Poet John Mateer left South Africa at 18, but is visiting the land of his birth for the Poetry Africa Festival. He spoke to Stephen Gray
John Mateer’s new collection of poems, Barefoot Speech including many about his native South Africa was launched this week at the popular Poetry Africa 2001 festival in Durban. Born in Roodeport in 1971, Mateer left South Africa at the age of 18. His first volume of poetry, (ECHO), was privately publhsed in 1998, followed by Spitting out Seeds and Mister!Mister!Mister!, both in 1999. He now lives in Australia, where he teaches a poetry course at the University of Melbourne and writes art criticisms for various publications.
Working in a post-Language Poetry vein, Mateer has developed a new style of oral performance based on African models. He is performing his Africa-related poetry in Durban.
You are being hailed as a leading new talent in Australia and the Commonwealth world. Having gone into exile, do you still feel South African?
I did come back once before, when I could, in 1995. I had left in 1989, just before I was conscripted when I was 18. Of course I’m struck by differences, mostly in how the South Africans I meet now conceive of themselves and how they have a nascent, more integrated culture. That is interesting for me to observe, coming from the other end of the ocean from Perth, where I’ve been looking back at Durban all these years. It’s so different from the days of my childhood in Roodepoort, first, and then when I was at King Edward’s School in Johannesburg. It’s ironic, though, that you’re all becoming a nation only now, when everyone else in the world is unbundling.
Have you lost your South Africanness, or do you still need it?
Well, what I am, whether it’s Australian as my passport says, or South African, is only a culture-created question. I always see myself as local as in “a local” wherever I am. That avoids the ideological problems of having to be one nationality or another, because those larger orders force lots of contradictions on you. But in terms of the poetry I write, that double situation does give me extra strength. There are gaps in the available poetics of Australian practice and I fill them in African ways, you see, with the oral techniques of here. And from Perth, paradoxically, I’ve gained inspiration in belonging to a larger, Indian Ocean region.
How have you found your niche in Australia?
Well, not easily, as there tends to be antagonism to newcomers there. But the poems have to be contact-dependent, so I must write for the environment I find myself in. That’s an essential part of the performance.
But you don’t do possums in the arvo much.
Yeah … But I do say “yeah” instead of yes, when I’m telling them about “Zouthafrikans”. In Australia I’m really categorised as part of the migrant-writer sub-set, and see to it that I stay in control of my local connotations. I’m kept at quite a distance from what is seen as mainstream, more international Australian poetry.
Can you live as a poet in Australia?
The answer is not yeah, it’s no. Easy. So I have to teach or write criticism to survive. But there are some benefits. Recently I was sent to Indonesia for a long period as a writer in residence. And they have paid for me, rather generously, to come home this time.
Mateer’s Barefoot Speech contains the whole of (ECHO), and is available directly from Fremantle Arts Centre Press at www.facp.iinet.net.au