Читать книгу Synapse - Antjie Krog - Страница 23

1.

the pants are unbuttoned, the erection thrusts,

Lady Justice lies on the floor pinned down

by men who dig around stubbornly in the squalid loam

of their consciences trying to verbalise

that she was looking for it, yes she provoked them:

thus lust pushes justifiably

through the President’s doublekeeled

swindlehead. but behind this tableau lies of course

another: one foot firmly planted on gold, the other

athwart the land while one hand takes

the other claws from the unbuttoned fly

dangle Baron Boerdick, Viscount Saltdick

and their mate the Duke of Acorndick

in this tableau the worst has already happened: blood stains

under the thighs of Lady Justice her eyes glazed

nobody helps her up – between Lady Justice’s

silence here on the floor and Lady Justice’s

blindness lingers more than the injustice of three centuries

and the recipe works like this:

2.

one does not know who one is one

feels in a constant state of

restlessness of nervous distress one

feels forever weighed and found wanting

one feels too insignificant to be

worthy the reason for this one does not know

therefore one feels how even less human

worth is added to one’s dehumanisation

after a time one adopts bravado and

avoidance because wherever one turns

that White Eye watches that White Eye

judges that one is so nothing, so nobody’s

somewhere in one’s deepest trampled self

only scrapings of one’s hopeless

hurtlessness and spacious fury move

unquenchably one thirsts for a purifying deed:

something bulletclean-freesinging something un-

touchably cuttingloose something so

ravishingly violent that the white-jabbering

Eye can only shit out its fear

if one beats with an iron pipe until

blood spatters the roof one will

call the police oneself: look, I

have dealt with the Number One Boer myself

3.

between Lady Justice and Lady Justice’s historical

blindness the Men of Great Nations play

(corrupt of head rapaciously pituitary aflame

with self-seeking covetous power neuroses: pornographically

staking claims to everything) to keep what they’ve

stolen while reminding themselves to steal again

from those places they’ve sucked dry before

between Lady Justice and Lady Justice’s silence

row the Russian kleptocracy, the netherworld of

the Ukraine the carefree historical virus of German

corruption and an American president completely at

ease with his stolen election handcuffing the rest of us

with monopolies exploitation consumerism

wars and spy-systems for the day of vengeance

4.

the lack of moral imagination

feathers forth in smug first-world

delusions: we deserve so much

because we work so outstandingly

hard. in the midst of their structural

violence they set up courts and give

shocked interviews about the South’s

sloth, impunity, their Law

and Disorder, Profit and Plunder

their Casino Capitalism

their Bogus Democracies

their False Labels Fetish

the Typecasting Politics of Phantom

States the Bulging Bellied

Dictators with their

Queen Elizabeth-cloned

Fake Dreams men who have never

even planted a seed in the earth

race around insolently with heavy weapons

ray-bans and rotten cocks

5.

let’s use the pronoun ‘we’ for a change, become part

of the world’s negating vocabulary for us because you are also

us, us with the ethnic testicles and unemployed youth trekking like

a plague of locusts it’s our representatives who leave behind rusted railway lines

crumbling roads and the ruined infrastructure of towns yes we vote

for the ones with the international salaries national syndicates but who can’t

audit a foyer pot plant correctly or draw up a balance sheet

6.

how does one breathe in the midst of all this violence

killing corruption rape the open and outward

festering of hate in this country

the searing and tearing apart of children – in-

human the poverty the poverty the dehumanisation

of it the grandmothers with their pensions

and sparkle of children the phalanxes of youth

bored and scabrous fed with ancestral

sacrifices who hold up absurdities as tradition

how does one live amongst this how does one live

in honourable balance how do you keep your

integrity amidst so much daily violation?

7.

between Lady Justice and Lady Justice First World

attention is constantly diverted from

the true locus of our deformed world:

Lady Justice has long since stopped focusing on justice

and turned instead to the law while poverty is not a given

but the blemish of deliberate un-

equalising through the systematic deprivation of others

the law sleeps unwillingly in the beds of

the poor. all our pants are unbuttoned

all our erections are visible Lady Justice lies

with her loamy locks on the mazista floor

it suits us that she’s a woman because now it’s

her word against ours: reconciliation is the celebration

of injustice, being kept inferior feeds the hate

8.

academics claim that the single vertically

integrated dominance of the West

has been replaced nowadays by the nervous

somewhat xenophobically tainted concept of

dissimilarity and heterodoxy

all according to Fanon’s logical template

therefore all one can do is post-colonially

sigh, smile and shrug one’s shoulders

9.

but how do we hold each other’s blood in safekeeping other than

to fervently commit ourselves to our shared sky and the sanctity

of all bodies so that the heartless the merciless the brutal

the cruel the vicious are not what we wear

facing each other. in the end, wherever you are, the

foundations on which everything rests remain corruption and complicity

but the most dangerous of them all are the clean hands

Based on texts by JM Coetzee, John and Jean Comaroff,

Frantz Fanon and Carl Jung.