Rustum Kozain

The following was originally published in Afrikaans in Rapport’s ‘Groot Woorde’ series (6 February 2010). Wish I had had more space:

City Johannesburg – Mongane Serote

This way I salute you:
My hand pulses to my back trousers pocket
Or into my inner jacket pocket
For my pass, my life,
Jo’burg City.
My hand like a starved snake rears my pockets
For my thin, ever lean wallet,
While my stomach growls a friendly smile to hunger,
Jo’burg City.
My stomach also devours coppers and papers
Don’t you know?
Jo’burg City, I salute you;
When I run out, or roar in a bus to you,
I leave behind me, my love,
My comic houses and people, my dongas and my ever whirling dust,
My death
That’s so related to me as a wink to the eye.
Jo’burg City
I travel on your black and white and roboted roads
Through your thick iron breath that you inhale
At six in the morning and exhale from five noon.
Jo’burg City
That is the time when I come to you,
When your neon flowers flaunt from your electrical wind,
That is the time when I leave you,
When your neon flowers flaunt their way through the falling darkness
On your cement trees.
And as I go back, to my love,
My dongas, my dust, my people, my death,
Where death lurks in the dark like a blade in the flesh,
I can feel your roots, anchoring your might, my feebleness
In my flesh, in my mind, in my blood,
And everything about you says it,
That, that is all you need of me.
Jo’burg City, Johannesburg,
Listen when I tell you,
There is no fun, nothing, in it,
When you leave the women and men with such frozen expressions,
Expressions that have tears like furrows of soil erosion,
Jo’burg City, you are dry like death,
Jo’burg City, Johannesburg, Jo’burg City.

(from The Lava of This Land: South African Poetry 1960-1996, ed. Denis Hirson, TriQuarterly Books, 1997)

I FIRST encountered this poem as an English I student at UCT in 1986, and it soon became one of my favourite poems. Coming from Afrikaans-medium schooling, I struggled in English I and enrolled in the department’s academic aid programme. Every Friday afternoon, I spent up to two hours with a tutor, Wendy Woodward (now herself a writer and a lecturer at UWC), trying to unlock the secrets of “critical analysis”.

I suppose it’s partly this process that has lodged “City Johannesburg” in my heart and mind, alongside John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”, W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and T.S. Eliot’s “Preludes”. And it is also a homage to Wendy Woodward’s tutoring that all these poems are firm favourites to this day.

Through the years I have also come back to “City Johannesburg”, in senior and graduate classes, and also when, as a lecturer, I tried to share this fascinating poem with students. Written probably in 1971, and published in 1972 in Yakhal’Inkomo (the cry/bellow of cattle), “City Johannesburg” fascinates me because of the way in which it fuses politics and aesthetics: what is being said is astutely fused with how it is being said.

First, the politics, which is easily read from the poem: working class black experience in Johannesburg during a time of pass laws. And it is in the context of the pass laws that the poem makes its greatest statement – that black people have an urban identity, in contradistinction to the ‘tribal’ identity on which apartheid sought to peg the pass laws.

The aim of the pass laws were to keep black South Africans out of white areas by regulating especially their urban movement. The apartheid premise for this was that black people were largely rural, tribal and tradition-bound. This rural and tradition-bound identity justified the Bantustans, while the pass laws helped apartheid South Africa to see the presence of black South Africans in cities as a temporary inconvenience.

And here is a poem that insists on a black urban experience, and which falls into a tradition of 20th century urban poems. With its regular refrain, “Joburg City”, it is even reminiscent of Part I of Eliot’s “Preludes” from the early part of that century.

But the formal aspects of the poem are fascinating because it reveals an ambiguity about that urban identity. That opening line – “This is what I am going to say now” – places the poem in a tradition of African praise poetry and also opens up the main ambiguity of the poem. Note the word “salute”, which is both a gesture of praise and of subservience: “This way I salute you”.

The poem uses other features of traditional praise poetry: the repeated “salute” to the city by calling out its name (as well as other forms of repetition), and the heaping of noun phrases at the end of sentences (“my pass, my life”, “to my love,/ my dongas, my dust, my people, my death”).

