examination of how identity is created within, and maintained by, given cultural ... The envisaged new society can only be fully realised if each constituent ... culture. Culture can be defined as a symbolic system that mediates and regulates ..... Black South African Literature in English (1983), Chapman's South African English.
Chapter 1 Identity and Culture Identity and culture have become the major socio-political issues occupying centre stage in literary, political, social, and even economic discourses. Cultural identity is a rapidly expanding field of study and research devoted primarily to the examination of how identity is created within, and maintained by, given cultural contexts. In a South Africa characterised by a diversity of languages and cultures, a country with a history of racial tensions, political discontent and social inequalities, a country that is still trying to articulate its identity and define its role both within the context of the African continent and within global society at large, questions of identity and culture have become, more than ever before, as pertinent as they are contentious. At issue is the relationship between identity and culture within the social reality of South Africa’s diversity, and the relationship between cultural identity and racial and/or political configurations. In terms of this study, a concomitant issue is how cultural identity relates to South Africa’s literary landscape and how, more specifically, identity is articulated in contemporary South African poetry. By contemporary South African poetry is meant, within the context of this study, poetry that continues to address the immediate concerns of our time and not current poetry. This chapter will explore the concepts of identity and culture, show their inter-relatedness, and illustrate how cultural identity is articulated within the ambit of contemporary South African poetry. 1
Within the context of South Africa’s diversity, the question of identity has always been problematic. Central to the problematic of identity is whether, in the context of South Africa’s history of racial polarisation, political intolerance, social inequality, and ideological divisions, the binary opposition of black and white adequately defines the concept.
At issue is the manner in which identity
articulates itself in relation to the other, bearing in mind Hall’s contention that identity has to “go through the eye of the needle of the other before it can construct itself” (1996a: 28).
Hall’s contention has serious and far-reaching
implications for the understanding of identity because it opens up the space for a number of interesting points pertinent to identity, identification, and identity formation. It gives credence to the notion of identity being strategic and positional, something that is never fixed in form, thereby recognising that identity is largely provisional, determined by and dependent upon the context within which it is articulated. The implication is that identity is constituted on the basis of shared characteristics and symbolic representations such as languages and cultural values in relation to other groups with different symbolic representations. Its provisional nature makes it adaptable and amenable to markers such as black, South African, Tshivenda-speaking, cosmopolitan and citizen-of-the-world. Each of these identity markers point to the hybridity that characterises modernity. This opens up an avenue, particularly within the context of South Africa’s diverse linguistic and cultural communities, for ethnic identities based upon differences in
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language, traditions and values. Flowing from this is the very pertinent question of what might constitute a truly South African national identity, a question that has sparked intense debate within various social, political and literary communities in South Africa. The debate is largely predicated on the perceived need to construct a functional definition of nationhood.
The envisaged new society can only be fully realised if each constituent component of South Africa’s heterogeneous community is in a position to contribute its history to the formation of a new national identity. Within the everchanging context of South Africa’s transitional socio-political discourse, popular concepts are created in the process of trying to harness a sense of nationhood. One such concept is that of South Africa being a “Rainbow Nation”. The symbolism of the rainbow imagery lies in the fact that South Africa is a nation with many constituent parts, and that despite their differences South Africans need to work together in order to make national identity a reality. The implication of this is that different cultural and linguistic entities retain their identities but that these identities are located in provisional relation to a national identity. The desired effect of the use of the rainbow imagery is the advancement of a feeling of pride in being South African and the psychological orientation of South Africans towards a spirit of new patriotism, leading to a recognition of the importance of unity in diversity. The resultant effect is not only the elimination of the binary opposition between black and white, rich and poor, rural and cosmopolitan forms of identity, 3
but also the ushering in of an awareness that, in their own right, these provisional forms of identity have a mutually interdependent role to play in the negotiation of national identity and, furthermore, help towards the forging of a new sense of South Africanness within the continental and global contexts. Within these contexts, the self no longer functions in isolation, but attains a heightened sense of consciousness by being in a constant dialogue with others, in a continuous process of dialogism that sees identity as mediated when subjects are reflected and refracted by those surrounding them. This conception of identity resonates with Hall’s examination of G.H. Mead and C.H. Cooley’s interactive conception of identity, in which
identity is formed in the “interaction” between self and society. The subject still has an inner core or essence that is the real me, but this is formed and modified in the continuous dialogue with the cultural worlds “outside” and the identities which they offer. (1996b: 275) It is important to understand that identity is negotiated out of a particular historical set of circumstances within a given discursive context. Against this background, identity emerges as being more than just a symbol of an “identical, naturally-constructed unity” (Hall 1996a: 4). Identity arises from historically determined expedients such as culture and language in the process of unfolding.
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It is about who a particular group of a people are, where they come from, what they may become, how they are represented, and how they represent themselves. Identity is constructed within and against this realm of representation. It is about sameness and difference, and concerns processes of identification, that is, expressions of intellectual, emotional and spiritual connection of one to the another within a relational system. As Hall rightly maintains, identity is
constructed on the back of a recognition of some common origin or shared characteristics with another person and / or group, or with an ideal, and with the natural closure of solidarity and allegiance established on this foundation. (1996a: 2)
Identity implicates identification, with the latter being a continuous discursive process that is never completed.
The interplay between identity and identification raises a number of important questions. The questions that arise are whether identity can, within the South African context, be essentialised through legislation, and whether in practice the concept of a national identity is a viable and necessary ideal, given the migratory and cosmopolitan tendencies obtaining within the country as well as constitutional attempts at “protecting” individual ethnic and cultural rights of the different 5
groups of South Africa’s diverse peoples. Questions also arise around the persistent opposition between black and white, African identity and European identity. The opposition occurs within a colonialist discursive construct where European identity is considered superior, suzerain, and the quintessence of excellence, while African identity is viewed as epitomising inferiority, ineptitude and decline. For the ideal of an inclusive and all-embracing national identity to be achieved, there is a need to shed forms of discursive constructs that act as an encumbrance to identification with country and continent. Identity and culture within the South African and African contexts should not be seen in terms of the Europe versus Africa construct, but should rather be based on a common pursuit of shared values and national ideals that help in defining and representing a people. This brings into the equation the question of culture.
In so far as identity concerns issues of language, tradition, and values, it concerns culture. Culture can be defined as a symbolic system that mediates and regulates belief systems and relationships. It can be seen as an unfinished presentation of meaning. As Bhabha contends, culture reaches out
to create a symbolic textuality, to give the alienating everyday an aura of selfhood, a promise of pleasure. (1994: 172)
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From Bhabha’s contention arises questions of how the notion of identity should be conceived and understood, and, particularly against the background of the poetry to be examined, whether it should be essentialised into any one category that excludes possibilities of diversity. Flowing from this is the need to examine the frameworks within which identity is operationalised to understand better how it is related to the concept of culture. Within this context it becomes important to factor in Scott’s contention that identity be taken as
the referential sign of a fixed set of customs, practices and meanings, as enduring heritage, a readily identifiable sociological category, a set of shared traits and / or experiences. (1995: 5)
Scott’s conception of identity echoes Hall’s understanding of what identity entails. It is against this background that an attempt will be made, in the subsequent chapters of this study, to explore how South African poets conceive and articulate identity in their poetry. It is thus germane at this point to highlight a number of positions available to theorists of cultural identity.
The past two decades have seen the concept of cultural identity receiving close attention from academics in the fields of Literary Criticism, Sociology, Psychology and Political Studies. The common denominator amongst these fields of study is the attempt to conceptualise cultural identity and thereby provide an analytical 7
frame of reference within which individuals and societies can define themselves. While the conceptualisation of cultural identity is central to these fields, it is also important to point out that each field has its own unique manner of articulating identity,
influenced not only by theoretical imperatives but also by historical
particularities
and the political power dynamics at play in any given moment.
Within these contexts theorists take the peculiarities of their circumstances and use these as tools to help analyse their identity. Accordingly, it is important also to pay attention to the role of colonialism in the construction of cultural identity. As Raditlhalo cogently argues,
colonialism caused so many distortions in the history of African societies that [these] contemporary societies cannot divest themselves of foundations of inequality by attempting to avoid the unpalatable past… [C]olonialism worked primarily on the process of a constructed “Other” to differentiate its victims from Us, that is, through a process of differentiation and thus identification. (2002: 38) It is against this background that calls made by theorists such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o for a “return to the roots” need to be seen. The implication of this return includes the total rejection of any traces of colonial culture and traditions in the quest to forge what wa Thiong’o calls an authentic Kenyan (African) cultural
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regeneration, national pride and dignity. Instead of accommodating difference as a starting point towards the forging of a new culture, wa Thiong’o sees culture and identity within the binary construct of the coloniser and the colonised, the oppressed and the oppressor, the self and the other. Within this approach there is no space for both the coloniser and the colonised to interact as equals in the construction of new forms of provisional identities that acknowledge difference as an essential component in the articulation of a common humanity. To buttress his point, wa Thiong’o quotes elaborately from Mutahi’s unpublished paper in which the writer, in his explication of the complex nature of colonialism’s quest for othering, avers:
The teaching of English to Africans must be seen as a process of safeguarding European interests in Kenya. This was to be done by making sure that these Africans had the same views and culture as their colonial masters. (1992: 61) While wa Thiong’o’s views on the need for a “return to the roots” are essentialist, it is important to understand the context within which they are made. It is a context in which colonialism was presenting itself as universalist and perpetuating the notion that “imitation of the Western model by all peoples is the only solution to the challenges of our time” (1993: xvi). It is, furthermore, important to highlight that wa Thiong’o’s assertions are made against the background of his call
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for the retention of a distinct identity for Kenya’s indigenous people, in the hope that this would unite them in their quest to destroy the remnants of an imposed cultural identity of “otherness”. By using the material predicates of history and culture, wa Thiong’o believes, society can construct, and ultimately articulate, alternative identities in resistance to a hegemonic neo-colonial system.
Wa
Thiong’o’s conviction is located in the understanding that it is necessary to reclaim an African identity in order to oppose European colonialism. That, in essence, “Eurocentrism is most dangerous to the self-confidence of Third World people when it becomes internalised in their intellectual conception of the universe” (xvii) as it aims, amongst other things, at the diminution of their cultural identity. Stripped of identity, it becomes impossible for Africans to know themselves either as cultural or political beings because their cultures and history have been mutilated and / or eroded.
Arising from this is a belief that, in order to give
content to their society’s image, Africans have to determine and define their own sense of self and cultural identity since culture is “a repository of all the values that have been evolved by the different social strata in that society over time” (xv). While there can be no denying the problematics that arise from the deeply essentialist paradigm that undergirds this approach to cultural identity, it is equally important to understand that within the context of struggle for national emancipation and cultural “freedoms”, cultural and ethnic identities are aggregated in the quest for self-definition.
In this quest societies attempt to
reverse the cultural and mental subjugation that was a concomitant part of 10
colonialism. It is important to understand this point of departure as it offers an opportunity to understand that the struggle, within this context, is one that revolves around identities that are either denied and / or enforced. In the end one realises that this is a struggle in which society fights to disentangle itself from the colonial identity of “otherness” in its attempt to (re)construct an identity that resonates with its precolonial historical patterns.
Appiah, however, warns against the essentialisation of identity on the narrow basis of sharing what he calls “a common group history” (1992: 32). In his critique of Du Bois’ conception of identity, Appiah illustrates the futility of a binary construct of racial identity where moral and metaphysical significances are assigned to a specific racial group at the expense of the other. The danger of adopting such an approach, Appiah further argues, lies in the fact that it opens up a space for the appropriation of difference and elevates it almost to a biological fetish. What one infers from the foregoing argument is that in dealing with issues of identity, it is important to understand that differences in
“language, moral
affections, aesthetic attitudes, or political ideology – those differences that most deeply affect us in our dealing with each other” (35) are not products of biological determinism, but should rather be seen as instances which illustrate that identities are provisional and multifaceted. The implication of the above is that identities should not, a result of some convenient issues of political and racial expediency, be forced upon individuals and / or groups. Furthermore, there is an inherent 11
warning echoed in Appiah’s call for the removal of identity from the narrow confines of very limiting racial categories.
Mouffe problematises the question of identity by locating it in a political context within which there is competition between the conceptualisation of identity in respect of the individuals and in respect of the citizens. The challenge, Mouffe contends, lies in trying to ensure that such a conception does not sacrifice the one to the other. There is a need to ensure that belonging to different communities of values, language and culture should manifest in a manner that is “compatible with our common belonging to a political community whose rules we have to accept” (1995: 34). What seems to be a solution to these vexing challenges is to envisage a sense of commonality that not only accepts practical differences, but also goes further to respect such diversity and open a space for different forms of articulating individual identity. The concept of identity necessarily invokes similarity and difference. It involves a form of cultural engagement that allows for the
representation
of
sameness
within
the
context
of
otherness.
Acknowledgement of similarity and difference opens up space for a multicultural perspective and creates a terrain of analysis in which the essentialisation of culture and difference can be avoided. This understanding makes possible the emergence of the envisaged nation in which the very idea of a national identity symbiotically exists with the concept of heterogeneous cultural identities. It illustrates, furthermore, how social relations and identities are always constructed 12
through what Mouffe calls “asymmetrical forms of power” (44), which, of course, problematises the notion of a harmonious or unitary national identity.
The question of identity, as has already been shown in the discussion above, can never be operational without a context. Such a context is culture. In attempting to define what culture is Wallerstein starts by pointing out the inherently paradoxical nature and character of culture. This paradox manifests itself in the bipolar interplay between culture’s particularistic as well as its universalistic points of reference. He sees culture as a
set of values or practices of some part smaller than some whole. This is true whether one is using culture in the anthropological sense to mean the values and / or the practices of one group as opposed to any group at the same level of discourse or whether one is using culture in the belles-lettres sense to mean the “higher” rather than the “baser” values and / or practices within any group, a meaning which generally encompasses culture as representation, culture as the production of art-forms. (1991: 91)
Seen from either perspective, the point that one readily assents to is that culture encompasses, on the one hand, what and how some people do or feel about certain issues (as opposed to those who may not feel or do anything about the 13
same things). This is what is termed culture’s particularistic point of reference. On the other hand there is the recognition that cultural values and practices are validated when predicated against a universalistic matrix. Within this context, Wallerstein warns against the essentialisation of the values and practices of particular groups as this may lead to “an absolutely paralyzing cultural relativism (since the argument would hold equally for any other group’s values and / or practices) or to an absolutely murderous xenophobia (since no other group’s values and / or practices could be good and therefore could be tolerated)” (92). These assertions suggest that culture should never be thought of in terms of absolute diversity. Instead, diversity should include a certain correlation “between cultures”, what Bhabha calls “culture’s in-between” (1996: 53). The “in-betweenness” of culture has to be seen as important in the articulation of identity.
The aforesaid argument accentuates the centrality of culture in humanity’s desire to define itself in terms of identity. The argument, furthermore, shows that the concept of culture is open to various interpretations depending on a group’s or individual’s sociological and ideological orientation. In facilitating the sublimation of instinctual, often destructive, behaviour in pursuit of the intellectual, culture serves as a defence against barbarism. It removes human beings from their primordial form of existence characterised by the instinctual dominance for survival to a level where norms and values preponderate. It is anchored in a specific historicity that helps to give it both content and character. 14
Culture
emerges as a form of self-love and also love for the “other” - commitments which are ethical “in that the ‘inwardness’ of the subject is inhabited by the radical and anarchical reference to the ‘other’” (Bhabha 1996:58). Through cultural and communal knowledge, there is an exploration of an interpersonal reality that is negotiated within a social symbolic construct. The symbolic matrix of culture thus operates as a normative medium through which subjects, and therefore identities, are created.
Within the polarities of identity and culture are encompassed the polarities of inside and outside, self and other, personal and political, subjective and objective. Earlier on in this chapter an attempt was made to provide functional definitions of both identity and culture. What became clear was that identity operates under erasure. This implies that identity is never fixed, as its construction and articulation are contingent upon the context within which an individual finds him / herself, hence its strategic and positional nature. By contrast, culture is often regarded as fixed and stable, and as embodied in political abstractions such as traditions, values, practices and customs, all of which are harnessed to the political project of nationalism in the form of, for example, cultural nationalism. Where identity is more about the inward and subjective, culture emphasises the social and the other. It can be argued, however, that the polarities are not exclusive as culture is implicated in the articulation of identity. The polarities do not exclude culture as a field of subjective experience in which identities can be 15
operationalised. In other words, the relationship between identity and culture is mutually interpenetrative and dialectical.
In the light of the above, cultural identity should, therefore, never be forced to conform to any one particular construction since, as Hall contends, by its very nature it
recognises that, as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute “what we really are”; or rather – since history has intervened – “what we have become”. We cannot speak for very long, with exactness, about “one experience, one identity”, without acknowledging its other side. … Cultural identity, in this (second) sense, is a matter of “becoming” as well as of “being”. (1994: 394)
Hall’s contention reinforces the significance of recognising that cultural identities are not constructed and articulated in a vacuum since they do not transcend space, time and history. Cultural identities are subject to time and history and can thus never be permanently hung on an essentialised past as they are in a constant process of transformation. The interpenetrative and dialectical relationship between identity and culture makes national liberation and unity become constituent parts of cultural identity.
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The coexistence of a national unity and a cultural heterogeneity has far-reaching socio-political implications. In South Africa these implications are more evident when seen in relation to President Mbeki’s pluralistic vision of the ‘African’ encapsulated in his now famous speech, “I am an African”.
Mbeki’s vision is
important to the study of cultural identity for it encompasses unity in diversity. As Klopper contends, the speech projects a “consciousness that is both rooted in lived, historical experience and able to transcend this experience through the act of self-reflection” (1999: 4). In this act, the self is seen as reflected in the other in a relational process of national and cultural reconstruction. The vision, in which Mbeki projects himself as an offspring of South Africa’s different cultural groups, seeks to unite the people around a new form of national identity which moves away from defining identity only in terms of racial and / or cultural homogeneity. It is a vision that is not only socially significant but also of literary significance, because it helps lay a foundation for the creation of a new aesthetics, one that marks a departure from the racialised aesthetics of the past. The envisaged national identity factors in the historical reality of South Africa’s bitterly divided past en route to a new form of identification. It is a more inclusive form of identity that is contingent upon being born in and owing allegiance to South Africa in particular and Africa in general. Previously identity was interpreted as being dependent upon racial categories, ideological affiliations of class, and gender politics.
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Over the years, South African poetry has expressed, in various ways, the sociopolitical realities of the time, enabling a process of interaction between the personal and the public. Poets are engaged in poetic activity within multiple sets of circumstances. These circumstances have far-reaching effects on and implications for the type of poetry produced. A closer examination of South African poetry in English reveals diverse influences on the different poets. These influences, to a very large extent, reflect the complex nature of South Africa’s socio-political and economic make-up. Influences include not only positional influences consequent upon the material realities of everyday life, but also ideological influences such as, inter alia, Liberalism, Black Consciousness, Marxism, Nationalism and Feminism. These influences have implications for the poetry, though they are not simply reproduced as undigested systems of selfidentification. As a form of symbolic representation, poetry disrupts the linear approach of other forms of expression, through metaphors, symbols, syntax and other stylistic effects. Consequently, poetry provides an opportunity to disrupt pregiven identities in the hope of providing forms of identification more suited to actual human needs. In other words, poetry provides space for the articulation of identity within a dialectical context of self and other, personal and political. It is against this background that the present study will attempt to examine the manner in which South African poetry in English negotiates ethnic, cultural and gender differences in the creation and articulation of identity out of heterogeneous influences. The poets’ responses to these multiple circumstances of positionality 18
and ideology help shape their poetry and, to a large extent, influence content, style and tone. This, coupled with the individual vision, contributes to the shaping of identity.
The question of identity in South African poetry raises its own specific problems. Central to the problematic of identity is the very important need to define how identity is represented within the context of historical racial tensions, social inequalities, and political discontent. Flowing from this is the need to determine the manner in which identity presents the self in relation to the other within the ambit of what Hall contends is “a structured representation which only achieves its positive through the narrow eye of the negative” (1996a: 31). Hall’s assertion becomes significant when viewed against the dialectical opposites through which identity is constituted, in terms of a process where difference is not excluded but rather included as an integral part to the construction of identity. Seen in relation to the pluralistic vision of an African referred to earlier on in the discussion, Hall’s assertion is useful in conceptualising how South Africa’s linguistic, cultural, and political diversity may be accommodated, indicating identity’s non-dependence upon racial and / or political configurations.
South Africa is currently going through a process of socio-political and economic transformation that has also impacted on the country’s literary discourse. As a result, there is an urgent need to interrogate the manner in which these changes 19
have influenced, and continue to influence, the South African literary scene in general and poetry in particular as far as the articulation of identity is concerned. In the process of examining the articulation of identity, an analysis will have to be made of the aesthetics that runs through the poetry to be examined. Aesthetics, within the parameters of the study, will be used in the materialist sense to refer to the space in which the ideological and the cultural, the political and the literary collide: an arena in which issues of class, gender and nation intersect, interact, conflict and converge with those of style in an attempt to create space for, and articulate, a new cultural identity.
In the 1970s and 1980s South African poetry in English was generally appreciated and examined along racial, gender, class and political lines. Poetic studies had a propensity to aim at categorising and investigating the individual poet’s ideological inclination and framework of reference in an attempt to show the continuing interdependence between cultural ideology and poetic technique. Evidence of this are studies such as Adey’s Themes in South African English Poetry since the
second World War (1976), Attridge’s & Jolly’s Wrting South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 1970-1995, Barnett’s A Vision of Order: A Study of Black South African Literature in English (1983), Chapman's South African English Poetry: A Modern Perspective (1984); Southern African Literatures (1990) and The New Century of South African Poetry (2002), Couzens’s Politics and Black Poetry in South Africa (1978), Frielick’s Aesthetics and Resistance: Aspects of Mongane 20
Wally Serote’s Poetry (1990), Geertsema’s Power, Discourse and South African Resistance Literature (1990), Mzamane’s Black Consciousness Poetry in South Africa 1967-1980 (1983), Ndebele’s Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture (1991), Nemadzivhanani’s Artifice and Signification in South African Poetry (1991), Trump’s Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture of the 1970s and 1980s (1990) and Watt’s Black Writers from South Africa: Towards a Discourse of Liberation (1989), amongst others. An ideological wedge was formed between what was considered revolutionary poetic practice on the one hand and reactionary poetic practice on the other. Within this context, in which there was a wide chasm between revolutionary and reactionary poetic practice, the notion of aesthetics became invariably identified with the literary orthodoxy who, it was argued, simply desired to camouflage their ideological axioms in the guise of an impartial formalism. Within this context arose the need to revisit South Africa’s literary critical practice.
The fluidity of South Africa’s current socio-political context, with its diverse and more indeterminate nature and character, however, renders nugatory most of the pre-given assumptions about the concept of aesthetics and its influence in the construction, negotiation, and articulation of cultural identity. While the initial conception of aesthetics, within the binary opposition between revolutionary and reactionary poetic practice, had its value as such, and could even be justifiable within a social context in which political consciousness-raising was the sole aim, a 21
rapid change and shift in context has overtaken the notion in its original conception and it thus no longer carries the same connotations as it did in the past. It is in the light of the above that the conceptual tools offered by studies in cultural identity, which emphasise the ambiguous interfacing of subjectivity and society, the individual and the political, the self and other, inside and outside will be employed, since they provide a more nuanced method of investigation than was previously possible. Conceptual tools borrowed from studies in cultural identity will be employed to argue the fact that subject positions are dynamic processes typified by difference. As a result they are never internally consistent in their nature and character. The use of these approaches will further help provide evidence that a pluralistic vision of heterogeneity opens up space for a creative process for the promotion of cultural revitalisation, as will be evidenced in the analyses. This pluralistic vision further lays a meaningful foundation from which to read, appreciate, and examine contemporary South African poetry and ultimately understand it within the context of the articulation of cultural identity.
South African poetry is infused with a sense of urgency arising from a very particular set of conditions. As a result of these conditions, many poets have very specific goals in mind, amongst which is the desire to conscientise the audience / reader into an awareness of the social, cultural and political realities surrounding them. However, the diverse nature and character of South Africa’s socio-political, economic and cultural make-up presupposes that poets use different frames of 22
reference. It is these frames of reference that, together with what Ngara calls authorial and aesthetic ideologies (1990: 12), influence, shape and determine the type of poetry a particular poet produces. As a result, it becomes possible to establish a literary identity which characterises particular poets tied together by a common literary project. In this study, a critical analysis of a selection of the poetry of Stephen Gray, Don Mattera, Jeremy Cronin, Mi S’dumo Hlatshwayo, and Ingrid de Kok will be made to validate the thesis that the question of identity is a central concern of recent South African poets, particularly in respect of their desire for personal and social transformation; that identity is articulated in complex ways with various cultural discourses including, for purposes of the study, those of politics, history and aesthetics; and that the dialectical relationship between identity and culture is conceptualised and articulated in different ways by the bodies of poetry to be examined. Flowing from this the study will also explore the tension between the homogeneity and stability of a ‘national’ identity and the heterogeneity and indeterminacy of an identity in process.
The above poets have been selected for examination because their work not only reflects the socio-political, economic and linguistic diversity inherent in, and characteristic of, the larger South African body politic, but also because their work provides an opportunity to trace shifts that have occurred in the politics of identity over the past few decades. The study includes within its ambit Poetry of the Self, Black Consciousness Poetry, Poetry of Revolution, Worker Poetry and Feminist 23
Poetry, showing how all these bodies of work may be seen to engage, overtly or covertly, with questions of identity. It is important to point out from the onset that the above categories of poetry are not immutable realities but conceptual constructs that enable the researcher to analyse poetry from the perspective of the problematic of identity and culture within the context of a liberal-humanist, black consciousness, Marxist, workerist and feminist conception.
In examining Stephen Gray’s poetry under the rubric “Poetry of the Self”, the researcher hopes to show that the poet articulates identity from, and evinces a cultural slant towards, a liberal point of departure which can be traced back to South Africa’s colonial literary tradition. The poetry further shows evidence of alienation. This sense of alienation, encapsulated within the liberal-humanist stance that pervades the poetry, is indicative of the persona’s ambivalence about his place in South African society. The same, however, cannot be said of Don Mattera, whose poetry represents a poetic oeuvre that came to be known as “Black Consciousness Poetry”. This poetry draws deeply from South Africa’s political history as the persona attempts to articulate the Black Consciousness conception of cultural identity in order to illustrate that the rediscovery of black cultural values and the articulation of a unified black identity are essential to the construction and affirmation of a new sense of pride, a sense essential to the expression of a black identity hitherto marginalized through the process of racial othering. An examination of Jeremy Cronin’s poetry as an example of “The Poetry 24
of Revolution” will reveal that by committing himself to the emancipation of South African society, the persona chooses to articulate his identity within the context of a new country. Having chosen to embrace Marxist ideology, Cronin strives for an egalitarian society in which the rights of the proletariat are paramount. Through his poetry, Cronin deliberately undermines the status quo by consciously articulating new forms of culture and identities predicated on a belief in a prejudice-free South Africa where capital is used for national advancement and not only for the benefit of the few, the so-called captains of industry. Mi S’dumo Hlatshwayo’s poetry is examined under the rubric “Worker Poetry”. The analysis of his poetry illustrates that, by working from a materialist matrix, drawing deeply from the oral tradition and profoundly influenced by Christianity, worker poets recognise the importance of articulating their own sense of culture and identity within the context of South Africa’s struggle politics. By forging a workers’ identity within the broader context of South Africa’s socio-economic and political emancipation, worker poets also highlight the centrality of culture in the construction and articulation of newer forms of identity. An analysis of Ingrid de Kok’s poetry in the chapter entitled “Feminist Poetry” will present evidence validating the notion that in their quest to deal with feminist concerns, poets also overtly assert their identity in terms of gender. In doing this they also transcend the prescriptive limits of South Africa’s racial divide by calling for new gender solidarity amongst all women. By doing this, feminist poets move beyond the borders of racial othering by asserting their dignity and articulating identity as 25
women struggling to free themselves from the shackles of male dominance. It is important to indicate at this stage that by using the above categories one is not suggesting that the poets occupy only these fixed ideological positions. The categories are so used because, to a greater or lesser extent, these are the positions that inform the poetry to be examined in this study.
