In the Heat of Shadows

Denis Hirson

Description

South African poetry today is charged with restlessness, burstng with diversity. Gone is the intense inward focus required to deal with a situation of systematic oppression, the enclosing effort of concentration on a single predicament. While politics and identity continue to be central themes, the poetry since the late 1990s reveals a richer investigation of ancestors and history, alongside more experimentation with language and translation; and enduring concern with the touchstones of love, loss, memory, and acts of witnessing. In the Heat of Shadows: South African Poetry 1996-2013 presents work by 33 poets and includes some translations from Afrikaans, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho and Xitsonga. This collection follows on from Denis Hirson�s 1997 anthology The Lava of this Land: South African Poetry 1960-1996.

Informations

• Publié par: Deep South
• Date de parution: 29 décembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781928476191
• Langue: English

Extrait

2014 © individual writers
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-9870282-3-5
ebook ISBN: 978-1-928476-19-1
Deep South
[e-mail]
www.deepsouth.co.za
Distributed in South Africa by
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press
www.ukznpress.co.za
Distributed worldwide by
African Books Collective
PO Box 721, Oxford, OX1 9EN, UK
www.africanbookscollective.com/publishers/deep-south
Cover art: Maja Maljevic, Nirox Diaries 7 (Oil on canvas)
Text and cover design: Liz Gowans

