Spring – light and dark

(Published in VISI Magazine, December 2012)

I have been living in Cape Town for 25 years and enjoy living here, even if this city is, after all, a visdorpie compared to most cities the world over. More than anything else about Cape Town as a city, I enjoy walking the streets of the CBD and discovering yet another small, independent coffee shop or another view or angle onto a street with its mix of hidden mosques and colonial, apartheid and modern-global architecture.

But almost every Spring something both light and dark tugs at the heart. It may be a bush of jasmine pouring over a wall in Tamboerskloof or the change of light on the face of Table Mountain that draws me back to what I call my home-home, the house and garden where I grew up in Paarl, the environs of the town, the mountains surrounding it. Then tugs at my heart a nostalgia lit by Boland sun, yet dark as any winter.

Many of my city friends react with disbelief to my childhood stories, which strike them often as stories of a rural idyll, notwithstanding that my home town, Paarl, was, even back in the 1970s and 1980s, peri- and semi-urban. But it was still a place where you had to negotiate Bothma’s cows being herded to a nearby grazing field on your way to (primary) school, or where, on your way from school, you might stop at a stream to catch tadpoles with friends.

Before we had climate change and shifting seasons, back when the seasons coincided with certain months, schoolboys celebrated 1 September by arguing with their mothers to be allowed to go to school barefoot and in shorts. It was indeed as if something tightly coiled had suddenly sprung free. And it is this verve that I associate with spring, a verve, alas, not always visible in the city and not always so tangible in adult life.

When I do see a jasmine bush in the city, it enlivens me and takes me back to the bush we had back home, just outside the kitchen door, pouring its green vines through the terra cotta wall closing off the front garden from the backyard and sweetening the morning air. It takes me back to my late father’s garden: a magnificent bush of mint growing underneath the garden tap a few feet away from the jasmine, and also, in other parts of the garden, yesterday, today and tomorrow, katjiepiering (gardenia), wisteria, sweetpeas, bottlebrush, violets, pansies. Mrs. Martin next door also had jakob-regop (zinnia) and leeubekkies (snapdragon).

Spring in Paarl. In my memory it is always about colours brightening. In high-school years, it was the oak trees with bright buds in front of the white school building: Noorder Paarl Secondary, an old-world school, built with community funds, opened in 1926, and left – during apartheid – in a then white area. Across from the school, on the banks of the Berg River, a veld of green with white clumps of varkblom (arum lilies).

But spring also carries its toll. With the warming weather, the lawn had to be mowed more regularly. What child wants to be emptying grass cuttings onto a compost heap that was now starting to “talk” as the days warmed? What child would not want to be out with friends, barefoot and in shorts, playing cricket on the sandy patch under a stand of pines in the veld just across the road from our neighbourhood?

The dark undertow to spring is that it is also, in a manner of speaking, short-lived, temporary, ephemeral as the buds and blossoms that define the season and not mitigated by the fact that, like all seasons, spring will come around again. As much as the child wants to jump out of his shoes and forget the chills of winter, as much as spring symbolises new life, one is always aware that, soon enough, next March, a sudden chill will fall over the late afternoon, that the vine leaves will turn red and brown. Squirrels know this.

If spring represents rejuvenation and life, looking at spring past and present is as much a reckoning of past winters and, perhaps, a dread of future ones. What has gone, what will be gone. The school still stands, but the stand of pines is gone – it had to make way for more houses, for more human lives, for that very thing that spring symbolises: life. The picturesque white mosque with the palm tree in Breda Street, central Paarl now stands largely unused, painted in a cast-off colour, as the Muslim community has expanded in the once new Group Areas, where they are served by an ugly, modern mosque and madressah complex – three storeys but nevertheless a squat building. Not all newness rejuvenates, not all change is as good as a holiday.

What would Jesus do?