In attempting to understand the historical determinants of South African poetry, an overview will be made of different aesthetic and political imperatives which contributed to the different trends characteristic of contemporary South African poetry. This history is singularly important to the understanding of South African poetry as poems are better understood within their contexts. The poems will, therefore, be examined with the express purpose of understanding their themes and contexts so as to better appreciate their aesthetic and cultural function in the construction, negotiation and articulation of identity. It is extremely important to comprehend the contexts within which the different types of poetry to be examined are produced, primarily because these contexts have a direct bearing on style. As Ngara puts it, “We cannot study the style of a work of art in isolation from the circumstances in which it is produced [as] … form is social experience artistically recreated” (1990: 08). The implication of both Couzens’s and Ngara’s contentions is that the rediscovery of cultural values, the search for a new common morality, the restoration of individual dignity, and social transformation are all of central importance to the articulation of cultural identity within the 26
context of artistic creativity. The common denominator of the analyses will ultimately be found in the argument that the relationship between culture and identity is mediated by given values and beliefs. In terms of a literary vision of the future, this presupposes the need for an aesthetic practice that will take cognisance of the various inter-subjective and social complexities which go into the shaping of identity.
It is, finally, germane to point out that the South African situation, as highlighted in the discussion above, has always been one in which racial, historical, social, political and economic contestations have been central in the construction, articulation and fostering of identities. South Africa’s current quest to forge a united country, seen against the background of its strife-ridden past, can succeed if there is a continuous recognition of the importance of multiple identities in the forging of a united and liberated country. This study attempts to argue that, in view of the historical and multi-ethnic context of its society, South Africa, in its desire to (re)construct the meaning and content of the cultural identity it aspires to, has to take into cognisance the multiplicity of identities that drive its quest for a national identity.
It is in the light of the foregoing that the study examines the various paradigms that inform South African poetry’s approach to identity with the view to illustrating that, in the quest to articulate identity, it is important for the country in general, in 27
view of its multicultural context, to adopt a non-essentialist conception of cultural identity. Analyses in the subsequent chapters of this study attempt to approximate such an approach by examining both the context and aesthetic paradigms that influence each poet’s conception and articulation of cultural identity in his or her work. The study furthermore argues that poets, within the aforementioned contexts, seek socio-political liberation through a redefinition of cultural identity in their work. The non-essentialist approach serves the requirements of both South African society and South African poetry better because it creates an enabling avenue within which people from different cultural contexts articulate their identity. The mutually inclusive nature of this approach, furthermore, recognises the significance of both similarity and difference in the quest for socio-political emancipation, showing that identities and identification, as already highlighted earlier on in this discussion, are as much about difference as they are about similarity. Instead of seeing difference only in a narrow divisive and minimalist context, it is seen in a more inclusive sense wherein it denotes a sense of uniqueness that can be harnessed for the reconstruction of cultural identities liberated from denigration and polarity.
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Chapter 2 Poetry of the Self The different literary identities of contemporary South African poets are mirrored in a variety of stylistic modes as poets articulate the many and varied perspectives and experiences relating to South Africa’s social, political and economic landscape. As already pointed out in the previous chapter, the gamut of South African poetry ranges from the political to the social, from the individual to the communal, and from the objective to the subjective. South African English poetry is presented from disparate perspectives which, including commitment to or revolt against the socio-political establishment of the given epoch. The diversity characteristic of South Africa's literary and poetic production is equalled by the diversity of South African people themselves. Located within the many layers of South African poetry production is an intensely individualised type of poetry which, as Stephen Watson puts it, “deal [s] with those anxieties which are a common currency in the psychic life of South Africans” (1994: ix). This is poetry that seeks to present the South African reality from a deeply personal perspective. While it is problematic to pigeonhole this type of poetry and somewhat reductionist to put it into any one category, the concept “poetry of the self” is appropriated for the purposes of this study. It is, however, important to point out that the appropriation of such a concept is done, advisedly, to facilitate a logical discussion of this poetry and
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because of the proximity to the stylistic approach examined in this chapter, which includes, amongst others, techniques of alienation employed by the poet.
Alienation as a literary phenomenon can be looked at and interpreted from different perspectives. The concept of alienation is derived from the Latin “alienatio” which, as Geyer puts it, means “individual separation or estrangement of man from other men, from his country, or from the gods" (1976: 5). Johnson, in his explication of alienation, stresses the importance of separation or distance between two or more things as a defining characteristic of alienation. He further maintains that such separation is generally accompanied by anguish or tension. The resultant effects are feelings of “purposelessness, moral relativism, absurdity, loneliness, a perceived lack of control over one’s environment and a consequent awareness of the unsuitability of one's action” (1973: 4). In an attempt to analyse the poetry, this chapter will not, however, insist on any one of the above tendencies. What it hopes to do is to select appropriate parts of the above definitions of alienation to help elucidate the meaning conveyed in the poetry of Stephen Gray. The chapter further attempts to discover, through the analyses of certain poems from Gray’s Selected Poems 1960-92, the extent to which the “unsatisfactory conditions” (Gray 1994: x) created by the psychological Berlin Wall that was apartheid contributed towards alienating individuals both from themselves and society.
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In his introduction to Selected Poems 1960-92, Stephen Gray asserts: If asked to summarise what I feel my main preoccupations in poetry have been [up to this great divide], I would have to reply: love and apartheid. The interrelationship between the two has been my chief subject-matter (what else could it have been?). About this blessing-curse there is a limited amount to be said. (x)
The above assertion indicates the direction of Stephen Gray’s poetic output. It further has the effect of making the reader aware of the force that propels the poet into a particular mode of expression. The irony that inheres in the oxymoron “blessing-curse” lucidly describes and encapsulates the larger betrayal of, and irony that was, apartheid. It also demonstrates the contradictory dynamics that became the defining characteristic of apartheid South Africa. At yet another level it reveals the tyrannical limitations that apartheid imposed on poets in particular and artists in general, with the result that in one way or another poets and artists could not blind themselves to the harsh realities that the apartheid reality imposed even on South Africa’s national psyche. In the same introduction, Gray continues, “I have never felt myself at home with the givens of any particular historical moment as it has occurred in South African life, so my impulse has been to write against it” (x). Gray’s assertion buttresses the view that the experience of
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alienation focuses attention on the conflicting relationships between individuals and their social and historical conditions. It is as a result of this anxious sense of non-belonging that poets make an effort to extricate themselves from that sense of estrangement, which manifests itself in social, cultural and political terms, and that they write poetry which serves as both a personal expression as well as an attempt at self-redirection in an environment bedevilled by contradictions and incongruities.
Gray sees his duty as that of using his poetry to explore and
express alternatives to what he calls “unsatisfactory conditions” (x). The sense of alienation that runs through his poetry is, by and large, a reflection of the poet’s close proximity to South Africa’s colonial writing tradition. By evincing ambivalence about the South African situation and a sense of alienation in his poetry, the poet inevitably illustrates that he is unsure about his place within South African society. Within his poetry there is an obvious conflict between his sense of justice encapsulated by his liberal humanist outlook, and what he sees as his role in the exploration of alternatives to the apartheid status quo. Unlike poets of the revolution such as Cronin, who commits himself to the mass struggle for emancipation, Gray is more of an observer who catalogues, condemns and confirms the facts of the apartheid situation without actively agitating for an overhaul of the status quo.
To further understand the interacting dynamics at play in Gray’s poetry, it is equally important to understand the authorial and political ideologies that 32
permeate and underpin his poetry. Within the context of South Africa’s diverse ideological nomenclature, Gray’s work can be identified with that group of South Africans deeply rooted in and influenced by liberal humanism. Bidstrup defines a liberal humanist as follows:
someone who has recognized the shortcomings of religion, and has accepted the fallibility of reason. Who has accepted responsibility for his own value system. Who understands the frailties of human reason, but who, in spite of human limitations, is willing to forge ahead, and try to make the world a better place for himself and his family and neighbours, based on the best information available to him. Accepting that he won’t necessarily get it right on the first try. But someone who also knows he can’t necessarily get answers from God either. (1997:4)
Liberal humanism recognises the vital importance of morality as well as ethical standards for personal and social growth and happiness. It insists on moral standards being a product of rational design based on proven and provable sociological principles. It furthermore eschews religious suppositions and or superstitions, believing that being informed by science, inspired by art, and
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motivated by compassion, human beings are better equipped to deal with challenges they have to contend with in their day-to-day lives. Stripped of its linguistic niceties, liberal humanism can be described as system predicated on the affirmation of each human being’s dignity through the maximisation of
individual liberty and opportunity consonant with planetary and social responsibility. It advocates the extension of participatory democracy and the expansion of open society standing for human rights and social justice. (Bidstrup 1997: 4) Liberal humanism permeates Gray’s work as he, the poet, interacts with society in an attempt, as Hall puts it, to “bridge the gap between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ - between the personal and the public worlds” (Hall 1996b: 276). Gray’s authorial ideology provides him with an opportunity to align his subjective feelings with the objective place that he, as an individual, occupies within South Africa’s social and cultural worlds.
In view of the contention made above, it is important to understand the world which provides a context for Gray to deal with issues of cultural identity. As has been pointed out earlier in this study, South Africa is a country that is as diverse as its people are different. The country’s ethnic, cultural and religious diversity is equally mirrored by its ideological and political multiplicity. Within the many 34
political and ideological strands located in South Africa’s body politic is liberalism, a concept entrenched. according to Marquard, in three fundamental tenets. Liberalism is, first and foremost, predicated on the belief that since man is distinguished from other creatures through the gift of reason, it is reason that, despite countless instances to the contrary, always has to prevail. In the second place, liberals
believe in the integrity and worth of every single individual. Religious people would express this by saying that every individual is a child of God; and liberals who are not religious may derive their belief from humanism. But whatever its origin, the belief is fundamental to Liberalism. (Marquard 1965: 08).
The third tenet of liberalism is that each individual is born with an innate desire for freedom that never dies. This desire may, however, be ‘stifled’ and even ‘retarded’ because of other desires such as the desire for personal and economic security. This is important as it provides for a better understanding of the South African situation.
Until the dramatic changes that came as a result of, and in reaction to, the watershed speech by F.W. de Klerk in February 1990, South Africa had, over the years, been characterised by a political and social system engineered to 35
undermine and suppress the articulation of cultural identity by the majority of its people in favour of a Calvinistic Western cultural hegemony. Within this context arose a collision between those who identified with the rulers of the time in their attempt to enforce a system of government that had become universally despised, and those who strongly believed in the worth of the individual and his or her concomitant freedoms. The polarity between the two groups was not confined to politics but permeated all aspects of life and manifested itself in the continued “othering” of black people and the general loss of civil liberties. Within this context the country’s people became increasingly divided along racial, cultural, political, ideological, ethnic and even tribal lines. In the light of this liberal humanists became even more determined to fight for the protection of individual rights and freedoms. The thrust of their struggle was to ensure that human beings were freed from a way of life generally dictated by the church and/or a system imposed by the state functionaries. Liberal humanists further believed the individual to be the site of meaning even if, in the light of the South African scenario, such a meaning appeared to be a Kafka-esque nightmare from which individuals struggle to awake.
Liberal humanists assert the centrality of individual freedom and liberty in the articulation of their conception of cultural identity. Through their deliberate focus on the worth of the individual irrespective of race and creed, and the protection of civil liberties, liberal humanists within the South African context united against, 36
and hoped to present an oppositional united front to the centralisation of race and ethnicity, to the exclusion of other markers, in the articulation of cultural identity. It thus becomes obvious that liberal humanism, within the context of a deeply polarised country, attempted to present an alternative ideology to apartheid for the construction and articulation of cultural identity, an ideology predicated on equality before the law and individual liberty for all, something that did not endear liberal humanists in general to the apartheid establishment. Furthermore, and in consonance with the principle of individual freedom, liberal humanists attempted to usher in an environment in which all South Africans could freely express their sense of cultural identity without having to contend with labels that were created to perpetuate the denigration of a particular group’s identity by means of racially biased appellations such as ‘non-white’ and ‘non-European’. In the final analysis liberals and humanists alike became identified through their support for those organisations that were honestly publicising facts about the possibility of an interracial society. But this was not easy since South Africa “had been under the heel of an overwhelming ‘nationalism’ that sought to intimidate and pour scorn on liberals as ineffectual, sentimental ‘idealists’ or denounce them as dangerous” (Marquard, 1965: 53). However, this did not dampen their spirits for theirs was a principled path of faith, courage and conviction based on what was perceived to be the great liberal traditions underpinning their cause.
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Early liberal humanist poetic activity in South Africa can be traced back to the days of Thomas Pringle who, through his sustained campaign against repressive colonial rule, achieved freedom of the press in South Africa. This poetic oeuvre was promoted in the works of poets such as, amongst others, Norman Clothier, Harry Brettell, Guy Butler, Roy Macnab, Alan Paton, Harold Goodwin, Patrick Cullinan, Peter Strauss and Stephen Gray. Their poetry, as Chapman contends,
is poetry which, in keeping with those conciliatory ideals traditionally associated with English intellectual life, broadly characterises a humane and reasonable speaking voice which dominates over image making. The tones are “familiar”, community-inspired; and while there is a willingness to criticise social authority, the poetry’s syntax, which is usually logically arranged, implies an underlying confidence in given moral and literary values. (1981: 16)
For the purposes of this study, analyses of Stephen Gray’s poetry will be made in an attempt to illustrate how the poet’s liberal humanist bias influences the diction, syntax, imagery and style of the poetry as he attempts to redefine his conception of cultural identity and, ultimately, attains a sense of physical, spiritual and mental liberation. In this context Gray’s poetry is selected to represent the “self” trend primarily because the personalised nature of its utterance exhibits a relatively protean mode of expression unalloyed by the dictates of social realism. It is poetry 38
that exhibits an enriching capacity to simultaneously appropriate private and public expressions, the conventional and the innovative, a poetry through which the poet enunciates his sense of freedom, peace and justice as well as his quest for a country in which individuals can freely articulate their identity.
Stephen Gray has had a varied career as an academic, critic, scholar, poet, novelist and dramatist. Born in Cape Town in 1941, he was educated at the Universities of Cape Town, Cambridge and Iowa, after which he taught in France before coming back to South Africa to teach English literature at Rand Afrikaans University, where he was also chairman of the English Department. He edited
Izwe as well as several anthologies of South African Poetry, short stories and plays. Gray’s seminal work Southern African Literature: An Introduction (1979) is a cultural-critical attempt at validating South African literature in English as a serious discipline in the study of English literature. His endeavour to redefine and reevaluate southern African archetypes is evident in publications such as Southern
African Prose Writers’ Territory (1973), his satirical novels Local Colour (1975), Visible People (1977) and Caltrop’s Desire (1980), as well as his collections of poetry such as The Assassination of Shaka (1974), It’s About Time (1974),
Hottentot Venus and Other Poems (1979), Love Poems, Hate Poems (1982), Apollo Café and Other Poems (1989), and Season of Violence (1992). Gray has also dramatised Herman Charles Bosman’s Cold Stone Jug (1982), an account of Bosman’s prison experience. Against the background of the above, it is quite 39
obvious that as a critic, literary historian, poet, novelist, playwright and editor, Gray is one of the most versatile and important exponents and advocates of South African literature in English today.
The poem “The Discovery” (p1), which, interestingly, is the first poem in the collection Selected Poems 1960-92, is significant in at least two ways. In the first instance the poem, in terms of progression, marks a linear point of departure that ends with the reader discovering the flawed thinking behind those who for a long time had styled themselves as pioneers who discovered the African continent. In the second instance the poem becomes a canvas on which the poet lays bare his ideas about, and interpretation of, the arrival of the Portuguese in the southern part of the African continent. Gray draws on history to portray and finally challenge the notion of Africa as a dark continent. Tongue-in-cheek, the persona presents a scenario about the Portuguese “discovery” of Africa. The title of the poem itself has a tinge of irony. When viewed against the rest of the poem, the title seems to suggest how gross the explorer’s arrogance is. One normally discovers what has never been seen or found by anyone else before. Thus, the use of the concept “discover” with regard to Africa is anomalous because there had always been people in Africa long before the Portuguese “discovery”. Without any pretension of rewriting history to suit his purposes, the poet simply points out an incontrovertible historical reality. This much comes out clearly in the second and third stanzas of the poem where the persona maintains: 40
We know how and why they came, and we know words like “piccanin”. But what caused them to feel Africa is dark? There are temples, the narrow-waisted tribes wear astonishing uniforms, their huts are painted weirdly, guinea-fowl and cranes have bright plumage, the leaves in the forest break up colour, even the rivers change entirely. Looked at superficially, the above stanzas are nothing more than an historical account of the unfolding of the colonial process, a depiction of the “discovery” of the African continent by explorers who set out from their own shores to venture into what was to them the unknown. A closer examination, however, reveals that the stanzas, and the poem at large, are more than just an historical account. The first three lines of the second stanza are significant in that they reveal the multilayered intent of the explorers. While the lines expose the expansionist endeavour that characterised the Portuguese exploration to seek for new outposts even in Africa, they simultaneously place the African continent within an oppositional relationship to Europe. The effects of this binary opposition result in a discourse of othering, which situates Africa as a “dark” antithesis of a “civilised” Europe. Darkness is thus used within a very narrow interpretative discourse of cultural marginalisation, with Africa’s identity only seen within the confines of a continent 41
peopled by allegedly inferior, primitive and witless beings worthy to be called “piccanin”. Through this deliberate process of othering, Africa is branded “dark”, “backward” and “savage”, to mention but some of the descriptive terms employed. In the end, this process of othering is used to justify the domination of a people considered intellectually and normatively “backward”. But the intent of this process of malicious othering is betrayed by the phrase, "We know how and why they came". The phrase essentially undermines whatever intellectual, social and political “justification” the Portuguese may have had in their expansionist quest. The persona further illustrates his consternation by portraying a situation in which it is patently clear that the Portuguese, who within this context represent Europe’s conquest of Africa, are motivated, not by some noble ideal of nurturing the “backward” "piccanin", but more by their greed for power and desire to be self-appointed overlords of the African continent. Hence the branding of Africa as “dark”. This is what makes the persona point out a number of very significant natural, cultural and structural phenomena that give expression to his puzzlement concerning the nomenclature of darkness.
In this way the poetic utterances no longer focus on the arrival of the explorers alone, but begin to illustrate the persona’s philosophy. The persona engages with the ways in which explorers exploit the idiom of language to construct an “othered” identity for the indigenous people through the use of the word “piccanin”. The word is used as a crucial determinant of the power relations 42
between the explorers and the indigenous people. The word is, furthermore, aimed at the diminution of the indigenous people’s identity so that the manner in which they interact with and relate to their location is severely compromised whilst at the same time it enhances the explorers’ sense of power and imagined cultural superiority. However, the whole situation is undermined by the persona’s assertion: “We know how and why they came, and we / know words like ‘piccanin’”. The assertion reveals the poet’s authorial ideology deeply anchored in the belief that all human beings are born free and equal and that social distinctions should only be founded if they are mutually beneficial and useful to all.
Furthermore, the persona employs irony to point out the opposition between the purported darkness of Africa and its colourful cultural tapestry. By taking trouble to give an elaborate account of Africa’s cultural and artistic richness, the persona negates the fallacious notion of Africa being a benighted continent. This the persona does by depicting the various facets of African life, evinced in his observation that “the narrow-waisted tribes / wear astonishing uniforms, their huts / are painted weirdly, guinea-fowl and cranes have bright plumage, the leaves in the forest break / up colour, even the rivers change entirely”. What is presented here is a uniquely intriguing and intricate system within which people practise their own culture and beliefs. The persona bemoans the fact that those
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who desire to further their colonialist dogma deliberately ignore these intricate systems.
As if further to prove that colonial discourse is peppered with contradictions, the persona concludes the poem by making the following observation:
Once a painter arrived, and although his skin was pale, he tanned himself, bought an old car, drove everywhere to show that Africa isn’t dark.
In the above stanza a number of interesting observations are made regarding the role played by individuals, as represented by the painter, within this debilitating racial discourse that sets out to marginalize the continent and its people. The persona, through the painter, illustrates to the reader that the obsession with the concept of Africa being dark is nothing more than political hypocrisy, a perception that is heavily clouded by the negativism of political othering and the Manichean machination of racial essentialisation. This becomes evident when the persona presents a scenario where a painter tans himself and goes about the continent showing that Africa is not dark. The act by the painter symbolically signifies the action of one who, despite having his ancestry within the dominant group which attempts to perpetuate its notions of racial superiority, deliberately chooses to identify himself with the continent. By so doing, the painter reverses the general 44
norms which characterise white society’s belief in its own superiority over the perceived inferiority of blacks and their “dark” continent. The stanza, furthermore, brings an ironic twist to the situation by showing the painter tanning himself. This ironic treatment of the painter is a stylistic device by the poet to illustrate the painter’s desire to belong by means of identification with the indigenous populace. In this way the poet holds up to scrutiny the whole idea of identity being provisional. By focusing on an apparently individual outlook to a “simple” story of “discovery”, Gray highlights, in a politically unobtrusive manner, the importance of the process of othering in the construction and articulation of any form of identity, individual and / or collective.
What emerges is the realisation that the articulation of identity, either individual or collective, has to be coterminous with, and predicated upon, the integrity and worth of every single human being. Throughout the poem there is an audible voice that calls for reason and, subsequently, urges the explorers to realise that to survive on the African continent, they will need to shed their adherence to notions of cultural superiority and replace these with an approach that allows for difference as it recognises that such acceptance breeds a context that guarantees civil liberty.
The painter in the poem represents those conscientious compatriots who contribute towards the redefinition of the African continent, the reconstruction of 45
its mutilated identity and of the way in which it should be perceived. Of interest is the manner in which the poet / painter successfully accomplishes this objective using subdued and measured tones without sliding into sheer sloganeering. Through his skilful use of a lyrical style, the poet asserts the significance of recognising and accepting diversity as an essential building block of life in the African continent.
In a very subtle but skilful style, the poet uses a historical
occurrence to make his pronouncement and assert his understanding of identity within the context of the African continent. The poem further reveals that the poet’s project is to contribute towards the suturing, and ultimately the reconstruction, of an African identity that had been mutilated over the years through a deliberate process of Western cultural expansionism, manifesting itself historically through the malicious othering of the continent as “dark”. In so doing, the poet transgresses the ideological boundaries and psychological walls that colonialism and, later, apartheid had imposed on both the cultural and political discourses of the epoch. Equally interesting in the poem is the manner in which the poet describes the “Portuguese” and their accoutrements. They are said to have “had beards in those days”, their “ships and spinnakers pulling South”, with “keels and crosses built of wood”, whilst “their hands were held somehow”. This detailed description is meant to evoke a vivid picture in the mind of the reader of a group that was ready to conquer the “dark” continent. The description simultaneously becomes ironic in that the explorers, represented in later history by the painter, ultimately change their appearance and thus identity once they are in 46
the continent. This change is remarkable as it is a threshold that marks the beginning of a process through which the Portuguese recognise the rich cultural tapestry of the continent. In so doing the poet accentuates the opposition between the purported darkness of Africa and its colourful cultures, in the description of the African setting in the second and third stanzas of the poem.
The colourful ambience inherent in the description of African cultures in “The Discovery” is taken to another level in the poem “Sunflower” (p2), which is richly endowed with metaphor. The poet employs the sunflower imagery as a metaphor for the larger betrayal encapsulated in South Africa’s troubled past. Furthermore, the poem is layered with images drawn from the huge tapestry of South Africa’s flora and fauna. The title of the poem, in its ordinary sense, carries positive connotations. Sunflowers are generally brightly coloured and tend to engender a sense of admiration on the part of the beholder. Besides being bright and attractive, the sunflower has life-sustaining qualities. It is from the sunflower that cooking oil and other culinary products are produced.
It is only when one peruses the poem in its entirety that one notices a number of discrepancies. The opening stanza starts with the adjective “poor”, which specifically refers to the flower. This immediately strikes one as being odd. One would have expected the stanza to open with more exquisite adjectives extolling
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the beauty and serenity of the sunflower. Not so in this case. The poem starts with an ominous tone as the persona remarks:
Poor sunflower, your neck so stretched and drooping to your feet can’t see the mossies can’t see your own glory reflected around sentenced to death dropping seed in plastic bags, it’s all over like the hanged man Pretoria Central Wednesday dawn.
One is immediately struck by the personification that is employed. The poet deliberately uses personification as a device to draw the readers closer to the subject of his discussion. The description of the sunflower is shrouded in the negativity of a “neck so stretched” that it is “drooping” to its feet. This suggests listlessness and lethargy. The sunflower is bereft of all energy. The use of “feet” is also remarkable for it further deepens the cryptic parallels encapsulated in the personification of the sunflower. The image that the personification conjures up is 48
contrasted with that of a person standing, feet firmly on the ground. In this instance the personification is employed in an antithetical manner to foreground the gruesome reality that is revealed in later stanzas.
The listlessness so pervasive in the first stanza of the poem finds further reinforcement in the second stanza where the sunflower is portrayed as not only being lethargic but also numbed to the extent of being oblivious to its surroundings. It has been so enfeebled that it “can’t see the mossies” and its “own / glory reflected around”. The image that these lines evoke is that of a plant that is wilting away to a painfully slow death. This compels the reader to become curious as well as being vigilant. The questions that arise under such circumstances are: Why the sunflower? Why doesn’t anyone do something to try to save it? It is in the penultimate stanza that an answer begins to emerge. The sunflower has been “sentenced to death / dropping seed in plastic / bags, it’s all over”. One cannot help but commiserate with the sunflower at this stage. Plastic bags are not natural: human beings artificially create them. The fact that they now contribute to the annihilation of the sunflower is indicative of their insidious quality. What emerges from all this is the reality that the death of the sunflower has been imposed not by nature but rather by means of an artificial process. Until now, the reader can safely assume that the poem is a lyrical narrative of the passing of a sunflower.
However, the last stanza brings in a totally different
reality that changes the complexion of the whole poem. The very localised 49
landscape depicted in the first two stanzas, with its typically South African ambience characterised by the use of “mossies” (sparrows), is dramatically disrupted and obliterated in the last stanza of the poem. The muteness of the sunflower as it wilts away stands in juxtaposition to the noise that a flight of sparrows makes. Compared to and contrasted with the rest of the poem, the last stanza of the poem essentially becomes a volte-face as the poet depicts
like the hanged man Pretoria Central Wednesday dawn. Initially the last stanza appears incongruous in relation to the rest of the poem because it appears to introduce a disjoined theme. However, careful scrutiny of the poem reveals that the last stanza, in essence, carries the central theme of the poem. The stanza that initially seems to be dislocated from the rest of the poem finds consonance through its connectedness to the first line of the third stanza which goes thus: “sentenced to death”. While the line introduces the readers to the reasons why the sunflower is wilting away, it further serves as a discourse connector that ties the third and fourth stanzas together. One realises that what began as an almost romantic observation of the wilting away of a sunflower expands to assume social and political significance.
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A cursory look at South Africa’s political landscape reveals that capital punishment was ruthlessly used as a tool to silence political discontent. While criminals were generally sent to the gallows for their nefarious activities, capital punishment was also used for political prisoners who had been jailed for their dissent against the ideology and apparatus of apartheid.
Thus the sunflower whose neck is “so
stretched and / drooping to your feet” transcends the ordinary to attain the political significance of martyrdom. The image of the sunflower with its neck “stretched and drooping” is significant because it symbolically represents “the hanged man” in “Pretoria Central”. The poet also skilfully uses omission as a technique to drive his point home. Pretoria Central prison was notorious as South Africa’s hanging capital until the moratorium that finally led to the outlawing of capital punishment in South Africa’s democratic order. Death row inmates, normally political prisoners, such as Solomon Mahlangu, were hanged at dawn on Wednesdays. The inherent irony in hanging at dawn escaped those who sanctioned these hangings. Dawn, in its metaphysical, romantic and literal senses, represents the beginning of a new day. It inspires hope for better things and engenders a sense of optimism. That people who were fighting for their right to self-determination should be hanged at dawn represented a particularly tragic travesty of justice.
It is worth noting that while the central message of Gray’s poetry is political, it is the manner in which such a message it is articulated that draws the reader’s 51
attention. The texture of the poem is skilfully wrought to ensure the maximum effect of the message communicated, a message that, in consonance with the muted tone of the poem, softly but persuasively calls for change. This is a message underlined by the poet’s deep conviction that the restriction of the personal freedom of some people gradually results in the restriction of the liberty of all, that indifference to the suppression of political expression and aspirations of any one group will, ultimately, induce an indifference to the rights of all. Such an attitude leads to a situation where difference is seen as a problem to be solved. In turn this leads to marginalisation of certain groups, resulting in cultural polarisation. Out of all this arises a discourse that engenders the suppression of “othered” cultural identities in favour of the dominant group’s cultural identity. By identifying with the marginalised other, the persona facilitates an imaginative expression of cultural identity, one that ultimately can only happen within an environment in which all South Africa’s people are free to negotiate and articulate their identity. Through imaginative identification transformed into socio-political change, South African society will ultimately be liberated from strife and gradually develop a new articulation of identity which will have little to do with race and creed but will rather be based on the acceptance of common values predicated on the recognition of the individual’s inalienable right to freedom and dignity. While this approach is patently political, the difference is that, whereas overt political protest poetry would have been loaded with jargon, Gray chooses metaphors and other poetic devices that are highly nuanced to add his voice to the many voices 52
that articulate their disaffection with South Africa’s socio-political conditions. His approach is markedly different from that adopted by committed poets, but his message is nonetheless equally effective. One cannot help but draw similarities between the poet's style and that of the painter in “The Discovery”. Gray draws from his vast experience as a literary practitioner to present a message that deals with the anxieties dominant within the psyche of South Africans. He does this in as unobtrusive a manner as possible, making use of a deeply nuanced style of presentation that is the hallmark of his literary identity.
