Towards a Survey

A reflection on South African poetry

Senzenina...
What have we done?
These are our people,

Why are they weeping?
Senzenina?

It is sung: at funerals, at rallies; it is written on banners and held aloft - at demonstrations, on marches, in meetings and in churches. The song has become. The poem belongs to people. It is emblematic, this little 'poem' of the breadth and range of the breath and soul of the spirit, the body, the voice and feelingfulness, the timbres and evocative wholesomeness, and self-questioning, life-involving, self-empowering force that invokes all our South African time and times, people and peoples, genders organs and generations, as well as the millions of gestures and textures which constitute South African poetry now.

Now South African poetry is organic, committed, responsible: it is communication and it Speaks to, for and from the people; it speaks out of experience, to the imperatives of mobilization, organization and action in the present, for the possible, full future. The pressures and needs that have, in part, produced this poetry are the simultaneous social, economic and political environment of an apartheid milieu that enforces fracturing, and the opposite ('what have we done?') push and pull; the philosophy and will and movement that posit and repotentialize one country, one people, one humanity and one multi-faceted living freedom:

These are our people

The lexicon of this poetry is the experience of pain: 'Why are they weeping?’ It is also a lexicon that disturbs the status quo: What have we done? What have we done? What have we done? What have we done? Its vocabulary is militant but not militaristic, its diction is various, as that of its tonalities (collocated and contiguous, cotemporal and continuous) vibrate on many levels: the poem-song involves us in pain and tragedy and asks us to re-evaluate our history and our existence so that the becoming, the shaping of tomorrow's world will be ours: consciously, compassionately, humanely, actively, collectively ours, involving our best intellectual and finest emotional selves in the act of making, re-creating.

The visible etymons of the poem - the popular (anonymous?) song reduced to the rallying-call inscribed on the banner (or the page) are Bantu and Indo-European; the dural implications and allusions are the chorally repeated, plaintively elegiac resonance of 'Senzenina', as an intricate backdrop to the slogan that becomes its own epistemological and existential suggestiveness: 'These are our people!' South African poetry, now, is verbal constructs that click. It is a variety of weaves of sound, of sound that is subtle and also direct, of words that are simple and complex, open, clear, direct and allusive, immediate and resonant, personal, individual (but not individualistic) and simultaneously overtly political, public and communal. This poetry uses tradition and innovation, vernacular and vehicular languages, standard and colloquial diction and idiom, the people's tongue ('mensetaal', 'tsotsi-taal?') as playful irony, jocularly, and also in high seriousness, with, alongside it, a rhetorically rooted and flowering statement, analysis, philosophic probing and synthesis.

It is this South African poetry that can produce the multiplicity, variety and apparent difference that is really such a rich unity. It is a poetic that accommodates many. It encompasses: Farouk Asvat, who writes about love and suffering, about individualism, snobbishness, pretence and pride, about human and environmental beauty and about opposing oppression, and who deploys metaphysical, lyrical and colloquial language, slang and standard diction, all with equal strength and ease.

Breyten Breytenbach, who uses many of the idioms of post- modernism, writing in Afrikaans and English, about prison, struggle, individuality and tomorrow’s nation with passion, power and drama. Dennis Brutus, the eternal experimenter who is also the complete classicist, the activist-poet. Stephen Gray, as prolific, as many-voiced, as intimate with the earth and the air and the activities of our South Africa as any one person - and his poems say AS People - can be.

Keorapetse Kgotsitsile, whose verse is an incisive music and a vision that is global, reminding us of where we have been in Africa, in Africa South in the African diaspora: where we are; whither we may be bound. Mazisi Kunene, the sonority and reverberations of whose remaking of his own original Zulu poems into English versions are an indication of how tradition be honoured and transmuted [and this is if one were to refer to merely one dimension of his oeuvre). Don Mattera, James Matthews, Oswald Mtshali, Sipho Sepamla: we may allowed to let the last four speak through a voice that may be said to represent generation they belong to, the generation that has been chiefly instrumental in orchestrating the expressiveness of the new South African poetry.

Mongane Serote:

The bright eye of the night keeps whispering
Then it paves and pages the clouds
It is knowledgeable about hideous nights
When it winks and keeps winking' and later
'mini
Mkaba

Molefe
Paul Peterson
We ask Luthuli
Mandela Tambo
How is a long road measured?'
'On the road, fear pulsating near me as if it were my footsteps

I
Looking always around me for my shadow' — then
'How can i forgive'... repeated
'But how can i forgive’. Often
'Can i forgive', and yet, though
'Your dignity is held tight in the sweating cold hands of death
The village where everything is silent about dignities
I will say again Behold the flowers, they begin to bloom?