Praise poetry is not all about praising the king. The praise poet has a license and a duty also to criticize, and “City Johannesburg” is then a critical praise poem to the city. It acknowledges the centrality of the city to the speaker’s life, but criticizes that centrality. However, the criticism is also softened by wry humour: “a friendly smile to hunger”. In the end, the city comes across as a paternal but negligent deity. The city is not dismissed in anger, but rather in resignation. The address is respectful, but also earnest, desperate and finally sad. If this was a love poem, it would have a broken heart.

The following short review originally appeared in Rapport, 26 December 2009 (scroll down). This is the English version of the pre-sub-edited Afrikaans version:

I DON’T want to interfere wholesale, and right now, in a conversation between Max du Preez (Rapport, 18 November 2009) and Antjie Krog regarding the themes of her book, of which the main one Du Preez characterisises as “identity suicide”. But I think it’s an important, interesting and necessary conversation; and I think I should add a few sjieling.

Begging to be Black traces no less than 6 strands in a journey which I think only now starts for Krog: her involvement surrounding a political killing in Kroonstad in 1992, the history of Moshoeshoe, letters from Berlin to her mother, a Berlin diary, conversations with an Australian philosopher during her residency at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, and travels and conversations in Lesotho.

Naturally, the reader is taken on several journeys across different time frames. There’s the 1800s with Moshoeshe, then there’s the Kroonstad murder which is revisited during the early 1990s, then revisited from the vantage point of the TRC, as well as from the present, when Krog looks up the old comrades concerned. The letters to her mother are undated, but are written during Krog’s residency in Berlin, letters of familial wonder and pride from the daughter of a South African teacher of German now coming face to face with the place and culture that her mother would have coddled.

The Berlin diary notes the typical South African amazement at how things work in the everyday of European cities: snow gets cleared, buses run on time even on new year’s, etc.

The conversations with the philosopher form the core of Krog’s ‘journey’: what is it that she, as white South African, misses, misunderstands or can gain in understanding about black South Africa. And how.

Sometimes, the other strands speak strongly to this central theme – Mosheoshoe’s African humanism, for instance. At other times, though, I wonder about this multi-genre approach to the book. Some of the strands touch lightly on her central concerns, but the multiple threads detract from her central quest exactly because these strands are never brought together for the reader. One is left with multiple searches – perhaps for the same thing – but I feel that the writer has not played a strong enough hand in bringing them together.

A long essay on Moshoeshoe, for example, can incorporate the history of the king and Krog’s present day concerns, and that should make an interesting book: the questing self in direct reflection on a historical figure.

On the theme itself, I think Du Preez’s criticism is partly right, but also partly to do with vocabulary – which of course is Krog’s problem as well. Of course Krog doesn’t mean that she is literally begging to be black. And neither is she, as Du Preez has it, wanting to commit identity suicide.

Perhaps the vocabulary we are looking for is something like ‘acculturation’ or ‘deracination’. If we look at Moshoeshoe and his relationship with Casalis, the king was quite prepared to acculturate – i.e. take on and use the cultural frameworks of the missionaries – while keeping his own identity. Krog is essentially asking to what extent it is possible for her to take on Moshoeshoe’s frameworks. Colonial society typically demands acculturation from its colonised. Perhaps Krog is starting to ask to what extent the colonising society is prepared for acculturation to happen the other way round?

Stanzas
—In Memory of My Mother

I.

Speak. But what do you want to say? Perhaps
How the barge moved along the city river, trailing sunset,
How all June until the solstice
Summer stretched on its tiptoes to the light,
How breath of linden blew through sultry squares
And how thunder rolled from all directions that July?
You once believed that speech needs an underlying cause
And a grave occasion. But that’s a lie.

II.

Listen: the grocery store reeks of watermelon rot,
An empty crate clatters at a back door around the corner.
From the suburbs, a breeze carries the echo of a handcar
And buries the asphalt in archive leaves.
Drop the Rubik’s Cube to the ground – it’s not worth the trouble.
When all plans fail, eat grapes in the rain,
Sit in the silent yard. Just look with your own eyes.
This is what you’ll recall among the crags and crevices of hell-

III.

