Review of the week
Alex Dodd
There’s this theory – a kind of conspiracy for chemically inspired dreamers. What would happen if some lateral guerrilla managed to put massive doses of Ecstasy in Johannesburg’s water supply. Would the murder and rape rates flatten out for one dizzy day? Would hijackers be disarmed by a strange and overwhelming desire to tickle the occasional passerby? Would everybody realise for a few heightened moments that everyone else in the city is also human and vulnerable and sometimes scared of the dark? If Jargonelles, a small but increasingly popular cabaret-style venue in Brixton, were big enough to have housed all this city’s people on Sunday night, I figure Jennifer Ferguson’s show might have had a similar effect.
Everyone I spoke to after the show had a different way of expressing one basic response. That they felt as if Ferguson was addressing them personally as a lover or a friend or a mother, as if each person’s own life story were the raw material for her songs. “I could tell a million stories for every song,” she says at one point in the show, “but tonight I’m just singing.” Those “million stories” invest her songs with a power that is allegorical and transformative like only good, timeless art can be.
Ferguson sings with wisdom and distilled passion about things that are at once as universal as the human heart and as gritty and specific as the Coke sign at the corner kaffie. “Jo’burg quiet like ceasefire,” she sings, “Jo’burg quiet like after a war … Lovers in bed dreaming. They settle for less because maybe they couldn’t handle any more.” Beyond the chorus, the song is packed with visceral vignettes about this city and the lives that populate it. Ferguson sings about Johannesburg like Paul Auster writes about New York – with a sense of magic realism that emanates from the pavements and neon signs.
The issue of place and placelessness is central to many of Ferguson’s songs, most poignantly Leaving to Return. Her attachedness to this country is patent in her constant familiar references and reverence for characters like Bessie Head, Helen Martins and David Webster. Yet her feeling for local idiosyncracy and home is in constant dynamic tension with her desire to rise above borders and nationalism. When she sings about the candyfloss on Strandfontein Beach you can almost taste its sweetness and yet there are times when her music, like her wild red hair, has an almost Celtic edge to it.
She speaks only briefly about Sweden, her other base (her husband is Swedish) and her home for the past few years. “People have asked me what was the most difficult thing to adapt to in Sweden,” she says. “I think it was the sense that you were the only crazy one. But then it’s all relative.”
Both as a politician and an artist, Ferguson has come under fire from numerous camps here in South Africa. The feminists have been at her throat for her complex stance on abortion, the chauvinists have tried to shut her up for her outspokenness and organic feminist approach in Parliament, the conservatives have decried her as lentil lefty, the cynical have dismissed her as a gauche romantic … Common to most of her detractors is a distaste for her earnestness.
This is the thing I’ve always loved about her music: it’s rawness, it’s gutsiness and honesty. The willing exposure of a rare mind making sense of the valleys and plains of her heartland. But as with performances by Karoo diva Antoinette Pienaar – who has much in common with Ferguson as an artist and powerful, uncompromising female presence – sometimes there are moments of untamed expression that are a little too much for some to bear.
Ironically it is this very censure, this unspoken edict that women needn’t be quite so exothermic, so publically wounded, that is the provocation to such unrelenting Boadiceas. Yet my sense of Ferguson’s work is that time and experience have brought to it greater refinement and discipline. Where she used to burst forth, she now holds back. And her general restraint lends a greater power to her chosen moments of abandon.
I first heard Ferguson’s music as an undergrad at Rhodes in the late Eighties. Along with so many other classics from the Shifty Music stable, songs like Bay of Bombay came to embody that heady era when students marched into barrages of cops spurred on by unchartered dreams of freedom and equality. The parties were as wild as the talk was serious. We had big ideals and big hangovers. But in Ferguson’s songs there was a divine sense to it all.
This sense remains, but the nuances and resonances have changed. She used to sing: “I still care about the future. I still do worry about the past.” Now instead of “the” future, she sings about “a” future. There seems to be less certainty now, less definition and assuredness. Her years spent trying to make that dream come true are almost painfully etched into the songs. And yet, there is not a fragment of doubt that Ferguson is “still caught with this desire for a fine time that is good and born to last forever”.
Due to overwhelming public response the show’s run has been extended for two weeks. You can catch Jennifer Ferguson at Jargonelles every Sunday until June 13. Her album, Untimely, is being released by Tic Tic Bang next month