Kelwyn Sole
SONG TRIALS by Mxolisi Nyezwa (Gecko)
For a number of years now, Mxolisi Nyezwa’s poems have appeared in local and international journals, as well as forming part of the 1992 collection Essential Things. In addition, he is editor of one of the most innovative literary journals published at the moment, Kotaz.
Nyezwa is of a similar age to two other young black writers who have secured their reputations in the last decade, Seitlhamo Motsapi and Lesego Rampolokeng. His driving interests are up to a point similar as well. Like both these poets, he shows an ability and a facility to mould English into a new language that better suits his concerns. He also has no truck with the supposed “new South Africa” that is rumoured to have emerged since 1994, remarking, in recent Kotaz editorials, that Africans still find themselves in a world not of their own making; where now the “professional lie thrives in the new breeze”.
The sense of dispossession and violation in these poems is strong: “i describe a world simple and hard”, the poet says; and exposed is a human consciousness aware of its own lesions, searching for spiritual and social verities in a reality of physical violence and psychological laceration – “it is plain / it is you and me, not the enormous snow. / it is life still in the tiny vein along the purple stream, along everyone’s back where the years clearly left / the erudition of cartels of men”.
Yet past a point Nyezwa’s style and concerns are unique. The title of the book points to a struggle to sing, to celebrate, through trying to understand a world that conspires to deny this possibility. It is this process that these poems document.
They are rooted in the everyday world of the Eastern Cape and, via this human landscape, mark how the violence and memories of the past remain: still today “the bones of boipatong live in front of us / inside the wine’s goblet, beneath the hooves of the old mule”. Yet they simultaneously exhibit a quiet, unassuming, and raptly attentive demeanour to the mundane (“today i committed myself wholeheartedly to the finest things / in life, to write the simple poems / and to sing line by line / the cry of geese”).
Nyezwa characteristically works through an associative poetry, juxtaposing macro- and microcosm, the familiar and the surreal, the local and the universal; often jumping between the five senses. As with Motsapi and Khulile Nxumalo, the influence of Spanish-language poetry is strong, and convincingly melded with local styles and traditions. The device of parallelism by initial linking is often used, la Cesar Vallejo (and the izibongo).
The certitude and celerity with which he makes his associations serve to evoke a vision which is deeply, but never merely, personal, and which paradoxically weaves a web of wide-ranging, objective patterns. At the same time, the interplay and disjunctures between the images used, and the contexts and emotions these evoke, demand constant reader participation and openness. Lines – and there are many – such as “a sea-shell sings to me the music of earth, / the last soil sells to me a heritage, / the madness of the land heals my name” are filled with an extraordinary beauty.
This collection extends and invigorates the concerns of the South African lyric in new and breathtaking directions, and I do not believe that tired old genre will ever be the same again. There are poems here as near-perfect as anything to be found in the history of our poetry: i cannot think of all the pains; it all begins; song of beauty; and just for us the lips, to name a few.
As one of a new breed of poetic voices of the last decade who, unanticipated and unannounced, have made their gifts to us, a solo collection by Nyezwa might, Ihave often thought, be a major event. It is. If you are a lover of poetry, or someone who just wants to keep abreast of the shifts in our cultural terrain, do yourself a favour – read Song Trials.