It’s true. Karen Zoid rocks. She has talent. She has balls. And she has edge. I’d love to see her on stage with some of the ”Feelah Sistah” quartet such as the outrageously talented Lebo Mashile, with her boldly feminist performance poetry.
”All my friends are yuppie scum,” bemoans Zoid in one of her songs that mixes biting humour, social commentary, languages and a whole lot of rock. Mashile says in a recent edition of Sawubona that women ”can talk about issues like rape and abuse over tea in their kitchens, but to express your outrage in public to big audiences is often regarded as shocking, especially by guys. Well, tough.
”I grew up around empowered women and I cannot accept being victimised in my own society.”
If these young women represent a new generation of artists, then we’re doing okay.
But it wasn’t with Mashile or Napo Masheane that Zoid shared the stage at the welcomingly unyuppish Labia for the recent Poetry Junction that formed part of the Tradewinds International Literature Festival. It was with Mzwakhe Mbuli, who treated us to his new brand of ”Mbulism”, telling us of his wonderful talent, his brilliant brain, his extraordinary mind. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with a bit of love poetry, even if it is with oneself. And perhaps as the poet connects more with the people again after being ”alone, all alone” in a cell for a few years, courtesy of charges and a trial that still have almost as many mysteries as the strategy of quiet diplomacy, Mbuli will once again become the booming voice of ordinary people.
No ordinary person is Antjie Krog, one of the driving forces behind the Tradewinds festival, and herself a poet and writer of note. ”For many years I’ve envied the Dutch their National Poem Day. On Gedigtedag, every shop, business and municipality has to display a poem on their premises. The evening news starts with a poem. Rubbish collectors have poems on their lorries. Children bring poems to school and an edition of specially chosen Dutch poetry is on sale,” wrote Krog in a piece previewing the festival.
We don’t have a Poem Day … yet, but there does seem to have been an outbreak of poetry in the past few years. Festivals such as Urban Voices and the Centre for Creative Arts’s International Poetry Festival, poetry competitions, radio stations such as Metro FM and Yfm with their weekly prime-time poetry slots, poetry circles and monthly poetry get-togethers have all contributed to the explosion of a word economy where so much is said with so few words.
The Tradewinds festival included a poetry caravan with four international poets taking poetry to the people of Montagu, Atlantis, Delft and Athlone. Here, the ”economy of words” took on a new meaning as ”words substituting perfume and spices [were] traded under the canopy of a temporary marketplace of poetry” by the caravan (not the Blue Train) of poets. Poverty alleviation of the mind. Development of the rural and peri-urban soul. All of this was sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science — of The Netherlands.
On the Labia stage, there was a reading by Nuruddin Farah and poems in Xhosa, Shona, Dutch, Khwe, !Xhu, Bahassa, English, Suriname and Afrikaans, a mini-United Nations of Poetry, affirming language, stimulating thought, celebrating talent. Artists just doing what politicians pontificate about.
Excuse me. I feel a poem coming on.