Alex Sudheim
Poetry is one of the great human paradoxes. Consumed as we are by infinite labyrinths of emotion and thought, we have at our disposal but one rudimentary tool for the expression of our ephemeral selves: that famously deficient thing called language.
As Samuel Beckett once pointed out: “Every word is an unnecessary stain upon silence and nothingness.” But then again, he said it.
It is within this conundrum that the poet resides, struggling with the eternally incomplete task of capturing an elusive metaphysical truth in a web of words. Others trap the abstract form of their existence in the sensual mesh of music or art, but the poet – for his or her sins – must labour at language to sublimate their invisible worlds.
Yet it is precisely this labour which makes poetry beautiful. If there were a resistance-less circuit which carried feeling to word, everyone would be a poet. But it is a rare gift to give beguiling aesthetic shape to the vague and commanding forces beyond our bodies, and one that was given its rightful due at this year’s Poetry Africa ’99 at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre in Durban.
Only in its third year, the event – convened by the University of Natal, Durban’s Centre for Creative Arts – attracted renowned poets from the four corners of the globe, together with a brace of local literary luminaries.
For six evenings in a row the participating poets read, performed, rapped, danced and sang their work, and – putting the lie to the notion that poetry is a defunct art form – were greeted each night by a large and enthusiastic audience.
And the spectators most surely got their money’s worth – the standard of work presented from home and abroad was exceptionally high, with the poets selected representing a profound range of style and content.
Among the European poets, the Netherlands’ Gerrit Komrij impressed with his surreal vignettes; Belgian Willem Roggeman’s verse exuded subtle, impressionist beauty; and Ireland’s Matthew Sweeney blended poignancy and robustness in his bittersweet verse. France’s Grard Noiret and England’s Adrian Mitchell performed with exuberant charisma, and the poems of Portugal’s Nunu JYdico displayed a dense and distilled power.
>From further afield, Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison moved the audience with the rich, plangent imagery of her work, while the charismatic young Surinamese scribe Louise Wondel enthralled with onomatopoeic renditions in her native Ndyuku tongue.
African poets Syl Cheney-Coker (Sierra Leone) and Jack Mapanje (Malawi) reflected upon the sad ironies of life in their countries from a prisoner/ exile perspective, while Zimbabwe’s irrepressible Freedom Nyamubaya also had a bilious chuckle at the tragicomic fate of her home country. And the sublime Lamine Kont, singing and playing the incredible 20- string kora guitar, seduced all with husky odes to his native Senegal.
The natives put up a fine innings as well, ranging from the acrid machine-gun blast of Lesego Rampolokeng’s rap-verse to the life- affirming humanism of Jeremy Cronin. Cape Town’s Loit Sls strummed his quaint, idiosyncratic “goema” liedjies, but the real find of the festival was Cradock’s Clinton V du Plessis.
An unassuming-looking accountant from the small Eastern Cape town, Du Plessis’s quiet, polite delivery belied a blisteringly heretical world view which stunned with its raw power. Choosing as his subjects death, sex, hypocrisy and the personal dimensions of politics, Du Plessis writes in a scathingly fearless fashion, free of literary pretension or false optimism.
His brutally personal and unromantic accounts of sex are reminiscent of Charles Bukowski, yet he is also fascinated by the impersonal side of sex: one of his poems consists entirely of ads placed in the “personals” section of The Star newspaper.
And when writing of the savagery inflicted by individuals upon each other in the name of politics, he evokes the scabrous cynicism of Louis-Ferdinand Cline – his blood-chilling rendition of the old national anthem is interspersed with the names of slain South African freedom fighters and their “official” causes of death. The full existentialist weight of South Africa’s grim history was felt by all when with sanguine cool he read: “ons vir jou alpheus madiba, SUICIDE BY HANGING Suid Afrika jundea tabakwa, SUICIDE BY HANGING ons sal lewe nicodemus kgoathe, NATURAL CAUSES – BRONCHIAL PNEUNONIA ons sal sterwe steve bantu biko, HIT BACK OF HEAD AGAINST WALL DURING SCUFFLE WITH POLICE”
So, even though the “old-fashioned” art form of poetry apparently continues to hover in critical danger of becoming marginalised in a world of mass media, sound bites and 12-second attention-spans, there’s life in the old beast yet. As long as we live in a universe where life, death, love, hatred and experience remain impenetrable mysteries, there remians an inescapable need to wrestle the invisible and impossible into fleeting, trembling shape.
For, as Willem Roggeman says in Programmatic: “The poem is a solution that is a mirror image of the riddle.”