“The Book of Tongues” appears at the Chimurenga Library:
If you know where to look, there is a steel trap door on one of the city streets that opens with double panels, such as those leading to the basements of many shops. There is no secret code, but if you know where to look and you find the trapdoor, all you need to do is knock and Maalik, a scrawny man with an ascetic aspect and dressed in robes of light shades, will open and let you in. Past a shelf of cabbages, onions and tomatoes, he will lead you into an opening that has a few armchairs, a couch, a gas burner sporting a brass pot brewing sweet coffee, and a sparse assortment of books and magazines. You might see a few people standing around or browsing the books or sipping coffee.
Along with many South Africans, I too am despaired by the violence perpetrated in the main by poor people on other poor people, and that racism (racism!) is used or voiced as a justification for that violence.
As some commentators in the press have indicated, the roots of such xenophobia and intra-African racism is perhaps also more cultural than simply economic. I.e. South Africa is apparently deeply xenophobic and the violence that is occurring is not simply a matter of poor people misidentifying the cause of their own suffering. Indeed, we certainly engage in a further othering of the poor if we dismiss the attacks and its causes as simply the expression of the desperation of the poor (it is, to an extent), or simply a criminal wave that has found useful cover in its racism (which it also may be). It is too comfortable, and comforting, that we imagine this xenophobia to obtain only on the desperately poor margins of South Africa. In other words, if there’s a cause, we can locate it in the economic, and once located there, we can blame the government for poor service delivery, the root cause.
But South African xenophobia is not the exclusive reserve of the uneducated or the poor. In the mid-1990s, I was friends with a young student who was the child of an MP, but who had grown up in Britain as his parent had been an academic ‘exile’. He told me a story of a political argument at a student drinking spot that had erupted in fisticuffs; some of his opponents in that argument, who had not agreed with his points of view, basically told him that, on account of his accent and views, he was not African, he couldn’t be African. Not in the sense that he was ‘westernised’; rather in the sense that they stubbornly refused to believe that he could have South African (Zulu) parentage. These were students, educated at university level. And this was 1995, the first year of our democracy.
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The Pan-African Space Station, a music festival from 1-4 October 2008 and curated by Ntone Edjabe and Neo Muyanga, hopes to broadcast free-format radio from Cape Town sometime from September to October this year. They need your support to help them convince ICASA to grant them a licence. Read about these Afrinauts here and sign their petition.
Poetry International has published a short selection of my poetry: 5 poems from This Carting Life and “Kingdom of Rats”, previously unpublished. Read them here.
Meanwhile, Richard de Nooy and I have been trading translations of Eliot and Van Wyk Louw. Groundwork posted some Afrikaans translations of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Hollow Men”, all triggered by De Nooy carelessly bandying his translations of “Raka” about. He followed this up by posting a Dutch translation of Parts I & II of “The Hollow Men” in the relevant comments section.
Watch these spaces for die opkoms van Raka.
A bumper selection of poetry by Michael Cope has just been posted at Groundwork. Do take some time especially to read ‘On Fire’. Here’s a little teaser:
The Corporation is the State
A cozy chatty little scene:
Our Leader and this guy.
They talk and laugh as though they were
on a lovers high.
The Corporation is the State,
The State, the Corporation
A doubled warp that’s woven through
the fabric of the nation.
The natural world can go to hell;
The poor can starve and die.
They do their deal today, and they
are on a lovers high.
The Corporation is the State,
The State, the Corporation
A doubled warp that’s woven through
the fabric of the nation.
Sorry for the misleading headline, but I am trying to jack my traffic.
It’s not entirely misleading, though, because it is the opening sentence of Coetzee’s little piece in SARoB in 1995, on that year’s Rugby World Cup.
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Yes, synchronising Groundwork with my BookSA blog has been placed on the backburner, so much so that I have forgotten about my hypothetical BookSA audience and/or have suffered identity-crash (just google it!). Until such synchronisation, I thought, I would just duplicate posts from Groundwork here, opening up the possibility of providing readers with an unnecessary loop by which to inflate my hitcount. I’ll do that nevertheless; but since I do not carry advertising, it is only my ego which will be mislead by such inflated figures and thus of negligible ethical import. So here are some links to recent posts – well, some of them aren’t really posts, but links to articles in that bare-bones genre of the lazy blogger.
Readers, welcome to my BOOK SA blog. I’ve been running a blog, Groundwork, since July 2006 and readers who scan the archives will notice that it is not updated too frequently. This is partly because I don’t always have something to say and I try and avoid a chatty tone. But while Groundwork is formal, it does not avoid lamenting Michael Schumacher’s retirement or the bad service in expensive Cape Town restaurants.
It is also mostly formal (and infrequently updated) because it is intended as an immediate forum for publishing and linking to bits and pieces of ’serious’ writing, like ‘Moedertang’, an autobiographical essay on English and Afrikaans at LitNet, or ‘The man who would be eaten’, which includes a recipe for preparing roasted JM Coetzee.
This Carting Life