JM Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus, Harvill Secker, 2013 (Review published in Cape Times, 22 March 2013)

In “A House in Spain”, a ‘story’ by JM Coetzee in Architectural Digest (2000), a protagonist crabbily considers the inflated language by which people define their relationships with objects, e.g. to fall “in love” with a house. In that rarefied mixture of autobiography and fiction that JM Coetzee has made his own, this man (perhaps Coetzee?), who has bought a house in Spain, realises that his fastidiousness about the slackness of such language hides “the envy of a man grown too old, too rigid, to ever fall in love”. This is so because he finds that the house he has bought occupies his mind when he is not in Spain. Details of the house – of its identity – occupy his thoughts and he starts thinking of the house as if it were analogous to a woman. His attentions in fixing the house assume the modalities of love, where previously he had considered ownership of property as simply functional.

There is enough autobiographical information in the story to suggest that the protagonist is a version of Coetzee. At the same time, the competing forces of different truths – in autobiography, in fiction – have been one of Coetzee’s own enduring intellectual preoccupations, so that Coetzee autobiography can be as enigmatic as Coetzee fiction. But I refer to “A House in Spain” because his new novel, The Childhood of Jesus, is set in “Spain” and the protagonist, Simón, seems similarly crabby. And so one looks for the autobiographical in the fiction. Not for the plots and crude facts that one can graft onto the real life of the writer for the reader’s prurient confirmation, but for the parallel situations that spur the protagonist/s to discourse on their preoccupations, for the facts that make the writer’s fictions and autobiographies.

A refugee from somewhere unknown, Simón has been given this name by the functionaries at a refugee camp and he is urged, like all refugees here, to forget his past. In this new place, where everybody, especially the bureaucrats, behave with dull decency and goodwill, Simón reacts against such denatured living. Passion is what he is looking for.

With Simón is a boy who was also given a new name: Davíd (all refugees are given new names). Simón has ended up, by happenstance, as a guardian to Davíd, the boy having travelled unaccompanied and having lost a letter which identifies his mother. Simón has promised Davíd to help him find his mother, a promise which is a keystone to Simón’s ethics. In this new place, the bureaucrats are kind, decent, helpful (even if the help often leads Simón and Davíd up the garden path), but their systems come across, nevertheless, as less than humane – lifeless. It is a place full of worthiness, but it fails to recognise what Simón considers worthy: keeping his promise. When Simón asks a friendly bureaucrat, Anna, to give him access to registers so he can trace Davíd’s mother, Anna shows him the futility of the task, in the dull and decent bureaucratic logic of the bizarre utopia in which they find themselves. Here, no one cares about the past and the bureaucracy is built on ridding people of “old attachments”. People have been “washed clean”, as, moments later, Anna will tell Davíd to tell Simón that he has been washed clean.

So dogged is Simón in keeping his promise that he will fulfil it even if by fiction. He will later convince a woman, Ynes, that she is Davíd’s mother, a role she takes up with eventual conviction. So much so, in fact, that she rescues Davíd from the education authorities when they want to send him to a school for rebellious and delinquent children. By now Simón and Ynes have become convinced that there is something special about Davíd. When the boy gets into trouble at school, they are quick to take his side, even to believe his version of events when reality clearly contradicts him. In short, they have faith in his fictions. Eventually, the three of them set off in a car, heading north towards a place called Estrellita (little star, feminine).

Since his youth, the Coetzee who has bought a house in Spain “has had a fondness for Spain”, but his “bookish” Castilian marks him as an outsider to the Catalonian locals of Bellpuig. “What he hopes for, and what he gets, is toleration.” He tries to meld in with the village, using the same colour paints for the house, planting, like his neighbours, geraniums in terra-cotta pots beside the front door. But as much as he wants to disappear, he also wants to leave a mark of sorts. Moreover, unlike his functional relationships with previous property, here “he hopes that in some sense the house itself will bear the memory of him” (“House”).

When is the outsider no longer an outsider? The foreman of the stevedores among whom Simón finds work early on, remarks on Simón’s apologetic, halting Spanish: “As for your Spanish, don’t worry, persist. One day it will cease to feel like a language, it will become the way things are.”