So get going. Yet a naked branch – the upas
Of school texts – stubbornly touches the window
Just as it did long ago, at night, especially during rain,
Feeling the pane that mama washed.
Though I remember very little from school
I can still see each grain of sand pouring through
The narrow glass neck, an unforgettable rustle.
A primitive instrument, but what a throat for sorrow!

IV.

Strike spitefully on the floor your ever-wobbly tripod,
Haggard charlatan, not hiding your crookedness,
So that a clear specter of water streams out, smells of ozone
Under the leaking roof of a state-owned house.
The chair jolts you with static electricity,
So speak again, as if tortured, sans schools and manifestoes,
If this hopeless time and god-forsaken place
Instill in you, a total deadbeat, such love.

V.

The widower, forty-seven year old Aizenstadt
Now roams the kitchen, can’t cop his usual downer.
Is there reason to smile at this, my friend? I think not.
Even if his funeral-black boxers hang down to his knees.
In this world, where one needs spirits to be happy,
Behind empty crates the guys who’ve seen better days
Raise a toast to Sergey Esenin or Andy Chenier,
Squander their latest check on drink by tradition.

VI.

After death I’ll go to the outskirts of the city I love,
Lift my snout to sky, throw back my antlers-
Taken by sadness, I’ll trumpet into autumn space
What human words could not express.
How the barge sailed into the wake of sunsetting day,
How iron time on my left wrist sang like a starling,
How the secret door was unlocked with a house key.
Speak. There’s nothing else you can do with this affliction.

[1987]

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The Use of Poetry

A prize for poetry can baffle its recipient – when a private thing, a personal predilection that’s almost a whim, is rewarded. It’s as if an inveterate mushroom-hunter or lover of ice fishing were given a prize. It’s customary to think that there are all kinds of whims but poetry is a serious and hardly useless pastime. Yet in the last twenty years, many (and certainly the best) Russain poets have recoiled from the word “use.” Like little children, poets demand that they be loved for no other reason than that they exist.

Society is correct to treat poetry with seriousness, but poetry is also correct to hold onto the bulwark of its own uselessness.

It’s good to sit in the hot sun on the grass and look at a river. But the supposition that the sun, the plants, and the water have the goal and purpose of giving us pleasure hardly enters the healthy mind; about the meaning of nature we can only guess – each person is remitted a certain amount of imagination, intelligence, and temperatment. Such is poetry; its ulimate direct aspirations are unclear and mysterious; the impressions that it produces are only the indirect consequences of its existence.

We can hope that poetry will help us, but we cannot demand help from it. Poetry is a gift, not a salary. Only when we finally take into account, when we get used to the idea that the natural responsibility of poetry is to be poetry, it is conceivable, I think, to fold down your fingers and estimate whether poetry has an earthly task. Not insisting especially on anything, I’ll offer a few thoughts.

First. Occupied primarily by words and by himself, the poet day in and day out writes his ideal self-portrait, personifies on the page a dream about himself. The tactical allegory “lyrical hero” we should understand in its original meaning – the poet “heroizes” himself, displays the most vivid attributes of his personality, subdued in daily life by routine conflict. A constant contact with the ideal twin disciplines the author, helps him not to give up. The author feels that the gap is too wide between himself and the lyrical hero – it’s disasterous for both: the devastation responds as muteness in the best instance, and in the worst, idle chatter.

But the moral return from creativity is known not only to those who write; readers feel it as well.

Poetry relates to reality like a finished manuscript to a rough draft. Art didn’t invent the drama of life. The drama is in the nature of things, but things obscure it. Poetry focuses life to a sharp clarity, and the main celebratory foundation of existence becomes visible from everyday babble. Poetry is the subjunctive mood of life, to remember how we would be, if we were not…. In short, poetry is in a position to better our morals.

Second. Everyone knows that life is not sugar; loneliness is perhaps the most bitter of its burdens. A person often cannot share his despondency, his sudden thoughts, his good moods, but he opens a book, and he’s somehow not alone. It turns out that total strangers were already here, were thinking, were happy or angry like he was, and for the same reason that he is. Suddenly, these people are no longer strange to him. That revealed spiritual likeness bothers the teenager’s feelings of his own exclusivity, but soon enough we become adults and have it up to here with our own exclusivity. In other words, art is also a communication. And poetry is the best means of communication, because it’s the most emotional.