These quotations come from The Night Keeps Winking [Gaborone, Medu Art Ensemble 1982) and Behold Mama, Flowers (Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1978) respectively. Serote had published three volumes of poetry previously, in 1972, 1974 and 1975. Between the earlier three volumes and the collections of 1978 and 1982 there had occurred the formative event, the second watershed in South Africa's recent history, namely the student demonstrations against 'Bantu' education, and the police shootings of Soweto. Let us quote extensively from Mbulelo Mzamane's introduction to Selected Poems (Cape Town: Ad Donker, 1982):

'His (Serote's) poems about places, particularly his Alexandra poems, and his epic poems in No Baby Must Weep and Behold Mama, Flowers, grapple with the problems of squalor, violence, death, destitution, exploitation and the Black People’s quest for identity and a sense of community. Serote's identification with the problems of the Black community is manifested through his use of ‘a profoundly compassionate authorial presence' in many of his poems. But he can also cultivate an artistic detachment through the use of expressions that are deadpan, which, far from sacrificing the emotional intensity of his poems, bring out most effectively the callousness, and the insensitivity of people.

He often employs township colloquialisms, through direct transliteration, in a manner which never detracts from the gravity of the situation evoked but rather reflects the lack of quality of the social (political and economic) milieu. The simplicity and the affective tone of his language and what may sound like cliches are intended to make his appeal to the black community as broadly based as possible’. Mzamane’s entire introduction deserves constant reading and analysis; most of his insights strike one as eminently relevant and profoundly true: issues such as the need for dialogue within the oppressed black communities and for constructive self-criticism, the emphasis on the influence 'of Black Consciousness, as propounded by the late Steve Bantu Biko' and of the poet's seeing, depicting conceiving of and articulating the vanguard role 'of Black women – downtrodden and degraded yet long-suffering and dignified -' in 'the Black people's struggle for liberation, in the manner in which Sembene Ousmane and ... Okot p'Bitek handle women characters in their work'.

III

The last passage of our long quotation from Mzamane suggest two further, very important notes first women as self-actualising makers of literacy artifacts, and next, two further aspects of the context for the ovulation of South Africa poetry into its present many-voiced and thrilling integrity. Then also, we wish to note a minor disagreement with Mzamane who says towards the end of his introduction: ‘Serote and his contemporaries are no longer writing for alien audience- unlike their predecessors, whom the protest tradition, the fact of exile and censorship had forced to write for an essentially non-black readership’. People’s quest for identity and a sense of community. Serote's identification with the problems of the Black community is manifested through his use of ‘a profoundly compassionate authorial presence' in many of his poems. But he can also cultivate an artistic detachment through the use of expressions that are deadpan, which, far from sacrificing the emotional intensity of his poems, bring out most effectively the callousness, and the insensitivity of people.

III

It is certainly not our intention to isolate women who write poetry, but it must be noted that, as in other genres and spheres from Schreiner to Gordimer, from Makeba to Mbulu, women have stood in the forefront of the battle for human rights in poetry too. In time and action, 1960 provides an immediate context for a new national voice and verse. The anti-pass campaigns, the police shootings at Sharpeville, Langa and Nyanga gave rise to an epochal poem in Ingrid Jonker's The Child Who Was Shot Dead By Soldiers At PhiIIipi Location Near Cape town, written in Afrikaans and allowed publication under the truncated title Die Kind (The Child). The poem concludes thus (our translation):

The child who has become a man
Treks through the entire Africa
The child who has grown into a giant
Journeys over the whole world

Without a pass.

The contexts that Jonker involves in her poem include the restrictive South African reality of reductive, dehumanizing votelessness that pass-bearing spells and that the women who proclaimed 'Now that you touch the women, you've struck a rock' were determined to help overthrow; these contexts also include the decolonization of Africa - Gold Coast becoming Ghana in 1957; Nigeria's independence in 1960 - as well as the historical context of the trek of Afrikaners in pursuit of their freedom from the British Empire.

