not: when shall we triumph?
But: how shall we triumph?
What shall we do after we triumph,
if that happens?

Black beret like a badge
on the side of his head
leaning to the left
he grins, and argues

argues with the fiftyonepercenters
who chew Nyerere endlessly,
and dream of a new paradise
behind dark glasses, dream
of their future posts
as Minister of Culture.

– It’s a long way
from the food queues of underdevelopment
to the sky-inverted dreams of socialism,
through an embroidery of party officials
knitting tyhemselves special shops
and better houses

and the monopoly of the State
in the neighbouring country he knows
didn’t look to him
like a cornucopia,
like the exploitation of man
by man.

They ask:
why did you come back?

This is my country, he says,
we have lessons to learn,
and a democracy of peasants and workers
to begin to think about.

Why worry now? they rebuff him.
Let’s get rid of the boers
first -

but he insists on conversation
of aid grants with strings
attached to every doallar,
loans made of rulers’ souls
which are never repossesed,
fat tongues licking blood off
the bruised thighs
of a miscarrying Africa….

The Branch say he’s dangerous,
a terrorist of the foulest kind,
and lock him up incessantly.
His comrades say he’s like a spy,
ruffling their ocean of intent,
murmur of an ‘infnatile disorder’.

He quirks his mouth and argues.

At the feet of a child

At the feet of a child
for Emma —– ——— (b. 1995)

The earth is young again tonight
And innocent of dinosaurs

Of war and famine; and small,
Cauled underneath a child:

Seven months, Emma rocks
On all small fours and belly

Rocks back and forth
Until her feet find traction

And, gurgling, she launches
Into her first crawl, sets us

And the earth in motion

(from This Carting Life, © Kwela/Snailpress, 2005)

Peter Horn on Censorship, 1979

Peter Horn, 1979, “The right of the people to censor the arts”,  In National Union of South African Students (Ed.), Dead in One’s Lifetime, Cape Town: NUSAS (1979) pp.92-105

The state which does not censor the arts, does not take the arts seriously. The state which does censor the arts, regards its citizens as minors, incapable of making rational choices. Any discussion of censorship and the relation of the state to the arts, which does not deal with both horns of this dilemma, will not come to grips with the complexity of the subject, and will end up with the irreconcilable dichotomy between the liberal stance of laissez faire and the authoritarian imposition of censorship.

As a writer I am deeply disturbed that the euphemistically so-called Publications Board (which publishes nothing but lists of unpublishable books) has banned nearly every word I have said and published in South Africa in the last ten years, so much so that it has become forbidden even to criticize me. Nevertheless, it would be a fallacy to reject the right of the state to indulge in practical criticism of this kind, and to demand that „there shall be no censorship”, as the basic law of some democratic states does (while at the same time imposing a sneaky kind of indirect censorship which purports to protect minors against the ravages of pornography and brutal violence). It would be a fallacy, because it would mean one of two things: either that the words, images, and sounds which we call art have no effect whatsoever, and that it is therefore futile to pretend that they can do any harm to anybody, and should therefore be banned; or that the state as the representative of the people has no business to be alarmed about the potentially harmful effect of the art, that the state should allow the poison of harmful art to circulate in society and bring about its harmful effect unchecked.

Peter Horn on Censorship, 1989

Peter Horn, 1989, “Censorship: Creating pockets of ignorance”, in South, 22 June 1989, p.18

(South [Weekly] was an independent newspaper generally aligned with the UDF and ANC, edited by Moegsien Williams, 1988-1991.)

Any form of censorship assumes that there is one group – usually a minority – which is wiser, more intelligent, more moral than another, which protects another group which is prone to be seduced, led astray, outraged or insulted by some form of writing, painting, music or other form of self-expression. Any form of censorship therefore denies the full equality of all the members of a society. The censors depict themselves as adult and responsible, and insinuate patronisingly that the rest of humanity, the majority, is in a childlike state of irresponsibility.

As such censorship is fundamentally incompatible with democracy, whether it is exercised by a government, a religious community, a political party, or even by the majority of the people, because it deprives at least some individuals of their democratic right to be informed about all issues, so that they can make up their own minds and come to a decision on the basis of all the available information.

Two from Yusef Komunyakaa

Fog Galleon

Horse-headed clouds, flags
& pennants tied to black
Smokestacks in swamp mist.
From the quick green calm
Some nocturnal bird calls
Ship ahoy, ship ahoy!
I press against the taxicab
Window. I’m back here, interfaced
With a dead phosphorescence;
The whole town smells
Like the world’s oldest anger.
Scabrous residue hunkers down under
Sulfur & dioxide, waiting
For sunrise, like cargo
On a phantom ship outsde Gaul.
Cool glass against my cheek
Pulls me back from the black schooner
On a timeless sea – everything
Dwarfed beneath the papermill
Lights blinking behind the cloudy
Commerce of wheels, of chemicals
That turn workers into pulp
When they fall into vats
Of steamy serenity.

Salt

Lisa, Leona, Loretta?
She’s sipping a milkshake
in Woolworths, dressed in
Chiffon & fat pearls.
She looks up at me,
Grabs her purse
& pulls at the hem
Of her skirt. I want to say
I’m just here to buy
A box of Epsom salt
For my grandmother’s feet.
Lena, Lois? I feel her
Strain to not see me.
Lines are now etched
At the corners of her thin,
Pale mouth. Does she know
I know her grandfather
Rode a white horse
Through Poplas Quarters
Searching for black women,
How he killed Indians
& stole land with bribes
& fake deeds? I remember
She was seven & I was five
When she ran up to me like a cat
With a gypsy moth in its mouth
& we played doctor & house
Under the low branches of a raintree
Encircled with red rhododendrons.
We could pull back the leaves
& see grandmama ironing
At their wide window. Once
Her mother moved so close
To the yardman we thought they’d kiss.
What the children of housekeepers
& handymen knew was enough
To stop biological clocks,
& it’s hard now not to walk over
& mention how her grandmother
Killed her idot son
& salted him down
In a wooden barrel.