And third. Coffee boils over on the stove just as if it’s trying to put its head through a sweater; the Russian word “train” [poezd] is already preparation for “delay” [opozdanie]; after a twenty-year intermission, the old forgotten poet appears in public in a sport coat, buttoned enthusiastically in the wrong hole. This is all the costly small change of the world, in which we for some reason awaken once and for the last time. It is shameful to be hard of hearing and half-blind. If only inattention to our small creativity, not to say anything about apathy toward Creation, or the ailment of mechanical existence offended us more than profanity! Poetry can help us to value life. Even when a poet curses the universe, he has nevertheless noticed it; it has genuinely disturbed him. “Keen observation,” Mandelstam said, “is the virtue of the lyrical poet.” I dare to add that keen observation is a kind of gratefulness. Poetry, in the end, is always the artless gratitude to the world for the fact of existence. [1997]

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“Stanzas” and ‘The Use of Poetry” both from: Sergey Gandlevsky, A Kindred Orphanhood (transl. Philip Metres), 2003, Zephyr Press, Brookline, MA. Thank you to Sergey Gandlevsky for granting permission to publish these at Groundwork and BookSA. Spasibo.

(Here are some audio files of Gandlevsky reading.)

It’s good to be here at Civitella. I’ve already finished a piece of work; admittedly small and short, but dashed off in the afternoon yesterday, while, in the kitchen – as I would later discover – pieces of rabbit and lamb were being prepared for roasting. So, a good productive start. (Hi Louis)

Their were all sorts of guests for dinner that evening, visitors with some connection to the centre, so, platter and platter of crispy pieces of little coniglio and lamb.

I thought it was going to be all legumes and pulses. It turns out (I didn’t realise this from my shallow browsing, my patchy gistology) that Umbria’s food is well regarded by fellow Italians; and that Umbria likes its meat. Such are things in the north.

So, I thought I’d drop in on BookSA, especially since I have been quite truant over the past few weeks (Hi Louis), given all forms of crises, especially the feline one. I’m waiting to have my printing set-up sorted, so I can get on with it, but am also suffering a bit from too much Amaro d`Abruzzo. Blame the poets… or that one from Mexico.

This is how the demographics shake down. Of the group of 12, there are 3 smokers (including me). These 3 smokers are all three poets. There is another poet, she doesn’t smoke. The 3 smoking poets are the only ones who order coffee after dinner. The 3 smoking poets naturally leave the table early to sit to one side and smoke. The one is Russian, and quiet. The other one is Mexican and arrived yesterday. He poured the Amaro.

Is this odd or significant: the meditative cigarette, the coffee, the poetry? Are poets prone to vice? Or are the vice-prone bound to write poetry?

I’m preparing some folders for Dropbox and came across this 1st draft Afrikaans translation of ‘Kingdom of Rain’ from This Carting Life (Kwela/Snailpress, 2005; English version here). I can’t remember translating it; perhaps someone else translated it? (Please drop me a note.)

Koninkryk van reën

from these I am growing no nearer
to what secret eluded the children
– Derek Walcott, ‘Sainte Lucie’

Iewers in ‘n donker dekade
staan my pa sonder werk,
en onbekend aan my broer en ek,
beneweld in ‘n Boland winter en ‘n skool vakansie.
Soos die kwik daal, maak hy, my pa
‘n fles koffie, koop pastei en ons tjoef
Du Toit’s Kloof pas op in sy ou ‘57 Ford’
en daar wil hy die berge – onder koue wolk,
bruin en blou rotswande nat in die reën –
hy wil dit alles oop, om sy kinders binne te laat
al maak hy verskoning – my streng en grimmige
vreeswekkende pa – al vra hy verskoning vir sy bestaan
sy houplek op die daad verklaar
aan die boswagter of opsigter in staatsgewaad,
altyd net daar om die volgende draai
of aan slaap in ‘n jeep by ‘n aftrek-plek:
‘Nee meneer, ons ry maar net. Ja meneer, dis my kar.’