Gray’s skilful use of metaphor finds further expression in “Zebra” (p2), a poem in which the persona extols the virtues and imposing beauty of the animal. It is interesting and worth noting that “Zebra” has links with Roy Campbell’s “The Zebras”, even tough in the earlier poem Gray plays differently upon the motif. The poem opens with a description of the animal and progresses to the different states, each of which represents a different level of action in the Zebra’s life:
Zebra has electric hair striped in black and white generates a striking kick integration on the hoof blowing off like dynamite holding more than he can bare
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there’s a stallion there’s a mare foaling how they breed overblown it makes you sick how they sow their stripy seed powerhouse you stay aloof Zebra Zebra gallop east west north especially south suck the air in with your mouth we need your type to settle here to crop the grass at least Looked at perfunctorily, the poem is nothing more than a description of a wild animal and its attributes. However, closer scrutiny of the poem reveals that the poem has another more nuanced layer of meaning which carries the central message of the poem, a message that also evinces the poet’s stylistic versatility as he oscillates between the personal and the public, the simple and the complex, in articulating his vision of a more open country that accommodates difference just like the stripes of the zebra that give it strength and character. There is in the poem an overriding symbolic significance attached to the zebra, particularly when seen in the light of South Africa’s multi-ethnic and diverse cultural context. The zebra transcends the ordinariness of being an animal to become a metaphor for
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what the ideal South Africa should be. Through it the poet articulates his vision of a new country cryptically encapsulated in the “black and white” stripes that generate “a striking kick / integration on the hoof”. The language used in the preceding quoted lines is resonant with the inherent power of unity. The black and white stripes that give the zebra its character symbolically refer to South Africa’s population groups.
While recent discourses tend to distinguish amongst the various shades of blackness, the notions of “black” and “white” have always been used as inclusive terms indicating the divide between oppressor and oppressed within the South African context. Out of this approach then arises the desire to see both groups symbolically united like the stripes of a zebra to give it its unique character. The inherent message is that all these colours are combinatively important as they glue together to give the animal its beauty. The corollary is that none of the colours is independently more important than the other. This is the poem’s central message, a message that reinforces Gray’s belief in the equality of all human beings irrespective of race or creed. Through this message the poet hopes to usher in a conceptual shift in the understanding and articulation of identity, a shift that agitates for a move away from essentialist forms of identity based on the binary opposition between black and white, African and European. What the poet does in this poem is to employ a deeply nuanced language to persuade the reader
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into realising that identity, cultural and otherwise, should not be conceived of in essentialist terms as its nature is highly strategic, provisional and positional.
The provisional and strategic nature of identity in the poem “Zebra” is encapsulated in the stanzas:
powerhouse you stay aloof Zebra Zebra gallop east west north especially south suck the air in with your mouth we need your type to settle here to crop the grass at least What these stanzas reveal is that the context within which the poem is written has not yet bred the goal envisaged in liberal-humanist terms. This is why the poet makes a clarion call to the zebra, which goes to the four cardinal points of the universe, to suck the air of freedom in with its mouth and come “ to settle here” where “we need your type” to “crop the grass at least”. What the persona alludes to is a sense of a South Africa that desperately needs the proverbial breath of fresh air to blow over it, a country open to all the world, thereby ushering in the dawn of an era in which there will be racial and cultural diversity and cooperation. In a sense, Gray’s call was prophetic because while it is true that South 56
Africa still has pockets of division and racial polarity, its people, black and white, are co-operating and working together to make the country a strong one economically, politically and socially by forging the unity symbolically represented by the black and white stripes of the zebra.
The desire to unite is predicated on the belief that, as highlighted in the last line of the last stanza of the poem, unity will “crop the grass at least”. This suggests movement forward, a movement that leads to greener grass on which the zebra shall graze. As pointed out earlier, the zebra becomes a symbolic representation of the country itself whilst the poem itself proffers ways in which South Africa can foster more united approaches to its social, economic, cultural as well as spiritual transformation, a transformation that factors in Hall’s injunction when he contends that identity is not
that “collective” or “true” self hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’ which a people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common and which can stabilize, fix or guarantee an unchanging “oneness” or cultural belongingness underlying all the other superficial differences. Identities are never unified and never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process 57
of change and transformation. (1996: 4) In the final analysis there can be no gainsaying that the poem “Zebra” is illustrative of Gray’s ability to use metaphor and cryptic language to enunciate an authorial ideology that adheres to the major tenets of liberal humanism. He uses these tenets as a base for both the articulation of cultural identity and for his vision of a South Africa liberated from its obsessive adherence to notions of race that at times were thinly disguised as culture.
Gray’s skilful employment of devices such irony and metaphor are equalled by his ability to draw from a wide spectrum of South Africa’s diverse experience to illustrate the tragic and conflictual conditions that prevailed at a particular historical moment. “Season of Violence” (p60) is a poem of anguish that captures the tragedy and political fatalism of the internecine violence that threatened to rend South Africa asunder in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is, furthermore, a poem which persuasively reveals that despite his attempt at using muted tones in articulating his disillusionment with South Africa’s political establishment, the poet does not avoid confronting the harsh realities that are visited upon the country through violence. The poem belongs to a group of poems published in a volume of the same title in 1992. Thus, in terms of chronology, it belongs to Gray’s later poems. In the poem the persona decries the violence that had caused South Africa to be a country at war with itself. Various political theses were postulated to 58
explain the intensification of violence, particularly in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The tone of the poem is prayer-like as the persona bemoans the fact that the cycle of violence does not seem to abate. This is the more evident when in the second and third stanzas of the poem the persona contends:
the air is cluttered with silent words can’t breathe for ascending petitions; not over yet; only begun; a derailment at Mariannhill; Sunday is another killer in South Africa; take a philosophical view: The cited stanzas are important in that they highlight to the reader the persona’s serious concern about the situation depicted as well as his standpoint. In articulating his revulsion of violence, Gray skilfully uses language also to accentuate his position as a liberal living in a country rent asunder by violence. It is this liberal voice that the poet employs, and the perspective from which he writes, that underlines his poetry. The word “cluttered” in the opening line of the second stanza, “the air is cluttered with silent words”, conveys a sense of untidiness and confusion. This initially strikes one as awkward until one realises that it is meant for the reader to realise that the “silent words” actually illustrate a deep sense of despair and utter disbelief on the part of the persona. What becomes obvious is that the disbelief is based on the realisation that hope for an 59
end to violence seems to be stillborn, particularly when predicated on the assertions made in the first stanza, which states that the season of violence
has not ended; was due to close; termination was fully announced prayer-day now throughout the nations …
It is important to point out at this stage that with the release of political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela and others in 1990, there had been hopes that violence would come to an abrupt end. It is, therefore, despair that engulfs the populace when it becomes obvious that the season of violence is not coming to an end. Violence, in these circumstances, only seems to beget more violence to the extent that the persona fears for the future of the country. Furthermore, the violence created a climate within which both the state and the warring factions were at each other’s throats. The resultant effect was that the state used its security forces to clamp down on any form of dissent and freedom of expression. While the curtailment of personal freedom was initially confined to the townships, primarily residential areas for black people, it ultimately permeated the rest of the country’s socio-political fabric to such an extent that, in the end, every person’s freedom was invaded. Consequently this gave the state the prerogative to use its ideological apparatus to assert and develop new forms of articulating identity. Within this context the government attempted to assuage the restive population 60
by constructing and articulating a “definition of nationhood based on social stability, Christianity, civilized standards, and the role of the market forces” (Greenstein 1998: 23). Instead of bringing the intended stability, this only worsened the situation.
The third stanza of the poem is an indictment of a society that for many years had tried to project itself as Christian. Sunday, which in the Christian calendar is a sacred day, has not only lost its religious significance, but has ironically turned into the direct opposite of what it should have been, a day of prayer and spiritual reflection. Instead it has become a day of mourning for victims of political violence which imbrue the day leaving it rancorous, all this in spite of attempts at forging peace. Peace that is represented by the image of a train that derails is vividly illustrated in the stanza by:
a derailment at Mariannhill; Sunday is another killer in South Africa; take a philosophical view: Petitions were generally forwarded to the police imploring them to stop the bloodshed which they surreptitiously fomented. Instead of facilitating the end of strife, the petitions ironically mark yet another beginning of the season of violence as is evident in the following:
the air is cluttered with silent words 61
can't breathe for ascending petitions; not over yet; only begun… The debilitating violence wreaks havoc in society and leaves individuals in a state of helplessness, despair and absolute dejection. The fragmentary nature of the utterances, emphasised by the semi-colons and dashes, as well as the flat tone of the poem, accentuate the despair and desolation referred to earlier. Individuals are trapped to the extent that they feebly attempt to adopt a philosophical view of the violence as it unleashes itself onto society, a violence that fragments not only the poetic voice but also the integrity of the persona himself.
In the fourth and fifth stanzas the persona entreats:
O Lord afford me detachment from those who want to but do not know how; bullets through the flesh fly easily
As Archbishop Tutu said Martin Luther King said: “those who live an eye for an eye end up blind people”. The persona has recognised the calamitous effects of violence on the nation’s psyche. His is an invocation for God’s mercy to grant him the courage and strength to press ahead and live his life to the full, to recover his fullness and 62
coherence, the all-consuming violence notwithstanding. However, his supplication for God’s assistance is undermined by the very violence he is trying to detach himself from, for, as he says, “bullets through flesh fly easily”, thus literally violating the integrity of the self. The persona is almost at his wit’s end. His attempt at trying to reason things out with his countrymen and women does not yield the desired result. The violence continues unabated despite his imploring his compatriots to heed the call made by Martin Luther King as quoted by Archbishop Tutu, that “those who live an eye / for an eye end up blind people”. This invocation of Martin Luther King’s statement is made in a futile attempt to conscientise South Africans to understand that in a war situation there is never a winner but that everybody is a loser.
The persona realises that the violence is so deeply embedded in the people’s psychosocial and political make-up that only God can restore sanity and order amongst them. This is cryptically encapsulated in the last line of the last stanza, where the persona cries out aloud, “help out now; Amen”. The cry for help is an admission that the persona realises the limitations imposed by human frailty in the quest for genuine lasting peace. Furthermore, the cry becomes a collective invocation by South Africans cognisant of the importance of peaceful co-existence irrespective of the diverse nature and character of people’s political, social, cultural and religious backgrounds and identities. In the final analysis, the call becomes an apotheosis of a vision that all South Africans need to rally around, a vision which, 63
within the Christian context of the poem, calls for a common humanity predicated on the understanding that the self’s humanity is contingent upon the recognition of the other’s humanity. Ultimately, such recognition leads to a better understanding of the interactive dynamics at play in the construction and articulation of personal, cultural and social identities.
It is germane to conclude this discussion by pointing out that while the vision of South Africa as a country, and the vision of its people’s articulation of a multicultural identity, encapsulated within the liberal humanist paradigm has generally engendered a sense of optimism for the future, it has not been without its critics. The main charge that is laid against liberal humanism, particularly during the days of struggle against apartheid, has been that the ideology sought to perpetuate white hegemony by diluting and ultimately appeasing the anger of the oppressed through its insistence on granting individual liberty. In some quarters liberal humanists were, and often still are, regarded with suspicion. This can be attributed to the fact that they were seen as people who wanted to maintain the status quo in that they were not ideologically radical enough. Furthermore, the fact that liberal humanism conceives of identity within the construct of the autonomous self and not, for example, in the collectivist sense of either class solidarity or as a form of struggle, means that it is seen as too individualistic to have made a serious impact in the fight against apartheid. Instead of mobilising solidarity against apartheid, it focused on the self as an individual, thus “affording” 64
the individual a critical “detachment” that was seen as a hindrance in the struggle against apartheid.
While one fully appreciates the foregoing sentiments, it is important also to point out that the liberal humanist conception of cultural identity, within the South African context, had a significant role to play in liberating those whites still afraid of extending freedom to all their countrymen and women. It has helped open their eyes to the realisation that their freedom would gradually be undermined if they continued to cling to narrow and exclusivist notions of identity and nationhood, that there can be no justification in the withholding of civil liberties from black South Africans on the simply basis that South African society is not homogeneous. In the final analysis, the contribution made by liberal humanists may be said to be their deliberate effort in helping free white South Africans from the Orwellian fear emanating from exclusive and isolationist fundamentalism that had become the hallmark of Afrikaner nationalism.
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Chapter 3 Black Consciousness Poetry The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a socio-political and literary revival contemporaneous with the rise of a movement towards a new form of consciousness in South Africa. This movement, whose influences can be traced to William E Du Bois, Marcus Garvey and the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, came to be known as the Black Consciousness Movement. It was essentially a movement that espoused black consciousness as its philosophy and was founded mainly by a new generation of black intellectuals and artists such as Stephen Biko, Onkgopotse Tiro, Farouk Asvat, James Matthews, Mongane Serote and Mafika Gwala, who believed that such a philosophy was a prerequisite for rethinking the role of politics within the context of South Africa’s liberation struggle. The main tenets of the Black Consciousness Movement were predicated on the firm understanding that the continued resignation of black people to racial stereotyping and domination could be located within what was perceived as a syndrome of pathological self-hatred amongst blacks, exemplified in Biko’s contention that
the black man in himself has developed a certain state of alienation, he rejects himself, precisely because he attaches the
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meaning to all that is good, in other words he associates good and equates good with white. This arises out of his living and it arises out of his development from childhood…. Now this is part of the roots of self-negation which our kids get even as they grow up. The homes are different … so you tend to begin to feel that there is something incomplete in your humanity, and that completeness goes with whiteness. This is carried through to adulthood when the black man has got to live and work. (1978: 105)
This syndrome had far-reaching social, economic and political implications, all of which had the effect of lowering the individual’s self-esteem. In addition, the syndrome tended to encourage black people’s perpetual dependence upon white patronage, thus buttressing the Manichean belief of the dominant race
that
they were by right the overlords of black people. Having been taught that Western values and culture are superior to the African ones, that African culture was barbaric and something to be ashamed of, blacks consequently aspired to imitate “white” culture which they saw as superior. This even translated into aesthetic concepts such as beauty of appearance, whereby African women used cosmetics to imitate white women’s appearance by using skin-lightening creams and hairstraightening devices because, as Biko explains,
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they believe that their natural state, which is a black state, is not synonymous with beauty and beauty can only be approximated by them if the skin was made as light as possible, and the lips are made as red as possible, and their nails are made as pink as possible. (104)
The Black Consciousness Movement encouraged a new awareness amongst the oppressed of a common identity that was to lead to renewed political commitment and socio-cultural reclamation. Proponents of the black consciousness philosophy, a philosophy encapsulated in the slogans “Black man, you are on your own” and “Black is beautiful”, emphasised the important role played by the oppressed people’s attitude towards their oppressors as well as encouraging their own desire to be free. As a result, black consciousness increasingly came to be seen (as Biko averred) as “an attitude of mind and a way of life” that aimed at the expression of “group pride and the determination of black people to rise and attain the envisaged self” (Wilson 1992: 50). This, it was argued, could be achieved only when black people themselves had come to recognise that the oppressor used the mind as a potent weapon of oppression. Cognisant of this, the Black Consciousness Movement aggressively developed a modus operandi whose aim was to enable the evolution and flourishing of liberatory ideas in order to give the oppressed masses a chance to voice their opinions. This opened up space within
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which the oppressed could vigorously renegotiate, reconstruct and reaffirm the articulation of their identity as a class of oppressed individuals. This process involved the reclamation of cultural values, the conceptualisation of a new and changed society, and the affirmation of a black identity necessary for the articulation of a broader sense of race pride. The affirmation was seen as part of the struggle for self-definition, a struggle which provided further evidence of the futility of imposing identities upon unwilling recipients. This is in line with Fanon’s standpoint that
the colonised man who writes for his people ought to use the past with the intention of open ing the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope. But to ensure that hope and to give it form, he must take part in action and throw himself body and soul into the national struggle. (1967a: 187)
Thus poets who became closely associated with the black consciousness era initiated a movement away from the protest tradition that had tended to direct its message towards those who wielded political, economic and social power over the oppressed. Poets recognised and acknowledged the need to direct their work towards the black community in an attempt to transform the consciousness of the oppressed and hopefully liberate them from self-negation and alienation. In
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response to the brutality and repression visited upon black people, writers began to focus their attention more on historical, artistic and cultural issues. As Mzamane rightly contends, black consciousness writers realised, more than any other group, “the essentially political importance of cultural struggle. Black Consciousness emphasised the educational function of cultural and artistic activity and exploited the political resources of art, theatre, music, dance and culture in general” (1992b: 185). Consequently, culture increasingly became central to the broader struggle for liberation. The struggle was no longer just about political and economic liberation, but had increasingly become a struggle for cultural reclamation and the restoration of black dignity.
Writing in an era characterised by an absence of models for emulation, as many prominent writers such as Es’kia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Dennis Brutus, Keorapetse Kgositsile and Mazisi Kunene had been banned and their works, therefore, were out of circulation, the black consciousness generation poets such as Mongane Serote, Mbuyiseni Mtshali, Sipho Sepamla and Mafika Gwala, amongst others, brought to their own poetry a freshness and energy that gave it a unique immediacy and vivid intimacy in addressing issues.
Against the background of apartheid repression, black consciousness poetry fostered the creation of a black identity which by its very nature undermined the ethnically constructed and racially based conception of blackness as defined in 70
apartheid terminology. The intention was to imbue the word “black” with a new sense of equality and dignity aimed at empowering blacks to feel proud of themselves as full human beings, which was in direct contrast to and in defiance of the spiritual, moral, psychological and political surrender that was expected of blacks by apartheid’s proponents. In the end it was inevitable that culture would become a means by which political aspirations and ideals for the creation of a new society were articulated. This approach was predicated upon the knowledge that while culture can be oppressive, it also has the capacity to empower previously dispossessed groups towards the reconstruction and articulation of new forms of identity.
Black consciousness adherents see culture and identity as a combination of signifying techniques and similarities of behaviour through which self-defining groups articulate their own sense of self. This process of signification accommodates the notion that distinctive qualities of culture are inherent in the different manner in which groups react and respond to the same environmental, socio-political and material conditions. Black consciousness poetry articulates the need for a re-awakened black cultural identity. A space is provided in which the interplay between the ideological and the literary, the individual and society, is made possible. Central to this, within the context of this poetry, is the desire for the creation of an environment within which cultural reclamation, the quest for a
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new morality, the reaffirmation of the individual’s dignity, and the recovery of a black group identity can be fostered.
Don Mattera, James Matthews and Mongane Wally Serote belong to a movement of black consciousness poets which includes such luminaries as Farouk Asvat, Ingoapele Madingoane, Mafika Mbuli, Mandlenkosi Langa, Fhazel Johennesse, Essop Patel, Christopher Van Wyk and Mafika Pascal Gwala. This movement rose to prominence in the 1970s and was concerned with the plight of black South Africans in general. Theirs was a poetry that not only set out to conscientise and champion the cause of black people, but also to project a new vision that questioned and challenged the racist ideology of apartheid and its state apparatus. Their poetry is characterised by a new attitude of confidence and assertiveness in challenging white supremacy. Furthermore, their poetry opens space within which to interrogate possibilities for a new social, economic and political approach to the restoration of black dignity and the creation of a new society. The initial aim of their poetry was to strip from the word “black” the negativity with which, within the context of apartheid, it had been imbued, and to inject the word with a new meaning resonant with the quest for freedom. The central objective was further to infuse the word with a new sense of equality and respect in order to engender an understanding that blackness is only a biological difference and not a political mistake. Racial difference should not be elevated to the status of a social or political fetish to be used for oppression. 72
The contradiction between the need for the construction of new forms of identity in a heterogeneous South Africa and the obvious essentialisation of identity inherent within black consciousness does not invalidate the project which black consciousness set for itself. Given the socio-political context, black consciousness created a necessary opposition to forms of identity imposed by colonialism and apartheid. The deliberate stripping away of the negativity that had hitherto always been associated with the word “black” was meant to highlight the need for common participation in a rapidly developing and transforming society. As a result of the historical burden of political emasculation and oppression imposed on black people, there was a need to seek alternative ways of life and to restore lost dignity by recovering and reclaiming cultural values that had been relegated to a status of lesser significance. In the words of Noel Chabane Manganyi:
black consciousness and solidarity [must] mean to us that we that we have to re-examine the forms assumed by personal and community relationships in our midst… [We] have the mutual knowledge about the assault on the sense of community that befell us. Our spirit of communalism was gradually eroded until we were left with individualism and its stable-mate materialism. Solidarity amongst other things means that we as a people have to share. This sharing is all-embracing since it involves not only the sharing of material things but also the sharing of suffering and the possible joys of being-black-in-the-world. (1973: 20) 73
Don Monnapula Lebakeng Mattera belongs to a group of people described in South Africa’s racially obsessed apartheid parlance as the “coloured” race. Mattera realised very early that South Africa’s puzzling set of definitions and labels for race groups was no more than a political construct meant to fragment people on the basis of their cultural practices and heritage. Cognisant of this, Mattera identified himself proudly as a black person, an African, because he understood that his identity as a person depended not on how the oppressive masters described him, but largely on the strong cultural and socio-political bonds of deeply shared meanings and other strong forms of identification within a group of people. The fact that his mother was a Motswana woman only buttressed his conviction of the need for group solidarity and unity amongst blacks. It further reinforced his sense of pride in being African, such pride being essential to the revival and recovery of cultural values and the shaping of a black identity. It is only when these issues are factored into the national psyche, Mattera suggests throughout his poetry and other creative works, that new forms of identification can be employed towards the reconstruction and articulation of a renewed South African identity. Mattera is also amongst the Black Consciousness poets whose poetic oeuvre withstood banning orders. These poets, who chose to remain in the country while others had gone into exile, remained steadfast in their consciousness-raising goal. Through their poetry they hoped to forge a sense of solidarity amongst the oppressed in a society that was bitterly divided. An examination of Mattera’s poetry helps in facilitating the exploration of the tension between the homogeneity and stability of 74
a ‘national’ identity and the heterogeneity and indeterminacy of identity in process, something that is central to this study.
Mattera’s commitment to the cause of black people permeates his creative oeuvre that has seen him publish several works including Two Poster Plays: Kagifo
Sechaba (1983), Exiles Within (1984), Memory is the Weapon (1987), The Storyteller (1991), and Five Magic Pebbles (1992). In 1994 Mattera republished Azanian Love Song, a collection of mainly lyrical poems, twenty-one years after it had first been published. One of the publicity notes on the back of the collection, attributed to The Horizon newspaper, describes the collection as “poetry which cries out from the depth of the heart and soul, complaining of man’s inhumanity to man; the pain of the orphan … of the phantom dreams of chained people, of Africa and its sons and daughters”. The publicity note accurately describes Mattera’s work, the muted tones of which evoke passion by moving the strings of the reader’s heart. The volume is, furthermore, significant in that it is, essentially, a collection that reflects a more flexible position within black consciousness. It is important at this stage to remind oneself that there is an essentialist streak that runs through black consciousness. This streak tends to see the articulation of cultural identity only in terms of black people without attempting to move away from that conception to a more accommodative stance. In a country that has a multiplicity of cultures this approach becomes problematic as it conceives of identity only within a binary construction of black versus white. While mindful of 75
the historical significance of this approach in the reconstruction of the political identity of black South Africans, an identity that had been denigrated and ethnically codified, and that had been relegated to the margins of cultural and social discourse, it is equally important to acknowledge that within the context of a more fluid socio-political environment such an approach remains inadequate in conveying the multiplicity of identity formations. The inadequacy becomes more profound when seen against the provisional nature of identity which transcends the narrow bounds of race. Furthermore, there is a need to recognise that the critical aspects of the transformation process, non-racialism and nation-building, need to be engaged with seriously and from a context that accommodates the multiple expression of cultures.
Mattera’s poetry draws deeply from South Africa’s divided past to express a vision and hope of a country liberated from fear, division and hatred. In the poem “Blood River” (p1), which is the first poem in Azanian Love Song (1994), Mattera uses a historical occurrence as a background for cataloguing the misery that black people were subjected to as a group. The poet skilfully plays on the meaning suggested by the title of the poem to drive home the fact of suffering. The title “Blood River” poignantly refers to the blood that flowed after it had been spilled in war, but also to an actual river so named because it came to represent the treachery and folly of war, particularly a war in which white Afrikaners believed they had been divinely mandated to subjugate black people. Stylistically, it is important to note 76
that the poem is not punctuated at all. This infuses the poem with a sense of flow and movement meant to heighten its conscientising effect on the reader about the severity of the pain visited upon black people. The reader visualises the speaker standing next to the banks of this “notorious” river reliving the experiences of previous generations. Against this background, it is even more striking that the poet relives these experiences only to juxtapose them, in the second stanza, to children’s experiences of baptism in the same river.
In the first stanza of the poem, the persona, in a very suggestive manner, persuades the reader to think back to the days of the battle of Blood River, hitherto known as Buffalo River, when a Boer commando defeated the Zulu army at Ncome (Swartland) in December 1838. Essentially, the reminiscence can never be positive for it revives memories of the massacre that took place. This is perhaps best illustrated when the persona declares:
Blood River Is redder than the setting sun in winter For it relives The dark lean years When a pact with God Was signed and sealed in Blood That the years referred to in the stanza are described as lean and dark is telling as one cannot but detect a ring of the biblical seven years of hunger in the statement 77
“dark lean years”. Biblical symbolism and analogies are often made within the context of the struggle for human dignity and freedom for black people in South Africa. When the poet further mentions the signing and sealing of a pact in blood with God, the history of the event is strongly evoked. The Afrikaners, the dominant and “victorious” group during the battle, elevated the battle of Blood River to a fetish of religious proportions. The battle also marked the hardening of attitudes between blacks and white Afrikaners, with whites believing that their victory had been divinely ordained. The day of the battle subsequently became a public holiday in the Apartheid Republic of South Africa, known as the “Day of the Covenant”. Black people saw the day as a watershed in the history of their oppression. They saw it as day in which they had to rededicate themselves to the struggle for freedom and the restoration of their dignity as a people. Needless to say, South Africa became racially polarised and divided into “white South Africa” and “black South Africa”, making any notion of unity in diversity and the construction of a unique South African identity practically impossible.
In the second stanza of the poem, the persona draws the reader back to the twentieth century where he observes the process of baptism in the very same river. A century or so after the actual battle had taken place the situation hardly looks promising. The children weep as they watch their fathers being baptised in the same water that represents the defeat of their ancestors. In terms of genealogy, the weeping of the children illustrates that the hurt of indignity and the 78
misery of oppression, metaphorically represented through the battle, continue from one generation to the next one. This makes possibilities for reconciliation even more difficult despite the fact that baptism symbolically marks a form of spiritual cleansing and emotional rebirth implied in the forgiveness of sin through Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. The irony of the situation is further reinforced in the second stanza in the lines:
Small wonder black children weep On the river banks When their fathers are baptised To the thumping of Ama-Zioni drums They too recall those lean years When the setting sun was not redder Than the River of Blood Which drowned the black man’s Liberty.
The “Ama-Zioni drums” should ordinarily carry a message of hope and a better future, for the word “Ama-Zioni” literally means the Zionists. In Christian parlance, Zion is a place of peace, tranquillity, freedom, equality and joy, qualities that are in short supply in the scenario portrayed in the poem. The answer to this is found later on in the same stanza when one realises that the river in which these “saints” are being baptised is bedevilled by a history of murder, plunder, betrayal, conquest and oppression. That the fathers are baptised in such a river is cause for concern to the children, who realise that they too seem destined for a future of 79
indignity, oppression and dehumanisation characteristic of the black man’s state after the loss of liberty. It is also worth noticing that “Liberty” is capitalised, further suggesting its centrality to the shaping and articulation of black identity. Flowing from this is the obvious significance of “Liberty” to the restoration of cultural values. The persona painfully sensitises readers to the possibility that violence may come as a result of South Africa’s racial polarisation. However, as a person who eschews violence, he is at pains to present the scenario in muted tones, for he hopes that a new understanding can still be found without resorting to violence.