In its quietly compelled probing at the borders of human life – what is it to be a refugee in a place that nurtures an overwhelming, all-encompassing semblance of decency yet bears little of the substantively human with its contradictions and waywardness, with its passions and blind faith? – The Childhood of Jesus is signature Coetzee.* But whereas in books like Life and Times of Michael K and Waiting for the Barbarians the outsider is set against systems of malicious intent, in Childhood this opposition is set against an anodyne world – or, at least, a world where systems that process people, specifically refugees, are evidently decent, even as they are the shucked shells of humanist discourse. The novel may well be a meditation on what might happen were Jesus to be a child refugee in the European Union. But then again, it’s a Coetzee fiction – only, marvellously so.

Notes:

* For some inexplicable reason this sentence was sub-edited to: “In its quietly compelled probing at the borders of human life, what is it to be a refugee in a place that nurtures an overwhelming, all-encompassing semblance of decency yet bears little of the substantively human with its contradictions and waywardness, with its passions and blind faith?// The Childhood of Jesus is signature Coetzee.” The title was changed to “What would Jesus have done?”

Kingdom of Rain II

Kingdom of rain II

I still dream of one day seeing,
sniffing at the ground not far from me,
softly grunting, a grizzly bear;
or sat down pulling at a vine of berries
or a sapling, oblivious to me or not caring,
or, even, knowing that I’m there
but with no malevolence,
with nothing more than wanting to stare
and wonder at it just being bear
and hope it will let me in –
not hunter, nor prey –
somewhere in a North American jungle
with god knows what else around us
but still just me, the trees, the bear.

Or sitting by a river, on watch with a bald eagle
guarding over time as time turns into dream,
the sound only of water over stones
like a chuckle dim and soothing
from a favourite uncle now gone
whom you try too late to love back
and the memory of him fading,
remorse too, trickling away
like some river where I dream
on watch with an eagle
which with a screech wakes itself
and me, and maybe the bear is gone
and the eagle flaps away
and time returns, the insoluble matrix.

Or maybe somewhere in a forest in India,
crawling by some small, slow river
to lie on the bank and watch
how with a muted plash surprising for its size,
a lone tiger breaks the algae on the water
and swims to the other side.
That I’d like to see, and see it rise
with its wet fur onto the far bank,
turn once, its whiskers dripping,
to look at me here outside of history, in dream
as in the idyll of this poem,
and then slip away, gone through the green reeds.

Many animals I dream of seeing.
The coelacanth which swims as if it walks.
A mustang fast and dark against a swathe of green.
Some rare bird whose name I still must learn.
A fox, a hedgehog, the astonished ratel.
Watch them from up close
or hold them in my hand, like once
a baby octopus at Blombos
in a two-second spell and it was off.
I would want them to know I mean no harm
but seek only these moments from their lives
so I may sometimes become no more human.
I’ll tell them tell the gecko too, and the salamander.

Most of all I dream of the sun on a rock
by the Molenaars up in Du Toit’s Kloof
and on the other side
by some small, still curve of the river
where from up a deep ravine forever in shade
a clear trickle runs in cold through fern and fynbos
where in a damp patch next to dark green moss
my father years ago may have pointed at a paw print.
I dream of lying in the sun there and watching
for that rare leopard to come and drink;
to see its paws settle on a stone,
to see its shy head lowered between rising shoulders,
to see the whole mechanics of leopard
in its easy possession of what belongs to it

and all would be that leopard and me,
the lap-lap of its tongue,
the soothing, chuckling water.
And it may stop and raise its head,
twitch its ears and squint,
then return to drink,
taking me in as if I belong,
knowing that it’s only me, it,
the water, the sun this idyll and the unseen;
that this is only dream
and that I seek no deeper meaning,
no encounter by which to turn this verse
into a dispatch from some other kingdom
or the failed settlements of philosophy.

Yet, I want to let that leopard know
that it is part of me
and I am part of it
in all the ways that that could mean.

