Try this poem out with an
American ear – or, for that matter, with whatever variant of English you happen
to have:
moni
& so the new blackses arrive
all scent & drape to their clamour
head & heart the liquid odour
of roads that defy oceans
from the fiery splash of pool
pits
they preach us redamp
shun from the dust
of the old ways
their kisses bite
like the deep bellies of conputers
the gravy of their songs
smells like the slow piss of culculatahs
& so
the new blackses
arrive
& promise us life beyond the bleed
of the common yell
they promise us new spring
for the slow limp
of our heads
meanwhile
the ladder finds the sky at last
heart or herd slinks to the waters
mbira grows into a synthesizer
the songs ask for more sugar
& my salt sets sail for babylon
If I hadn’t known the
context of this poem in the latest tripwire, I
would not have recognized it as African until the word mbira,
the Shona variant of the thumb piano, an instrument I
associate with the music of Zimbabwe. Not surprisingly, then, the poet Seitlhamo Motsapi comes from the
South African province of Limpopo, the northernmost part of the country, bordering
Zimbabwe & nearly 1,000 miles north of Cape Town.
I don’t, it’s worth noting,
know enough about orchids to recognize the poem’s curious variant spelling of
the Latin term for the South African witch orchid, disperis cucullata, and in fact that name is also
found in the Latin term for a South African bird, the bronze-winged mannikin, so I can’t even be sure that it’s the humidity I
associate with orchids in general that is the image schema underlying the “slow
piss” at the end of the third stanza.
One of the great challenges
of reading poetry from another culture, let alone language, is to be able to
grasp some portion of the references & allusions without importing too many
of your own. Reading the very first line of this text, I have to suppress the
idea that (1) the opening phrase might be an allusion to Pound’s Cantos & (2) the even more perverse
echo I get of Tolkien’s character Gollum pluralizing blacks as blackses. Conversely, there are so many possible meanings to the title moni – it’s
everything from the first name of a popular pan-African singer to a resort in Windhoek to the surname of an early Italian settler in South Africa to the stock ticker for Marconi Communications on
the South African Stock Exchange – that I simply have
to let it go. To the degree that this name tells a native reader the subject of
this poem, I have no access to what it might indicate.
But I don’t need to know
this in order to recognize that “moni” is an
unquestionably wonderful poem. It’s use of imagery & rhythms jump right off
the page. The prosody has an elegance that translates beyond dialect & a
deliberate “misspelling” (e.g. conputer) positions the text into a voice-based tradition
that Heriberto Yepez’ Mexican poetics would acknowledge as different from their
own.
Over one third of the new tripwire is devoted to new writing from Southern Africa, a good portion just as riveting as Motsapi’s poem. Overall, however, I found myself frustrated
that the brief introduction – a single page, unsigned -- & Robert Berold’s interview with Lesego Rampolokeng & Ike Mboneni Muila don’t offer more than the merest of glimpses at the
broader contexts in which this poetry is being written. The brief reference to isicamtho doesn’t make it clear, for example, that this is
a form of township slang that enables speakers of South Africa’s multiple languages to negotiate daily life. Muila’s own poem “In No Time” literally offers glosses to
the right of the text body.
The question of context
certainly has implications for how a work is received. Consider this section of
a longer poem by Jeremy Cronin:
Sometime
after the revolution, Soviet libraries adopted the Dewey Decimal System
With
one rectification – the two hundreds: Religion
All the
way from 201, 202, skip a few, 214 Theodicy, 216 Good
& Evil, 229 Apocrypha & pseudo-epigraphs, down to 299 Other religion –
this great textual body of human wisdom,
confusion, folly and aspiration was reduced by the Soviets to a bald:
Dewey
Decimal 200: Atheism
This
was not (not by far) the worst sin of Stalinism
But it
was its most typical
This
should be remembered of the 20th century
This deadpan recitation, a
rough approximation of which might occur on any given day in the United States on the programs of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan or
the 700 Club, seems curious in this collection. That Cronin is the Deputy
Secretary General of the South African Communist Party doesn’t so much position
the statement as it does testify to the degree to which someone from the U.S. has an immense bridge to cross in order to gain any
sense of grounding when reading contemporary South African poetry.
Writing of how many “nation
language” poets have arguments not dissimilar from those associated with langpo
for arriving at a non-standard approach to English language, Juliana
Spahr wrote in this blog last November that “They are different arguments
but they meet in various ways. And yet the poets so rarely meet in journals, in
readings, at parties. What a lost opportunity.” tripwire is certainly ensuring that such radically different
poetries meet in the pages of its journal, but I wish that somebody had done
for South
Africa
what Heriberto Yepez did for Mexico & offered a map.