Structurally, the poem is modelled in the form of a classical Petrarchan sonnet although it reverses the order of the octave and sestet. In “Blood River” the persona uses the first stanza, which is a sestet, to present his point of view and then employs the second stanza, an octave, in an attempt to answer the questions implied in the presentation of his point of view. The fact that the poem deviates from the traditional form of a Petrarchan sonnet is illustrative of Mattera’s attempt at breaking away from rigid traditionalism which, within the context of South Africa’s racially based political life, has seen black people suffering immeasurable pain. Through the poem the poet gradually evolves a defiant stance in line with the desire for cultural reclamation. He implies, through the poem, the very urgent need for the restoration of black dignity and pride, essential qualities for a reconciliation that will lead to a new vision: a vision that accepts and 80
acknowledges difference not as a problem that divides people and thus has to be overcome, but as a quality through which cultural groups can forge a better understanding leading to the formation of a more inclusive South African identity. The society that Mattera envisages for South Africa is one achieved without bloodshed, the background provided in the poem “Blood River” notwithstanding.
Mattera’s deep sense of the worth of humans, his generosity of spirit, his profound sense of fairness, the absence of aggressiveness in his heart, and his intense love for humanity in general are best encapsulated in the poem “Sea and Sand” (p85) in which he exhorts:
Sea and sand My love My land, God bless Africa Sea and sand My love My land God bless Africa But more the South of Africa Where we live Bless the angry mountains And the smiling hills Where the cool water spills To heal the earth’s brow 81
Bless the children of South Africa The white children And the black children But more the black children Who lost the sea and the sand That they may not lose love For the white children Whose fathers raped the land Sea and sand My love, my land God Bless Africa. The above poem is typical of Mattera’s poetry, which cries out from the depth of the heart of a person who is concerned about his country and petitions God, on behalf of his countrymen and women, to bless and protect the country before it is rent asunder and brought to ashes through hatred, anger and pain. His injunction for God to bless “more the South of Africa / where we live” and “more the black children / who lost the sea and the sand” accords with Bhabha’s contention that
the engine of social transformation is no longer [just] the aspiration to a democratic common culture but [has metamorphosed to the arena of] identity in which the attempt to memorialise lost time, and to reclaim lost territories, creates a culture of disparate interest groups or social movements. (1996: 59) 82
The poet recognises that cultural and racial affiliations have become historically antagonistic and carry within them the risk of socio-political polarisation between the “black children” and “white children”. Here the poet implicitly suggests a middle route, a departure from the radical and essentialist approach generally associated with Black Consciousness, which may hopefully help in creating a new form of socio-political and cultural commonality that has to be negotiated through, and as a result of, what Bhabha maintains is the “contingency of social, [historical and economic] interests and political claims” (59).
In essence the poet calls for a new approach to the racial and social problems that bedevil South Africa in the hope that this will help create an environment more conducive to peace and mutual acceptance. In the poem Mattera further implies that genuine “reconciliation” needs to be based on the recognition of historical truths and the validation of black people’s experiences of suffering at the hands of their white compatriots. Anything short of this, the poet seems to suggest, will result in the wounds of the past continuing to fester and further ripping the country and the continent apart. The poem thus reveals Mattera’s deep commitment to his country and its people. His vision is imbued with a fresh sense of a united country in which people recognise and acknowledge difference on the understanding that this leads to better co-operation in building a better country for all to live in. This is a kind of vision that accepts difference as an essential component of a common national project through shared identification. It allows 83
for an all-inclusive resignification of the past and a commitment to understanding the present which provides an opportunity for different cultural and / or ethnic groups to work through the present in order to build a better future. However, it is important to point out that such a vision of unity has to be premised on the restoration and reclamation of the dignity eroded when the black children “lost the sea and sand” as a result of the actions of the white children’s “fathers who raped the land”. This is Mattera’s bold declaration in which he delineates conditions that have to be fulfilled before God can continue to “bless Africa / Sea and sand / My love / My land”.
Mattera’s poetry does not, however, only focus on the tension-ridden and generally anxious black-white relationship. True to the philosophy of black consciousness, he moves further in a self-reflective and inward-moving process towards spiritual and psychological emancipation. Through his poetry, he also emphasises the need for black people to look at themselves and even at their own agency in the process of oppression. The poetry skilfully calls for a revival of black cultural values, self-love and black identity. This message is encapsulated in a poem symbolically entitled “Tokologo” (p63), Sesotho for freedom, which reads as follows: Now when dirges burst the monotony of our lives when black hearts seek solace 84
in values foreign and false and forsake the sanctity of old customs, now, would I die for a new anthem a deep and sonorous march plaintive yet plundering angry yet committed protesting yet personifying our black cries A singing tree telling the turmoil of our time our beginning our destiny, singing it in rich song O sing Afrika, sing me a Freedom song chant in the glow of sunset in jungle frames around the sacrifice and yellow flames Sing it Mother in the ghetto where laughter masks the black man’s pain where men move on bended knees raped by colonial terror Sing it in the prison cells 85
and tombs and dungeons where martyrs lie thirsting for the new sunrise Sing me a song of Freedom that I may rise from the quagmire of debasement and take my rightful place amongst free men. The poem epitomises the message of emancipation that forms the central core of black consciousness’s clarion call for black people to break down all psychological and physical impediments to freedom. The notion of freedom, explicitly enunciated in the title itself, operates on two levels. On the first level, freedom refers to physical freedom from social oppression, economic marginalisation and racial segregation. The second level of freedom, which is equally, if not more, important within the context of the poem, is psychological. In the first stanza, the poem overtly suggests that solace can be found only when black people go back to their social and cultural roots to redeem all those values that characterised black people’s humanist approach to life, typified in the notion of “ubuntu”. The concept “ubuntu” is a central component of what ideally should be a way of life for black people. It is a practice that is informed by, and predicated on, humanist values such as empathy, sharing, respect for the other, humanness, gentleness, hospitality and mutual acceptance in human interaction. Ubuntu recognises that 86
one’s humanity is inextricably bound to the other’s humanity. It takes cognisance of
the
delicate
network
of
complementary
relationships
of
human
interdependence. It forms the essence of what black society should be by informing the manner in which blacks should behave, their world view, their belief systems and their social conduct. Ubuntu means the essence of being human and embraces compassion and toughness in the recognition that in togetherness people become human.
It is against this background that the poem “Tokologo” categorically states that freedom, both in its physical and psychological manifestations, will not be attained through mimicking alien values and concepts such as colonialism, individualism and racial domination, the agenda of which is further to marginalize and denigrate everything African. The abandonment of African values in favour of the mimicry of alien ones results in moral and spiritual decay symbolically representative of the dearth of black cultural values implied in the poem by the connotation of the word “dirges”. Significantly, “dirges” coexists in the same stanza with “a new anthem”, which as well as symbolising nationhood is also suggestive of a new beginning. This apparently contradictory coexistence has far-reaching implications for the reclamation of black cultural values, the shaping of a new society, and the construction of a South African identity. It reinforces the notion that differences of cultural identity should never be seen as a problem to be overcome but rather as a means through which people may understand each other in the process of 87
forging new forms of social solidarity. It is also significant that the “new anthem” for which the persona is prepared to die is described as “deep and sonorous”, “plaintive yet plundering”, “angry yet committed” and “protesting yet personifying / our black cries”. That the anthem should personify black people’s cries best illustrates the centrality, not only of the need for a new black identity, but also of the rediscovery of such values as would help the restoration of black dignity and pride which, within this context, are concomitant elements towards national reconstruction, a reconstruction cognisant of and based on the principle of equality, a reconstruction that will acknowledge and recognise the suffering of black people at the hands of their white compatriots as exemplified in the fifth stanza.
“Tokologo” in essence deals with the many facets of black South Africa’s experiences and suggests that these have to be acknowledged if calls for reconstruction are to become meaningful to all South Africans. This the poem does by cataloguing the black experience from “our beginning / our destiny” through “the glow of sunset / in jungle frames / around the sacrifice / and yellow flames” into “the ghetto / where laughter masks the black man’s pain / where men move on bended knees / raped by colonial terror” to “the prison cells / and tombs and dungeons / where the martyrs lie thirsting / for the new sunrise”. It is this multiplicity of black suffering that the persona wants recognised. The implication here is that for as long as these experiences are pushed to the 88
periphery of national discourse and sacrificed on the altar of political expediency, all attempts at reconciling the nation and constructing new forms of identification will become futile. One extrapolates a message that the construction of a new national identity can never be legitimised as long as it is not predicated on justice and morality, a notion that echoes the liberal humanist conception of identity. For a new national identity to be meaningful it has to impact positively on the lives of the humblest of citizens as represented in the poem by the ordinary laughter of folks in the ghetto. It is only when the lives of ordinary people have been positively affected and a new sense of freedom and equality permeates every sphere of life that black South Africans will “rise / from the quagmire of debasement / and take [their] rightful place / among free men”. Thus, the persona’s freedom is contingent upon identification with other people in society who are equally free. Hall’s contention that “identification is the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person… comprising cultural ideals that are not necessarily harmonious” (1996a: 03) underscores this notion. What is important in this process is a commitment towards the construction of a new national identity as both identity formation and identification are ambiguous, provisional and subject to the interplay between homogeneity and heterogeneity.
What one extrapolates from the poem, particularly in the last stanza, is a recognition that the diverse factors which go towards the construction of identity should never be essentialised since identity itself is both positional, strategic and 89
fluid. What is of central importance is the recognition that differences of culture and identities be understood within the context of the desire to construct something new out of a divided and polarised past. The free men referred to in the last stanza are not necessarily homogeneous in character. On the contrary, they may have their own cultural peculiarities, which distinguish them from other equally free men. What is important, within this context, is their identification with one another on the basis of ideals that in themselves do not obliterate their differences. The last two lines of the last stanza of the poem evince the poet’s apparent recognition that identities, as Hall maintains, are “never unified and never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic … positions” (1996a: 04). In the end what becomes crucial is the understanding of the various inter- as well as intra-human and social complexities which go towards the reclamation of individual cultural values - values which are important in the shaping and affirmation of identity. Such an understanding recognises the importance of reviving and reaffirming black cultural values as being central to identity, an identity that is both conscious and cognisant of the significance of unity in cultural diversity.
The conclusion that one readily assents to in the final analysis is that, as was pointed out earlier in the discussion, while the central tenets of black consciousness are predicated on an essentialist paradigm that employs binary categories in its conception of identity, Mattera, through his poetry, articulates his 90
vision in a manner that illustrates his understanding of the provisional nature of identity. One can, therefore, assert that his poetry represents a more flexible position within the broader philosophy of black consciousness, a position that recognises that black consciousness represents a historically located moment that should be a component part in the movement towards a more heterogeneous conception and articulation of identity. Furthermore, Mattera’s stance implicitly recognises that identity is always dynamic and contingent upon both personal and social factors that collide, converge, interact and intersect. As Hall contends, “identity bridges the gap between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ – between the personal and the public worlds” (1996b: 276).
Through his poetry Mattera initiates a process that should, ultimately, represent “healing” amongst South Africans. Such a message comes out clearly in, for example, the poem “Sea and Sand”, where the persona exhorts God to “bless the children of South Africa / The white children / And the black children / But more the black children / who lost the sea and the sand / That they may not lose love / For the white children / Whose fathers have raped the land”. One cannot get a clearer call for reconciliation than this. What is important to note is that such a call is made against the background of the persona’s recognition that “The white children / And the black children” need each other, that it is important for both parties to understand that in order to restore and reaffirm the social and spiritual fibre of the country, there is a need for co-operation. At this point one cannot help 91
but draw parallels between the preceding message and that which is articulated in Stephen Gray’s “Zebra”.
Where Mattera is forthright in illustrating the historical, binary divisions between white and black, and by so doing attempts to bridge the gap between the two groups, Gray uses symbolism to illustrate that both white and black need to forge an understanding based on the recognition of each group’s worth, highlighting the importance of unified diversity by asserting the “Zebra has electric hair / striped in black and white / generates a striking kick / integration on the hoof”. While Gray and Mattera adopt different ideological perspectives, it is interesting to note that there are areas in which their conceptions of identity, as illustrated above, converge. This gives further credence to Hall’s notion (1994: 395) that, because cultural identities have histories, they are in a constant process of transformation. Within this context they can, therefore, never be fixed to an essentialist past.
In the light of the foregoing discussion, and in view of South Africa’s desire to establish inclusive forms of identity, it is important to fully understand the role played by each approach to the conception and articulation of identity. It is, furthermore, crucial to take into consideration that the fluidity that has become characteristic of South Africa’s socio-political and literary discourses renders inadequate any conception that assumes identity as being “eternally fixed in some 92
essentialist past … waiting to be found and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity” (Hall 1994: 89). What is important, therefore, is the recognition that both liberal humanism and black consciousness, as conceptions of identity, are ideological forces that were useful at given historical moments to mobilise South African society’s understanding of the dynamics interacting within the various ideological and socio-political contexts. However, looked at independently of each other, they are ultimately both inadequate in conveying the multiplicity and heterogeneity of identity formation.
South African society is not a unified whole with clearly defined and identifiable cultural boundaries primarily because identity itself is provisional. Instead, South Africa is a society that is undergoing a metamorphosis eventuated by its desire to articulate its own sense of identity within a heterogeneous context. The country is going through what Laclau argues is a difference that characterises “late-modern societies”. Societies, Laclau further argues, “are cut through by different social divisions and social antagonism which produce a variety of different subject positions - i.e. identities for individuals” (1990: 39). These are the subject positions articulated, in this case, through both liberal humanism and black consciousness. It is interesting further to note that Laclau argues that societies hold together not because similar subject positions, identities, are articulated, but rather because they are different. Flowing from this argument is the notion that the conception and articulation of cultural identity is not contingent on sameness 93
but rather on the recognition of difference. It is difference that opens up spaces within which different identities can be simultaneously articulated. The simultaneous articulation of identities consequently leads to the possibilities of forging and articulating new subject positions through what Laclau calls
the re-composition of the structure around particular nodal points of articulation. (1990: 40) This, in the final analysis, dovetails with and reinforces Hall’s assertion that
no single identity could align all the different identities into one overarching master identity on which a politics could be securely grounded. (1996b: 280)
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Chapter 4 The Poetry of Revolution By the 1970s South Africa witnessed an unparalleled and increasing interest in poetry production that resulted in the “Poetry `74 Conference” held at the University of Cape Town in January 1974. This momentous conference served to usher in new conceptions of the value of poetry and its inherent worth for its immediate readership, something that also led to a call for a more rigorous critical practice that would factor in social, ideological and historical contingencies in the evaluation of South African poetry in English. Amongst the many voices that called for the emergence of a radical critical practice was Hofmeyr, who maintained that
South African literary criticism needs to be a rigorous and exacting discipline, placed on a respectable theoretical footing and grounded in a truly interdisciplinary approach. If we continue to use literature as easy philosophy for making moralistic judgements on ‘universal human nature’, or an elitist pursuit for preening one’s sensibilities, we might as well forsake any pretence of being interested in South African literary history and the society from which it comes, And go instead to join therapy groups. (1979: 48)
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The early 1980s saw the emergence of this “rigorous and exacting” critical practice that Hofmeyr had called for. This “new” critical practice which challenged literary traditionalism was, as Klopper succinctly puts it,
distinguished by a concern with the socio-historical determinants of literature, [and] had succeeded in establishing itself as a significant force in South African literary studies. (1990: 258) Critics such Tim Couzens, Mbulelo Mzamane, Kelwyn Sole, Michael Vaughan, David Maughan-Brown and Mike Kirkwood, amongst others, became major proponents of this critical literary practice. Another defining characteristic of this practice was that it located its examination of literature within a materialist matrix. Klopper (1990) argues, however, that a major shortcoming of this critical practice was its failure to challenge the idealist framework of “traditionalist criticism” as a result of the tendency by proponents to conceptualize the interconnection between social context and literary text in an idealist manner. He further attributes this failure to the lack of a “semiological” formulation of materialist approaches. Singling out Jeremy Cronin as one of the critics whose approach showed an awareness of and willingness to address the shortcomings of radical critical practice in South Africa in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Klopper declares:
It is not until the mid-1980s that materialism is explicitly
96
deployed as a semiological conception. Jeremy Cronin’s work in this field is of particular relevance … as he deals directly with South African poetry. Cronin’s understanding of the relation between social context and literary text draws substantially on semiology… Cronin’s understanding of ideology, which is crucial to his critical practice, is explained at length in ‘Ideology and Literary Studies in South Africa’ (1985). To begin with he draws a functional distinction between ‘aesthetic ideologies’ and ‘socio-political ideologies’. (1990: 259)
The poetry produced during this period was, therefore, as diverse as the body of poets was large. This diversity, to an extent, also mirrored the country’s diverse socio-political, ideological, economic and cultural tapestry as well as its critical practice. The common denominator of some of the new poetry, with its diverse themes and cultural backgrounds, was its inclination to agitate for social scrutiny and political change. The message encapsulated in this poetry was generally predicated on the poets’ desire to counter the socio-political agenda that had been set by the South African political establishment.
The intensification of the struggle for political emancipation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, characterised by the escalation of political militancy and guerrilla insurgency, left an indelible mark on the face of South Africa’s literary development. Within a context in which the country had come to be characterised 97
by an even greater degree of political and racial polarisation, a number of white poets concerned with facilitating the articulation of “an emergent national culture” - a more inclusive culture in which all South Africans would be treated fairly and be equal before the law, a culture which would inaugurate more accommodative forms for the articulation of identity - came to the fore. These poets’ work evinces a shift in ideological orientation towards a more radical social vision which moves beyond the quest for self-affirmation and race solidarity characteristic of the black consciousness philosophy. Their work, furthermore, also marks a departure from liberal-humanism, which, in itself, was a deviation from the racially established patterns of thought and behaviour, towards more radicalised approaches in searching for alternatives to South Africa’s racialised social and political situation. Their work is geared not only towards cataloguing and denouncing the facts of apartheid South Africa as they affect the individual conscience, as is mostly the case with poetry of the self, but also towards providing what the poets saw as a viable alternative to the status quo. These poets’ work became variously known, particularly within literary establishments, as “the poetry of commitment” or “the poetry of resistance” because their work evinces their obligation to draw attention to the evils, injustices and abnormalities of apartheid South Africa’s social order. Through their poetry they could reflect upon their own social vision and continuously search and explore modes of articulating identity that would resonate with the majority of South Africa’s populace. The concept “the poetry of
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revolution” is employed here to suggest the radical vision of social transformation contained in this body of poetry.
It is this writer’s contention that in response to the harsh conditions of existence which they witness in their interaction with the oppressed majority, poets of the revolution express their concern by taking a committed public stance to inform, accuse and exhort, and by making a conscious, deliberate and purposeful effort at reflecting the nature of the society from which their poetry emanates. The approach adopted by these poets may appear to be incongruous as they catalogue the evils of a system they are supposed to benefit from as members of the privileged white class. However, as Kelwyn Sole, a Marxist intellectual and poet of note, whose work falls under the umbrella of the poetry of revolution, accurately observes, “privileges along colour lines may indeed be the experience of all whites, but this does not mean that all whites get an equal slice of the cake or live in a monolithic cultural universe” (1983: 41). Sole’s observation is instructive for it obviates the tendency towards essentialising white identity and the concomitant danger of undermining the role played by conscientious white people in the struggle for social and political transformation. Sole’s contention, furthermore, seems to buttress the notion of identity being a position that a subject assumes within a very particular set of circumstances, and points to the fact that the assumed position is a representation constructed from imperatives that do not presuppose adequate identical processes of subject representation 99
(Hall 1996: 5). In its explication of alternative ideological and political points of view, the poetry of revolution opposes the forms of identity offered by the apartheid status quo.
Against the background of apartheid’s social engineering, and the dominantly held notions which constrained individual and cultural identities within the narrow confines of racial configurations, the trend amongst poets of revolution is to challenge the status quo based on the ideological framework of apartheid segregation. Theirs is an attempt to deliberately demystify the racially-biased notion of a South Africa built upon what Chapman defines as “the alleged aesthetic, moral, intellectual and economic superiority of the white man” (1982: 193). Through their poetry, which enunciates their political ideology, poets of revolution attempt to make a contribution to the national agenda for transforming South Africa, redefining its role within the context of the African continent and in its ideological shift from apartheid to democracy.
In certain instances, the poets deliberately take on the apartheid ideology through a process of reversal. Jeremy Cronin’s is a case in point. In an interview of April 1984, Cronin pointed out his indebtedness, as a poet, to black South African poets such as Mongane Serote, Ingoapele Madingoane and Mafika Gwala. Cronin states that he learnt a lot from reading their poetry. In a South Africa based on the erroneous belief of white superiority and black subservience, Cronin’s assertion is 100
remarkable in that it reverses the dominant psychological attitude of presenting whites as a master race whose culture and knowledge systems preponderate over black values. By looking at the works of black poets as a learner and not as an imposer of culture, identity and knowledge, Cronin inaugurates a journey of critical inwardness and reflection. The journey is simultaneously a release from the ideologically imposed privileged enclave of white society in an attempt to facilitate the emergence of a new, inclusive and all-embracing national culture, cognizant of the significance of otherness in the articulation of new forms of cultural identity. Within this context, otherness is not seen in the narrow sense of its binary opposition to the self, but more as an enabling other that participates in the process of liberating society from racial and class oppression. This is what poets of revolution hope to achieve through their depiction of what they perceive to be the real circumstances faced by those who are on the receiving end of the ideological state apparatus of apartheid.
The endeavour of poets of revolution is perhaps best encapsulated in the following comments by Peter Horn, as cited in Frances Lochner, when he avers:
I write poems in a situation where most of the masses live in dire poverty and under inhuman conditions of injustice and exploitation. Unless my poetry has some relevance to this situation, I would feel a parasite of a state and social 101
system which I abhor. My poetry is thus squarely located in the struggle of the masses against Apartheid and capitalist exploitation in South Africa and elsewhere in the world. (Lochner 1982: 213)
Poets of revolution, and other committed poets, give themselves what AlvarezPereyre contends is the “triple aim of informing, accusing and exhorting” (1984: 251). This chapter focuses on the work of Jeremy Cronin, a representative poet of this category, to examine the contribution made by poets of the revolution towards South Africa’s political and social emancipation. The analyses of the poems attempt to highlight how poets of revolution, represented by Cronin, conceive of and articulate cultural identity in pursuance of their goals.
Cronin and other poets of the revolution, such as Peter Horn and Kelwyn Sole, adhere to the ideology of Marxism, which does not subscribe to the philosophy of art for art’s sake. Instead, Marxism focuses on the presentation and evaluation of literature in relation to history, and the relationship between authorial ideology and the material conditions imposed by historical reality. Marxism requires that the style and form of poetry be studied within the parameters of the circumstances in which it is produced. Accordingly, form is seen as social experience artistically reconstructed. The poet is thus seen not just as a product of history but also as a maker of history (Ngara 1990: 8). Reality, within the context of Marxist social analysis, is examined from the perspective of social class structures, where the 102
ruling class’s ideology is projected through religious, educational, political and cultural apparatuses aimed at hegemonising the ideology of the dominant class. Consequently, this dominant ruling class inevitably feels threatened by any oppositional or competing ideology that seeks to provide an alternative to the status quo. From a Marxist point of view, identity is conceived as a form of struggle against ideologies that constitute and justify systems that perpetuate the oppression of the working class. In so far as this conception is concerned, people identify their social interest in class terms. Within this context, class thus serves as a “discursive device or mobilising category through which all the diverse social interests and identities of people can be represented” (Hall 1996b: 280).
Against the background of the foregoing, it is important to appreciate that understanding South Africa’s poetry of revolution requires an appreciation of the historical and social conditions, ideological factors, and literary forms and devices in relation to which such poetry is produced. This is largely because the poetry comes out of real conditions of human existence characterised by social, racial, ideological and political conflicts that have a historical basis. Thus, fully to appreciate the poetry of revolution it is important to ask the questions: What does the poetry say about the ideological orientation and class sympathies of the author? What does the poetry mean to the oppressed masses? What does the poetry reveal about the hopes and fears of the poet and the liberation movement? Does this poetry offer something towards the total emancipation of South Africa 103
and the articulation of a new national identity? These questions will now be taken up in an examination of the themes, social vision and concerns that run through Jeremy Cronin’s poetry.
The son of an officer in the South African Navy, Cronin was born in 1949. While his early years were spent in several naval bases, it was largely in Simonstown where a substantial part of his formative years was spent until the family moved to the suburb of Rondebosch after the death of his father. In Rondebosch he started his school career and later studied philosophy at the University of Cape Town before furthering his studies in Paris. He took up a position as lecturer in the Departments of Philosophy and Politics at the University of Cape Town in 1974. For a number of years Cronin had been doing underground work for the then banned African National Congress. In 1976 he was arrested under the Terrorism Act and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. His sentence was served in several prisons, including a three-year stint amongst death row inmates in Pretoria Maximum Security Prison. It was during this period of Cronin’s incarceration that his first wife died. He was released in 1983 and became part of the United Democratic Front, an umbrella body for various political, youth and community organisations which were in the forefront in calling for the unbanning of liberation movements and the release of political prisoners. The dawn of a democratic order saw Cronin becoming a Member of Parliament for the ANC / SACP / COSATU tripartite alliance. He also serves as the Deputy Secretary General of the South 104
African Communist Party. Cronin has published several articles on South African literature in accredited academic journals such as The English Academy Review and Staffrider. His publications, however, are not confined to academic journals. Since the dawn of the new South Africa he has also been actively engaged in national debates (largely in the print and electronic media) that seek to define the matrices on which the new South Africa has to assert its identity. His first collection of poetry, Inside (1983), described by Peter Horn as “the speech of solitary confinement, the speech of jail” (1992: 81), won the Ingrid Jonker Prize and was reprinted and translated into many languages. Subsequently, he published Even the Dead: Poems, Parables & A Jeremiad (1997), a collection of poems and observations about the socio-political and economic direction democratic South Africa seems to be taking. He lives in Johannesburg with his wife and two children.
Inside is a typical example of the deep commitment to social and political change that white revolutionary poets evince in their poetry. The poetry is both personal and political, individual without losing its sense of universality. Cronin’s commitment to the articulation of a new sense of deracialised and non-exploitative nationhood within a deeply divided South Africa earned him the wrath of the apartheid government. A section of the publicity note on the outside cover of
Inside (attributed to the judge who sentenced Cronin to seven years’ imprisonment) reads: “So far as you are concerned Cronin, I get the impression 105
from the political statement you made from the dock yesterday that you are quite unrepentant. I do not suppose that the prison sentence I am going to give you is going to reform you”. The statement in essence captures the type of committed person that Cronin is, particularly to the cause of justice for all South Africans. It is also interesting and ironic that the judge, who in terms of the dynamics at play is supposed to wield power, recognizes how disempowered he is as far as his ability to “reform” Cronin is concerned. It also is prophetic as indeed Cronin never changed or “reformed” his political and ideological beliefs. The statement, furthermore, simultaneously changes the power relations at play and thus the situation is almost reversed with the judge acknowledging and publicly declaring his inability to “reform” the person he is about to send to prison. This implied reversal of situation is extremely important in the attempt to understand the philosophical and ideological standpoint of white revolutionary poets vis-à-vis the might of the state. It reveals the determination with which these poets challenged the status quo in their quest for socio-political transformation.
Inside is divided into six self-contained sections, each dealing with an area of the poet’s life and experience. The poems in the first section, “Inside”, which also gives the collection its title, deal with the poet’s prison experience. “Walking on Air” (p5) is one of several of Cronin’s poems that portray prison life and attempts by the state to break the sense of commitment demonstrated by those they want to subjugate. The poem, which is the longest in the collection, spanning about 106
nine pages, deals with prison experience from the perspective of one John Edward Matthews. It opens with an interesting prologue in which the narrator describes the daily routine of prisoners in the workshop, which is also referred to as the seminar room. Under normal circumstances, the fact that a prison workshop would also be described and known as a seminar room would strike one as extremely awkward, to say the least. However, one needs to put this in the context of South Africa’s struggle politics in order to fully understand the implications. Prisons, which by their very nature are supposed to be places where an individual’s freedom is curtailed, were, paradoxically, used by political prisoners as areas for the continuation of the struggle for liberation. It was in the workshops that younger prisoners got the chance to interact with the older generation prisoners. These interactions, which sometimes occurred clandestinely under the very noses of prison warders, were characterised by ideological explications and debates, which were acts of political self-empowerment by prisoners. The prison became a “workshop” in more ways than its creators had originally intended. It became, so to speak, a workshop for political education, emancipation and social transformation. Hence the reference to it as a seminar room.
