soil
Richard Bowker
If we are to have a history
Then their consensus is
It lives best in conversation, disagreement,
And has its being in the history-makers
Of the passing moment.
– Cathal Lagan, Alcantara Memories, 1956, iii. Song for Miguel
Lovedale Press has been around for so long it has almost sunk into the oblivion of the hinterland below the Amatola mountains of the Eastern Cape. Originally part of a missionary settlement and for some time now attached to the University of Fort Hare in Alice, Lovedale Press celebrated its 175th anniversary at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in July 1999.
The event served as a launch for four new volumes of poetry from the institution that first published Enoch Sontonga’s Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika: Cathal Lagan’s Sandbird; Seasons, a collection of haiku by Norman Morrissey; Brian Walter’s Tracks; and If You Want to Know Me: Voices from Somafco, an anthology of works from the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College.
The vision in Lagan’s Sandbird ranges to encompass both the Ireland of childhood and the rugged Eastern Cape of present experience – one feels the fidelity of the heart tensing creatively between these poles.
Poetry, for Lagan ”Is like leaving a window open / For the cat” (Writing Poetry), a half- anticipated illumination startling in its realisation, as in the lines written for his father ”You peer across at me, / A kinder Moses now: / We have both stopped / Short / Of the Promised Land” (Retrospective).
Religious imagery in the poems is likewise adapted to the perceptions of the poet, allowing him to reach otherwise inaccessible domains: ”And the loud sea- crash / Against the black pulpits of rock below / Echoed in the dark inlets of my brain” (Integration).
The hard-hitting poems are simple in their directness – as is Green Tomatoes – and apt in the South African context: on seeing a long abandoned ”empty taxi aslant the road”, ”you are glad to have been told / it was only an accident, / the driver lost control” (Violence).
The haiku of Morrissey’s Seasons sometimes tend toward overly epigrammatic obscurity – often their syllogistic construction and the foreignness of their close rhyme detract from the koan-like potential for illumination that haiku can bring to the reader.
Nevertheless, Morrissey provides some fine examples of the form, and these seem to ”work better” for being unforced. To my mind, two instances of the latter are ”Now I grow older / the gum is cracking, pages / start to flutter loose” (Autumn), and ”It’s your arm sleeping / on my strung chest gets me through / the night’s long watches” (Gill).
The poems in Brian Walter’s Tracks are located securely in the vastness of the Eastern Cape – from the sea flats around Port Elizabeth to the far reaches of the Amatolas. Walter makes use of colloquialism and Afrikaans where necessary, juxtaposing this with a thorough yet conversational English-language poetic voice to bring out more directly the intimacies of his subject matter.
The poem in dedication, Water Muse: for Cheryl, combines the simple quotidian with a thematised craft-in-creation (of this poem) that lends both processes a complementary sensuality that is larger than either of them.
Longer poem sequences incorporate narrative elements that allow the poet to steadily build meaningful conclusions from his observations: ”No. I root my dry words out of this place. / Naked beneath a thin foliage of rhyme / they cower in guilt. Seeds of cunning / aglint in downcast eyes, they go” (Familiar Chat, iv. Flight).
The last four poems of the Nieu-Bethesda Way sequence were used in Elaine Matthews’s installation Quest – a Journey into Sacred Space, which formed elements of the !Xoe site-specific project in Nieu-Bethesda. In these poems particularly, Walter combines the reality of the specific with a larger, more universal symbolism.
The works collected in If You Want to Know Me comprise poems (mostly in English), a short story and two plays (one unfinished) written by in-exile South African students at Somafco in Tanzania in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Thematically the poems are reminiscent of the poetry written and performed in South Africa at the time – angry and hopeful, defiant and proud – the youth shouting from the streets – albeit, in this case, from a safer distance.
The feel of the book as a whole is, however, one that suggests primarily an archival significance for the works – capturing an element of history rather than reflecting present knowledge, ability and circumstance.
There is some satisfaction in seeing poetic works arising from this part of the world, adding to its history of ”the passing moment”, particularly from an institution with roots as deep in the local soil as are Lovedale’s.
The resurrection implicit in these accomplishments can only bode well for local publishing, especially that of the impoverished Eastern Cape.