—————————

Picture sources and credits:

1. Grizzly bear: First People; http://www.firstpeople.us/pictures/bear/adult-grizzly-bear.html

2. Bald eagle: First People; http://www.firstpeople.us/pictures/eagles/1152×864/Majesty-in-the-Pines-1152×864.html

3. Tiger: The Everyman Photo Contest, 2009, Landscape/Nature winner, Sudip Roychoudhury; http://www.theeveryman.com/images/2009/emP/hSRoychoudhury1.jpg

4. Sculpture of coelacanth: photograph provided with kind permission of sculptor, Stuart Gold; http://www.shadowandlight.com/html/sculpture/CoelacanthV4B.html

5. Leopard: photograph provided with kind permission by Tiffany Turkington; http://www.flickr.com/photos/tiffanytp/4385307122/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Poem from Groundwork, Kwelabooks/Snailpress, 2012.

See also Kingdom of Rain, from This Carting Life, Kwela/Snailpress, 2012.

Love Poem – Kelwyn Sole

LOVE POEM

I am a coward. Away from a suffering homeland
I feel very little and can tell you even less.
What would you need to know? That the sun squeezes up
like a pip in a pale blue bowl, regularly? I yawn
and rub gum from my eyes as I watch it.
There is the stumble of lightning
in the distance.

I build myself a house in the desert,
white and tiny, where birds flirt and tangle
and thunder on the tin roof: here I weld poems
under the vast sky that mocks me,
kick sloughed adders’ skins out of the way,
get drunk, fall monotously in love.
My thighs wrinkle into shadow

I cannot think of a precision of ideas
brighter than lovers’ teeth, and undending generation
from their dark cavities.
It’s not that I fear touch – it’s easy to fall in love -
it is easy to fall in love…

Everything is quiet in the village. Girls weep over
unforseen pregnancy and take brutal husbands.
Their speech, mine, is full of consequences.
All this has happened before.

We find time for beauty simply in the violence of the rain.
People die quickly from alcohol
or being stood upon by snakes:
these and adultery our only pastimes,
the burgeoning pumpkins we tend. And shudder
at the thought we may already have surrendered.
To what, nobody knows.

Kelwyn Sole, The Blood Of Our Silence (Ravan Press, 1987)

That river, that river

That river, that river

For Sean Africa

Then there’s one moment I’m doing everything:
dusting books, shelving them.
Brewing coffee.
On the stereo

Bob Marley, slow and sad:
‘Johnny was a good man,
never did a thing wrong.’
Another moment

and Melancholia is my name.
And I’m floating down a river,
down that river,
down that river,

sifting through a pile of chapbooks,
then regret, regret.
I tell you, Regret is my name.
And Desolate my heart’s.

A funeral programme,
the photograph of an old friend,
his hint of a jowl
like mine too now in age.

I look for him now
down that river, that river,
paging the thin programme:
the pallbearers’ names ring in long friendship

from home, into the church,
out of the church;
names who are still here to bear you
and me through the estranging decades.

But then there are only pages of hymns,
thin, inconsequential hymns
in the new, awkward poetry, or no poetry:
‘Yea, though I walk through death’s dark vale.’

What kind of God will respond
to His own absence in the mirror we hold to Him?
When God Himself is inconsequential?
As this funeral programme now is

with its inconsequential notes
scribbled in my own inconsequential hand:
‘Thunder rolling over the Boland’
and whispers overheard from schoolchildren,

or, no, it was from a friend: ‘Juffrou is ook hier.’

Juffrou is ook hier. Five syllables
and a life of consequence,
full of chalkboards and class registers,
the dedicated Juffrou who worries

about the children, all the children,
and the slowest among them,
whether they’ve eaten, whether there’s trouble
at home and in your heart again.

Juffrou is ook hier.