(from “New Poems”, Neon Vernacular, Wesleyan University Press/ University Press of New England, 1993)

The man with the hoe

In Dagga, Part 2, I wrote about a photograph of a man with a hoe, a small-holding farmer on the outskirts of Durban, ca 1972:

One branch of that extended family in Durban owned a small holding in a lush, hilly area where they farmed peanuts, among other things. Being so young at the time of our visit, my memories are necessarily fragmented, but augmented (and maybe created?) by photographs that, in later times in my childhood, my family would pore over with nostalgic recollection; photographs which I now, with an even deeper cut of that ache for home, wish I had before me. One photograph stands out, a picture of a tall, lanky and dark, moustachioed man, dressed in dark blue cotton trousers (or was it a blue overall rolled to the waist?) now all muddy at the ankles, a white shirt, rolled sleeves, a hoe over his shoulders and staring dead pan and exhausted at the camera. Behind his right shoulder, a corrugated zinc water tank, fed by a pipe running from the roof of a building of which only part of a wall is visible. The ground is dark and muddy; in the far background of the picture, a deep, indiscriminate, dark green jungle.

I have now found the photograph and all the stuff about memory’s trickery hold. I got some details wrong: the left-right composition, that his facial expression is clearly visible, the sense of a jungle in the background. And the photograph is not as vivid as it appeared in my memory when writing the above:

 

Durban farmer, 1972

Derek Walcott, Sainte Lucie, parts I and II

Sainte Lucie

I
The Villages

Laborie, Choiseul, Vieuxfort, Dennery,
from these sun-bleached villages
where the church bell caves in the sides
of one grey-scurfed shack that is shuttered
with warped boards, with rust,
with crabs crawling under the house-shadow
where the children played house:
a net rotting among cans, the sea-net
of sunlight trolling the shallows
catching nothing all afternoon,
from these I am no nearer
to what secret eluded the children
under the house-shade, in the far bell, the noon’s
stunned amethystine sea,
something always being missed
between the floating shadow and the pelican
in the smoke from over the next bay
in that shack on the lip of the sandspit
whatever the seagulls cried out for
through the grey drifting ladders of rain
and the great grey tree of the waterspout,
for which the dolphins kept diving, that
should have rounded the day.

II

Pomme arac,
otaheite apple,
pomme cythère,
pomme granate,
moubain,
z’anananas
the pineapple’s
Aztec helmet,
pomme,
I have forgotten
what pomme for
the Irish Potato,
cerise,
the cherry,
z’aman
sea-almonds
by the crisp
sea-bursts,
au bord de la’ouvière.
Come back to me,
my language.
Come back,
cacao,
grigri,
solitaire,
ciseau
the scissor-bird
no nightingales
except, once,
in the indigo mountains
of Jamaica, blue depth,
deep as coffee,
flicker of pimento,
the shaft light
on a yellow ackee
the bark alone bare
jardins
en montagnes
en haut betassion
the wet leather reek
of the hill donkey.

Evening opens at
a text of fireflies,
in the mountain huts
ti cailles betassion
candles,
candleflies
the black night bending
cups in its hard palms
cool thin water
this is important water,
important?
imported?
water is important
also very important
the red rust drum
the evening deep
as coffee
the morning powerful
important coffee
the villages shut
all day in the sun.

In the empty schoolyard
teacher dead today
the fruit rotting
yellow on the ground,
dyes from Gauguin
the pomme arac dyes
the earth purple,
the ochre roads
still waiting in the sun
for my shadow,
Oh, so you is Walcott?
you is Roddy brother?
Teacher Alix son?
and the small rivers
with important names.

And the important corporal
in the country station
en betassion
looking towards the thick
green slopes of cocoa
the sun that melts
the asphalt at noon,
and the woman in the shade
of the breadfruit bent over
the lip of the valley,
below her, blue-green
the lost, lost valleys
of sugar, the bus rides,
the fields of bananas
the tanker still rusts
in the lagoon at Roseau,
and around what corner
was uttered a single
yellow leaf,
from the frangipani
a tough bark, reticent,
but when it flowers
delivers hard lilies,
pungent, recalling

Martina, or Eunice
or Lucilla,
who comes down the steps
with the cool, side flow
as spring water eases
over shelves of rock
in some green ferny hole
by the road in the mountains,
her smile like the whole country,
her smell, earth,
red-brown earth, her armpits
a reaping, her arms
saplings, an old woman
that she is now,
with other generations of daughters flowing
down the steps,
gens betassion,
belle ti fille betassion,
until their teeth go,
and all the rest.

O Martinas, Lucillas,
I’m a wild golden apple
that will burst with love
of you and your men,
those I never told enough
with my young poet’s eyes
crazy with the country,
generations going,
generations gone,
moi c’est gens Ste. Lucie.
C’est la moi sorti;
is there that I born.

 

(from Derek Walcott, Collected Poems, 1948 – 1984, Noonday Press, 1986/1993; originally from Sea Grapes, 1976)