The publication of this book is a legacy project of
the South Africa-France Seasons 2012 & 2013.
www.france-southafrica.com
Contents
Introduction
Antjie Krog
Country of grief and grace (extracts)
Poet becoming
Arrival
Morning tea
How do you say this
Sonnet of the hot flushes
Winter
Robert Berold
To my room
The water running
All the days
The rock thrushes
Letter to Mary
Visit to my mother
Angel
Karen Press
Glass cabinet: the watch
Praise poem: I saw you coming towards me (extract)
Do you love yourself like this
Pasternak’s shadow
Walking songs for Africans abroad
A cow and a goose
Vonani Bila
In the name of Amandla
Ancestral wealth
Baba Mandela
The toilet cleaner at OR Tambo International Airport
Bulelani Zantsi
The clan names of amaBhele
Praise-singers of the house of Ntu
Bongekile Mbanjwa
Lock and key
Why?
Ari Sitas
Slave trades (extracts)
Keorapetse Kgositsile
Affirmation
No boundaries
Renaissance
Mongane Wally Serote
Freedom, lament and song (extract)
Jeremy Cronin
End of the century – which is why wipers
Mxolisi Nyezwa
It all begins
Story
Songs from the earth
Letters of demand
The road ahead
How do i say this, that once your eyes
They have asked me many times
Isabella Motadinyane
Nonhlanhla
Red crown
Come people
Sink a shaft
Gert Vlok Nel
Beautiful in Beaufort West
River
Hillside lullaby
Leaving behind the beautiful words of Beaufort West
Why I’m calling you tonight
Epitaph
Kobus Moolman
Poem from a Canadian diary
Two moons
They come again
Kelwyn Sole
This is not autumn
New country
The land
I never meant to cross the river
I live in a house
He had to come in
To be inside
Ingrid de Kok
Married late
Stay here
My muse is a man
Meeting after much time has passed
Histoplasmosis: a guide’s instructions at the cave
Notes for that week
What kind of man?
Rosamund Stanford
Forefathers
Our president
Ditch
Rustum Kozain
Kingdom of rain
Memory I
Leaving
That river, that river
Dear Comrades
Death
Stars of stone
Gabeba Baderoon
Fit
I forget to look
The pen
Postscript
True
Where nothing was
Cinnamon
Denis Hirson
Scar
Initiation
Time lines
Cider and water
Doctor fish
The song of the crows
Why dogs would make good writers
Joan Metelerkamp
Points on poems
Intact
Deliver her from the depths
Isobel Dixon
The skinning
Tear
After grief
Back in the benighted kingdom
Finuala Dowling
At eighty-five, my mother’s mind
Widowhood in the dementia ward
Brief fling in the dementia ward
Butter
How I knew it wasn’t me
Summarising life
To the doctor who treated the raped baby and who felt such despair
Petra Müller
Intensive care, thoracic ward
Night crossing II
Toni Stuart
Ma, I’m coming home
Marlene van Niekerk
Rock painting
Winter finch
Night psalm
Jim Pascual Agustin
Chameleon caress
Missed fortune
People who live with lions
Khadija Tracey Heeger
I am
Witness
Home
David wa Maahlamela
Autobiography
Nathan Trantraal
Hammie
Valhalla Park
Parable
Fifa 06
Ronelda Kamfer
Where I stand
Pick n Pa
Good girls
Shaun
Dust
Retelling 2
Beware depression
Katharine Kilalea
Portrait of our death
Portrait of the beach
A perfect love
Hennecker’s Ditch
Notes on some poems
Biographical notes on poets and translators
Acknowledgements
Introduction
A NYONE who followed the development of South African poetry through the darkest of the apartheid years, and was aware of its constantly recurring themes of guilt and victimization, rage and denial, identity and dispossession, might be surprised by its current reach and range.
South African poets today find themselves writing in the midst of uneasy political transformation, some of it neither planned nor hoped for, while spinning outwards from the casing of isolation to join the bustle and complexity of the turning world. Their work is charged with restlessness, bursting with diversity. Gone is the intense inward focus required to deal with a situation of systematic oppression, though awareness of that time continues to surface sharply. Gone is the overriding, enclosing effort of concentration on a single predicament. Instead, the reader will discover outward reaching poems that record movement through time and space, experiments in language and translation, alongside enduring touchstones such as love and loss, memory and acts of witnessing. Faced with this rich array of work, I have made out of it a collage of many dimensions, rather than doggedly trying to pursue specific themes or approaches.
A number of the poets whose work is represented here came to the fore between the late 1980’s and the mid-1990’s, at a time when the country was achingly alive with dreams of change. I believe much of today’s dynamic in South African poetry can be traced back to that period. Robert Berold, who edited the magazine New Coin between 1989 and 1999 and transformed it into a unique seismograph of the times, appropriately named the anthology he sifted from those years It All Begins , after a poem by Mxolisi Nyezwa which is reproduced here. This poem might well be referring to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1996-1998: “It all begins with one statement,/ with the scratch of one pen. / it begins with the smell of death dying/ with people of all sizes in every epoch/ shouting from the grave”.
Antjie Krog, in the extract from “Country of grief and grace” which opens this anthology, believes the identity of the entire country widened as a result of the Commission, since it allowed for the emergence of hidden, unspeakable apartheid-era stories, spoken by voices “baptised in syllables of blood and belonging”. One section of her poem concludes with the line “This country belongs to the voices who live in it”, and it is bearing in mind this perception of the conflictual emergence of multiple voices that I have chosen 1996 as the starting point for In the Heat of Shadows .
A political conversation runs through these pages, from Krog’s overture, through Karen Press’s reference to one ex-political prisoner who came before the Commission (“Do you love yourself like this”) to Ingrid de Kok’s interrogations concerning that same man’s torturer (“What kind of man?”). The conversation takes on a broader tone of disenchantment in Vonani Bila’s “In the name of Amandla”, Rustum Kozain’s “Comrades”, Kelwyn Sole’s “This is not autumn” and Jim Pascual Agustin’s “People who live with lions”, all published in the years following Mandela’s resignation from power, touching in one way or another on the “vast regions of my country/ rolled around their ulcer and their pain” as Kozain puts it in “Death”.
More specifically, in “Our president”, Rosamund Stanford expresses the unease and distrust surrounding Jacob Zuma today, while Vonani Bila in “Baba Mandela” and Karen Press in the extract from “Praise poem: I saw you coming towards me” express despair at Mandela’s political actions as a retired old man. I should add that I have resisted the temptation to include here any of the rising number of poems written on Mandela’s death, most of them shying away from acceptance of his human fallibility and revealing instead a need to elevate him to the level of a demigod; a need perhaps equal and opposite to the depths of difficulty prevailing in the country he once led. Not that the political vision suggested in this anthology is unequivocally negative. Keorapetse Kgositsile (quoting Abdellatif Laabi) remounts “the curve of evil times/ to unearth my anchored memory” (“Renaissance”), while Jeremy Cronin maintains a sense of hope despite the “slant-wise” ironies of “End of the century – which is why wipers”.
The poems I have mentioned show the poet as pulse-taker, messenger and critic, a role which was perceived to be fundamental at the time of apartheid when so many political voices were gagged. This role belongs to a tradition stretching back long before 1948 to poets as diverse as Thomas Pringle, SEK Mqhayi, NP van Wyk Louw and generation upon generation of iimbongi who have acted as intermediaries between the people and their leaders.
Most contributors to In the Heat of Shadows who have taken on such a role today make it implicitly or explicitly clear that those they wish to address have disappointed them. The high hopes for post-apartheid Sou