In that moment comes a life
more full than any poetry
or the prose of the anthropologist;
a poetry of consequence more than any god’s ken

and which is solace to all my names,
a raft down that river,
that river, that river.
Who knows how strong that river,

Sean,
that river that took you in?
Meneer Africa, of solace
and consequence

to the schoolchildren
who knew your care
and who now stand by the river,
thunder rolling in over the Boland,

rain over the warm earth
and up in the mountains
more water over rock,
more rivers gathering strength.

(from Groundwork, Kwelabooks/Snailpress, 2012)

The Muezzin and I

This is an Author’s Original Manuscript of an article whose final and definitive form, the Version of Record, has been published in SOCIAL DYNAMICS, 22 October 2012, © Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.108002533952.2012.716627.

 

Adamu

One night at a local hangout in my neighbourhood, I joke to Adamu, a musician I occasionally bump into in such hangouts, that I was leaving early to go and do battle with my demons. It is only half a joke. He laughs and asks how many demons I face nightly. Thousands, I say.

Whenever we bump now into each other on the streets of the neighbourhood, he asks me how my battles are going. I cannot tell him that they do not go well, and that out of the many, the one I cannot conquer is the big daddy of them all: Paralysis.

Badr

The Battle of Badr (624 C.E.) may be considered as the founding battle of the Islamic state. The Muslims vanquished the Meccan Quraish, threefold in number, thus gaining control of that city and, by extension, Arabia.

As a child I listened to stories by returned pilgrims who had visited the site of the battle. They swore that by reciting a specific prayer at the site, they could hear the clash of swords and cries of men from that distant battle.

Cave

Chased, I think, by the Quraish, his own family whose hegemony in Mecca he was now challenging, Muhammad reportedly hid in a cave. His pursuers investigated the cave and found a spider-web spun across the mouth of a cave. No one could be hiding in the cave, they reasoned, otherwise the web would have been broken. Thus a spider in a cave saved Muhammad and thus I was taught not to harm spiders.

How does the child resist the pull of such literary stories?

Roll call: Poetry Africa 2012

I’m gonna steal some stylistics from Mr Senor Love Daddy, here, on WeLovePoetryAfrica FM, and do a roll call. And that’s the truth, Ruth:

 

Peter Rorvik, for building this magnificent church;

Magadalene Reddy, Dhiya Bahadur, Andrea Voges,

all three an empress of eternal patience;

Sam Ntombela, of the brownie and of the purse;

Carole Gumede, that one with the widest smile;

Noxolo aka Nox, Matete, for staying beautiful;

Monica Hemming-Rorvik, for making us look good;

Siphindile Hlongwa, Steve Jones, Sakhile Gumede,

Khaya Mbonyana.

 

And, Jabulani Memela, Mfanelo Ziqubu,

Lindokuhle Sithole and Mervin Naidoo;

Oziel Mdletshe, Thami Mtshali

for driving us all and playing cool music;

 

Sound and lights, others, more names

I forgot, but you know who you are.

 

Our Elders

Madosini, Werewere, Tuku and Pedro,

lead, we will follow.

Saul Williams, Poppy Seed and Philo Ikonya.

The Magnet aka Nii AyiKwei Parkes.

The fire and love of D’bi Young.

Tumi Molekane, the rapper who can pay

for an old-school poet’s lunch;

Jessica Mbangeni, Mbali Vilakazi, Tumelo Khoza,

you put the brothers to shame, keep stoking the fire…

Niels Hav, from Denmark, with his hygge pipe.

Solja and Sam, Queen and Prince, may your rule last long.

Oskar Hanska, shine on you crazy mother-fucking diamond.

The unknown creature behind Laura’s eyes.

The snake that is totem to Gouslaye.

Ewok, RESPECT, and for taking the edge off the afternoon.

Croc E M, I re-baptise you, PREACH!

That quiet bird of wisdom in Tolu Ogunlesi’s verse.

Henry Bowers, KONG, KING, KUNG!

 

Madala Kunene, Zos Kunene.

Isaac Machafa, Praise Zinhuku.

Guy Buttery and Nibs van der Spuy

who know the secret life of rivers.