It is during these interchanges that the persona gets close to John Matthews, a man of few words who had proved to be very dexterous with his hands. Getting closer to John marks the beginning of a process towards identification for the persona because he ultimately gets some of his questions about the struggle 107
answered. Peter Horn correctly points out that the interaction between the two is “a narrative, answering the comradely demand (not that other demand, uttered by those who want to know for other reasons and who use instruments of torture to wring the narrative out of one), the comradely demand to know” (1992: 85) what happened, and whether Matthew was present on the day the Freedom Charter was adopted in Kliptown. Matthews responds by pointing out to the persona that while he had not been there on the day itself, he had actually built the platform a day prior to the adoption of the Charter. This information further reinforces his skills for manual work, something Matthews seemed to be content doing in prison. This two-page long prologue ends with the persona acknowledging that the ensuing “story” was pieced together over a period of months, as Matthews was not generally given to speaking but was rather more into “making and fixing things”.
Looked at perfunctorily and separately from the rest of the poem, which the persona refers to as “one comrade’s story”, the prologue immediately strikes one as slightly “odd” or as nothing more than just a presentation of dates and events. However, a more careful and attentive reading of the prologue reveals that it serves the crucially important stylistic purpose of presenting a background against which the reader is required to understand the rest of the poem. The prologue has to be seen, therefore, not as an appendage to the poem but rather as an integral part of the totality of experiences explicated in the poem. Stylistically, the 108
prologue strategically lays a foundation for a more incisive reading and understanding of the poem in its entirety. The persona skilfully presents this background, which initially appears very mundane, in order to lay a solid foundation on which the subsequent social and political message inherent in the poem is located.
The poem proper, which spans the next seven pages, reveals a number of interesting facts about the South African situation. It starts with biographical information relating to Matthews. This information is important because it helps readers to understand the context and influences which impacted on Matthews’ life as he grew up. Furthermore, the information creates a landscape within which a new sense of solidarity arises between the persona and Matthews. From this solidarity emerges a sense of identification that is lodged in the contingency of the two of them being on the same side of struggle against exploitation and oppression. Thus the two individuals immediately bond once they realise that they are in a strategic and situational solidarity “negotiated through the ‘contingency’ of social interests and political claims” (Bhabha 1996: 59).
Right from the beginning of the first two stanzas of the poem, there is evidence of the difficult circumstances Matthews had to contend with from the very early stages of his life, as encapsulated in the following lines:
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Born to Bez Valley, Joburg into the last of his jail term stooped now he has grown In this undernourished frame that dates back to those first years of his life.
The obvious inference that one draws from the above description is that of a person growing up under trying circumstances. Circumstances seem to have conspired to mark the path that the rest of his life has had to take. One cannot but detect, particularly from the second stanza, a sense of a child growing up under very limiting and limited conditions that do not portend well for his future. It is only when one moves on to the subsequent stanzas that one realises the seriousness of the situation. Here one begins to see and understand the picture from a different perspective. That his father comes home one day blacklisted suggests that the father had done something “out of the ordinary”. Given the deeply racially divided country that South Africa was then, one is immediately struck by the blacklisting of what appears to be an ordinary man trying to earn an honest living. Historical accounts around the 1922 Rand Revolt reveal, amongst other things, that while the revolt itself was about labour issues, there were very strongly held perceptions amongst Afrikaner miners that the government was pandering to the wishes of the English. This deepened the wedge and sense of
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suspicion between the two groups further, resulted in the ultimate downfall of the Smuts government, and ushered in a new exclusivist, isolationist and authoritarian form of Afrikaner nationalism. The reader is, therefore, not surprised when the persona maintains that
He was nine when his father came blacklisted home From the 1922 Rand Revolt, and there with a makeshift Forge in their backyard a never again to be employed father passed on to his son A lifelong love for the making and fixing of things.
It is this “lifelong / love for the making / and fixing of things” that becomes the central signifier of the deeper connotations of the poem. Besides its being an obvious reference to the persona’s dexterity with his hands, the statement, at a more significant level, refers metaphorically to the Matthews’s lifelong contribution to the struggle for a more just society, a society in which individual freedom is 111
guaranteed. It is ironic, however, that the protagonist’s desire to fix things lands him in jail primarily because the state did not share his vision. Instead, they saw his vision as subversive and a threat to their ideology of conquest and dominance. However, Matthews is determined to see his vision through because he is convinced that it is grounded on sound moral and political principles. Matthews’s personal account transcends his individuality to assume, at least, national proportions. His dreams, hopes and desires become representative of the desires of many South Africans for the formation of a united country, a country that will exhibit a caring and collective identity within which the values of solidarity will prevail. The poet uses this stylistic device in the hope that the message he wishes to articulate resonates with the majority of the people whose hopes and desires Matthews shares. In a sense, what Cronin does through the poem is to employ the experiences of the individual to articulate collective experiences. He universalises, in a socialist sense, Matthews’ experiences within the context of South Africa’s socio-political and ideological discourses, so that the “he” of the individual’s experience is transmuted into a universal collectivist “he” of group identity.
In the subsequent stanza, mention is made of Matthews’s name being “inscribed / inside / of a red party card”, an obvious reference to his joining the South African Communist Party. It is important to point out at this stage that for many years the apartheid establishment used the Communist Party as a weapon with which to 112
frighten ordinary white South Africans from considering extending universal suffrage to their African compatriots. Laws to suppress legitimate political expression and black aspirations were enacted to silence opponents of apartheid. Amongst these laws was the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950. However, the myriad laws only helped to popularise the struggle and make people even more determined to fight for a humane, just and democratic society within which difference could be seen as something that opened space for the creation of a new sense of unity in diversity. This is evident in the fact that the Communist Party opened its door to all races, so that black and white joined forces in the class struggle against capitalist exploitation. Implicit in this multi-racial solidarity is the understanding that homogeneity, in an emergent society with its emergent identity, is not a sine qua non for the creation and articulation of new forms of cultural identity. The struggle was intensified because South African people of diverse races were convinced that the continued oppression of the black majority, through the imposition of exploitative laws and other repressive actions, was in conflict with the desire to articulate multiple cultural identities.
The conviction was furthermore based on the understanding that limiting freedom for a particular group inevitably leads to the erosion of individual freedom for all groups, and for the whole of society in its collective sense. Of interest are the syntactical implications arising from the use of “inscribed” and “inside”, which are stylistically employed to counter the “inside” image of the prisoner’s confinement. 113
In this context “inscribed” is employed also to communicate the permanence of a sense of freedom that arises from Matthews’s conviction about his ideological beliefs. It further implies that despite being incarcerated, his social and political convictions permanently engrave in his consciousness a sense of freedom in the same manner that his name is “inscribed / inside / of a red party card”. Flowing from this is the realisation that being “inside” becomes just a physical condition out of which both the persona and Matthews develop survival mechanisms that make them soar mentally, thus transcending the bounds of physicality. At another level the “inside” of both the persona and Matthews conversely becomes, as Horn avers, “for the average white citizen the outside, outside of society: the criminal is banished outside of society into the inside of the jail” (1992: 84). What this does to the white citizens outside of jail is to engender a perspective that marginalises those in jail as the “other”. Hence the use of “criminal” in Horn’s contention. But by being outside “the inside of the jail” the white citizens symbolically close themselves off from the discourse of freedom, a discourse whose purport is the construction and articulation of new forms of identity and identification based on society’s struggle for collective solidarity and freedom.
In the light of the foregoing, it became important to wage campaigns that were to intensify the struggle for a prejudice-free environment. The struggle was to assume many forms:
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Passive Resistance, the Congress Alliance, Defiance Campaign, Pass Burnings, Bus Boycott, Potato Boycott, the Women's March, the Treason trial, the Freedom Charter, until Until 1960: the massacre Sharpeville and Langa. And people said: “Enough, our patience, it has limits”… and so it was no longer just typewriters and duplicators to mend. The above stanzas encapsulate the patience with which South Africans waged the struggle for equality and human dignity. Contrary to how the apartheid machinery projected them, those resisting apartheid exhibited a great sense of discipline and responsibility primarily because they were convinced of the correctness of the struggle. This conviction manifested itself in the manner in which they exhausted all legal means of expressing their political discontent, until they felt that the only choice left was to take up arms to challenge the apartheid machinery’s ruthless crushing of all forms of legitimate and peaceful protest. Furthermore, the above stanzas clearly point out who should ultimately take responsibility for violence as a means of struggle.
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The poem also shows evidence of the poet’s dexterity in employing poetic devices the effect of which is to enhance the message communicated:
So they changed their tune. Tried sweet-talking him round. Think of your career (that didn’t work) Think of the shame of going to jail (that thought only filled him with pride) You really want kaffirs to rule? (like you said) Think of your wife (Dulcie. Dulcie. 7 kids. Dulcie. She’s not political at all). In this stanza the persona employs stylistic devices meant to reinforce the message communicated. The two stanzas preceding the one above catalogue the pain and humiliation that Matthews has to endure as the security establishment uses its instruments of torture to wring information out of him. However, he shows resilience and, finally, his tormentors are forced to change their tactics. They try, in vain, to blackmail him psychologically to join their side. This is where the poet employs language in a wry manner to illustrate the folly of Matthews’ tormentors trying to “turn” him. Cronin uses both reversal and irony to heighten 116
the reader’s comprehension of Matthews’ deep conviction. The attempt at blackmail is methodical and starts with Matthews being advised to think of his career. The battle here is at an intellectual, ideological and aesthetic level. Apartheid was predicated on a deeply divisive paradigm that engendered a great sense of selfish individualism, hence the tormentors’ attempt at appealing to his self-interest by pricking his conscience through the words “Think of your career”. It becomes evident, however, that this has the opposite effect.
True to his conviction as a socialist whose “name got inscribed / inside / of a red party card” Matthews transcends the narrow bounds of individual interest to think more in a collectivist sense contingent on the understanding of class solidarity and struggle for a truly representative country. This is the reason his captors, furthermore, attempt to evoke in him a sense of shame at being jailed. Their attempt ironically has the opposite effect: “that thought only / filled him with pride”. Matthews recognises at this stage that “Living inside a very confining boundary, one which allows practically no escape, one lives outside the boundary of society” (Horn 1992: 94). The reasons for his being outside these social boundaries “filled him with pride”. What the poet does here is to present a situation in which the prisoner reclaims the dialogic space to steadfastly project his vision of a new egalitarian society. When Matthews’s captors ultimately resort to a discourse of malicious “othering” through “You really want kaffirs to rule?”, he knows that he has finally won the battle of wits and, therefore, the combative 117
right to assert the need to forge a progressive identity which includes the cultural practices of the majority of the country’s people.
Structurally the poem combines different formats to ensure that a wide range of experiences is forcefully enunciated. The prologue, as indicated in the early stages of this analysis, is in the form of a narrative that forms a background against which the rest of the poem needs to be understood and interpreted. The rest of the poem is structured in sections that represent vignettes of experience. What is of further interest in this regard is the poem’s prosaic style. It is only when one considers that the poem is both a celebration of a political ideal of South Africa’s liberation and vehicle for an immediacy of consciousness that one understands even the “ordinariness” of the language used. The poem strikes the reader with a vividness that is meant to draw one closer to the reality that unfolds. Against this background the persona presents John Matthews, not only as an individual, but also as a revolutionary who (re)presents the possibility of a new country in which a collective sense of community can spur the articulation of a regenerated sense of national purpose and identification, a South Africa that will have moved away from a past characterised by a government that deliberately, as Sole concisely puts it, “kept the different racial groups from mutual knowledge or common identity and purpose” (1994: 1). The poem’s achievement, in the final analysis, rests on the manner it succeeds in illustrating Bhabha’s contention that within the context of cultural identity and identification it is important to take into cognisance 118
that “to exist is to be called into being in relation to an otherness, its look or locus. It is a demand that reaches outward to an external object” (1994: 44). The poem challenges the reader imaginatively to acknowledge his or her otherness in the figure of John Matthews.
Cronin’s poetry is not a mere cataloguing of apartheid ills. As the publicity note on the cover of his second collection, entitled Even the Dead: Poems, Parables & A
Jeremiad, rightly maintains, Jeremy Cronin’s poetry “ranges from the lyric through mock epitaph to short narrative”. The poetry evinces his desire to appropriate language in a variety of ways. This is evident in a poem such as “White Face, Black Mask” (p87), arguably one of Cronin’s most multi-layered poems, from the section titled “Isiququmadevu”. Playing on the title of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin
White Masks, the poem is crafted like a jigsaw puzzle the aim of which is both to separate and alienate. The persona avers:
Thoughts concerning the person named Who: Who is naked beneath his clothes, Who is black in the night, Who is unwashed before his bath, and you mustn’t suck cents you never know 119
Who might have touched them last. Who is mask. Who is beyond mask, lock, yale, bolt, chain, electric alarm. The reader is compelled to question who the “Who” is. On further reading the poem, one begins to realise that the “Who” is always written in a capitalised form throughout the poem, thus signifying its importance. But the continued anonymity remains mystifying until one realises that this is a deliberate ploy by the persona to ensure that “Who” remains deeply ingrained within the collective consciousness of South Africa’s privileged class. The structural pattern that the first three lines of the poem utilise bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Sipho Sepamla’s “To Whom It may Concern”. This way the poet deliberately brings the similarity into sharper focus for he wants readers to understand that an emergent culture may be facilitated through the cross-pollination of ideas towards the expression of the aspiration of the majority of South Africans. Thus, Cronin deals another blow to established patterns of behaviour by reversing the predominantly ideological view of difference as a source of strife rather than a potential for the construction of new forms of cultural identity. What he does through his deliberate reversal of situations is to render nugatory the ideologically loaded apartheid view that intentionally attempted to distort cultural difference as a means of inhibiting any striving towards possible unity, thus reinforcing the policy of separate development and the establishment of tribal “national states” along ethnic and 120
linguistic lines. What Cronin does through the use of alienating techniques is to draw attention to the fact, as Alexander puts it, that
linguistic, cultural differences, etc are neither permanent nor necessarily divisive if they are restructured and redirected for the purposes of national liberation [and unity] and thus in order to form the nation. (1987: 28) The deployment of the narrative and lyrical modes in Even the Dead: Poems,
Parables & A Jeremiad registers Cronin’s attempt to grapple with and articulate the inherently multi-layered contradictions characteristic of South Africa’s transition period, a transition that has seen the country change from being a repressive state to a democracy, from racial polarisation to striving towards racial harmony, a transition that is still bedevilled by social challenges and contradictions such as the unequal distribution of wealth and the continued poverty of the majority of its people. Cronin uses his poetry to open issues that would otherwise have been foreclosed in other forms of ideological speech. This way he problematises the issue of transformation in a country that is still deeply divided in terms of class and wealth. In a remarkably touching observation of the contradictions of having to make poetic pronouncements in a society whose people are still deeply divided, the persona contends:
I am not sure what poetry is. I am not sure what the aesthetic is 121
Perhaps the aesthetic should be defined in opposition to anaesthetic. Art is a struggle to stay awake. Which makes amnesia the true target and proper subject of Poetry.
These lines, taken from a poem and section entitled “Even the Dead”, from which the collection derives its title, are typical of the reflections the poet makes throughout the collection. Of interest is the poet’s juxtaposing of “aesthetic” and “anaesthetic”. The two are deliberately put in opposition to each other so that they collide with each other while they simultaneously converge to bring out a more profound understanding for the reader of the contradictions that characterise the South African situation. On the one side of the dialectic divide are proponents of an aesthetic of detached formalism and conservatism, those who insist on perpetuating the privileged status quo, what the poet labels anaesthetic, while on the other side are proponents of an aesthetic that is rooted in lived experience and, thus, takes cognisance of the varied inter-human and social complexities which go into the shaping of a transforming country, an aesthetic appreciative of the interacting dynamics entrenched in the desire for an alternative approach to the affirmation of identity.
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The use of the notions “anaesthetic” and “aesthetic” to represent the perpetuation of the status quo and lived experience respectively has important implications and ramifications in terms of symbolic representation. The persona aligns anaesthetic with the detached formalism of “art for art’s sake”. The poet playfully highlights the fact that this is art that shies away from dealing with contentious issues of liberation and identity by literally remaining oblivious to these realities. Consequently, such an art does not alert the reader to issues of oppression and is therefore identified with anaesthetic, something that numbs one’s senses. The implication here is that to continue insisting on “higher forms” of art in a harsh environment that demands otherwise is to “sleep through a revolution” as if one has been anaesthetised. Ultimately, being anaesthetised leads to even greater and more serious problems of amnesia. What the poet does here is to build a case against attempts to excise realities that are uncomfortable to the privileged class. To buttress his observation the poet catalogues numerous snippets from South Africa’s past and present which are either conveniently altered, through a process the persona calls “syntagmatic amnesia”, or blocked out of existence through “paradigmatic amnesia” because they present an uncomfortable reality to the establishment. What the persona does is to suggest that such attempts will come to naught since they are only “convenient” measures for the elite, and do not attempt to address the serious issues of the nature of South African society, what it should be and how this should be achieved. A typical example of the deliberate
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blocking out of historical reality is, perhaps, best encapsulated in the persona’s observations when he avers:
When the Little Maestro, Gary Player, acknowledged his British Open victory, saying South Africa’s sporting achievements are impressive indeed considering ‘we only have three million people’.
The foregoing stanza is used in the poem to illustrate the levels to which the privileged class stoop in an effort to reinforce their idea of eradicating the existence of blacks from their minds. That Player should claim that South Africa only has three million people is indicative of the estrangement of whites from their black compatriots through a process of othering which reduces blacks to nonpeople. The persona’s assertion amounts to an observation and a comment on state of many white South Africans’ psychic make-up.
Further on in the poem the persona remarks:
Amnesia prevails when we claim we have returned to the family of nations Forgetting to ask: Who is we? Forgetting to wonder: WHAT family? 124
and Amnesia classifies Third World countries as ‘developing’ (structurally adjusted amnesia) as well as Winning-nation amnesia implies Some win, many lose
And where does that leave Mozambique, Zimbabwe Zambia, Angola, Lesotho and Swaziland And where does that leave us In any sustainable future?
The reader becomes increasingly aware of the poet’s ironic slant on and biting criticism of the country’s collective consciousness. A deeper examination of these observations reveals an individual at pains to try to make sense of the disparate interpretations of South Africa’s transitional politics, his need to contribute towards a new consciousness that will factor into the national equation the importance of acknowledging the past imbalances and the need for redress, his desire for the country to construct and articulate its identity in tandem with the rest of the region and within the larger context of the African continent. This is essentially what the poet is getting at. He warns that superficial changes that do not address the country’s fundamentals will remain hollow for as long as the system still relies only on symbolism and abstractions that do not translate into tangible action 125
reverberating throughout the country and the region. No one is spared the poet’s acerbic pen.
Equally important and interesting is Cronin’s employment of the stylistics of criticism. By skilfully foregrounding the ironic contradictions inherent in the apparent lack of change in the status quo, the poet tactfully relates the fundamentals of his critique of the status quo to the fundamentals of the grammar he employs throughout the poem. This the poet does by appropriating from South Africa’s post-apartheid discourse instances he uses to show that while at face value there seems to have been some change, there has not been any radical transformation of the status quo. The poet skilfully manipulates South Africa’s politically-correct discourse to illustrate the adage that, as far as he is concerned, the more things seem to have changed the more they have remained the same. He is vitriolic in his attack on the rampant consumerism and subscription to entitlement amongst the previously oppressed groups, as typified in the following stanza:
There is upwardly mobile amnesia Affirmative action amnesia Black economic empowerment, the world owes me one, Dr Motlana, give me a slice of it amnesia (syntagmatic amnesia – an elite for the whole)
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The mood of the vignettes quoted above is decidedly political because the poet consciously foregrounds what he considers to be the continuation of a neocolonial, trite and unacceptably flawed economic solution contrasted to the real issue of poverty amongst the majority of South Africa’s inhabitants. Cronin is acutely sensitive to the way language is used to perpetuate the capitalist status quo to which he is opposed. Through his careful use of language and attentiveness to grammar, Cronin shows an awareness that syntax can be manipulated to perpetuate exploitation.
This is further evidenced when, through the poem, he highlights the irony and anomalies inherent within South Africa’s transitional socio-economic discourse: …past dispossession still pays the dispossessor In compound interest and Apartheid still declares An annual dividend. The poet, in this context, sees it as his duty to critique and probe the rhetoric and silences of the country’s political and socio-economic discourse to raise the readers’ consciousness of the material reality around them without falling into open didacticism. Cronin simultaneously presents, true to his aesthetic and authorial ideologies, a self-reflexive awareness of the hegemony of grammar, and how it can be used to liberate thinking from pre-given notions of identity. By 127
disrupting the linearity normally associated with ideological discourse, and by bringing out, through his poetry, the need to focus on a vision of common humanity, Cronin shows his awareness of the intimate relationship that exists between language, thought and identity.
By consciously foregrounding what he considers to be the continuation of an unacceptably flawed political solution, through poetry that is not only witty and cerebral but also accessible, the poet succeeds in interpreting and evaluating the South African reality in its relation to history. Cronin’s major concern in his poetry is the construction of a new sense of morality and justice that will underline the articulation of identity in a situation characterised, as highlighted on the cover of
Even the Dead: Poems, Parables & A Jeremiad, by “too-easy reconciliations, [and] the smug rainbowism that he feels is settling over the new South Africa.” As a Marxist Cronin rejects the “rainbow” approach to South Africa’s articulation of identity primarily because, in his view, as popularised by the new political elite, it offers a semblance of social harmony while leaving intact greedy individualism, global competition and the emergence of a new black oligarchy that, instead of challenging the old power structures, is simply making common cause with the old ones. This, as far as Cronin is concerned, only serves to perpetuate inequality “designed to re-route the freedom struggle into consumerism. We are no longer congregations, workers, communities, students, citizens, we are individual consumers” (1997b: 15). This, Cronin posits, is the reason why there is a struggle 128
in the new South Africa over the images that must be used to articulate the country’s identity in the world, a struggle that should, in his view, replace the deeply oppressive image with an image of a more “caring, collective, internationalist society in which the values of solidarity prevail” (1997: 15).
It is interesting to note that each category of poetry examined so far has its own unique approach to the conception and articulation of identity. The poetry of self, for example, conceives of identity in very autonomous terms where the focus is largely on the individual’s liberty. The fulcrum of this poetry’s conception of identity relies on its very strong liberal-humanist paradigm that puts emphasis on the individual’s freedom as essential to the creation and articulation of identity in an open and just society. A comparison between the poetry of self and poetry of revolution reveals that the two categories stand at opposite ends of the identity spectrum. The poetry of revolution conceives of identity as a form of struggle, the whole conclusion of which should engender a sense of collective solidarity in the quest for an egalitarian society. The poetry of revolution, as illustrated in the foregoing analysis of Cronin’s poetry, is highly critical of attempts to maintain South Africa’s socio-political status quo through the creation of a black elite. In place of this, the poetry agitates for change that can only be ushered through the active and deliberate challenge of various social and political power structures that, for years, have perpetuated and maintained racial, social, class and evidently gender discrimination. 129
Chapter 5 Worker Poetry In the 1980s South African society witnessed a militant political reawakening contemporaneous with the resurgence of trade union activity on the labour front. In the political arena the period became characterised by harsh repressive activity that turned South Africa into a virtual police state. The apartheid government, weary of the defiant mood that had begun to engulf the country, went into overdrive mode, ruthlessly suppressing all voices of dissent and further eliminating almost everything and everyone perceived to be a threat to the security of the apartheid state and its machinery. This ruthlessness also translated into unionbashing activities and the proscribing of individuals. Freedom of association and movement were eroded. The whole of South Africa, with its conflict and tension, was in a restive state. Within the labour force, the state’s suppressive activities resulted in the revival of trade unions which hitherto had been dormant. The trade union movement saw itself as an integral part of the larger drive for socio-political, cultural and economic transformation in South Africa. It is within this context that a “new” breed of poets emerged. These poets, who were to become known as
worker izimbongi (worker poets), made a noticeable impact on South Africa’s literary production and political transformation. Cognisant of the artistic viability of this poetry, critics such as Kelwyn Sole have highlighted the fact that worker poetry as an artistic form of expression has been “bred and nurtured” amongst 130
“ordinary people” (1994: 2). Sole further argues that this development, which took place in spite of adverse conditions, was initially ignored or scorned by South Africa’s cultural elite. It only began to capture the imagination of, and made an impact on, the literati after it had been adopted and popularised by workers’ organisations as a form of cultural expression. Sole succinctly captures this when he observes:
Generally, it has taken the renewed interest in working-class culture generated by the trade union movement in the last decade to challenge this [scorn], just as it has taken the rise of groups using indigenous musical and dance forms to convince intellectuals and cultural agents that such popular forms and preferences are a crucial area of identification and enjoyment for the majority of South Africa’s people, and not just a form of ethnic crypto-apartheid masquerading in cultural form. (1994:3-4)
The poets, called worker izimbongi because of their identification with workers’ struggles and aspirations, gave oral renditions of their poetry in trade unions’ mass meetings as well as at mass funerals of political activists. These were the only avenues available for worker poets’ and black people’s general expression of political aspirations and dissent against apartheid. Consequently, the worker
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poetry movement mushroomed to the extent that a rally or a funeral was considered incomplete if it did not have space for the oral rendition of poetry by a worker poet.
While the worker poetry movement is located within a deeply materialist matrix, where poets oscillate between the oratorical, the local, the heroic and the ordinary in an attempt to locate and articulate their identity as an exploited working class in South Africa, there is evidence of other influences such as Christianity and the oral tradition. In his seminal study of oral poetry and performance Brown traces the influence of Christianity on worker poetry to the days of Isaiah Shembe, a messianic Zulu evangelist and founder of the Church of the Nazarites. Through his church Shembe sought to revive Zulu social customs and mores. He, ultimately, syncretized
the belief systems of Zulu tradition (which are directed primarily towards social concerns) with those of Christianity (which are more abstractly theological and futuredirected), and by hybridizing the Christian hymn with Zulu poetry and song, he created forms which expressed religious and political resistance to colonial oppression. (1998: 120)
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In the light of the above this poetry focuses on worker solidarity in its attempt to present alternative symbols through an oppositional culture and confrontational performance. It aims at presenting social alternatives to what workers see as an extremely repressive and exploitative status quo they have to help change. Workers thus see their poetry as having social relevance within the broader context of struggle politics. By focusing on the day-to-day challenges that workers have to contend with, and through performance, worker poetry attains both its contextual significance and socio-political significance. Chapman sees this as poetry the mimetic affirmations of which “are related directly to life and, therefore, have narrative power in the real social world” (1992: 512). The poetry is further defined through the quality of its “intensified utterance and incantation”. To understand the poetry’s relevance and how it attempts to articulate a workerist identity, it is important always to respond to the “text” in tandem with the poetactivist in the context of the call for cultural liberation, a call that “cannot take place outside the broader struggle for a democratic South Africa” (521). The foregoing quotations suggest that another inherent quality of worker poetry is its desire to democratise not only the South African polity but South African culture as well. This entails speeding up the interaction and interpenetration of various cultural art forms, the encouragement of more public and communally-based art forms and the “transformation of experiences of art, culture and identities”(Sole 1994: 5) in the emergent South African culture that allows and celebrates a multiplicity of voices. 133
The popularity of worker poetry can largely be attributed to its accessibility, efficacious articulation of workers’ struggles, and its general political slant geared to contributing towards change in South Africa. The poetry draws heavily from what was mistakenly thought to have been an extinct oral tradition. This tradition, characterised chiefly by praises, employs a number of poetic devices such as imagery, symbolism, satire and parallelism. To a very large extent, it is these devices that present worker poets and ordinary people with a platform through which to voice their struggles and thereby, hopefully, reclaim public space in the struggle for freedom and their desire to articulate identity within a unique context of social and political struggle. This opens space for worker poets to act as repositories of popular memory and consciousness by recording the history of the workers’ struggle. Worker poets thus find the art of izibongo a viable form of articulating the aspirations of workers in general. While the worker poetry movement was largely dependent on the labour movement for its reinvigoration, worker poets further recognised the significantly important role that poetry had to play in the very important process of cultural reclamation so central to South Africa’s transformation and identity politics. In essence, worker poets realised that they could not divorce themselves from the larger struggle for political, economic and cultural freedom that was going on in South Africa. Thus, they saw theirs as being both a workers’ struggle and a struggle for the emancipation of South Africa’s oppressed majority. This, to a large extent, was informed by the workers’
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understanding of the Marxist perception that puts the worker movement in the vanguard of socio-economic and political transformation.