That voice of freedom to which this particular verse of Jonker's attests is carried on in the variousness of texture and tone, the declamation and demand and determination, the organization and freedom and attention that issue from what is unfortunately a fairly rarely read or seen volume Malibongwe (ed. Sono Molefe) that has at least a German translation (by Elizabeth Thompson and Peter Schultz; WeItkreis-Verlag, Dortmund; 1980). These are voices to which attention must be paid; as to the voice of a Gladys Thomas:

We mothers don't sleep at night!
Sometimes we the mothers,

He cries of fourteen-year-old children.
It is us they want,
It is us they love,
Set them free to us,
THEIR MOTHERS!
(Prefatory poem to The Wynberg Seven 1987. Copyright G. Thomas, Cape Town.)
The cries of the children issue from mouths that make shapes of a startling beauty and even greater potential out of the pain, deprivation, exile and death that their youthfulness has experienced so often, so vividly:
You can't stop me from fighting
Fighting for my oppressed people
We shall take up the spears

Of those who fall
You can't by Jabulile Kunene
Mamma-
The gallows sucked life out of your son
Like a thief that sneaked into a kraal
To milk Africa's cow into its mouth
Mother of a Spear (dedicated to Mrs. Martha Mahlangu, Solomon's mother) Patrick Mogopodi Mmusi.
THESE are my people

These are my ancestors
My blood! My everything!
To them
My life is dedicated
These are my people!
They shall be avenged.

These Are My People - Keneibe Saohatse
We shall overcome
injustice upon man by man
Remember'Isandhlwana' victory
Spears and shields against
Guns and cannons
Victory in Africa!
We Shall Overcome - Jabu Mahlangu.

These are taken from poems in a volume, Mother of a Spear, by students of the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College, located in Mazimbu, Tanzania, published in Groningen, The Netherlands in 1982. A cyclo-styled production from Mazimbu, Somafco Pioneers Speak, contains nine poems by primary school pupils. Here are snatches from In Mazimbu by the then11-year-old Lentsoe Serote: In Mazimbu/When I see the mountains/In Mazimbu/When I see the fields/I think of my Mother land/I think of South Africa. In South Africa/I see the mountains/In South Africa/I see the fields/But these are only dreams/Dreams of my Mother land/ The first stanza of Black Feet by 12-year-old Sunyala Thom: Black feet cover the floor/of the country's police stations/ Black feet cover the grounds near the stinking lavatory holes/ Black feet huddle together/to escape the rioting men/ Block feet dance the mad dance/called apartheid/ and the first of Crying Child by Barbara Marin-Rivas (12 years): Crying child/sitting on the steps/of the house/He doesn't cry loudly/He cries softly/He cries painfully. /Small round tears/fall from his/eyes The excerpts chosen do scant justice to the range of subject matter, sentiment, sensibility and sense, to the power and gentleness of the work of these young wielders of words, but they give a sense of how drenched the youthful poets are in experience and ideal, and how they wrestle with their medium and make it sing and say. Their work cries out for recovery and nurturing.

1960-1976.Half a generation in time; in content a gestation and regeneration; in context 1960 anti-pass marches, Sharpeville shootings continental African decolonisation as far as Britain, France and Belgium go and in 1956-76, student uprising against slave education, the Soweto massacre, the success of the anti-imperialist struggles in Angola and Mozambique.

Now the Freedom movements in 'Lusophone' Africa had had as part of their mobilization the output of cultural workers, writers like Agostinho Neto, Antonia Jacinto and Noemia de Sousa, Marcelino dos Santos and Bosta the political commitment of these poems in no way gainsaid their aesthetic dedication, and their immediate functions in no way precluded their lasting value.

Poems such as Fourth Poem, Letter from a Contract Worker, the Neto collection Sacred Hope, Black Cry, Mamparra M’Gaiza and Jorge Rebelo’s Poem:

Come brother, and tell me your life,/come, show me the marks of revolt /which the enemy left on your body/ ... 'Here my mouth was wounded/because it dared to sing/my people's freedom'/... Come, tell me these dreams become/War, the birth of heroes, /... Mother fearless, / ... And later I will forge simple words/... which every house/ will enter every house/like the wind/and fall like red-hot embers/on our people’s souls/ ... In our land/Bullets are beginning to flower.

This timbre, this scope, this sweep and finesse is available even in translation these voices were heard by South African writers in exile and at home, as clearly as ‘all’ South Africans were hearing, heard, or hear voices like those of Neruda and of the freedom songs, the voices of anonymous or recorded lyricists from the Kalahari, Namaqualand, the Karoo (cf. e.g. the work of the Bleeks and Laurens van der Post), the voices of praise-singer and traditional bards, orators in Sotho, Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana( of the works of commentary and translation of A.C. Jordan, Dan Kunene, Vernie February): over time, all time all these, and more poured into, were poured over and made over by South African poetry. Hence our disagreement with Mzamane: there may be changes in ostensible subject matter and differences in peculiar circumstances and particulars of publication, but from about the mid-fifties, under the impact of South African conditions and events, the forms of struggle in constant growth and transformation, apparent power redistribution continent-wide, and deriving from the influence of diverse poetic outpourings, local and from other-where, traditional, indigenous and novel, unconventional, modern, there was a continuity that gradually became more encompassing and was made irreversible by the generation of 1976. The oneness, the integrity and continuity of this new South African poetry is, it is clear, a fundamental assumption and a truth of Feinberg's collection Poets to the People. Particularly instructive is a comparison of the 1976 (Alien & Unwin) and the enlarged 1980 (Heinemann) editions. That contact, that continuity is, it seems, borne out by a collection such as Black Voices Shout, an anthology edited by James Matthews, banned in South Africa, published in the USA (Austin, Texas: Troubadour Press, 1974) with an introductory note by Dennis Brutus, who says, inter alia, that these "are new and distinctive voices (Serote belongs to an earlier generation, and Matthews to an even earlier): they are often uncertain and sometimes frankly prosy, but there is no doubt of their commitment'.