By die hoogste punt van die pas
stop ons om te eet, en hy, my pa,
my streng en grimmige, vreeswekkende pa,
my pa vir wie ek lief is en sy donker vel,
hy dryf hierdie heelal oop wat hy vreemd genoeg
ons eie maak, wat nie meer myne is nie:
‘n slim ou grys bobbejaan, weggesteek
teen sout-en-peper klip, wat ons dophou;
‘n onuitstaanbare edel roofvoël
selde te sien, en wat nou nes toe vlieg soos die weer draai.

En daar, dink ek, daar is ons nader
aan my pa se God, die wind huilend
en wolke wat oor ons druis, en ons
verruk en klein in die groot kar wat in die wind rond wieg.

Stilte. ‘n Skielike stil punt
as die heelal huiwer, asem skep
en genade binnehaal. En dan
die sneeu wat soos donsveer val
as die wêreld ons
ons vlugtige, blink koninkryk gee,
onkenbaar deur die boswagter. En vir minute
staan daar ‘n kar met drie stom insittendes
staan ons daar op ‘n bergspits, buite
die vinnige verduistering van ons grootword;
te kortstondig om die duister jare te verlig
toe ek sou leer:

hoe die skerp, skoon boerplek van krap en forel
waar ons in die somer swem
nou, in winter, ‘n donker, bruin rotsgedruis;
hoe berg en denneboom en fynbos
of die muis-gedrewe valke van my veld;
die laaste, mosterd-droeë duiwelsnuif
wat my pa deur die lug gooi
om soos ‘n rook-bom teen die grond te plof;
en een keer, ook êrens een somer,
‘n praterige piet-my-vrou;
of die mirakele rondomtalie van waterhondjies
oor ‘n tee-kleurige water-poel
wiegend tussen bruin klip en varing-groen varings;
my eerste en enigste uil,
groot en geheimsinnig
diep binne ‘n dennebos,
groot uil onkenbaar aan ons
totdat jy wegvlieg, ontroer deur ons stemme;
hoe ek ook ontroer sou word, en sou leer
dat hierdie boom en hierdie voël, hierdie wêreld
die aarde en hierdie kind se tuiste
alreeds buite sy besitting val.

En hoe, êrens noord deur die droeë
Boesmanland met sy swart klippe,
oor ‘n bult in die pad, die skielike groen
soos die vreemde en bekende sisklanke
in Keimoes en Kakamas.
En die keelklank was die gorrelende water
oor rotse by Augrabies.
Die Garieb oor rotse by Augrabies,
by Augrabies waar die hek toeslaan
en die hekwag styf-lip soos ‘n sinode:
‘Die nie-blanke kant is vol’
terwyl hy ‘n kar vol
bruingebrande wit jeug deurwink
wat na ons lag, na my pa, my vader
my stille pa wat êrens ver-langs verstaar
en die kind wat hierdie heim-sweer ver verby metafoor aanleer.
En hoe, soos ‘n bobbejaan, die reg en staat
sy fok-jou-stert aan ons sou wys
en weg drentel.

———————

Editorial comments or suggestions for better phrases, etc. welcome.

Lick yer lips wiv fish & chips:

The speech writer, the crispy fish and the very hot chips

Something literary for a change, but, I’m afraid, still on the iBurst tip. I compare the discourse of Cybersmart’s boss with that of iBurst’s new boss. When I discuss the iBurst CEO’s discourse, I focus on an opening paragraph in one response he’s written to me at MyBroadBand, and I focus only on one aspect, the ethos of the discourse.

There are some other stuff going on in that paragraph – ignorance or lying – but that is connected to other paragraphs, which I’ll look at in due course.

I post it at MyBB because that’s a primary audience. It’s also a non-literary audience, so I’ve used crude analogies to explain ethos.

Check it.

You need to fasten your seatbelts again.

Check it.

Four poems from FIONA ZERBST’s forthcoming volume, Oleander, and four poems from HELEN MOFFETT’s forthcoming volume, Strange Fruit, are up at Groundwork. Both volumes are published by Modjaji Books. Check it.