It is important to point out that the materialist matrix upon which worker poetry is based is the same matrix in which poets of revolution locate their construction of identity. The question that arises is why an attempt is made in this study to distinguish between two categories of poetry that predicate their conception and articulation of identity on a similar ideological premise. A closer examination and reading of the two categories of poetry reveals that whilst both move from the same socialist point of departure, poets of the revolution are white and have in common, besides their adherence to Marxist theory, academic backgrounds that enable them to engage with issues from a theoretically nuanced perspective as they raise the reader’s consciousness towards understanding the material function of literature in the construction and articulation of cultural identity. Worker poets, within the context of South Africa’s historical reality, are black and proletarian, and their poetry generally draws on both rural and urban oral traditions rather than advanced literary study and tertiary education. Thus their poetry tends mainly to focus on issues they contend with daily as they battle to eke out a living and to seek solidarity as a class of exploited workers.
Equally important is the poetry’s approach and tone in redefining and transforming the power dynamics characterised by the contrasting relationship between the 135
oppressor and the oppressed, the powerful and the powerless, typified in the employer-employee relationship. This the poetry does by drawing from a wealth of poetic traditions, some of them already highlighted above, which make it challenging to compartmentalise this poetry into any one specific category or nomenclature. As correctly averred in the introduction of Izinsingisi: Loud Hailer
Lives, in worker poetry the reader can detect influences of “the Nguni oral tradition, the Christian Bible, the black-consciousness poetry of the 1970s, jazz poetry just as [one] can pick the rhythms and imagery of street talk” (Sitas 1986: ii). These are the influences that imbue the poetry with a quality of linguistic accessibility and enable it to touch the ordinary person, to whom the poetry is primarily directed. The poetry’s accessibility contributes largely to its assertiveness in articulating South Africa’s socio-political and economic realities, particularly the realities facing workers defying a system engineered to exploit, subjugate and dampen their steadfastness and will to survive. Worker poetry is, furthermore, replete with a sense of urgency, vivid immediacy and a forthrightness that encapsulates the workers’ determination to survive despite the harsh conditions that the political and labour realities visit upon them. It is this determination that makes workers and worker poets recognise and reassert the centrality of cultural identity in the broader national struggle for political emancipation, encapsulated in the following declaration:
Because, even if we are culturally deprived as workers, 136
we demand of ourselves the commitment to build a better world. and This makes us say that it is time to begin controlling our creativity: we must create space in our struggle through our own songs, our own slogans, our own poems, our own artwork, our own plays and dances. At the same time, in our struggle we must also fight against the cultural profit machines. (Sitas 1986: 59-60)
The above declarations describe the importance attached to the role played by cultural identity in the struggle for a new South Africa. Workers and worker poets assert the indispensability of culture in the political and economic transformation of society as well as in the articulation of identity. What worker poets do through the above declaration is to assert that they, too, as the proletariat, can and will make their contribution to the articulation of a workers’ identity, and that the process of articulating any form of cultural identity through art in South Africa should not be left in the hands of the bourgeois class. The declaration furthermore warns workers against abdicating their responsibility of challenging apartheid power structures. It bears testimony to the determination that worker poets have towards what they consider a very important task of transforming South African society. Through the declaration, worker poets display their desire to rid themselves of the mentally imposed manacles and the apartheid exploitation that 137
had become characteristic of South Africa’s exploitative labour laws. Their avowed desire is nothing less than the total extirpation of oppressive institutions in the quest to build a new country embracing just, caring and collective principles of equality for all its inhabitants, a society in which internationalist values of solidarity prevail. The foregoing qualities are evident in the work of Mi S’dumo Hlatshwayo, which forms the central focus of this chapter.
Hlatshwayo was born in Cato Manor, Durban, in 1951. He grew up as a so-called illegitimate child in a poor working-class household in this shack settlement which was also known as M’kumbane. His family’s financial difficulties forced Hlatshwayo to abandon his education at a very early age while he was still doing what was then standard seven, or Grade 9 in today’s parlance. Leaving school was for him a major blow that almost turned his dreams into nightmares. As he told Fosatu
Workers News, with his leaving school all his dreams were sunk:
I wanted to be a poet, control words, any words, that I might woo our multi-cultured South Africa into a single society. I wanted to be a historian of a good deal of history; that I might harness our past group hostilities into a single South African history…. After 34 years of hunger, suffering, struggles, learning and hope, I am only a driver for a rubber company. (1985: 35)
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Hlatshwayo’s determination, however, saw him continue with self-education through reading whatever he came across. He joined the St John’s Apostolic Church, the eCibini, after he had been healed from a serious illness (Sitas 1986). In this independent African church whose members were generally poor, he experienced acceptance, concern and care he had never experienced before. This was a church without distinction or status, where ordinary people shared and prayed together. Through the church’s emotional gatherings where men and women had integrated the imbongi tradition of Nguni traditional poetry, Hlatshwayo began to discover the power of language and poetry. This he carried with him into all levels of life. He ultimately joined MAWU (Metal and Allied Workers’ Union) where he was catapulted into cultural activism. After listening to Alfred Temba Qabula reciting his poetry, Hlatshwayo realised that he did not need formal tertiary education to write poetry. This realisation brought him closer to Qabula who also strongly believed that poetry, as Brown puts it, “was not the sole preserve of specific members of society” (1998: 221). He composed “The Black Mamba Rises” to praise the Dunlop workers’ struggle. He teamed up with Qabula and others to form the Durban Workers’ Cultural Local. This strengthened their belief that poetry was public property. For example, Qabula once asserted that one of his main aims was redress the generally held notion that poetry belonged to ‘amaintellectuals’ (Gunner 1989: 51). In collaboration with fellow worker poets Qabula and Nise Malange, Hlatshwayo published Black Mamba Rising: South
African Worker Poets in Struggle in 1986. Izinsingisi: Loudhailer Lives, South 139
African Poetry from Natal, a collaborative effort by Hlatshwayo, Malange, Qabula, Naidoo, Ndzimande and other worker poets was published in 1988. Ari Sitas edited the two anthologies.
In Hlatshwayo’s “The Black Mamba Rises” (p25) from which the anthology Black
Mamba Rising, derives its title, there is evidence of the poet’s skilful use of oral traditional literary forms. In the poem, Hlatshwayo, like other worker poets, acts as a repository of popular memory and consciousness by recording the history of the struggle for workers. Hlatshwayo regards the izibongo as a viable form for articulating the aspirations of the workers, as illustrated in the comment, “it was here, amid the spontaneous singing which marked all worker gatherings, that I saw the possibilities of refashioning the traditional oral praise poem to articulate the struggle of the workers” (Oliphant 1989: 42). The statement has important cultural significance as it lays a foundation on which traditional oral forms of expression are merged with the workers’ socio-political aspirations in the quest for a new society and new forms of identities. It also illustrates that workers and worker poets have a role to play within South Africa’s cultural identity politics. That Hlatshwayo sees the possibility of refashioning a new poetry from the traditional oral form is evidence of the workers’ need for articulating their conception of cultural identity within the broader arena of cultural reclamation. The statement constitutes another building block in the path towards cultural, social and political renewal and reclamation. 140
The poem itself opens with a vivid description of “victors of wars” who “then retreat” and “The builders of nests” who “like an ant-eater ... then desert” and finally “leave the employers / unnerved”. The above description initially evokes and engenders a vague sense of unease in the reader. It is only when the reader realises that the description is a build-up to the unveiling of the poem’s central image, the black mamba, that things become more clearer. The black mamba is a symbol for the resurgence of the black workers’ trade union movement so that the reader is able to put the mamba within the social and political context of struggle against apartheid exploitation and oppression. In the poem, this analogy of the revival of unions is evident in the following lines from the poem’s sixth stanza:
It was stabbed good and proper During the day, At Sydney Road right on the premises To the delight of the impimpis, And the delight of the police There were echoes of approval on the TV at Aukland [sic] Park saying: Never again shall it move, Never again shall it revive, Never again shall it return, Yet it was beginning to tower with rage. The rising mamba, putatively dead, engenders tensions and anxiety for those initially happy with its destruction. Suddenly, they have to face up to the 141
challenges posed by the mamba with its recharged might. That the revival of the mamba represents the resurgence of trade union militancy is accentuated by the obvious discomfort of employers upon realising that they had enormously misjudged the situation. This is reinforced by the parallelism in “Never again shall it move, / Never again shall it revive, / Never again shall it return,” which is ironic, for, contrary to expectations, the mamba begins “to tower with rage”. The employment of the mamba imagery, a direct borrowing from the animal imagery characteristic of izibongo, reinforces the majestic qualities of the union. From an aesthetic perspective, the borrowing also marks a departure from the idea of poetry being private property. It becomes public property whose aim is to help engender an atmosphere within which workers can begin to articulate their own identity in their own terms, something highlighted in the workers’ declaration earlier on in this discussion. This can be seen as a form of cultural democratisation whose aim is to spread knowledge beyond an elite few to enable workers to participate, on their own terms, in the production of a culture that will form part of their identity. It is, furthermore, important to note here that the poet applies a propagandist approach through which he wishes to uphold that which is acceptable to the labour movement whilst simultaneously discouraging that which is unacceptable. This inaugurates a process in which workers reclaim their voice and space within the context of the employer-employee discourse. This also illustrates that the discourse on identity becomes a contested terrain and that the contestation has a lot to do with the fact that for worker poets the main issue, 142
first and foremost, is the important one of liberating workers from racialcapitalistic exploitation and, subsequently, asserting their right to articulate their identity either as individuals or as a collective. Employers now realise that they can never supplant the workers’ desire for fair and democratic representation in their quest for dignity and identity. They become aware that identity imposed from without, an identity that does not open a window for self-definition, will always be fiercely resisted by workers. Through the revival of unions, workers set the tone for the forging of a new worker culture on the factory floor. Tension is heightened by the multiplicity of unions that arise out of the initial one employers had thought was totally crushed. This is evident in the seventh stanza of the poem where the persona describes, in a mischievous tone that almost borders on contempt for employers,
The old mamba that woke up early in the Morning at St Anthony’s On rising it was multi-headed, One of its heads was at Mobeni, Njikazi, the green calf of MAWU can bear me out Another of its heads was at baQulusi Land at Ladysmith, On rising it was burning like fire.
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That the union has risen with ferocity and that its influence in the labour sector is pervasive causes helpless consternation amongst employers. The image of a burning fire in the last line of the stanza underscores the influence, militancy and vigilance of the resuscitated unions. This militancy encapsulates the workers’ desire to continue asserting their human dignity in their fight against all forms of exploitation, deliberate dehumanisation, cultural maligning and malicious othering. Cognizant of this newfound power, even the most pertinacious of employers, typified in the poem by the ruthlessly unscrupulous Sikhumba, realise that things cannot go on as usual. The persona makes the same observation in the eighth stanza when he maintains:
But he is now showing a Change of heart Let’s sit down and talk, he Now says. Hlatshwayo employs several images to buttress his conscientising message. Whilst the mamba is the leitmotif for the poem, there are other equally important images that accentuate the process of cultural reclamation, even if only by drawing deeply from cultural forms. The buffalo, for example, is another powerful image that is used in the poem in consonance with the spear and the dangabane weed. This is evident in the following:
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You black buffalo Black yet with tasty meat The buffalo that turns the Foreigners’ language into Confusion. Today you’re called a Bantu, Tomorrow you’re called a Communist Sometimes you’re called a Native. Today again you’re called a Foreigner, Today again you’re called a Terrorist, Sometimes you’re called a Plural, Sometimes you’re called an Urban PURS.
The imagery of the black buffalo is significant in this respect, particularly when viewed against the apparent confusion it brings. This image, suggestive of vitality, force and a combative spirit, is meant to catalyse workers into action. The image also highlights the dichotomy inherent in the employer-employee relationship. On the one hand, the buffalo is seen as objectionable by the white employers because of its black colour and strength, while on the other hand the selfsame employers need the labour of the black buffalo. The stanza also resonates with the
tragi-comic
nomenclature
that
characterised
the
inflexible
ideology
underpinning apartheid South Africa. In its effort to confine blacks to the periphery of economic activity, successive apartheid governments fragmented the country into linguistic and tribal enclaves called homelands. From these satellite 145
homelands, the white captains of South African industry could tap cheap labour. Consequently, black South Africans were disenfranchised, alienated from and deprived of their South African citizenship in favour of a dubious homeland citizenship. This, in essence, meant that black South Africans were subjected to a process in which they had enforced identities imposed upon them as a result of the government’s political agenda: to impose its own versions of identities on the whole country.
However, because industry needed black labour, new categories were invented to legitimise black labourers in what had effectively become “white South Africa”. Amongst the many laws enacted to enable whites to tap cheap black labour was a law acknowledging the existence of Permanent Urban Residents (PURS). When the black populace in urban areas became restive a concoction of names and excuses was invented. When blacks demanded dignity and the recognition of their cultural practices as essential defining characteristics of their South Africanness, “Communists” and “Terrorists” were invariably blamed. Throughout the poem, the persona highlights the curious dichotomies of the South African situation, dichotomies that further illustrate the contradictions inherent in the government’s policy of institutionalised racism. As Mala Singh rightly observes:
Apartheid was a powerful allocator of identity. It assigned identity through legislation and other sanctions. It suppressed 146
identity – through centralising race and ethnicity at the expense of other markers of identity. It facilitated identity through unifying its opponents in a common assertion of non-racialism. (1997: 120)
It is not surprising that towards the end of the penultimate stanza the persona apprises the reader of the inevitability of the resurgence of black trade union movements symbolised in the poem by the black mamba. The employment of the mamba metaphor is deliberate so as to enable the audience and reader to deduce the resurgent union’s vigilance by drawing an analogy between the unions and the venomous qualities of the black mamba. Coupled to this are the ferocious qualities of the buffalo which then add to the strength of the revived unions. The revival of unions does not only represent the revival of the struggle for workers’ rights but transcends the narrow confines of the workers’ floor to become representative of the broader struggle for the assertion and articulation of identity and black cultural reclamation.
Through the use of izihasho (peer praises) in “The Black Mamba Rises”, Hlatshwayo skilfully infuses a satirical slant into the poem:
Ngudungudu, the woman Who married without any Lobolo, 147
Busy boiling foreigners’ Pots Yet yours are lying cold. The name Ngudungudu is used here as a term of endearment, but it is downplayed by the persona who, instead of praising the subject, chastises her for the folly of giving herself free of charge to the employers whilst her own homestead remains unattended. Of interest is the use of the lobolo imagery.
Lobolo is a cultural practice of paying money or cattle for a bride. Its aim is to strengthen kinship between the families of the bride and the groom. Therefore, a woman who marries without lobolo is seen in the eyes of society as a lesser woman. As a matter of fact, no culturally sensitive and self-respecting woman would want to be married without lobolo primarily because, in rural communities, great store is placed on the marital status of women. Here the persona uses the
lobolo image to buttress the folly of selling one’s labour cheaply, just like a woman who does chores when she knows that her husband has not paid lobolo for her. In the end Ngudungudu gets “Busy boiling foreigners’ / Pots” while “[hers] are lying cold”. Hlatshwayo successfully employs satire to highlight and ultimately reinforce the inherent irony within this particular situation. As adumbrated earlier, Hlatshwayo draws from a wealth of literary material and tradition to buttress the points he makes in his poetry. Hlatshwayo’s use of izihasho is particularly significant in that they are used to strengthen an individual’s sense of belonging to a community and cultural groups. As Coullie correctly points out: 148
the praise poem … is a statement of identity in community, its appeal lying in social anchoring and the pleasures of performance and the performer, whether that be the subject of the poem or not, and the auditors. Instead of a developmental depiction of subject, of a self split between the private, interiorized “real” and the public persona, the self in oral poetry is addressed as a knowable, stable and unified entity. The subject is hailed, interpellated, known, through the praises, to him / herself and to members of the community. Instead of the economy of personal revelation, of individualised confession, oral forms rely on communalism, on shared knowledge and ritual, on conformity and concord. (1999: 72)
Hlatshwayo uses available literary works as his point of departure in highlighting and reinforcing salient points. In the last half of the sixth stanza, for example (quoted earlier), he says:
There were echoes of approval there on the TV at Aukland [sic] Park saying: Never again shall it move, Never again shall it revive, Never again shall it return, Yet it was beginning to tower with rage. 149
The poet is echoing a section from Nyembezi’s poem (1960) to Shaka from “Izibongi zika Shaka” in which the poet avers:
The jest of women of Nomgambi, Jesting while enjoying the sun, Saying Shaka shall never rule, Shall never be king, Yet he was beginning to flourish. (English translation courtesy of Mr S C Ndaba)
At the same time, there are further traces of Nyembezi’s (1960) “Izibongo zika Dinizulu”, in the following lines from the fifteenth stanza of “The Black Mamba Rises”:
Run in all directions Stand on top of the mountains, Report to Botha at Pretoria Report to our heroes on the Island, Report to the angels in your Prayers, Say unto them - here is a Flood of workers The employers have done what Ought not to be.
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The above lines echo Nyembezi’s lines:
Run in all directions Tell the people of Sidladla and Ntini And those of Vuma Not to drink the waters of the Mkhize River Because Dinizulu has done what ought not to be done. (English translation courtesy of Mr SC Ndaba)
“The Black Mamba Rises” is, therefore, a tribute to the workers that draws heavily on historical antecedents such as the izibongo tradition to locate the workers’ struggles within the broader struggle for the forging of identities and the (re)construction of new forms of cultural identification. The poet deliberately draws on traditional oral forms to reject the conception that traditional oral forms, which are a constituent part of African identity and culture, are devoid of educible patterns for socio-cultural and political reconstruction. By borrowing deeply from traditional oral forms, the poet brings poetry to a public platform in the hope of making it more accessible to ordinary people. Thus poetry is removed from the domain of private property accessible only to academics and a few other individuals, and becomes the public property of the people, property that helps them in their quest to articulate their cultural identity firstly as the working class and secondly as members of the movement towards democracy. In this way the poet adds weight to the argument that culture, as represented in this case by
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poetry, has a significant role to play in social transformation and the articulation of communal identity.
In the poem “We Workers Are A Worried Lot” (p32), Hlatshwayo continues with his consciousness-raising process. This time the immediate target of his vitriol is the “racist oppressor”. The poem opens with a warning to the “racist” about the psychological state in which the workers generally find themselves. The title itself suggests a greater element of anxiety and restiveness on the part of the workers. This is the persona's primary concern throughout the poem. The persona presents the ideals cherished by workers, which include the desire to fight against “injustices”, “unemployment”, “starvation”, and the quest “to gain peace” and “win equality”. However, workers become worried upon realising that their point of departure and frame of reference are diametrically opposed to those of the “racist oppressor”. This immediately creates the occasion for confrontation as the two parties run on an ideological collision course with no apparent possibility of backing down as is evident towards the end of the first stanza, where the persona realises and illustrates the differences as he avers:
Kodwa Hawu! To you, our friends Are foes! To you, our foes
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Are Friends! We workers are a worried lot.
The quoted section highlights the source of the workers’ discontent. They operate in a hostile environment where their values are antithetical to those of their employers, who were defined as “racist” in the beginning of the poem. The second stanza of the poem is a wake-up call to the “racist oppressor”, a warning for him / her to realise that time is running out. The persona also attempts to narrow the obvious ideological chasm and conceptual differences between employer and employee. He exhorts the employers to take off their ideologically-tinted glasses and to see things from the workers’ perspective. This message is taken over to the third stanza of the poem where the persona calls for a concerted effort to “wave off / Mass dismissal” and “stave off / Mass unemployment”. This call has farreaching implications for the relationship between employers and employees. Within the context of South Africa’s deeply racialised divide, a society in which employment or unemployment was essentially the dividing line between blacks and whites, such a call would obviously evoke interest from different perspectives and quarters. This is largely because South Africa had been divided into two sections, whites who were a minority, generally well-off as employers, and blacks, who were a majority, generally poverty stricken with a large number of their adults unemployed. It is against this background that the persona calls for the staving off of “mass unemployment”. Furthermore, the persona realises that for 153
the country to remain peaceful there is a need to pacify the majority and also to ensure that mechanisms are put in place for equity and justice. It is within this context that the persona evokes the names of Helen Joseph, tireless veteran of the democratic struggle in South Africa, Neil Agget, trade union leader and secretary of the Food and Canning Workers’ Union (Transvaal) who died in detention in 1982, and Neil Alcock, agrarian self-help activist killed during attempts to create peace amongst warring factions at Msinga, Kwazulu, all of whom are called “disciples of justice”. The persona describes them as such because while all of them were white and thus belonged to a privileged class, they chose the path of justice by being actively involved in workers’ struggles and in the broader struggle for liberation, some of them paying the ultimate price: losing their lives in the quest for democratic liberation and justice. It is also interesting to note at this stage the persona skilfully bringing in an important reference to identity and identification as he avers:
Yes, in Africa Let us be Africans Fear is a fallacy Now Let us touch on your untouchable sacred ground To be forged by FOSATU To struggle in CUSA
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What a march Of people’s congresses To come!
The message that the persona brings to bear in the first five lines of the quoted section has significant implications for the construction and articulation of identity. Apartheid was based on colonialist and separatist notions of white superiority. Thus, the majority of white South Africans continued to see themselves as overlords to the black people. They saw themselves as masters who had to subjugate the African by suppressing his “heathen culture” and destroying his “barbaric identity”. Through this understanding, everything associated with Africa was, therefore, inferior and vile and had to be destroyed. The direct consequence of this mentality was the binary division between black and white. In this division black was seen as the “other” that needed to be supplanted. Flowing from this understanding the majority of white South Africans continued to see themselves as Europeans in Africa despite the fact that their families have been living in the continent for three centuries. This is what the persona challenges. He calls for identification with Africa by revealing that those who want the continent to succeed have nothing to fear in identifying themselves as such. The persona further attempts to reassure those for whom the mere mention of Africa conjures up the misery of poverty, hunger, war and death that their fear needs to be
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replaced with a determination to unite in the quest for liberation to rid Africa of its negative colonial legacy.
The importance of unity is further buttressed in the fourth stanza where the persona calls for united action in staving off “Star Wars”. Instead the persona wants unity towards building “empires without / Bombs”, putting “power in maize fields / Not missiles”, giving “respect to God and not / To dollars” so that “even the soil / Shall sing praise hymns”. Through these sharp antitheses, that invert contemporary materialistic and militaristic values, the persona calls for a new united and collective approach towards addressing social and political problems. He calls for action in developing the continent. The persona sees this as the only way to restore country and continent. He warns against continued wars and calls for peace. He attacks the obsession with wealth, typified by the dollar, at the expense of spirituality. The persona illustrates that through united action people can foster a sense of identification with country and continent. Anything short of this results in the fragmentation of people into artificial racial categories, a fragmentation that perpetuates divisions and strife.
The fifth stanza of the poem opens with lines in parallel construction with the opening lines of the first stanza. However, the tone and content of this stanza are different from those of the first stanza. Where the first stanza focuses on the fight against injustices and exploitation, the fifth stanza focuses on the positive qualities 156
inherent within the African continent. What the persona does is to invite those who are committed to a non-racial South Africa to join him on a path of discovery as he posits:
We can discover The secrets of Africa The splendour of Africa We can discover The pride of Africa Covered by the sand dunes Of exploitation Covered by the sand dunes Of colonialism And Maye! Africa The Eden of nations The pillar of the universe Shall now lead the world From its hunger From poverty -
Of minerals
-
Of morals
-
And love
Workers are a worried lot.
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The above stanza is quoted in full because in it the persona makes a significant number of assertions that have a direct bearing on the reclamation of Africa’s values and the general reconstruction of the continent. The use of the word “discover” in the third line of the stanza has profound implications. It suggests that Africa still has inexhaustible hidden wealth that even colonialism could not ravage. The use of the collective pronoun “we” immediately suggests a cooperative arrangement in the restorative process of discovery. The persona seems to be suggesting to the “racist oppressor” that if they join hands together in the process, benefits will accrue to both of them and to the continent as a whole. This, in essence, is a turning away from the confrontational and oppositional tendencies that generally characterised the employer-employee relationship. In this instance, a hand of friendship is extended to the oppressor because the oppressed are cognizant of the importance of conciliation in the quest for the restoration of Africa. Thus, the situation becomes a microcosm of what the rest of the continent should follow. Ultimately, it transcends the narrow confines of the binary opposition between employer and employee to become representative of the larger need for national and continental co-operation. The persona suggests that through this co-operation people can discover the “splendour” and “pride of Africa” that hitherto had been covered by “the sand dunes” of a racially conceived “exploitation” and “colonialism”. The use of words such as “discover”, “covered” and “dunes” suggests an element of blindness that had made it impossible for the oppressor to recognise the “splendour” and “pride” of Africa. As it is, the persona 158
suggests that it is only through working together with the oppressed that the oppressor can be redeemed from his psychological and spiritual blindness, a pervasive blindness that hinders the cultivation of meaningful relationships between people, who by virtue of their geographical situation are supposed to be compatriots.
The second half of the stanza describes Africa as “The Eden of nations / The pillar of the universe”. On the surface, this assertion looks superficial, stereotypical and overstated. But closer scrutiny is quite revealing. The assertion highlights that Africa has indeed been an Eden, because of its rich raw resources. In its former unadulterated state, the continent epitomised the unalloyed beauty, almost in a romantic sense, of rusticity before the advent of colonial exploitation. The statement further points to Africa being the cradle of humanity. Recent palaeontological discoveries reinforce the continent’s Edenic character in the historical development of the human species. Of interest is the persona’s assertion that Africa, which has become known as a doomed to economic failure and social collapse because of its internecine wars and famine, “Shall now lead the world / From its hunger / From poverty”. It is worth noting that, despite the negativity that has become associated with Africa over the years, the persona is still able to see the good that Africa can contribute towards universal human development. It is ironic that a continent generally associated with internecine wars, malnutrition, genocide and poverty is now portrayed as the potential saviour of a new world. 159
This is illustrative of the persona’s commitment to Africa and his deliberate aim of focusing on the good that can come out of Africa. The persona seems to subscribe to the notion that because Africa has seen the worst in suffering, it can only improve.
Finally the persona qualifies the poverty from which Africa can deliver the rest of the world. It is poverty “of minerals / of morals / And of love”. The invocation of morals in parallel with minerals suggests that morals are the minerals of a good life. It further points to the importance of moral and ethical behaviour in the quest for material wealth. The implication here is that throwing away morals in pursuit of profit and material wealth leaves individuals ethically bankrupt and spiritually empty. What the persona advocates is the pursuit of wealth in such a manner that its acquisition is beneficial to the individual and the rest of society and not only for the elite. This is the message that the persona wants the “racist” to hear. He believes that once this reality has dawned upon the “racist”, there will be a greater possibility for better human interaction that may lead to a greater understanding of humanity’s mutual interdependence. This understanding would lead, hopefully, to acceptance of difference not as a problem to be overcome but rather as something that provides individuals with an opportunity for interaction and interfacing in the construction and articulation of cultural identity.
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Worker poetry in general has a propagandist slant as it aims to uphold and propagate that which is deemed acceptable by workers in their struggle for social, political and cultural emancipation. This the poetry does by addressing issues that are pertinent to the workers’ struggle and that contribute towards the transformation of South African society. Hlatshwayo, a representative of worker poets, also uses his poetry not only to mobilise workers and document their struggles, but also to offer a socio-political critique of the South African situation. Through his skilful borrowing from traditional oral forms such as izihasho and
izibongo, Hlatshwayo uses his poetry to articulate a worker-centred vision of an egalitarian South Africa that will be without exploitation and oppression. This, coupled with a desire to ensure that the articulation of workers’ identity is never ignored within South Africa’s political and cultural discourses, is what Hlatshwayo and worker poets in general set out to do. The history of the liberation struggle, an important weapon in the arsenal of worker poets, is used to instil a sense of urgency in the message that the poet communicates. As an ardent student of liberation history, Hlatshwayo taps from such aspects of history into which he infuses elements of the heroic to conscientise the workers into action. Ultimately, this marks the beginning of a process towards cultural reclamation, which he hopes will eventually usher in the articulation of new forms of cultural identity.
