Article
Editorial: December 2008
November 26, 2008
The names of political leaders also make their way into work by South African writers of this issue: in the epigraph of ‘The Leper Band’, Stephen Gray quotes former South African president Thabo Mbeki, who was criticised for his denial of AIDS. This is ironically countered with an absence of any reference to AIDS within the poem itself: rather, the image of a group of lepers singing before a flinching governor offers an implied parallel, and the sombre message of the poem conceals itself behind the lightness of the regular, song-like rhyme-scheme. S.E.K. Mqhayi, an early-twentieth-century Xhosa-language journalist and poet who acted as the mouthpiece of the colonially oppressed, also singles out political figures in his poems, for example deriding the prince of Wales as “a descendent of the buffalo cow Victoria” in his wry and bitter mock praise-poem ‘Aa! Hail the Hero of Britain!’ Mqhayi’s poems were a rallying cry to fellow Africans to unite against the suppression of colonial rule, yet they are not mere cultural relics, important only for their historic significance: their craft means they endure as poems that inspired subsequent writers in Xhosa.
There are also other types of political poetry in this month’s South Africa issue – poems which, without specific critique of governments or leaders, engage with issues such as racial division, poverty, disease and violence. Through chant-like rhythms and repetitions as well as evocative imagery, Zulu poet Bongekile Joyce Mbanjwa expresses her lament for those suffering in a nation in transition between traditional values and modernisation. Ronelda Kamfer, a young poet writing in Afrikaans, also employs repetition and apparent simplicity in her poetry to excellent effect; more candid than Mbanjwa, she often references social issues not through metaphors but by name, yet retains a wry irony and understatement in her sparse verse:
Good girls don’t join gangs
they don’t get pregnant at thirteen
they don’t wear tjappies
they don’t smoke weed
they don’t do meth
they don’t have sex with their teachers
or with taxi drivers
they don’t work for Shoprite
they are not the cleaners
good girls don’t live on the Cape Flats.
(‘Good Girls’)
It is notable that in these politically satirical or socially motivated poems, an explicit exploration of individual subjectivity is often absent, even though an ‘I’ voice may be present. Other poems featured this month, however, are underpinned by an exploration of selfhood and the human condition. These poems might be classified as non-political in that they neither directly address party-political issues nor appear to comment particularly on specific social struggle, but it is important to consider them in light of the opinion of writers such as the American feminist poet Adrienne Rich, who argues that the personal is political; therefore poetry, as expression, assertion and investigation of identity is necessarily an engagement with power. South African Nadine Botha’s poems, for example, disarm the reader and challenge established poetic boundaries in their subversion of traditional form, syntax and indeed logic, pushing language into odd new shapes and meanings to investigate and represent the self.
The Australian Peter Minter has a similar drive in his poems, which are explicitly concerned with ontological issues and the way that language intersects with our perceptions of reality and our existence, frequently contemplating the natural world in his investigation of human subjectivity. In his poem ‘Life ™’, the narrator observes bats while at a bus stop – shifting between imagined viewpoints including that of a wildlife documentary filmmaker, his “eyes’ aperture / widening to take in the distance / between image, language and object”.
In Portuguese poet Luís Miguel Nava’s extraordinary and beautiful poems, nature and landscape are inseparable from the human. Seemingly prescient of his own youthful death (he was assassinated aged 37), Nava’s poetic struggles to articulate existence and death are infused with corporeal imagery: bodies decay, and fuse with the natural world – indeed even before decay, they are part of it: “The wind holds my vertebra in its grip” he writes in ‘Stakes’, and in ‘The King’: “The sea’s in our body.”
The politics of individual expression and human relationship to nature brings us to the final poet of this issue, Billy Ramsell, from Ireland, who, in his satirical poem ‘Gated Community’, dissects the way in which our identity is formed and controlled by the power structures around us, as well as by trends of consumerism and urbanisation. In it, a man goes to comical extremes to try to protect himself from “identity theft”, until, stripped of all trappings, he retreats to “the woods”. Yet these woods, thick with thorns and brambles, haunted by “bony” children, are not an Edenic rural idyll – after all, the natural environment is no longer, or perhaps never has been, an apolitical space: nor does a retreat to nature equate with utopian happiness. In protecting his own ‘identity’, the man has also rejected the self constructed for him by external forces; however Ramsell leaves it uncertain as to whether there can exist a ‘truer’ self outside of the political, administrative, cultural and economic systems we live within.
This begs the question – if Obama is indeed able to bring about change within the dominant modes of American and global power, how will our conception of ourselves and the world around us be altered? I suspect that the answers to this will continue to be found within poetry.
Since my last editorial, international news has been dominated by the outcome of the USA’s presidential election, which engaged and unified disparate groups of voters across America in their common desire for meaningful social and political change. You may be relieved to hear that PIW is not featuring Barack Obama tribute poems this month, and if you are, you might consider why many of us are happy to read blog posts and newspaper editorials, yet, regardless of whether our opinions match those of the poet, feel uneasy when poetry directly tackles current affairs. Politics and good poetry are certainly not incompatible: many excellent poems are politically motivated, whether they interrogate hegemonic power structures, lament war, rage against unjust regimes, or give a voice to the oppressed. But a poem also necessarily lives outside of the world of tight deadlines and up-to-the-minute newsflashes: poetry is expected, unlike a lot of journalism, to have lasting relevancy, both in terms of its political statement and as a piece of art – as Leonard Woolf wrote in his autobiography Beginning Again, “When you write for a paper, you write for a moment in time. You write it for consumption with the kipper or eggs and bacon at the breakfast table. Literature is written not with the eggs and bacon but in the mould of eternity.”
