Shaun de Waal and Yvette Christiansë discuss the anguish of liberation from slavery into the non-life of indentured work, as portrayed in her poetry collection, Imprendehora
Apartheid and the struggle gobble up too much of our history, says scholar, novelist and poet Yvette Christiansë. Hence her work delving into slavery in Southern Africa — the background to her novel Unconfessed (published in South Africa in 2007), and her second collection of poetry, Imprendehora (Kwela), launched last week.
“Of necessity, apartheid took our attention, particularly when it came to history,” Christiansë said at the launch of Imprendehora, where I discussed her work with her before an audience. “When I was doing research for a scholarly work, looking at the stories of six slave women whose lives I was trying to trace, and I thought about Robben Island, it was the Robben Island of the apartheid era, of the struggle. Apartheid was greedy to absorb all history and it made history rather shallow, except the histories that could be chosen to have depth. I felt that if I thought about Robben Island and didn’t think about the other lives there, if I didn’t imagine how they sounded, the language of Robben Island would be monolingual. It’s politically necessary to allow that deeper history.”
Unconfessed is the story of a slave woman who ended up on Robben Island, then, as more recently, a prison. Imprendehora takes up such themes, also dealt with in Christiansë’s first poetry collection, Castaway. Imprendehora was the name given to a Portuguese slave ship captured after the official abolition of slavery in 1807. Its now-illegal cargo was taken to the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, where the “liberated Africans”, as they were called, were kept until they could be absorbed by the labour-hungry plantations of the West Indies, Réunion, the Seychelles and the vineyards of the Cape.
Such people were indentured as labourers for seven years, but then often disappear from the records. They were not slaves, yet were not entirely free either; having been “liberated”, they were of no further concern to the anti-slavery movement. They were freed into a non-life.
Christiansë evokes the presences of these unfortunates in Imprendehora, as she did that of the slave woman in Unconfessed, investigating their lives, sensations and feelings in oblique, moving lines. She imaginatively reinhabits these obscure histories, giving new life to such personae. She gets into the minds of real historical figures such as Sister Thomas and Fernão Lopez, both of whom lived on St Helena.
Sister Thomas was a “native” woman who had been converted to Christianity in the 1800s and became wildly religious, rushing back and forth across the island trying not to miss a single sermon. “As my family would call her,” chuckles Christiansë, “she was a religious fanatic.”
Further back in history, Fernão Lopez was an official in the Portuguese colony of Goa in the 1500s. He “went native” and turned against the Portuguese. He was punished by severe mutilation (including possibly having his tongue cut out). Years later he fetched up on St Helena, having reportedly stowed away on a ship and having asked to be left there when the ship stopped at the island for supplies. Apart from a brief visit to Europe, where he had come to be seen as a fascinating figure, a proto-Crusoe and even some kind of holy man, he remained on St Helena as its only inhabitant for nearly 30 years, dying there in 1545.
“I’m still haunted by him,” says Christiansë. She gives such people a voice, and, moreover, a delicate yet deeply sensual, physical voice, one alive to both bodily feeling and the torments of the psyche. They are people in limbo, like the “liberated Africans”; they are in-between people.
“When I was doing this research in the archives, I was asking: Where are the slave narratives in South Africa? They don’t exist, but one has to read to see how else a slave might be heard, or intimated; how a thinking mind might be guessed at.”
Imprendehora concludes with a long poem based on the register of the Columbine, a British ship policing the Mozambique channel in the years after the official end of slavery. Former slaves were photographed and described in the barest terms — a number, a “Christian” name, sex, age, mother (“child of”), distinguishing marks and “how disposed of”.
“I was so shocked, so moved by that register,” says Christiansë. “The horrors of what it was to be a ‘liberated African’. The ironies of that name!”
Born in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, Christiansë moved with her family to Swaziland, then to Australia, in the 1970s. She has been teaching at universities in the United States since the early 1980s, but visits South Africa regularly. Much of her time here has been spent in archives, poring over old colonial documents. (At the launch, she made an impassioned plea for better funding for South African archives, where invaluable documents are fading into illegibility.)
The connection to St Helena is personal, in that her grandmother was born there in the late 1800s, probably the daughter or granddaughter of freed slaves. “I grew up with the idea of St Helena, to which I’ve never been, as purely a place of my imagination,” says Christiansë. “I carry the deep personal baggage of the stories my grandmother used to tell me. My family always had these stories, but we didn’t know where to put them.”
Now she has followed such traces back into history and given its occluded denizens a new voice. As she puts it in Imprendehora: “In their cries, we hear our own bodies.”