The foregoing analyses clearly illustrate that Hlatshwayo, as representative of worker poets, draws from a wide range of poetic and cultural experiences to 161
present poetry which seeks not only to articulate a worker identity but also to present an alternative socio-political and economic system. Through his poetry the poet starts a process whose ultimate goal is the creation of a collective, workerist self-image of South Africa. The poetry draws strongly from the izibongo and
izihasho traditions to ultimately relocate poetry from a deeply private domain to the public domain of the ordinary person. The workerist perspective, which informs this poetry, has much in common with the materialist perspective upon which the poetry of revolution predicates its conception of identity. Furthermore, what becomes indubitable is the contention that the different conceptions of identity articulated in poetry of self, black consciousness poetry, poetry of the revolution, and worker poetry recognise identity as being a process that is provisional and greatly influenced by both personal and social factors. What further becomes clear is that each conception of identity provides an occasion for South Africans to interrogate factors that need to be considered in the construction and articulation of the country’s cultural identity.
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Chapter 6 Feminist Poetry Much attention has been given to feminism in the context of South Africa’s sociopolitical and literary transformation. The attention is predicated on the contentious space which feminism, both as a literary theory and as a social movement addressing the country’s gender disparity, occupies in South Africa’s socio-political and literary discourse. Feminism has always been, and will probably continue to be, a loaded concept that carries within it a variety of political, sexual and social nuances. One of the reasons for this is that feminism continues to be a mushrooming area of intellectual and academic contestation. In a transforming society eager to rid itself of vestiges of inequality and of maladies such as racial and sexual discrimination, feminism is faced with challenges and, to some extent, contradicting interacting dynamics such as the need to affirm gender equity in a traditionally patriarchal society.
In her foreword to South African Feminisms: Writing, Theory, and Criticism 1990-
1994, Barbara Bowen suggests that South African feminism has a significant contribution to make in the doubled-edged question of examining race and gender (1996: x). This, Bowen further contends, is important in developing relevant theoretical underpinnings and practices cognizant of oppression’s multi-faceted forms, and in ensuring that such underpinnings and practices do not overlook the 163
historical conditions of oppression. It is crucially important also to understand that different meanings can be ascribed to feminism primarily because feminism in South Africa does not represent a homogeneous category. The differences in understanding and articulation tend to reflect the various strands that have characterised the debate surrounding South Africa’s attempt to address gender issues, from historical, social, as well as political perspectives. South African feminism addresses issues of gender in a very particular context that has known the suppression of women as a result, on the one hand, of patriarchy, and, on the other hand, of apartheid’s racial segregation which made South Africa’s situation unique. It is the uniqueness of South Africa’s patriarchal apartheid context that necessitates the need to address what Bowen calls the “overlap between the institutionalisation of racial ‘apartness’ and masculinist epistemology” (xi).
South African feminism finds itself in the peculiar position of having not only to address gender-related issues, but also to play a constructive role in the country’s social and political development. This historical contingency has seen women increasingly articulating their needs for equality in conjunction with a broader demand for the democratisation of the country. In the end, the struggle for feminists becomes conflated with the broader struggle for political emancipation. Within this context, feminist writers desire to (re)negotiate the space within which their identities as women and mothers can be articulated. Thus, the politics of identity cannot, in this light, be separated from other aspects within the liberation 164
struggle. Consequently, this opens a space within which characteristics of apartheid oppression are contrasted with the patriarchal domination opposed by feminist writers. Patriarchy, in this sense and context, is seen as a process of socially constructed beliefs of differences in what Ruthven maintains is a highly “phallocratic order - a system which enables men to dominate women in all social relations” (1985: 1).
This chapter will examine poems by Ingrid de Kok in an attempt to illustrate that her poetry not only articulates her individual identity as a woman, but further enunciates her attempt to achieve what Hassim and Walker maintain is a “solidarity on the basis of common goals” (1996: 84). This need for solidarity based on common goals is necessitated by the context within which the poetry is produced, a highly divisive context that has seen women being socially and racially separated in terms of ideology, theoretical inquiry, and the balance of literary power relations. This context has unwittingly fed into the process of racial othering where white women generally dominated feminist discourse and the production of knowledge in scholarly matters. Evidence of this can be found, for example, in Sisi Maqagi’s article “Who Theorises?” (1996), where she takes up and simultaneously problematises what she sees as inherent contradictions in Lockett’s “concern for the open-minded acceptance of black women’s point of view” (27). Maqagi strongly warns against white feminists’ unwitting “prescription” to black feminist writers through a “sympathetic discourse” that ignores the fact that black 165
feminists can theorise and also have a special talent to produce. Maqagi further maintains that “the very fact that the discourse will be a ‘sympathetic’ one indicates that it will not have arisen from within” (28). Her argument is, to a large extent, based on the fact that the use of the word “sympathetic” carries within it the implication of tolerance for something that is not up to the mark. Interesting in this regard is the emergence of a dialectical relationship between “within” and “without”, one which mirrors the dialectics of inside and outside, self and other, that are integral to the conceptualisation of identity. Thus the feminist struggle also becomes one of contestation where women attempt to (re)claim their suppressed voices and the voices of the other, a struggle that also attempts to articulate a historicity from the various voices submerged under the yoke of difference accentuated by the reality of racial and political oppression. In the end, the poetry attempts to close the ideological and racial chasm as poets venture to illustrate that, historical and interpretative differences notwithstanding, black and white women can create a mutual bond.
As Lockett avers, for feminists “there is a necessary continuum between identification of the self as ‘feminist’ – a primarily political act in which the politics of gender oppression are confronted – and professional practice as critic and teacher” (1996: 4). The preceding contention describes the essence of what feminist writers in general set out to achieve: to challenge, in theory and in practice, social perceptions that have served to bestow upon women the identity 166
of other. This becomes the common denominator that binds different feminists as they articulate the need for solidarity within a deeply gendered and oppressive context that constructs their subject positions as individuals. As Daymond points out:
white women as well as black have to speak and be spoken in the plural; no one here can be adequately scripted black and white. The problem [in South Africa] is certainly white supremacy, but all women have a part to play in dismantling it. (1996: xxv)
This claim can be seen as the basis for an understanding of how and why poets such as Antjie Krog, Jennifer Davids, Gcina Mhlope, Nise Malange and Ingrid de Kok, amongst others, have felt, as feminists, able to speak of and for South Africa’s women in a manner that transgresses racial boundaries.
Ingrid de Kok, who has also published as Ingrid Fiske, was born in 1951 and grew up in the mining town of Stilfontein. The town is located in what was then known as the Western Transvaal, now part of the North West Province, with a very strong Calvinist conservatism characteristic of the Afrikaans culture that bred apartheid. She received her tertiary education at the Universities of the Witwatersrand and Cape Town, both of which were characterised by a strong tradition of liberalism, before she proceeded to Canada to further her studies at 167
Queens University. Upon her return to South Africa, she worked as an educational planner and coordinator at Khanya College, which, as a project of the SACHED Trust, provided a progressive alternative to the inferior training of teachers provided in state-controlled black Training Colleges. She subsequently joined the University of Cape Town’s Department of Adult Education and Extra-Mural Studies. With such a cosmopolitan background, it is, perhaps, not surprising that she has a comprehensive understanding of her position as woman, evident in the poetry to be examined in this chapter.
The publicity note on the cover of Ingrid de Kok’s collection, Familiar Ground (1988), describes hers as poetry that “charts the impact of the state on the individual’s psychic and erotic life”, and that ranges “across the experience of the girl-child growing into adulthood and explore[s] the complex of identities and positions demanded of women in South Africa today”. The collection is divided into three sections titled “In a Hot Country”, “Where There Is Water”, and “Small Passing” respectively.
Each of the three sections represents a gamut of
experience in the persona’s development, both as a human being and as a woman. The range of emotions, experiences and feelings conveyed by the poems covers anger, fear, love, pain, suffering and eventually hope for the dawn of a new era, one in which there is compassion, sympathy, care and understanding for the other. The poems carry within them an inherent message that exhorts women, in particular, to begin to grapple with the importance of creating bonds 168
that transcend racial differences in the fight against the oppression of women in a typically phallocentric society in which, as Lockett correctly observes, “cultural meaning [is] attached to sexual identity” (1996: 3).
A poem in which the above finds expression in a more pronounced and deeply nuanced manner is “Small Passing” (p61), which is dedicated to “a woman whose baby died stillborn, and who was told by a man to stop mourning, ‘because the trials and horrors suffered daily by black women in this country are more significant than the loss of one white child’”. The dedication is chilling enough in itself and immediately invites racial and gender-based interpretations of the poem. Its implicit message resides in the desire to understand loss, any loss, as such. However, because of the historical and racial contingencies imposed by apartheid, the man referred to in the dedication seems to think that the pain of one woman’s loss of her child is irrelevant compared to the plight of millions of suffering black children. The man objectifies suffering and thereby dismisses the pain of the grieving mother. In the poem, there is, from the very beginning, protest against a society that tends to weigh pain in terms of magnitude and racial overtones. This protest is evident from the opening lines of the poem, where the persona says sadly:
remember the last push into shadow and silence, the useless wires and cords on your stomach, 169
the nurse’s face, the walls, the afterbirth in a basin. Do not touch your breasts still full of purpose. Do not circle the house, pack, unpack the small clothes. Do not lie awake at night hearing the doctor say “It was just as well” and “You can have another.” In this country you may not mourn small passings.
What becomes even more shocking is the sense of resignation that pervades the stanza as the persona reflects upon events that preceded the stillbirth. It is apparent that attempts were made to save the baby but these proved futile. This is clearly reflected in the manner the persona describes “useless wires”, “cords on your stomach”, “the nurse’s face”, “the walls”, and “the afterbirth in the basin”, all reminders of the painful process of having to face up to the loss of a child. It is also remarkable that the situation as depicted is presented in the form of a second person narrative. This is a stylistic device the poet uses to indicate that the loss of a child is a painful experience to mothers, all mothers, irrespective of their racial, religious and even political origins and inclinations, as the reader is placed in the position of the addressee. Reading the poem one is struck by the deep sense of loss for a mother, not just a white mother. At the level of signification, the universality of the woman’s experience, invariably so, undermines the haughty 170
superciliousness and utterly objectionable tone and tendencies displayed by the doctor in his arrogant, “It was just as well” and “You can have another”. Such statements coming from a doctor who should be more sympathetic are crass, to say the least.
It is, however, at the level of power relations that the statements assume even greater significance within the context of the discourse of difference, gender and oppression. The statements buttress the already evident male chauvinistic streak in the poem’s dedication in which the persona explicates some of the reasons for composing the poem. Out of this background arises a situation within which men, at least as represented in the poem, continually exhibit deeply phallocentric tendencies that, in turn, continue to enable them to dominate women in socioeconomic and political relations. That men continue to undermine the suffering of women in general and adopt an almost contemptuous attitude as evidenced by the doctor’s words is symptomatic of the skewed nature of gender relations, relations that need to be (re)negotiated so as to factor into the power equation equity, acceptance and understanding. Only then can South Africa lay claim to being a truly representative and discrimination-free society.
The poem attempts a consciousness-raising process through which society can begin to be compassionate about human pain and suffering as represented by the woman’s loss of her child. Furthermore, the poem brings out the importance of 171
gender solidarity towards the articulation of female identity, particularly within a society attempting to articulate new forms of identities based on respect for human dignity and an understanding of otherness. The poem simultaneously envisions a radically new situation within which there is a stronger sense of identification amongst women as mothers first and foremost. One cannot help but also detect a subliminal tone of protest against human (in this instance male) insensitivity towards the plight of a female individual, something that evokes the frequently hierarchically skewed nature of male / female power relations. In this context, one might even speak of a technology of power in which rationalistic and scientific power (as typified by “useless wires” and “the walls”) is linked to male power. This deliberate stylistic association is meant to reinforce the notion of an uncaring male whose power is not helpful to the female when it is most needed. The poem illustrates that, even within this context where there is an obvious move towards female solidarity, the old power relations of the male as the self and the female as the other have not been totally eradicated.
The subsequent stanzas of Part 1 depict typical South African scenarios starting with a “newspaper boy in the rain” who will “sleep tonight in a doorway”, through to “the woman in the busline / [who] may next month be on a train / to a place not her own”, and the “baby in the backyard” who “will be sent to a tired aunt,” a “Clumsy woman” who “moves so slowly / as if in a funeral rite”. This litany of woes presents the ugly face of social inequalities suffered by women and children, 172
in particular. This is a negative reflection on a society that seems to place a very low premium on women and children, who ironically are the biological basis of posterity. The last stanza of Part 1 depicts how the fate of the majority of women was “sealed and signed for” in a racially polarised South Africa. The persona describes what, at face value, seems to be a mundane conversation amongst the nannies. It is only upon reflection that one realises the very important social and political tone of protest that layers and pervades this deceptively innocuous stanza. Tongue-in-cheek, the persona immediately apprises the reader of the meeting and its legality, encompassed in the following lines:
On the pavements the nannies meet. These are legal gatherings. They talk about everything, about home, while the children play among them, their skins like litmus, their bonnets clean.
That these nannies gather in this fashion on the pavement is an indictment of society’s failure to provide its unsung heroines, the nannies, with amenities that would contribute to their physical comfort when they need to rest. Invariably, the nannies find solace in meeting on the pavement. While the meeting initially appears to be an official one, further scrutiny suggests that the character of the gathering is an informal one. However, the informal nature of the gathering does not detract from the very pertinent issues the nannies discuss. The depiction 173
evokes a very vivid scenario where the nannies talk animatedly about their personal experiences that bind them to identify with one another, firstly as nannies and secondly as women who are worried about what may be happening at their respective homes while they have to take care of their employers’ children. Equally interesting is the description of the white children the nannies are minding. Their skins are described as being “like litmus” and “their bonnets [are] clean”. Litmus is a paper that turns red in acid or blue in an alkali. Such a description acts as a double-edged sword that cuts both sides of the divide. On the one hand the children have lotion applied on their faces to protect their skins from the very hot African sun. To assist in their skins’ protection they also put on bonnets which provide some shade for their skins. On the other hand the description shows that the nannies are able to survive even in the face of the harsh African sun, which the children cannot survive without some form of skin protection. This dimension also helps the reader to realise that for white people to survive the Africa, they need to develop the proverbial “thick skin” in more ways than one. In a very subtle way the persona skilfully brings in issues of identity through racial identification and thus creates a background against which gender solidarity is made possible. The persona depicts the above scenario to begin illustrating that, while the cost of solidarity is high, it is a price worth paying to ensure that both black and white women create a mutual bond. Such a bond begins with an enabling environment in which there is space for self-criticism and
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the acknowledgement that black women in particular have been doubly othered in gender and racial terms.
There is already, amongst the women in the quoted stanza, a sense of solidarity that leads them not only to identify with each other but also to realise that, as women, they are oppressed. Invariably, there is also an underlying comparison between their oppression as women, in an essentially patriarchal society, and apartheid oppression, which, in terms of feminist discourse, is based on a deeply phallocentric sense of dominance and self-importance. Given half a chance, these nannies would rather be taking care of their own children. However, they find themselves in a situation about which they have no choice, primarily because of the politics surrounding race, class, and even more importantly, gender. The conclusion that one readily accedes to is that these black women resign themselves to the historical imposition of being nannies within a social system that practises multiple forms of oppression, as encapsulated in apartheid. This presents a momentous challenge to white women, particularly within the context of feminist discourse, because within the racial context of Apartheid oppression, as Lockett puts it, “the paradigm of power considers whites as the Self and blacks as the Other, which means that white women are subsumed into the masculine Self” (1996: 17). The foregoing assertion crystallises some of the challenges that feminists have to contend with in the quest to redress gender, social, racial and
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class contradictions in the quest for a more egalitarian society in which the political agenda of feminism will not be suppressed.
The last stanza of “Small Passing” openly propagates the idea that, despite the reality of social, racial, gender and class differences imposed by what Bowen calls “the patriarchalism of nineteenth-century Calvinism” (1996: x) that characterised apartheid ideology, it is possible and, indeed, essential within certain contexts, for black and white women to bond and form their own solidarity. The message of female solidarity in the struggle for survival, within the context of the poem, has to be seen in relation to the superciliousness of men, a relation that inheres in the poem's dedication and is further typified in the doctor’s insensitive utterances in the first stanza of the poem. The poem concludes thus:
I think these mothers dream headstones of the unborn. Their mourning rises like a wall no vine will cling to. They will not tell you your suffering is white. They will not say it is just as well. They will not compete for the ashes of infants. I think they may say to you: Come with us to the place of mothers. We will stroke your flat empty belly, let you weep with us in the dark, 176
and arm you with one of our babies to carry home on your back.
As already pointed out, the stanza envisions a sense of solidarity. This solidarity, I want to argue, is based on the universality of the experiences as mothers and, thus, as women. There is a sharp juxtaposition between the attitude of males towards a woman’s loss, and the mothers’ compassion. The concept of dream in the first line of the stanza factors into the equation a sense of hope. This hope is reinforced in the third line where the persona employs a pun in “mourning” in the statement “Their mourning rises like a wall”. On the one hand, the statement refers to a deep sense of loss that the mothers, naturally, mourn; on the other hand, it engenders a sense of hope and reflects the courage that the mothers have. Mourning in the stanza has echoes of morning, which marks the beginning of a new day, and thus hope for better things. There is also, within this context, the invocation of religious imagery in the form of the Wailing Wall to which both Jew and Gentile go to express their sorrow to God. The wall imagery is used in a double-edged manner where, on the one hand, it can act as a barrier to access while, on the other hand, it also represents a monument of hope. The significance of the pun on mourning and morning lies in its capacity to inject a sense of hope into the whole situation. Despite the fact that the mothers are mourning one gets a sense that their hope “rises like a wall”, a wall of hope on which they see possibilities not only for new beginnings, but simultaneously the threshold for 177
passing on to a future. It is in this new situation that they will pledge solidarity primarily as mothers and human beings, in “a place of mothers” which is soothing and presents a possibility of new forms of identification. The poem projects a vision of a just society in which women are united in articulating their identities on the basis of shared experiences, experiences that are seen as harrowingly painful, something that Bowen agrees with in her contention that the persona’s “voice expresses a vision, not an actuality. Against the tenderness in these lines, Ingrid de Kok’s work is often ruthless in its analysis of the brutal history of oppression that has also constructed her white subject position” (1996: xxvi).
In its examination of the role of motherhood, the poem represents “the place of mothers” as one imbued with qualities such as compassion, comfort, racial harmony and empathy, in short, a place where mothers console each other and thus form a solidarity that helps in articulating their identity as women irrespective of their racial and class origins. Here one detects tension between the old and the “new”. Motherhood has often been used as a way of confining women to conservative roles as minders of the household. That the persona projects a vision in which women come together in solidarity, almost in open defiance of their conservative, socially constructed roles of domestication and racial difference, is a sharp departure from the apartheid construct of white “madam” / black “nanny” power relations. As a result of her determination to see a more just society, the persona envisions a society in which white women enter a “place of mothers”, 178
stripped of the pretensions of their assumed power and superiority over their black counterparts, rather than accept as holy writ the condescending and guiltinspiring utterances of her male speaker in the poem. The persona’s determination to envision such a society is evidence of a desire to (re)construct and articulate new forms of female identity, in a transforming society, based on equity and acceptance. It is, furthermore, an attempt by the persona to move away from a paradigm that divided women in terms of their race, social status and class origins to a new paradigm predicated on common goals and experiences. This “new” paradigm of female solidarity must not be construed as a monolithic quest for homogeneity amongst women, but rather as an essential political weapon within feminist discourse to prioritise the elimination of racial and gender oppression in a changing society attempting to move away from racial compartmentalisation, and from political and socially constructed notions of difference and otherness.
“Woman in the Glass” (p38) is another poem that seeks to examine the role and status of women in a prejudiced society. The examination is presented in a defiant tone through which the persona portrays the different states used in a phallocentric society to define women and their roles. Right from the beginning of the poem, the persona adopts a radical stance in her self-representation. Of interest is the way in which the persona defines herself in terms of what, in a typical phallocentric society, she is not. This is a skilful poetic device successfully employed by the poet to project her feminist stance and foreground women’s 179
demand for their right to define and name themselves as opposed to their being categorised into otherness:
I am not the woman in the train who pulls your hand between her legs and then looks out of the window. I am not the woman with the henna hair in a city street, who never says a word but beckons you, beckons you. Nor am I the woman in the glass who looks at you look at her and the glass smokes over. Nor am I the woman who holds you whilst you call out the names of lost lovers as you will call out this one. Nor am I the woman in the dark whose silence is the meteor in the sky of your conversation. That woman: bent over, offering her sex to you like a globe of garlic, asking for nothing; the one without fingerprints, hiding in the amulet of your protection; 180
the one surrounded by photographers printing her supple smile, her skin: that woman. I stand to the side and watch her, widow-virgin, burn on your pyre. Acrobat falling into a net of ash, in the flames her mouth drips wax, her eyebrows peel off, her sex unstitches its tiny mirrors. Your woman: cousin, sister, twin. You want her burning, distant, dumb. I want to save, and tear, her tongue.
The poem raises a number of very salient points as regards the power relations between men and women. It is a skilfully wrought public declaration against the domination and oppression of women by men. The persona methodically describes the woman that she is not, thereby indicating that, contrary to popular masculine opinion, she is not going to let her identity as a woman be in constant erasure for the convenience of the male. The persona refuses to be a passive, unassuming and almost witless victim in a process that compromises her identity both as an individual and as a woman. There is a clear challenge to the assumed roles of women being objects of men’s subjugation and gratification, sexual and otherwise.
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The challenge which is simultaneously a warning to men, is clearly encapsulated in “I am not the woman in the train / who pulls your hand between her legs / and then looks out of the window”. The warning directed to men in a male-dominated society signals the persona’s determination to assert her sense of self both as a human being worthy of respect and a woman who suffers no fools. The woman referred to in the first stanza is representative of countless women who suffer abuse in silence at the hands of male prurience and aggression and are complicit in such abuse. The act of pulling the man’s hand between her legs and then looking out of the window is an indication that the woman finds herself without control over her own body. Looking out of the window is a psychological attempt to free herself from male sexual aggression in relation to which she is an active participant, which makes her doubly subjugated. The window is significant in this context because it offers a momentary mental reprieve in that she is able temporarily to ignore being violated. Furthermore, it represents an opportunity, a psychological escape route, to rid herself finally of the trauma of being sexually harassed. That the woman gazes out of the window marks the beginning of a selfreflective process that, if taken further, should end with her freeing herself from this phallocratic violation. That the incident occurs in a train, a public utility, reflects how debased society has become. It also suggests the anonymity and depersonalisation of the experience. The incident almost becomes an “ordinarily normal” one. One can even hazard to add that men still trapped within a patriarchal construct would see nothing wrong with the act and will probably even 182
condone it. The persona warns these men that she is not one of these women who continue suffering in silence, afraid of rocking the proverbial boat of male dominance.
The description of the woman that the persona is not touches a number of areas still dominated by the politics of phallocentric discourse. For the persona, there are no holy cows in the struggle for gender equality as she boldly asserts that she will not allow her female identity to be compromised for the sake of male gratification. The tone adopted by the persona is a radical one for she wants her audience, in this case the readers, to sit up and take notice. What the persona also does is to bring in a fresh perspective and add a new voice in the discourse. Her voice begins the very important process of suturing the feminine identity that has progressively been mutilated through the phallocratic discourse of othering. This discourse, as Ruthven correctly points out, “enables men to dominate women in all social relations” (1984: 1). Ultimately, this discourse engenders a sense of inferiority amongst women as it makes them feel lesser human beings whose identity can only be defined and articulated from a male perspective, and renders them objects.
The persona refuses to submerge her identity in a cloak of silence. This way the persona also begins a very important reclamation process which aims to lay a foundation for the (re)negotiation, (re)construction and (re)articulation of 183
women's identity. Ultimately this sets the stage for a feminist counter-discourse the aim of which is to undermine male hegemony, to reclaim the muted voice of oppressed women, and to affirm females and motherhood. In the poem the persona makes this obvious by cataloguing what she perceives to be the negatives ensuing from the deeply sexist construct of female identity “whose silence is the meteor / in the sky of your [male] conversation”, and who offers “her sex to you / like a globe of garlic, asking for nothing; / the one without fingerprints”. The highly graphic language employed is deliberately meant to shock the audience / reader into the realisation that male dominance, if it remains unchallenged, will continue to perpetuate the subservience of women which, in turn, leads to loss of identity as reflected in “the one without fingerprints”. Fingerprints are signifiers that define an individual’s identity. A loss of fingerprints thus signifies a loss of identity and further relegates the woman, within the context of the poem, into oblivion. It is also interesting to note that the persona in the poem acts both as an observer, and later on, participant. She observes the phallocratic power complacency that, within a highly sexist society, confines women to commercial commodities that are objectified solely for the benefit of men.
The penultimate stanza of the poem presents a symbolic volte-face in terms of signification. There is a dramatic turn in which the ostensibly faceless, “distant” and “dumb” woman is represented as a “widow-virgin” burning “on your pyre”. The poetic effect of the “widow-virgin” interplay is to bring forth the pervasive 184
influence of sexism and its insidious power of objectifying women and thus compromising and corrupting their identities. Furthermore, it shows that “victims” of sexism are branded from an early age, as represented by the progression from virgin to widow. The disintegration of the “widow-virgin” into “a net of ash” represents the totality of the othering process, where the woman is sacrificed to the fire of male lust. The “widow-virgin” image derives from a practice in India, where widows immolate themselves after their husband’s death. In this instance, because of the nature of pre-arranged marriages and the polygamous nature of patriarchal society, the widow would still be a virgin at the time of her husband’s death. The image is presented in the poem within a universal context where the poet wants to show that women have been reduced to mere appendages of their male counterparts. Not only is the woman in the poem reduced into a “net of ash”, but “her mouth drips wax”,
“her eyebrows peel off,” while
“her sex
unstitches its tiny mirrors”. From this context one cannot help but reflect that the only way to the restoration of the woman’s identity is through rising up, phoenixlike, in a new form of identity which is much stronger.
The final stanza of the poem drives home a very uncomfortable point about the dynamics inherent within sexist discourse conveniently ignored in patriarchal societies. The commodified girl-woman is some man’s daughter, cousin, sister, twin. Here the persona brings reality closer to home to illustrate that society tends to apply double standards for as long as the problem remains at a distance. When 185
the persona draws the audience / reader closer to the girl-woman, she attempts to prick the male dominator’s conscience, if he still has any. By so doing the persona hopes that society will wake up to the reality of male dominance over women and not continue to consistently sweep the issue of equality under the carpet or, worse still, treat it just like a footnote of social discourse. When the persona finally highlights the contrast between the phallocentric and feminist conception of a woman, she brings to bear a reality that still has to sink into the consciousness of a male-dominated society. Thus she declares:
You want her burning, distant, dumb. I want to save, and tear, her tongue.
The irony that in order to save the woman the persona has to cut the woman’s tongue cannot escape one’s attention. One becomes mindful and is simultaneously discomfited that such a drastic step as the tearing of the tongue is presented as inevitable. The tongue is a very potent organ in the articulation of identity. In the context of the poem, the woman had been silent and, by extension, had given in to a process of othering. The persona sees the tearing of the tongue, not as an act of muting, but ironically as an empowering one that should result in the articulation of new forms of female identities independent of male prescription, definition and dominance. As far as the persona is concerned, the woman should have no tongue at all but continue to represent the emerging identity of a strong
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woman, rather than have a tongue but remain dumb in a phallocentric world that thrives on silencing women in more ways than one. That the woman retains her tongue no matter how torn, split or divided it may be is symbolically representative of the multiplicity of subordinate roles that society imposes on women. It further highlights the split between the phallocentric and feminist conceptualisations of the role of women and the way women should articulate their identity in a society that is characterised by sexism.
It is germane to conclude this chapter by pointing out that De Kok’s poetry adopts a radical stance in her attempt to conscientise the reader to an understanding of the debilitating effects of the phallocentric othering of women. Through this stance, she simultaneously sets out, through her incisive poetry, to challenge pregiven notions of female identity as projected within a deeply sexist society in which women are generally defined almost as “children of a lesser God”. Through her poetry De Kok sends a message of solidarity to women all over so that they begin a process which aims to batter down the socially imposed and psychological manacles that inhibit the articulation of female identities. However, De Kok the poet is also aware of the dangers inherent in the feminist project of reclaiming identity. She is mindful of the dangers of essentialist tendencies like the description of women as a monolithic entity. Such essentialisms may vitiate the feminist project of ensuring that women have the right to name themselves and that the word ‘woman’, within the hierarchical and oppositional man / woman 187
power relationships in society, is stripped of all sense of inferiority. For De Kok and other feminist poets, female solidarity and its articulation are seen as crucially important weapons in the struggle for female liberation.