For a poem about a contemporary political figure or event to stand the test of time it should succeed as poetry in its own right. Ciaran O’Driscoll, featured this month on the Ireland domain, found it difficult in his early career to write “poems that made political or social statements” and eventually moved away from obliqueness and restraint, opting instead for satire as a way to express political opinion. The success of a poem such as ‘A Gift for the President’ – in which a newspaper photograph of George Bush meeting the Irish prime minister is critiqued as though it were a Surrealist painting – is due to its poised, ironic humour, through which O’Driscoll reflects seriously not only on the image of “a bellicose American President” together with “an abject Irish Prime Minister”, but also on academic art criticism and Irish national identity.The names of political leaders also make their way into work by South African writers of this issue: in the epigraph of ‘The Leper Band’, Stephen Gray quotes former South African president Thabo Mbeki, who was criticised for his denial of AIDS. This is ironically countered with an absence of any reference to AIDS within the poem itself: rather, the image of a group of lepers singing before a flinching governor offers an implied parallel, and the sombre message of the poem conceals itself behind the lightness of the regular, song-like rhyme-scheme. S.E.K. Mqhayi, an early-twentieth-century Xhosa-language journalist and poet who acted as the mouthpiece of the colonially oppressed, also singles out political figures in his poems, for example deriding the prince of Wales as “a descendent of the buffalo cow Victoria” in his wry and bitter mock praise-poem ‘Aa! Hail the Hero of Britain!’ Mqhayi’s poems were a rallying cry to fellow Africans to unite against the suppression of colonial rule, yet they are not mere cultural relics, important only for their historic significance: their craft means they endure as poems that inspired subsequent writers in Xhosa.
There are also other types of political poetry in this month’s South Africa issue – poems which, without specific critique of governments or leaders, engage with issues such as racial division, poverty, disease and violence. Through chant-like rhythms and repetitions as well as evocative imagery, Zulu poet Bongekile Joyce Mbanjwa expresses her lament for those suffering in a nation in transition between traditional values and modernisation. Ronelda Kamfer, a young poet writing in Afrikaans, also employs repetition and apparent simplicity in her poetry to excellent effect; more candid than Mbanjwa, she often references social issues not through metaphors but by name, yet retains a wry irony and understatement in her sparse verse:
Good girls don’t join gangs
they don’t get pregnant at thirteen
they don’t wear tjappies
they don’t smoke weed
they don’t do meth
they don’t have sex with their teachers
or with taxi drivers
they don’t work for Shoprite
they are not the cleaners
good girls don’t live on the Cape Flats.
(‘Good Girls’)
It is notable that in these politically satirical or socially motivated poems, an explicit exploration of individual subjectivity is often absent, even though an ‘I’ voice may be present. Other poems featured this month, however, are underpinned by an exploration of selfhood and the human condition. These poems might be classified as non-political in that they neither directly address party-political issues nor appear to comment particularly on specific social struggle, but it is important to consider them in light of the opinion of writers such as the American feminist poet Adrienne Rich, who argues that the personal is political; therefore poetry, as expression, assertion and investigation of identity is necessarily an engagement with power. South African Nadine Botha’s poems, for example, disarm the reader and challenge established poetic boundaries in their subversion of traditional form, syntax and indeed logic, pushing language into odd new shapes and meanings to investigate and represent the self.
The Australian Peter Minter has a similar drive in his poems, which are explicitly concerned with ontological issues and the way that language intersects with our perceptions of reality and our existence, frequently contemplating the natural world in his investigation of human subjectivity. In his poem ‘Life ™’, the narrator observes bats while at a bus stop – shifting between imagined viewpoints including that of a wildlife documentary filmmaker, his “eyes’ aperture / widening to take in the distance / between image, language and object”.
In Portuguese poet Luís Miguel Nava’s extraordinary and beautiful poems, nature and landscape are inseparable from the human. Seemingly prescient of his own youthful death (he was assassinated aged 37), Nava’s poetic struggles to articulate existence and death are infused with corporeal imagery: bodies decay, and fuse with the natural world – indeed even before decay, they are part of it: “The wind holds my vertebra in its grip” he writes in ‘Stakes’, and in ‘The King’: “The sea’s in our body.”
The politics of individual expression and human relationship to nature brings us to the final poet of this issue, Billy Ramsell, from Ireland, who, in his satirical poem ‘Gated Community’, dissects the way in which our identity is formed and controlled by the power structures around us, as well as by trends of consumerism and urbanisation. In it, a man goes to comical extremes to try to protect himself from “identity theft”, until, stripped of all trappings, he retreats to “the woods”. Yet these woods, thick with thorns and brambles, haunted by “bony” children, are not an Edenic rural idyll – after all, the natural environment is no longer, or perhaps never has been, an apolitical space: nor does a retreat to nature equate with utopian happiness. In protecting his own ‘identity’, the man has also rejected the self constructed for him by external forces; however Ramsell leaves it uncertain as to whether there can exist a ‘truer’ self outside of the political, administrative, cultural and economic systems we live within.
This begs the question – if Obama is indeed able to bring about change within the dominant modes of American and global power, how will our conception of ourselves and the world around us be altered? I suspect that the answers to this will continue to be found within poetry.
© Sarah Ream
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