VII

Commitment does not guarantee excellence. It may encourage laziness. Brutus' evaluation of 1974 is one that is appreciative, unpatronizing, and aware. That 'committed' laziness may become vapid, posturing, haranging sloganeering is the danger that we are alerted to by, for instance, the views expressed by Achmat Danger in an interview in Canada: Literature beyond the Platitudes (Toronto: Southern Africa Report, July 1988).

'Protest literature had not gone much beyond protest. It was not enough to have a culture of protest', Danger sees it being one of the reasons why the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW) was launched nationally in Johannesburg (July 1987). The theme of the launching conference gives the title to Danger's interview, and at the launching Njabulo Ndebele warned 'against pamphleteering the future'. That this self-examination and self-criticism takes place without its developing into self-censorship or art-for-art's sake aestheticism, is (a) a sign of health, (b) an omen of greater growth and an augury of fine unfolding, and full, rich harvests and (c) attested to by the fact that (i) an oral poet, Mzwakhe Mbuli, was detained from January 1988 and was still in detention in June/July 1988 and (ii) that the 121

Director of the cultural desk of the Congress of South African Trade Unions is also Vice- President of COSAW, and that he is a poet and a worker. Dangor says, of literary endeavour in general: The challenge to writers is to create, as cultural workers, new forms of writing that are accessible to people . . .… . Almost 50% of the adult population cannot read. One of the most popular and successful literatures is that of Mzwakhe Mbuli who has developed the tradition of the oral poet and performs and records rather than writes his poetry.

VIII

Performing and recording poetry co-exists with publishing it; in South Africa magazines and publications like Staffrider, Upstream, the Mantis editions brought out by David Philip in Cape Town and the Beeton Saunders selection Twenty Three South African Poems (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1979] are severally and together partly responsible for anthologies like the Penguin Book of South African Verse and (what is in many ways - paradoxically - a complementary but richer and more really representative volume] The Return of the Amasi Bird Black South African Poetry 1891-1981 edited by Tim Couzens and Essop Patel (Johannesburg: Ravan)

What these notes have essentially boiled down to is a semi-bibliographical survey so we continue:

( i) an anthology of South African writing:

Somehow We Survive (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1982]; the choice of poems by US editor is interesting next to choose in

(ii) South African reader:

A Land Apart edited by Andre Brink and J.M. Coetzee (London: Faber and Faber, 1986).

(iii) To complement these two, another broad view may be used, the best four anthologies of poetry from Africa, the compilations by Beier and Moore, Reed and Wake, Wole and Keorapetse Kgotsitsile.

(iv) For yet another perspective, a rich contextualization and closer weaving together of the colours and contours of variously related poetics and systems, there is Frank Chipasula's When My Brothers Come Home (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1985] which is unsurpassed for a steady look at and a panoramic survey of 'Poems from Central and Southern Africa'.

(v) Finally, three books of criticism that seem invaluable to at least one reader: Cordimer's Black Interpreters (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1973], Jacques Alvarez-Pereyre's The Poetry of Commitment in South Africa (London: Heinemann, 1987) and Soweto Poetry, edited by Michael Chapman (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982).

However divergent their audiences may seem to be, the poets who write
South African girls are more scantily clad...
South African men crack their voices like whips
Voices like whips...
But when, in bright daylight
Complacency slips
Their hands creep down to the guns on their hips.
South African men crack their voices like whips.
Mike Cope "South African' in Upstream, spring 1985;
And also
Haita, Joe let's hit the road
Let’s take the highway

Out of the battle zones....
Kom my bra, ek se moenie strik nie mamma

The road will rise to meet us;

The music is a road which will not let us go without it

Wally Mondlane: 'Highway Blues' in Staffrider, vol. 7, 1, 1988

As well as, to conclude his Makeba Poem, Dumatude KaNdlovu's Lelizwe Linomoya repeated thrice, suggesting the interplay between earth and sky/land

and spirit/air/soul] and hinting at the rallying call Izwe Lethu and the in Nkosi sikelela - Woza Moya - Come now/come back spirit, along with Home/Where the sorrow is/ with two variations of agony and loss following initial 'couplet' of the refrain-chorus which ends with home/where the music is and later catalogues a number of South African music's individual ‘giants’ and groups and anonymous mbaqanga (township jazz] creators and performers for the poem to conclude its statement with

'But home/

Is where Masekela is?