Finally, it is important to point out that, as with all categories of poetry examined in this study, feminist poetry focuses on the important aspect of liberation. What is also incontrovertible is the fact that each of the categories of poetry examined so far has its own conceptual matrix, which informs the manner in which cultural identity is constructed and articulated. It is interesting to note that while the poetry of self focuses on the need to reaffirm individual liberty, black consciousness poetry seeks to reclaim cultural values that will help in the revival of pride, the poetry of revolution seeks the creation of an egalitarian society and class solidarity, worker poetry aims at the formation of proletarian forms of identity, feminist poetry focuses on identities denied as a result of the very phallocentric nature of society. What becomes even more interesting within this context is that, depending on the poet’s authorial and aesthetic ideologies, feminist poetry has the capacity to fit into any one of these other categories. This is illustrative of this poetry’s enduring qualities that make it transcend the boundaries created by male hegemony in a deeply phallocentric society.
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Chapter 7 Towards a New Aesthetics The previous chapters of this study analysed poems from a variety of local traditions in an attempt to show how the ideological dynamics and cultural contexts within which each poet operates contribute towards the formation and articulation of each of their literary identities. The convergence and interaction of identity and culture, the manner in which each poet enunciates his or her theme, as well as the socio-political circumstances dictate that each poet uses a different frame of reference in articulating an urgency arising from very specific circumstances within which he or she is located. In consonance with the interacting and sometimes conflicting dynamics of what Ngara calls authorial ideologies (1990: 12), the frames of reference referred to above influence and even determine the kind of poetry a particular poet produces. Consequently, it is feasible to establish a literary identity that is the defining quality of each poet’s artifice. Furthermore, it is possible to establish the threads that run through the works of poets tied together by a common aesthetic project. The concept of aesthetics has itself been subjected to various exhaustive scholastic, philosophical, artistic as well as critical interpretations. The common denominator amongst these interpretative examinations of what aesthetics entails, from Schiller through Adorno to the present, has been an acceptance that it deals with the relationship between artist and audience. It is clear, therefore, that aesthetics is not free from 189
subjectivity. On the contrary, it is a deeply value-laden concept coterminous with the politics of cultural ideology.
This concluding chapter attempts briefly to argue that between culture and identity, which have been employed in this study to provide a more acute interpretation of the poetry investigated, there is a mediating link comprising complex values and beliefs. It is this link that necessitates a break from the conception of aesthetics that is characterised within the South African context by the reductive juxtaposition of revolutionary and reactionary poetic oeuvres. Poetry, as suggested earlier in this study, is created as a result of very particular circumstances to which poets respond. It is, therefore, crucial to interrogate and then factor into the broader equation of poetic output the various interpersonal, social and political dynamics that go into shaping a particular poetic identity. Flowing from this is the need to employ new interpretative approaches that will take into cognisance the idea, as Townsend puts it, that “new art forms require new approaches and produce new feelings” (1998: 10). Given the preoccupation in South African poetry with forms of identity, South African critics need to be alert to the contexts and dynamics of identity formation. As poetry is also more about society’s interrogation of notions of the world around it and how this world is interpreted, it is important to understand that the construction and articulation of identity, which take place within ideological and cultural contexts, are important aspects in the consciousness-raising project that poets from diverse traditions set 190
themselves within the broader context of social transformation. There is a need to understand and appreciate the significant influence of and role that aesthetics and cultural ideologies play in the shaping and articulation of identity. The convergence of aesthetics and cultural ideologies ultimately contributes towards determining the content and form of the poetry. Once the foregoing has been recognised it becomes easier to note that the poetry discussed in this study embodies many facets of life in attempting to capture the diverse aspects of South Africa’s socio-literary and political body politic. This renders problematic the tendency to analyse this poetry using “tried and tested” critical canonical methods as if these were suzerain. While traditional critical paradigms in themselves are good, have served, and will continue to serve an important role in the aesthetic analysis of poetry in general, it is equally important to recognise and understand the danger of arbitrarily imposing these critical paradigms without attempting to understand the nature of what a particular poetry aims to do, and the methods employed in achieving the avowed project.
Analyses of the poetry cited in this study have revealed that poets conceive of and articulate their literary and cultural identities from diverse perspectives. An examination of some of the perspectives evinces the intersection of authorial and aesthetic ideologies in the articulation of identity.
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In examining the poetry of the self, as represented in this study by the work of Stephen Gray, a number of interesting observations came to the fore. Through his application of poetic techniques such as alienation and irony, and his telling employment of metaphors, Gray breathes new life into a liberal-humanist paradigm. The examination also showed the convergence of authorial and aesthetic ideologies in the explication of Gray’s vision of a new country.
This
convergence is buttressed by Gray’s assertion that a major thrust of his poetic oeuvre has been to focus on apartheid. This contention is telling as it reveals the poet tacitly agreeing that the context in which he finds himself tyrannically prescribes what he can and cannot write. Moving from a liberal-humanist point of departure Gray's poetry deals with issues current to South Africa’s national psyche as he attempts to address what he considers to be “unsatisfactory conditions”.
The spread of Gray’s poetry examined in this study covers an eclectic range of issues and experiences. These fluctuate from issues dealing directly with the conception and articulation of identity in the poem “The Discovery”, through Gray’s nuanced application of metaphor in presenting the heinous nature of apartheid and its effect in “Sunflower”, his oscillation in the laconic “Zebra” between the personal and the public as he metaphorically envisions a country within which a multiplicity of cultures can interact in the construction of a new society of co-operation, and finally the elegiac “Season of Violence” in which the persona entreats both his compatriots and God to stop the internecine carnage 192
that threatened to rend the country asunder. All this Gray’s poetry does in muted but sometimes derisive tones as can be seen in “Sunflower” and “The Discovery” respectively. However different the tones may be, and whatever the theme may be, the poet displays a liberal humanist authorial ideology that focuses on the importance of individual liberty. Even when the persona takes up communal issues such as the violence that had engulfed South Africa, he does so from a deeply personalised perspective which reveals that his conception and understanding of the inter-subjective dynamics at play in each circumstance are predicated on a liberal humanist foundation that recognises the importance of the individual.
Subsequent to the examination of Gray’s poetry the thesis discussed Don Mattera’s black consciousness poetry. The analysis was done against the backdrop of the provisional nature of identity formation. The analysis revealed the various layers underlying black consciousness’ conception and articulation of identity and its socio-psychological affirmation and signification of the black experience. Through poems such as “Blood River”, in which the poet draws on history to lay a foundation for understanding the possibilities of a new country, Mattera begins a significant process that underpins his flexible approach to identity and identity formation. By shifting away from the essentialist paradigm that generally characterises black consciousness, Mattera simultaneously opens up possibilities for a better understanding of the particularities of culture. Such an understanding ushers in possibilities of “articulating those social divisions and unequal 193
developments that disturb the self-recognition of the national culture, its anointed horizons of territory and tradition” (Bhabha 1996: 54). The divisions that Bhabha refers to in this quotation find resonance in Mattera’s “Sea and Sand”, a poem in which the persona entreats God to bless the African continent, especially the southern part where he and his people are located. By going on to give the background to his invocation, the persona draws the reader closer and invites him / her to join in this journey through history. By the time the persona finally pleads for understanding between the “black children” and the “white children”, the reader is persuaded by the persona’s vision of a more humane and accommodating country in which people are treated in a just manner. Here, as in the poem “Tokologo”, there is no essentialist vision that fetishises the binary opposition of black and white, but rather an understanding that resonates with Gray’s observations in “Zebra” of the need for both black and white to work together. What we have is poetry whose message proffers what, according to Bhabha, are “forms of contestatory subjectivities that are empowered in the act of erasing the politics of binary opposition” (1994: 179). The sense that one gets here is of poetry that proposes the articulation of a new self-image of cultural identity in which there is no longing for “eternal belongingness” because there is recognition that culture is an uneven discourse of meaning created in the act of survival, that each conception has a historical function of mobilising society around several ideological and social contexts of identity and identification.
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The flexibility that inheres in Mattera’s poetry is followed by the dynamism that characterises Jeremy Cronin’s poetry of revolution, which agitates for a more radical vision of social change. Through his poetry, Cronin reflects upon a new social vision as he explores modes of articulating identity that will factor in the needs of the majority. Adopting a Marxist point of departure, the poetry of revolution quietly discredits the notion of mutual exclusivity in black and white writing. Cronin declares his indebtedness to black South African poetry such as that written by Serote, Madingoane and Gwala thus:
I think I learnt a lot from reading their poetry, and now since I’ve been out, listening to some of it. But I am white South African and write and speak like a white South African. Since I got out, I have been involved in a series of poetry readings, at political meetings, commemoration meetings to largely black audiences, mainly working class people…. I have learnt a lot from doing that. (Gardner 1986: 16)
In so doing, he disrupts, and ultimately reverses, the inside / outside, white / black, master / learner polarities that hitherto had always assumed blacks to be inferior and, therefore, perpetual learners from whites. Cronin’s assertion begins a process whose aim is the reversal of white people’s attitudes. What the assertion further does is to redefine the aesthetic relationship that had always assumed 195
whites to be imposers of culture. From this arises the possibility of a more inclusive emergent culture within which all people will be free to articulate their identity. Through his poetry, Cronin represents an alternative radical, Marxist, socialist and collectivist tradition that challenges the might of the apartheid state. This tradition, which found resonance amongst the masses whose rights had been progressively thwarted, proved intractable to apartheid’s ideological apparatus as it sought to undermine the central tenets of apartheid in ideological, social, aesthetic and political terms. Anderson correctly observes:
Cronin, although white and middle class in origin, has made the vital crossing…. from the strictly anti-apartheid politics of the enlightened white opposition, to the broader pro-liberation politics of the black majority. (1990: 44) By merging his aesthetic outlook with that of the majority, Cronin adds another weapon to the arsenal of resistance to apartheid and its identity formations. His poetry, therefore, contributes to an emerging common culture that engenders new forms of aesthetic appreciation and identification instead of just playing (what Anderson sees as) “the role of a splinter of conscience under the skin of the oppressor in a society regarded as irrevocably bifurcated from the start” (44).
The emergent society envisioned in the poetry of revolution is reinforced by the vision enunciated in worker poetry. Moving from the materialist conditions that 196
inform worker solidarity, influenced by Christianity and the oral tradition, worker poetry projects itself into the body politic of South Africa’s literary production as poetry that agitates for a unified approach to the enunciation of a proletarian identity through cultural expression. As Sole observes, worker poets, as part of the progressive community organisations and trade union movement, have
allowed a sense of unified and purposeful cultural activity to be achieved and maintained among people previously denied access to such self-conscious cultural creation. The gains have been a sense of direction, a moving towards more cogent and insightful representations of the life of the oppressed; access to [finance] and cultural space; and (for the individual) the benefits of self-education, comradeliness, self-confidence and self-assurance. (1994: 6)
It is, therefore, not surprising to see the sense of solidarity and community that permeates worker poetry and ultimately becomes the fulcrum of worker poets’ construction and articulation of a cultural identity based on worker solidarity by addressing issues pertinent to workers and which spur them to creativity.
Solidarity is the operative word that binds together worker poetry and feminist poetry. Where worker poetry calls for the articulation of identity based on the solidarity of the proletariat, feminist poets desire to renegotiate the space in which they can articulate their identities both as women and mothers within a deeply 197
patriarchal social context. The examination of Ingrid de Kok’s poetry has shown that solidarity and identity are constructed through a process of change, that questions of gender can preponderate over racial and ethnic issues. In poems such as “Small Passing” and “Woman in the Glass”, amongst others, De Kok expresses a vision that black and white women can create mutual bonds even in the face of harsh social conditions, that, as Daymond puts it, “motherhood, so often a means of holding women in a conservatively understood role, can be thought of as instrumental in the demise of racial oppression” (1996: xxvii).
It is against the background of the above that one asserts that, through her poetry, De Kok articulates a feminist desire to create solidarity among women on the basis of common goals. The goals which become rallying points for this conception of women’s identity, arise as a result of the phallocentric nature of society - a society that sees women “othered” into positions of social, political and economic inferiority, and that objectifies and sexualises women in a demeaning manner. Women assert themselves by adopting positive approaches towards selfexpression, so creating an aesthetic environment that sees them joining hands to articulate their identity. Cognizant that culture has been used
to “other” and
oppress them, they can use it conversely to enunciate a common identity.
The foregoing summation illustrates the complexities and multiplicity of both South African society and its literary production. It furthermore highlights the 198
continuing tension between the homogeneity and stability of a ‘national’ identity and the heterogeneity and indeterminacy of an identity in process explored in this study through the examination poetry representing various categories. One thus questions the efficacy of applying uniform aesthetic models while evidence suggests the need for particularisation. As a result of South Africa’s history of racial, political and gendered fragmentation, the temptation to attempt homogenisation always lurks ominously. However, this researcher is of the view that South Africa’s literary production is enriched, rather than impoverished, by accepting diversity and difference as essential components of social and literary development. Thus, instead of attempting to compartmentalise poetry into one category and consequently apply aesthetics generically, there is a need to factor in the very particular set of circumstances to which poets respond, circumstances which this study has highlighted. This presupposes the application of an aesthetics that is appreciative of these circumstances and, ultimately, makes for a richer understanding of each body of poetry within its context. Aesthetics, in this context, is understood within its broadest possible sense, encompassing as Townsend correctly puts it, “all of the underlying concepts and feelings that form our experience of art [poetry] and [its] nature” (1998: 2). Such an understanding opens space for the confluence and mutual reinforcing of aesthetic, authorial and cultural ideologies which play a significantly effective role within the broader cultural context of the construction and articulation of identity, as was evident throughout this study. 199
Frielick (1990), in his examination of South African poetry that mainly focuses on protest and resistance poetry, highlights the importance of the construction and application of a “new” aesthetic approach to the examination of South African poetry and its signification. Frielick’s argument is premised on the conviction, which one readily accedes to, that the construction of such a critical approach to South African poetry can help in forging an understanding of the poetry’s aesthetic qualities as well as appreciating its cultural impact. Such a conviction is furthermore, based on the recognition that it is futile to embark on any examination of poetry without acknowledging the need to forge a critical structure that will take into account the many impulses - culture and identity being the primary ones - that are operational within the body politic and the production of South African poetry.
It is crucial, at this stage, to warn against interpreting the call for a new aesthetics as propagating the abandonment of traditional aesthetic approaches. On the contrary, it should be seen as an enriching process whose focus should add value to the understanding of South African poetry within its ideological and cultural contexts. The examination of Mattera’s poetry, for example, has revealed that he represents a more flexible stream of black consciousness that does not see the articulation of identity in essentialist terms. It would, therefore, be wrong to have the same expectations of this poetry as one would have of poetry that represents the more radical and essentialist category of black consciousness that conceives 200
identity within the black versus white binary construct. The call for a new aesthetic should be seen as an attempt to highlight and illustrate the effects the various conceptions of identity and culture have on South Africa’s literary production. It foregrounds the notion that it is sometimes ineffective to presume that traditional aesthetic paradigms are the only yardstick with which to judge any poetic expression. It is a call that aims, first and foremost, to affirm the notion that South African poets produce poetry which attempts to show a great sense of socio-cultural meaningfulness. This, I aver, is what Gray does as he expresses his vision of a country in which individual liberty and freedom may be guaranteed, or what De Kok does as she enunciates her vision of a country in which women are freed from domestic and sexual exploitation.
A new approach will hopefully imbue the concept “aesthetics” - hitherto understood from a very exclusivist Eurocentric bias - which for historical reasons such as tradition and literary development tended to exclude the particular cultural and social contexts characteristic of South African poetry, with a more inclusive meaning - a meaning that will contribute to a new, diversified critical environment that recognises the aesthetic importance of diversity and its signifying influence in the articulation of cultural identity. Within this environment there is recognition, for example, that the contexts validate liberal humanism, black consciousness, Marxism, workerism and feminism as paradigms employed by different poets in enunciating their various conceptions of cultural identity; that within each context 201
lies what Ndebele calls an “aesthetics of recognition, understanding, historical documentation and indictment” (1992: 442).
The call for a new aesthetics also arises from the need to identify the various methods that are at play in the poetry as this enhances the possibilities of locating what Ndebele maintains is the “effective audience”. He further contends that the importance of locating this audience contributes towards the validation of the writing in terms of its “own primary conventions… and its own emergent complex system of aesthetics” (1992: 440). The importance of recognising different kinds of poetry in terms of their cultural and aesthetic ideology can, thus, not be overemphasised in this instance. This, ultimately, necessitates the need to evaluate each kind of poetry in terms of its own aesthetics. The examination of poetry representing the five chapters Poetry of Self, Black Consciousness Poetry, Poetry of Revolution, Worker Poetry and Feminist Poetry, has revealed that while all the categories deal with issues of social emancipation and political liberation, each employs its own conception predicated on a matrix influenced by both authorial and aesthetic ideologies. The concomitant argument, therefore, is that while there may be areas of confluence, each body of poetry engenders its own aesthetic validity because of the context and ideological position adopted by each poet.
In order properly to understand the conception of culture and identity it is important to examine the philosophical point of departure of each body of poetry, 202
as this is the place to locate each poet’s understanding and interpretation of the realities enunciated in his / her poetry. It would have been inappropriate to examine each kind of poetry simply under the general rubric of South African poetry without attempting to locate such an examination on the very particular aesthetic circumstances that inform and influence each poet’s conception of culture and identity. Hence the need for a new aesthetics.
Poets examined in this study were chosen not only because their work reflects the cultural, social, political and linguistic tapestry of South Africa’s body politic, but because their work provided the researcher with an opportunity to trace the shift in the poetic conception of cultural identity and aesthetics from the conception of identity as autonomous in the Poetry of Self, the formulation of identity as racially determined in Black Consciousness Poetry, through the approach to identity as a form of struggle in Poetry of Revolution, the formulation of identity as a form of class solidarity in Worker Poetry, to the conception of identity as based on sexual differentiation in Feminist Poetry. Through the analyses it was shown that identity and culture are not necessarily dependent upon the specifications of racial and or ethnic configurations. What emerges strongly from the analyses is the complex interplay between culture and identity as well as the aesthetics employed in articulating these notions in the said poetry. This was done by understanding both the historical as well as ideological backgrounds and the aesthetic category of
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each body of poetry within the broader context of the articulation of cultural identity.
The convergence of identity, culture and aesthetics opened space in which it became possible to validate the assertion that poets, being engaged in poetic activity as a result of very particular circumstances, have very specific goals in mind. These goals include, amongst others, the articulation of identity within the context of a consciousness-raising process. As a result poets infuse a sense of urgency in their poetry in an attempt to highlight the interacting dynamics of identity and culture. Furthermore, poets make use of different frames of reference together with authorial ideologies to shape their particular brand of poetry. In the end it becomes possible to establish the literary identity characteristic of poets bound together by a common aesthetic project.
As pointed out earlier in this study, South Africa’s history of socio-political segregation and ideological division makes the essentialisation of certain conceptions of identity highly tempting. The desire to move away from a divided past has the risk of making people attempt wholesale homogenisation in an attempt to create a “unified” national identity. Through the analyses of poetry in the different chapters and by calling for a new aesthetics, this study also attempted to illustrate the validity of Hall’s contention that
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identities are constructed through, not outside, difference. This entails the radically disturbing recognition that it is only through the relation to the other, the relation to what is not, to precisely what it lacks, to what has been called its constitutive
outside that the positive meaning of identity can be constructed. (Hall 1996b: 4) The implication of the above quotation is that it is futile to attempt to read homogeneity as the only constituent part of identity. By examining the different aesthetic trajectories and matrices inherent in the different bodies of South African poetry, this study further attempted to indicate that the construction and articulation of cultural identity is dependent upon a number of factors, amongst which ideology is prominent. Furthermore, the call for a new aesthetics is made from the realisation that the diverse nature of South Africa’s linguistic and cultural communities, and the multi-layered character of its literary production, implies that paradoxically difference is the common denominator. Cognizance is thus taken of the fact that difference can be an enabling quality towards the forging of new forms of identities towards a common project, which in this case is the desire to construct a new inclusive sense of South Africanness and the narrowing down of the black / white binary divide. The recognition of the foregoing is predicated on the understanding that cultural identity, as Etienne Balibar contends,
appears as a collection of traits, of objective structures 205
(as such spontaneously thought of in the dimension of the collective, the social and the historical) and as a principle or process of subjectivisation…. Between these poles there would normally be correspondence or reciprocity, following the models of exteriorization and interiorization; but in certain cases there may be conflict. (Rajchman 1995: 174)
The above quotation is as important as it is instructive. It buttresses the notion that identities are not contingent upon sameness but are constructed within an arena where there is convergence, collision, interaction and conflict of the interacting dynamics that, within the context of poetry, provide the opportunity to disrupt the linear discursive in an attempt to provide new forms of identification more suited to the new society. Context thus provides a mediating link between culture and identity through values and beliefs. Through this link one is then able to establish each poet’s authorial ideology. Flowing from this is the determination of an aesthetics that runs through each poet’s work, an aesthetics that is influenced and informed by the context in the articulation of identity.
Identity, culture and aesthetics will continue to be areas of academic and intellectual contestation. This is largely because the spaces occupied by identity and culture will continue to be value-laden, politically volatile and ideologically charged. However, there can be no gainsaying the fact that within the context of
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poetic expression, the link between identity and culture provides an opportunity to (re)evaluate the manner in which poetry enunciates its themes and observations, its unique way of attributing values significant to human existence. Such an examination ultimately reveals the need for the recognition of the very particular set of circumstances that for historical reasons have formed the context of South African poetry. Hence, the call for a new aesthetics.
Seitlhamo Motsapi’s earthstepper / the ocean is very shallow (1995) best exemplifies the striving for a new understanding of identity dealt with at length in this chapter. While critics such as Peter Anderson have observed that the majority of ‘new poetry’ in postapartheid South Africa tends to confirm notions enunciated in the ‘old’ resistance and protest poetry, or can be seen as simply affirming the new order, Motsapi’s poetry evinces, as Ramakuela maintains,
a transcendence of political correctness and a dislike for political ideology or any ideology at that, thus producing an independent voice calling for humanity to rethink itself. (1997: 40) While firmly entrenched within South African experience and history, Motsapi’s poetry transcends the local idiom as he deals with issues of universal concern, particularly in the context of a globalisation. One detects in Motsapi’s poetry a deeply personal voice that calls for the revival of the worth of the individual. The 207
voice becomes embedded in the reader’s psyche to provoke a meditative process geared towards self-reflection and an awareness of one’s surroundings. Personal though the voice may be, it is sufficient to prick the individual’s conscience and to remind one of, as Ramakuela aptly puts it, “depthlessness of the modern world [that] is balanced by the presence of hope to be found in nature, human beings and the Creator” (1997: 34).
In a poem such as “the man”, for example, Motsapi continues to deplore the consumerism that has characterised modern society almost leaving human beings spiritually dry like the proverbial straw. However, he does not lapse into complete negativity as he believes that redemption is possible through the quest for simplicity as he contends,
an almost forgotten acquaintance was in town recently i noticed that it started raining just as he ambled in i remembers him as a simple man growing up, we all wanted to be doctors, lawyers & teachers so the blood could ebb out of the village my friend had much more sober dreams 208
he asked the heavens to grant him the imposing peace of the blue-gum tree in his backyard & that all the poor send him their tears so he could be humble like the sun so the red wax of the stars would not drip onto him i remembered that man today & all I think of is his unassuming radiance like that of a blushing angel as for his dreams he tells us whole forests invade his sleep at night so that there’s only standing room for the dreams. The visit by an “almost forgotten acquaintance” is described in very mundane terms to reinforce the importance of simplicity and ordinariness, themes central to most of Motsapi’s poems. The nameless ‘acquaintance’ becomes a symbol of that which is ordinary and simple. His is an ordinary life characterised by “sober dreams”, an “unassuming radiance” and his desire to “be humble like the sun”. That the person remains nameless throughout the poems is a clear indication that in his ordinariness, he transcends specificity to become a symbol of the universal person in the quest for a reordered humanity. In his representation of simplicity, moral rectitude and life in harmony with fellow beings and nature Motsapi seems to have based his conception of ‘the man’ on Ayi Kwei Armah’s character in The 209
Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. It is remarkable that Armah’s character is also simply called ‘the man’. In a postmodern and global world characterised by ambiguities, spiritual aridity, rootlessness, indeterminacy, instability, discontinuities and disconnectedness, the poem focuses, to borrow from Ndebele, on “the rediscovery of the ordinary” (1992). Through ‘the man’ the poet seeks to reawaken a sense of self-worth and encourage human beings to move away from a rampant materialism that leaves them and their environment dry spiritually and otherwise.
To buttress the importance of an ordinary life the poet uses rain as a metaphor for prosperity, rejuvenation and sustenance. The fact that it rains as soon as ‘the man’ comes to town is telling. It furthermore highlights a number of interesting and revealing contradictions. Here is an ordinary man who comes into town, a symbol of modernity with all its contraptions and modern trappings, and brings along rejuvenation in the form of rain, a soothing that “doctors, lawyers & teachers” with their intellectual and technological sophistication have failed to bring. Thus the coming into town of the man symbolises a reawakening. The poet uses this metaphor to inaugurate a self-reflecting process that ushers in the desire to strive for the ordinary. The rain metaphor is not used in isolation. It is supported by other images which, interestingly, are natural phenomena such as ‘dreams’, ‘heavens’, ‘blue-gum’, ‘tears’, ‘sun’, ‘stars’, ‘angel’ and ‘forests’. The
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effect of these images is further to reinforce the need for a peaceful coexistence between human beings and nature.
Through his poetry Motsapi wants readers self-reflect so they can see that values of simplicity have been eroded. Upon realising that they inhabit a world governed by material desires bordering on avarice, the poet hopes to encourage readers and society in general to begin a spiritual journey back to simplicity and harmonious coexistences with nature. Here one almost hears, from a distance, echoes of Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us”. Motsapi furthermore invokes, through his poetry, a humanity that compels individuals, as Ramakuela observes, to “see in each other’s faces, the peace inherent in each one of us and how to achieve it” (1997: 34). The direction of Motsapi’s poetic oeuvre is, perhaps, best described by Zuidema who maintains that the poetry shows
the increasing complexity of the political reality of South Africa which can no longer be grasped in the systems of binary oppositions generated by most conventional ideologies. On another level it reflects the poet’s own personal journey from a firm commitment to militant black politics to the embrace of Christianity and a search for spiritual values. (1997: 117)
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The quest for voluntary simplicity becomes one of the defining qualities of Motsapi’s poetry. Poems such as ‘tenda’, ‘bratha moses’ ‘dawn’ and ‘bratha saul’, amongst others, Motsapi continues to deplore what he sees as rampant materialism in favour of a simple uncomplicated life rich in its simplicity, moral value and content. In a world that has become dominated by an acute sense of pessimism, Motsapi defiantly refuses to bogged down in negativity. Instead, he chooses to see the continued worth of the individual because this is where he first and foremost, locates his aesthetics and also sees a possibility of what his conception of life should be like. In ‘tenda’, for example, the persona maintains
i look at you & you remind me of all the mountains i haven’t seen or embraced & since you are like every one of us you rise out of my heart with the craggy serenity of Kilimanjaro enduring like prophecies peaceful like distances since you are like all of us eternal like every river even when the seal claims us for me you carry affirmations a sprout in the parch, a mend in the rend
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Like in other poems the poet puts his message against the background of images and metaphors taken from a natural context. The poet reminds the readers that it is through harmony with nature that life is better sustained. That seeing the good inherent in other human beings opens up vistas for a life lived to its fullest. The ‘mountains’, ‘heart’, ‘distances’, ‘river’, ‘sea’ and ‘sprout’ all add to the process of re-awakening a sense of self-worth which the poet believes can only be found in simplicity. By valorising simplicity the poet hopes to inaugurate a process which will eventually lead to a spiritual cleansing to rid society of consumerism and a spiritual aridity that he sees as having added to the process of human degradation. Through his poems, Motsapi encourages society to look beyond materialism to find what is ‘sober, simple & humble’ (‘the man’) so that eventually
… the mountains come to rest in the breast of every one of us beginning the long journey across the dessert since the forests & the skies & the faces of children overflow with the lessons of love. Motsapi’s poetry also evinces an eclectic range of influences including Rastafarianism, pan-Africanism, and militancy amongst others. It is this eclectic range that gives him an opportunity to carve a niche for himself by producing poetry that calls for humanity to evaluate itself. By drawing from a variety of
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forms Motsapi provides an alternative voice which further contributes towards the creation of a ‘new aesthetic’. As Chrisman contends, the poetry is a
very far cry from official new South Africa pietistic discourse of reconciliation, this collection brilliantly fuses pan-Africanist militancy, romantic spirituality, and scathing attack on neo-colonialism in its global and local forms. The political urgency is never, here, experimental poetry, raining down fresh imagery, complex conceits, carefully patterned to produce a volume of striking originality and stylish rigour. (1996: 60)
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