Vavanger, who we still must hear play…

 

We want to thank you all for making our lives just a little bit brighter.

We love you, and that’s the triple truth, Ruth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Comrades

Dear Comrades

You who once were children, students,
young athletes become the heroes
of we the people warmly teeming
in the joyful new republic of our dreams,
a fulsome, healthy common weal;
you who once yourself were dreaming heroes
in your speechifying or in striking poses
defiant and heroic like Olympic gods
with raised fists over balustrades,
from balconies and stages
overlooking us,
and at the sides of graves
in vigil overlooking our fallen comrades
believing their blood makes fruitful
the earth of what would be that new republic.

A NEW republic!
How daring you were then,
almost almost the gods
we were keening for, that we’d make.
How daring then to have just that:
a dream. Just a dream.
Yet how you dreamed. In your dream
you were become a god who could defy the force of death.

And we would harbour you, we
the people in our council houses,
our shacks in winter damp –
was where we harboured you.

There we shared our consolations
with wood smoke from the coal stove
or the smell of paraffin.
There we cut the meat
into smaller, meagre pieces
made more to share with you;
added half a cup more meal
so you too could eat, then sleep,
then dream that dream which we too dreamed,
that dream in which we came upright
fully human, warm and dry.

That dream that was so fierce.
Did you then believe that dream?
Or back then dreamt already
of a house of proper, bourgeois dream
somewhere overlooking the sea
from where you would no longer
have to worry about still overlooking us;
dreamt already then
of how you’d sell our foolish dream,
or rip it
into the gilded tatters
of your newfound love for dear commodities –
a new, expensive car,
whiskies and cigars,
the fine cloth of another land –
the contraband you trade in off our once useful dream.

We are now become your fools,
our heroes’ fools.
Jeered at
for having believed in dream,
for having not known
that our better future
was forever always lost,
then already would have had the bitter dregs
and our heroes, you, always then already bound
in any case to end up
loosening forever the belt around your widening girth.

We admit, declare,
declare that we were fools to dream beyond our brokenness,
and that now breaks us more.
We must admit
we’re broken,

but broken from your dream.

Comrade, you must know
that dream we dreamed is dead,
that dream in which you once were almost god
is no longer yours. You can muster
only soporifics
like a wizened walrus lolling in the sun
or like your children too, fattening
like grubs on the food chain of this fetid ecology,
the corpse of our dream-dead republic.
You must know
you are no more a thing of us,
of our creation,
no more the welcome guest
when once again we build a dream.

The Shitbook Manifestos: Revelation

The Shitbook Manifestos

1: Revelation

I am the great big hairy arsehole
that every morning unclenches
over the great big bowl of the world
shitting out you all
in all your forms
firm or loose, short or tall,
you great big presidents,
hypocrites with your cocks in the common weal,
in your smart suits and red ties,
your shiny shower heads
and your yes-we-can bullshit
and all the other shit you shit out over the world,
the lies, the thieving
the photo-ops,
the conferences rank with your effluvia
all its earnest shit
flowing from your mouths,
your brown mouths and pink mouths,
your puckering shitholes tightening
when I rise, me, the Great Lord Shitbook.

Royaumont Hash-up

This essay was originally published in Home Away (Zebra Press, 2010), edited by Louis Greenberg. Sadly, the book is being remaindered, an all too common fate for books in South Africa. “Paris, a kiss” is a companion piece, covering the same period and event.

Royamont Hash-up

For two weeks during July 1994, I was one of six aspirant black South African writers on a fiction workshop with Denis Hirson, a South African writer by then established in Paris for more than twenty years. The other writers were Joan Baker, Sipho Mahlobo, Isaac Mogotsi, Roshila Nair and Mango Tshabango. Sponsored in its entirety (travel, accommodation, stipend) by the French Ministry of Culture, the workshop included five or so days in Paris – staying with Parisian families, doing readings at two bookshops. But the main part – the workshop proper – took place at Royaumont Abbey, close to a small village thirty-plus kilometres north of Paris.