/ 5 December 2001

A collective voice

Like South Africa itself, anthologies of South African poetry have mostly been and continue to be, until now, strictly compartmentalised.

Protest poets jostle with protest poets, English academics stick with English academics, exiles feel at home with exiles. This point becomes clear when you realise, after reading The Lava of This Land, that Stephen Watson hasn’t been in the same anthology as Lesego Rampolokeng before; neither has Ingrid Jonker and Mafika Gwala.

Denis Hirson, the editor, brings a lucid intelligence to this new anthology, representing the work of 54 poets writing between the early 1960s and the late 1990s. His choices show the same regard for structure that a poet has for language. It has resulted in a unique collection, where poems gain layers of meaning through juxtaposition with poems by other authors. The “resonance [the poems] share, or the dissonance between them”, as Hirson writes in his introduction, is as calculated as the ease or the friction between words in the same stanzas.

Hirson has included five chronological sections, but has taken the liberty of shifting poets out of their time period if their work makes a more interesting comparison to poems in another section. For poets who are not in the same section, the anthology still advocates exploration. For example, the nature of the debate on what is poetry and what isn’t, which has been raging in South African literary journals over the past decade, is radically altered when Watson and Rampolokeng are read one after the other. While Watson’s slowly crafted verse and Rampolokeng’s spontaneous invective may ideologically be at loggerheads, both poets are profoundly concerned with rhythm, whether that of the Cedarberg or the streets of Soweto.

Ostensibly, Afrikaans was the language of the oppressor, but the cliché is tipped over when you read Jonker’s The Child Who Was Shot Dead in Nyanga, translated from the Afrikaans, alongside Gwala’s Bonk’abajahile, written in an English that crosses over with tsotsitaal. Jonker and Gwala did not meet in real life — she committed suicide long before Gwala joined the Black Consciousness Movement and began writing. Yet, their work speaks to each other: both poems, the first written by an outsider, the other by an insider, are about the township.

Hirson’s selection makes room for surprise by including poems that, according to precedent, do not belong together. A tool he uses well in creating such a diverse anthology has been translation. Included in the collection is the poetry of Sob W Nkuhlu and St J Page Jako, originally written in Xhosa, Stephen Watson’s versions of /Xam narratives, and the work of Breyten Breytenbach, Adam Small, Johann de Lange, and others, originally written in Afrikaans. In fact, The Lava of This Land was also simultaneously published in French, sometimes creating entirely new sounds: in translation, the harsh consonants of a line from Dennis Brutus — “police cars cockroach through the tunnel streets” — become more subtle.

By including so many diverse voices, The Lava of This Land creates a fluid canon while proving that no poem should be canonical. It includes both poets obsessed with apartheid and those who “situate themselves at a discrete tangent” to this country’s history. It insists that an anthology can only challenge the partitioning of society when it is of the belief that a collective voice can still exist while individual poets differ.

This collective voice is what is most impressive about the anthology: it leaves the reader with the conviction, where none existed before, that South Africa has a rich poetical tradition for new poets to draw from.

Henk Rossouw is the Africa correspondent for The Chronicle of Higher Education, published weekly in Washington, DC