>From songs to sermons, these new South African poems represent some remarkablework
Dan Wylie
Some years ago, when I reviewed Adam Schwartzman’s The Good Life, The Dirty Life, I thought that here was a poet to watch out for. Schwartzman’s new (1998, just received!) collection, Merrie Afrika! (Carcanet) doesn’t disappoint, though it’s not a pacific read.
Images of Southern and Eastern Africa wrestle through sinewy language with economy and force: “No one could say how, stacked up,/ her horizons/ slumped into each other;/ ever knew of the lumpy paths/ beaten by hills/ down to hessian shores with their limestone/ interiors all simmering/ like milk.”
Places and people – the “eye-thin traders”, a disgruntled civil servant, the poet’s immigrant ancestor, the “village- thief [who] itched like a flea/ in your vest” – offset one another like figures in a Breughel painting. The ambiguous pleasures of the ill-at-ease settler are prominent. This Africa is not a simplistically ravaged Arcadia, but a crossroads of histories grown richly moribund.
Because Schwartzman largely eschews the personal “I”, precise occasions and a centralised vision remain elusive – perhaps too elusive. The effect is almost of generalisation, but because the imagery is so vividly concrete, the poems attain a seductive authority. Politics and rocks are inseparable, but this is the view of a lightly sardonic (partial) outsider, whose visible Oxbridge learning jacks him out of narrow partisanship.
“All the tricky history came through here/ on its way to happening/ elsewhere”: he might be talking of his own poetic persona. This is strong, elliptical poetry, worthy of many re-readings.
Politics and rocks intermesh also in Robert Berold’s Rain across a Paper Field (Gecko), very differently. This is muse, complete: “wind marks the formation of rock/which leads downwards// now that the shooting has died away/ the beginning of a dream becomes clear in the distance// a continual boiling of dust and pain/ red pain stinging unploughed fields// but I will love you always/ against you I’ll never struggle// even in the long descent into darkness/ I will be your companion”.
Since The Fires of the Dead (1989), Berold has become even more pared down, impressionistic, abandoning punctuation, compressing as deftly as Blake (of the Songs). Some blues-like “songs”, without music, are awkward and vapid on the page, the refrains ineffectual. But the love- poems are wistfully direct and unaffected, other meditations brief and feathery as Zen illuminations. None of our poets has a lighter touch.
Berold only once or twice verges on hectoring; mostly our violent politics remains a menacing shadow. He draws sustenance from compassionate touches of love, and from a directly experienced earth that “holds and balances you/ flowing upwards into your feet”. His very attentiveness is a plea for greater responsibility for a fundamentally loveable world. The closing line of the collection is both prophetic and salutary: “the ones who will care are already here”.
Berold has also cared for the country’s wealth of poetry. Under his patronage of New Coin (which he’s now handing on to Joan Metelerkamp), he has fostered a number of voices – some of dubious quality. One such protg continues to wow and alarm audiences here and overseas: Lesego Rampolokeng.
The Bavino Sermons is another substantial production from Veronica Klipp’s Gecko Poetry imprint. It contains some of Rampolokeng’s by now well-worn performance pieces, like Rap-ranting and To Gil Scott- Heron, as well as extracts from an Artist’s Notebook, prose vignettes largely of violent sex, gore and other varieties of mayhem.
The poems are characteristically volcanic, vituperative, at times oddly vulnerable. Outrage marks, or masks, caring. Images strive unremittingly to startle, if not offend. The wit is hyperbolic: “scorncobwebbed for intestinceneration [sic] by nuclear excretion”. Subject-matter spills over the minimal constraints of those shaggy, opportunistic rap rhymes.
Almost any lines are representative: “bloodstains on morguesheet sweat of impotence/ born to die lie dead in the street the lie of omnipotence/ scarstripes on the soul sign of demention/delusion/ look of drugged minds hidden behind illusion.”
Perhaps unfashionably, I consider Rampolokeng overrated. Doubtless ranting about the violent delusions of a hypocritical society is valid and necessary. So is having the boundaries of conventional forms, language and moralities periodically breached and parodied. But, in the end, despite a formidable though slapdash array of literary reference, the social critique is simplistic, the surface rhetoric meretricious. Rampolokeng hectors in every line; the tone of swaggering complaint rapidly numbs.
That Ramplokeng knows exactly what he’s doing – that he’s “afflicted with a scatological addiction” and does indeed “wax incoherent in shivers of emotional disorder” – doesn’t necessarily rescue the poetry.
Still, he’s a unique voice, almost a minor Blake (of the “prophecies”), and no doubt many will continue to find his forthright energies liberating.