Jo Nel
Anatomy of dark: collected poems of arthur nortje edited by Dirk Klopper (Unisa)
In 1972, exiled South African critic Lewis Nkosi wrote in The Will to Die: “Time, frustration and despair, with their attendant drugs alcohol and suicide are taking a toll on South African writers. Nat Nakasa. Ingrid Jonker. Now Can Themba … Their deaths are not simply natural deaths even when they are technically so … their anguish is in many ways related to the anguish of the people of South Africa.”
Nkosi may as well have added the name of Arthur Kenneth Nortje, born in Oudtshoorn in 1942 and, in December 1970, died of an overdose, a victim of his own angst and depression. His state of mind at that juncture may be adduced from the last poem in this anthology, Wayward Ego: “For then I am most alive and revitalised/ when self’s dead,” and he finds himself “awash in the city tide/ or swimming between the rage of bottles,/ floating in muck, flotsam and tossed jetsam,/ rockbottom smelling the gutter.”
Klopper’s endeavour to assemble Nortje’s poetic oeuvre is an overdue initiative to allow a wider dissemination of the works of a poet whose name is often sandwiched between those of other writers of his generation: Nkosi, Dennis Brutus, Bloke Modisane, Mafika Gwala and others. The collection is chronologically arranged into four sections: South Africa 1960 to 1965; England 1965 to 1967; Canada 1967 to 1970; and England 1970. Yet, no matter which period the reader selects for reading, the overall sense of alienation and loneliness is predominant.
The brutality of the apartheid system evoked, in many writers, a feeling of futility and a loss of individuality, bringing about a literature suggesting the constricting nature of South African society. In Autopsy Nortje writes: “The luminous tongue in the black world/ has infinite possibilities no longer.” In this regard, perhaps Nortje thought of his homeland as a vast prison cell, his soul imprisoned by the constrictions of apartheid. In Mother Republic Nortje reflects on his place within the system: “I am your property,” he says and he identifies with the suffering of his countrymen, “Your crop of toil-potatoes wrung/ From rains of blood”, suggesting, also, his helpless rage directed at the apartheid machine.
Nortje’s work cannot escape the scrutiny of critics, who concede the captivating nature of his poetry but who also recognise some deficiencies. Often, sentiments similar to those expressed by Michael Chapman arise. For him, Nortje’s poetry is “as likely to give way to bathos, while the telling image may be overwhelmed by unnecessary epithets and scatological references”.
Finally, though, the reader is left with the impression that he was a poet trying to communicate with a larger world while recognising that his attempt might be blighted by the uncompromising and stifling nature of a society inhabited by people of differing colours and ideologies, where each individual like the poet is ensconced in a cocoon or a laager of his or her own, sometimes emerging then retreating. His is a poetry of migration: from South Africa to foreign lands, often with a lyricism built in and brought about by solitude and despair.
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