Where the music is

Where the heart is.'

'Masekela in Poem’ in Staffrider, vol. 6, 1987:

such poets write within the same single new full tradition from an integrated (however differing) experience for another South Africa. This tradition is that of the categorical implosive, of the subsuming of seeming of antinomies, apparent dichotomies, ostensible opposites into a dialectical synthesis which can transform and interrelate the previous existences and genres re-create out of music and song and narrative and action and conflict and lyricism and satire that entire new world of resolve, will, desire dance, recital, ritual, rightness, death, transubstantiation and life: people and peoples, peace, freedom, fulfilment, belief, deed, beliefs.

Let us listen:

why/my friends/in a land/

whose multi-colour wealth bloomed/

in a blinding flash

Are we confronted and confounded here by mixed metaphor and ineptness or it is rather - and this can be proved with an analysis of word after word and the meaning - the high and deep meaning of the phrase and the sentence which sing and think on, which state and analyse, re-live and reveal a reality, deconstruct that ugly past-present:

Dappling the air which glitters with gold/for whites/while blacks toil/... ask any worker/the miners whose sight like a chameleon now changes the colour of their stare/now for the light and then for the darkness… . I smile/for every day so many people in the world agree/that our bloody battle is just... i smile/for war shall have taught us/and Africa shall have taught us/and the world shall have taught us/that equality of a people/is a firm foundation for progress... Serote, A Tough Tale (Kliptown Books, London, 1987) pp. 11-12 and 47-48. We readily absorb the choral, symphonic effect of the repetitions, and we do not need (for the sake of superficially examining this extract) the knowledge of the fact that the dedication commemorates, memorialises the blood of those who died in Southern Africa for South Africa's freedom, to be able to experience the tensions, the multiple meanings of bloody: pejorative, angry, frustrated, gory, determined, sacrificial, calling for heroes, leading to death, enabling and enhancing life; we note how that bloody co-exists with smile: sadistically? No, for the bloody battle is just and this war in South Africa like others in Africa, in the world teach, instruct, educate us, humanize into the knowledge of social equality -global equality! - As a sine quo non-for peace and progress; new energies, released in the peace thus finally achieved, lead to further creativity, wholeness, and development. And the dance goes on, with people ... singing.

Temba Mqota, in a short article which is a tribute to Vuyisile Mini, says, in dealing with South African Freedom Songs that they 'are the songs of a New Africa, they cannot be crushed'. In one way the offspring, in another sense the moving simultaneous image of that music, South African poetry now, functioning with all its directness, rich and various vividness of voices, is to be found dramatized and recited - e.g., by the Amandla Cultural Group in shows, concerts or manifestations - is declaimed or chanted, is spoken or read, is published: at Homes, funerals, rallies, public reading, on record; to small groups or vast assemblies; abroad, at home. What Mqota says about the revolutionary song is true of this new (post-1950) South African poetry: its ‘content and form not only express forcefully the mood and feelings of the South African freedom fighters but … it also unites black and white in the expression of their common aspiration for a free South Africa’. 1965:

Hey Strydom, /Wathint’a bafazi way ithint’ imbokodo uza Kufa’ (Hey Strydom, now that you have touched the women, you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, and you will be crushed.)

Verwoerd* Pasopa naants’ indoda’ emonyama

Verwoerd*

*Later ‘Vorster’

Pasopa – pas op: Afrikaans =beware”.

Behold the advancing Blacks, Verwoerd. Beware the advancing Blacks, Verwoerd)

(Translations in parentheses by Mqota)

These songs- one imagines listening to the rich baritone of the late Vuyisele Mini when he led mass Congress meetings in song because, as is likely, many will-do remember James Madhlope Philips as the resonance of his leading a group in song or rendering a solo: ‘an inspiring event in itself’.

That spirit informs the continuing movement of South African poetry. It is found in the change and continuity of the music and poetry of Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) in the music and committedness and lyrics of Ekaya (home), in the deliberations and decisions of cultural workers at CASA to create s real people’s Culture in Another South Africa.

South African poetry, that healthy sound, weeps and smiles and it makes. It is informed with history; it is there to help shape history.