Derek Walcott, A Far Cry from Africa

A Far Cry from Africa

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon  the bloodstreams of the veld.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
“Waste no compassion on these separate dead!”
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilisation’s dawn
From the parched river or beast teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?

(Derek Walcott, from Collected Poems, 1948-1984 (1986/1992); originally from In A Green Night (1962))

Elegy

Elegy

It is for my mother I write now
these poems about my father,
the visions attempts to conjure him
by a lost son who seeks to soothe her melancholy.

Let it be for her what little anodyne it can be
when she reads this
my tired magic against a faded back-drop,
a show only a mother would applaud.

Let it be. She loved him,
he loved her
despite times of acrimony
because she had done this or that

or had not done this or that
in submission to God,
or in rearing the children,
the influence she was on her youngest

who in their shared love of books
certainly would grow wayward,
“westernised”
and wandering lost in every valley

but home or God’s house.

Let that be. Let it be just
the dim echo of an ache through the years
because, she says,
he grew gentle and softer

and, you hear ring true in her voice,
more loving,
as she looks down at her hands
then at you, then into the distance.

For her I wish I could return the times
of their early retirement
more than any of this conjuring
by image and doleful metaphor,

to look in the distance long enough
and have him here beside her
from some unseen beyond
that my mother husbands inside

from which he may materialise.

Catch a fire

Catch a fire

I’m listening to the Wailers,
Catch a Fire
and I’m thinking: 1973,
where was I, seven years old?

And my father? Thirty-six?
My mother beautiful at thirty-three
in a short floral dress
bright in the stony front yard

of our small new house,
a “community development”
as people are kicked out
shunted east of the Berg River,

the short give
given begrudgingly
to us a people become a buffer
in someone else’s fearful strategy

and as some cruel joke
the place called “New Orleans”.
Perhaps we loved jazz
and we could imagine

ourselves somewhere else.
As I now imagine my parents
there in our lounge, low-lit,
in another time and place.

She in that floral dress,
he in jeans and pointers,
slicked back hair
little darlin’ stir it up…

They’re dancing,
skanking,
in love in a world that would never be,
would never have been.

What is this dream I have,
at forty-six, listening
to Marley the Rude Boy
with short dreads

in a youth I could never have understood
but by way of the roots music
I came to love in 1980
when we all were all a revolution.

How they might have loved it,
this music of rebellion,
had they known then what I know now
or had they been somewhere else,

my parents, somewhere other
than the world of quietude and inner unrest
in the crimped horizons and hearts
of a people treated as pawns.

I want to hold them to me now
to let them know
how now, this night,
with Marley on the stereo,

how I want them to have been
or how I imagine
they could also have been
me now and then, and them then

also burning
like I did in youth
like I still do
in this broken republic that was once a fervent dream;

the child and the man confused
now become his parents
in an imagined youth
dancing in a rebellion

always already never to have been.

My parents never to see
what they only could dream,
dying instead in testimony
of what the rebels had wrought –

a nightmare of venal dreams.

Here are only broken melancholies:
a dream, ultimately, for a dream,
an ache for an elsewhere of the past
dreamed from the past

where now my parents dance,
they dance,
they… catch a fire
in love with each other

even as inside I know, I know
now my father cries:
he is become a man in a new house
but still on a white man’s terms.

Self-portrait in three colours

Self-portrait in three colours
(after Charles Mingus)

Today I want to sit my father down
in my comfortable red chair,
tell him to hold his judgement,
forget about Islam and God,

just for now dissolve all prejudice,
and tell him about my music,
my love of jazz I got from him.
But mostly talk about Mingus

whom I never heard in his house
and who like him was a bassist.
Then play him some,
not too loud, Mingus just right, loud

enough, my father can feel
the bass notes tug
under his left pectoral,
where his heart stopped six years ago,

maybe restart the thing,
beating anew, but slightly different,
to a Mingus rhythm,
sad or joyful, the bass gentle, gentle

or furious up-down the fretboard
and out of such seeming chaos
see my father smile and sigh
as he finds a melody, a standard,

washing from it all and from inside
him, like a familiar, with a trumpet
calm and precise like a rock pool –
the clear water where we swim in summer.

And he, my father, is at peace
even as he sees me roll a joint
with some good Swazi
I nod and tell him I get from a friend;

or maybe it’s hashish,
an Arabic word, I say,
and tell him how it was used
to demean the Hassasin as rabble.

And I’ll pour us some whisky
or rum, and light up
and have him toke,
sip at his drink till we sit

as if we’re long-lost friends –
over years, through nights
of narcotics and music
having become known to each other,

then lost to each other
in the confused, silent decade
of my self-estrangement,
wary of him and his God.

But here we are now.
Better get it in your soul, I say,
the bass, Mingus, that music that music
that calls you to peace

but it can also share,
I say to him,
your anger at the world.
Mingus can be your comrade.

And there’s peace in that.

As he nods and the drugs
wash through him,
as he relaxes,
I want to see him find himself

tapping a foot, his hand
around his chill glass,
with the other reach for more marijuana,
sit back freely stoned

for now peaceable in knowing
I’m his son
wayward, but in love
with the same things he loved

and be called to peace –
a night’s comradeship
I carry like an ache
here under my left pectoral,

in my head a febrile dream.

