Editorial: 15 October 2010

September 10, 2010 It is a sad state of affairs when a country that has suffered greatly under a dictatorial regime forgets the lessons of the past. That there is democracy in South Africa does not mean that there are no longer problems which need solving, and the recent curtailing of freedom of speech is hardly a step forwards along the path of progress and human rights. Liesl Jobson has written an insightful and honest appraisal of certain key issues and events surrounding new government bills and the impact this may have. I urge you to read it; this is contemporary and this is important.

Then again, these issues of secrecy and the protection of public officials boil down to a simple consideration: that the people of a country cannot be trusted to be good citizens. Can they be trusted? Can poets be trusted? It’s perhaps understandable that a government official’s answer might be no – look at the example set by people in power: the politicians, the chiefs of police and forgetful heads of state who are now allowing the sharpened claws of history to reach out of their coffin and take a hold of journalists and editors.

Should a poet like Mafika Gwala be allowed to write his political, punning poems about ‘kwela’ (referring to both a township musical traditional and a slang term for a police van)? When he spouts lines, in ‘Tap-Tapping’, such as, “I am still surviving/ the traumas of my raped soil”, readers can feel political history breathing down their necks. A ‘right-thinking’ government cannot expect its citizens to remember history’s lessons, for history gives us a perspective by which to judge our present state, to mistrust current diktats. In order to create a society in which trust between rulers and ruled is no longer needed, the lessons of history must be forgotten. Yet poetry is a way of remembering.

Consider Adam Small’s celebration of common, ‘vulgar’ language in his poetry. Should he be allowed to elevate the everyday citizen’s voice to such poetic heights, when he writes:

a new Mosas
a new Mosas
o Lord, our Mosas –
we’ll hide him away Lord, we got lotsa hidingplaces
from the daggers what don’ like him –
to lead us, the whole bunch of us
lead us to the plain before the vineyards of Canaan
of Canaan Lord
Lord, our Canaan

from (‘Great Krismis Prayer’)

Indeed, Mike Dickman’s translations into English convey well the immediacy of a non-centralised dialect. Small writes with a language that speaks to the people in a way they’ll understand, yet maintains poetic vigour through ritualised repetition. The global attention these poets can garner is something to be considered carefully. The international community watched apartheid closely, and put pressure on that government to change its ways. It is important to ensure that these poets, and their historically-aware messages, are given the right treatment.

Equally, a poet like Angifi Dladla, working so intensively in the community, shows how poetry can become a way of allowing people to have a voice, to express better their concerns with government. This, too, could be considered a threat by a ‘right-minded’ government. Dladla’s celebration of ubuntu – his claim that “Poems are with the people; they must remain there” – is a direct threat to centralising political power.

Poetry, of all the modes of verbal expression, is where people take refuge in times of need. And people should not need to take refuge in these places out of necessity. It should be a choice, one that, when engaged with willingly, allows for aesthetic consideration, for the kind of luxurious experimentation and testing of the self that Tada Chimako’s poetry displays so brilliantly.

From Japan’s domain, then, comes a poet who seemed to have ridden the wave of a localised, deeply personal late modernist mode. Chimako’s poetry is beautifully crafted, delivered to an international audience through Jeffrey Angles’ precise, careful renditions. It is hard to tell what is lost in the conveyance, for the results are so striking and fresh, so deeply layered, despite the fact that some of the poems were written four or five decades ago.

What comes across above all is how Chimako infused an alien atmosphere into familiar imagery; she applied razor-sharp metaphor to common objects to create what my limited understanding of Japanese aesthetics would describe as yugen. Loosely speaking, this manifests as a kind of philosophical awareness, or spiritual realisation, arising from a profound sense of mystery:

I am planted in the earth
Happily, like a cabbage
Carefully peel away the layers of language
That clothe me and soon
It will become clear I am nowhere to be found
And yet even so, my roots lie beneath . . .

from (‘Myself’)

The point at which the poet can make that leap, from a more familiar poetic territory – of self and metaphysics – to a sense of oblivion and tradition walking hand in hand, is wonderfully smooth. This kind of deep thinking and simple expression comes from the contemplative space granted to poets by their social circumstances.

As Angles writes in his introduction, Chimako “spent most of her career working at the edge of the Japanese poetic world . . . in relative isolation”; though her situation often brought a degree of sadness, “it was also fruitful, as it encouraged her to think independently and allowed her to work in ways that did not necessarily parallel the quickly shifting trends of the capital”. Poets, everywhere, depend upon this ability to step back, think independently, and then decide when and how best to speak to their communities, from their experience and understanding of the world.

Above all, these poems, from South Africa and Japan, will hopefully provide readers with a global perspective on how poetries and poets emerge, survive and express themselves in different contexts. Leaping between two vastly different cultural spheres, at least some personal decisions can be made about where one’s own tastes, one’s own expression, can flourish. Imagination never was, never will be, the recourse of a few elevated individuals, be they poets, or politicians. Links

The Right 2 Know Campaign, South Africa
A brief introduction to Japanese aesthetics, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy