Stephen Gray’s new poetry collection, his first in six years, has just come out. He spoke to Chris Dunton
Your last collection, Season of Violence, appeared in 1992. Between that and the new volume, Gabriel’s Exhibition [Mayibuye], there’s quite a gap. Was there a break in your writing of poetry?
To me Season of Violence seems very much a work of the 1980s, although it came out in 1992. Because it was conceived as a sequence of short, immediate comments on emergency issues of the day, once it was completed it was written off for me. For me this new collection is very much a work of the 1990s, particularly since the writing deals pretty explicitly with the transition period from 1993.
Are there ways in which you feel the recent poetry differs from your earlier work? Do you sense you’re moving in a new direction here?
The answer to those questions has to be a very strong yes. I do feel that I’ve shed a lot of my old worries about writing poetry in South Africa. In the new situation I do feel very liberated personally and imaginatively … The new poems are more ambitious than anything I tried before. I’m now free to strike out.
In what ways did you feel constrained before?
I think I did experience forces that convinced me to remain cautious, not to take risks, to cut back on anything too freewheeling. I have almost a sense of pity now over the way in which I was persuaded, or perhaps persuaded myself, to remain quite inhibited. But I think all South Africans have experienced this belated feeling of release; in the new work I’m responding to that.
Quite a number of the new poems, like Gricault’sShipwreck and Dead Man’s Disclosure, are on historical subjects. There’s a powerful sense here that you’re revisiting the historical record from a fresh perspective.
In a broad sense I have always been interested in how history can be used to free South Africans. We are people who’ve been trapped, or been forced to be trapped, in a very thin, one-strain version of how we came to be who we are. So my whole career became devoted to rewriting that history, and so redefining our South Africanism. It was the necessary thing to do.
In one of the poems in the new collection, Passages, you write about the momentous changes that have occurred in South Africa in the last few years, and about other contemporary events. You say,”While writing this I did hold back time,/ but could not stop or reverse it -/ in that sense life is not the news -/ and I have been bumped on to change;/ and you have changed too,/ read
ing the above.” These lines turn on a number of important issues – your sense of ongoing history, your sense of the poet’s responsibility, of the relationship between poet and reader …
There’s a secret scenario in that poem … something we all know, when we’re just hit with a TV bulletin that has no less then three items of extraordinary news. In this case, one piece of news was the South African election of 1994, the results of which were coming through as I was writing that poem. I was in Italy, and this news – monumental to me – was top of the bulletin. The second event was that they’d discovered that during World War II partisans had committed dreadful massacres; it wasn’t just Mussolini’s fascists – these bones and decapitated heads were being unearthed, which was a terrible reversal of what we though we knew. This spoke to that feeling I always have about Europe representing one unending human rights abuse after another – they’ve certainly got Africa beaten on that score. The third thing was Ayrton Senna, the Brazilian racer, driving into a barrier and being dismembered live on TV. I just thought, “Well, there are three major events I could not relate one to the other – a triumph, an atrocity, and an appalling accident.”
And so the secret story of the poem is me commenting on how television grabs one’s attention, but doesn’t satisfy it. I thought I could imitate in the process of the poem that kind of attention-grabbing. But while I’m interested in commenting on contemporary events, the other half of the story must be that I’m also concerned with how one functions as a poet. That’s a more formal interest, so I thought, “Well, I’ll do a poem that answers to the news – that tells you it is doing the news, and then that it’s done the news.” I hope this is brought about with some humour, too, because it’s meant to be light and funny.
Another of the new poems, Ovid in his Exile, deals with the banishment of the poet Ovid to Scythia, after he had written a series of scurrilous satires on Augustus Caesar. One thing that comes through very strongly is the anger and venom in Ovid’s voice, and the brutality of his contempt for the people among whom he lives out his banishment …
We can’t escape the situation of the main speaker there. He’s railing against his exile, but really pleading to be forgiven and reinstated at the heart of imperial power. He’ll betray and sell out anyone in order to have the sentence of banishment lifted from him. But it’s footling and pathetic and vile, because the cruelty of the emperor that is passed down on to him he merely devolves upon those kind people whom he insists stay grovelling at his feet.
But why I thought the Ovid poem might be useful for South Africans – in the discourse we’re conducting at the moment – was to talk quite baldly and blatantly about how the old black/white process of abuse really worked. I’m saying it’s been bloody and butchery. I had also been reading that wonderful Nol Mostert history, Frontiers, which I think challenged all South Africans to reassess their positions vis-…-vis white civilisation.
Frontiers is shocking and terrifying, about expediency and about selling out, it’s about destruction and genocide – I don’t want to use a word like genocide lightly, but it’s about what genocide really is: I mean utter mass destruction. Those are the issues that Ovid was talking about as well, so I wanted to discuss grown-up stuff about what our history really does mean – no evasions. Ovid says the unspeakable: “Yes, I’ll kill ’em all, every last one of them, if I have to choose between them and my own advancement.” I thought, that kind of vindictive, racist, expedient violence needed to be psychologised and addressed. It’s my kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission, my inquiry into past atrocities, trying to see them for what I really think they were, and facing the fact of that.
You write novels, short stories, travel, book reviews, and you’re working now on a biography of the poet Beatrice Hastings. What place does your poetry occupy here?
The poetry is the centre of it all, the work I’d like to stand or fall by. But I feel that, enclosing it, one must be a general man of letters. All those other activities are perfectly normal, to pass the time between poems.