 

It has been such a long road – Alfred T. Qabula

This poem is one of the last pieces composed by Alfred T. Qabula (1942-2002), a poet from the trade union movement in Durban in the 1970s and early 1980s, famous for “Praise poem to FOSATU” and as one of the poets of Black Mamba Rising (1986). “It has been such a long road” was published in World Literature Today in 1996 and it is thus interesting to note this early critique of former comrades, now become moneyed government functionaries, from a worker and trade unionist’s perspective. (Here is an obituary and commemoration of Qabula by Ari Sitas.)

It has been such a long road

It has been a long road here
with me, marking the same rhythms
everyday.
Gentlemen, pass me by
Ladies, pass me by
Each one greets me, “eita!”
and adds:
“comrade, I will see you on my return
as you see I am in a hurry
but do not fear, I am with you and
understand your plight.”

“Do not worry
no harm will greet you
as long as I am alive.
We shall make plans with the guys
and we for sure will solve your problems.
You trust me don’t you?
I remember how hard you struggled
and your contribution is prized.
In fact everyone knows how hard it all had turned
when you were fighting for workers and for the community’s emancipation.”

Nothing lasts forever
and our friends now show us their backs
and they avoid eye-contact
pretending they never saw us.
Even those whom by chance our eyes did meet
would rush and promise and leave behind
a “see you later.”

“What is your phone number comrade?
I will call you after I finish with the planning
committee on this or that of the legislature
and then we shall work something out for you, be calm.”
Days have passed, weeks have passed
years have also passed
with us waiting like the ten virgins in the bible.

I remember the old days
when we had become used to calling them
from the other side of the river.
Some of them were in the caves and crevices
hiding when we called
but we hollered loud
until they heard and they responded to our voices.
As they came to us dust sprang up
and spiralled high all the way up to the sky.
When the dust of our struggle settled, there was no one there.
The dust covered my body
it cursed me into a pathetic fate
disguising me, making me unrecognisable
and whoever recognises me
is judged to be deluded, deceived
because the dust of their feet still covers my body.

And now we, the abominations, spook them
as the dust of their feet covers our bodies.
And they run away
each one of them saying: “hold up the sun
dear friend, doesn’t the fog cover each and every mountain?”

Although you don’t know us, we know ourselves:
we are the movable ladders
that take people up towards the skies,
left out in the open for the rain
left with the memories of teargas, panting for breath.

Winter and summer come and go and leave us the same.
The wind or the breeze has not changed us. Here is a summary of our praises -
the iron that doesn’t bend, even
Geneva has failed to bend it,
the small piece of bath-soap about which
meetings and conspiracies were hatched
to catch and destroy it.
It still continues to clean men and women
who desire to be cleaned.

It has been a long road here
see you again my friends
when you really need us
when the sun clears the fog from your eyes.

Alfred T Qabula, 1942-2002

Reunion, Durban

Reunion, Durban

(for Gouslaye)

Because there are still [people] whose hearts
Bear the large optimistic burden of freedom and peace…
[T]here is a time of healing coming
Because these [people] of strength are with us.

- Owen Dodson, “For Edwin R. Emtree”

Ships lie three columns thick in the bay:
containers, grey tankers, oil and gas –
our consumption a monomania
congealing into dread disease,
the clots of commerce and commodities
ready to enter the harbour’s heart,
a folly against which we pitch our own.

From the fishermen on the pier
you have earlier magicked
a small green fish
on which we feed for a week
in exquisite folly, in laughter
at night when the ships’ lights flicker
like small, separate settlements
clustered each around a fictive bay
on shores unseen, distant and near.

No one can say with certitude
where you come from:
an everlasting colony,
a small island somewhere
we struggle to triangulate
in the Indian Ocean.

I see you
skin bronzed
like that of a childhood friend.
Your eyes like a green enlivening
the sunned shallows
where the children play.

I see you
hair like a forest of deep shade
where trees grow upwards
and sideways
in corkscrews and curls,
grow back to earth
in the welcome dark,
a sudden caldera at the back of my mind.

Your goatee a well-kept piece of chaos,
a magic garden around your mouth
itself a house
where we can live and eat.

Brush your warm skin against me
take my hand
and tell me again
of the Cirque de Mafate
and its maroon history,
its secret paths
from the transactions of masters.

I see you stride across the sea
bearing from your garden
vanilla, like small divining rods
which find in me sweet, forgotten water
and this small folly I return,
a gift of gentle verse.

Adult alphabet

This poem didn’t make the cut for my forthcoming book, so I’m dropping it here:

 

Adult alphabet

A is for apple, Ava and Adam;
B is for their banishment, far better than Eden.

C is for both cock and cunt, of course;
D is for doing it, i.e. intercourse.

E is for either Eileen or Ebrahim;
F is for ‘Fuck!’ when you’re lying between them.

G is for growing into your gender;
H is for hetero or homo, both can refuse that blender.

I, however, is for the self now alone;
J is for jilted; watch out, it hurts to the bone.

K is for knockers, those who beg at the door;
L is the lie that you tell to the poor.

M is for money, you can have more and more;
N is for niggardly, when you keep scores and scores.

O is for opus, the one you’ll never write some day;
P is for poetasters, they should hide theirs away.

Q is for the quandaries that adult life brings:
R for rent, S for sex, T for evermore taxing things.

U is for underworld, and it approaches fast;
V is for vitamins as you try your best to last.

W is for worldly, that stuff left behind;
X will mark your spot that no one will find.

Y is for the youth that you have surely lost;
Z is for the flies zooming round your corpse now host.

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”.

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)

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)