Читать книгу Ties that Bind - Shannon Walsh - Страница 18

STACY HARDY AND LESEGO RAMPOLOKENG

I first met Lesego Rampolokeng at the beginning of the millennium, a turning point in the history of our country, a time of rapid change and radical uncertainty, but also one of tremendous excitement and infinite possibility. Everything was being questioned: race as well as social, political, religious, and cultural life. To my generation, the dream of a free South Africa provided a space for new possibilities, new audacities, transgressions, and a new quest for collective identity.¹

This was the South Africa that Rampolokeng and I, together with fellow South African authors Ivan Vladislavić, Phaswane Mpe, K. Sello Duiker, and Nadine Botha were invited to represent at the 2003 Crossing Border Festival in Den Haag, Netherlands. We traveled as a group and in a very short period of time spontaneous friendships were forged — especially among the young writers. Sello and I spent many afternoons walking Den Haag’s streets, discussing the themes that propelled our work — the volatile intersections between race, class, and gender that continued to fracture post-apartheid society, especially in Cape Town, whose cosmopolitan character was strangely echoed in our surrounds.

We also talked about our dreams for other forms of belonging, of new friends, queer utopias, and different communities. Sex and desire with their erotic drives had a great part in it. As did politics. As Sello (Duiker 2001: 381) wrote in The Quiet Violence of Dreams: ‘There comes a time when we must face who we are boldly, when we must listen to the music of our dreams and delight ourselves with courage as we grasp our destinies firmly in our hands.’

In our youth and bravado — our naivety — we were unwilling, and perhaps unable to listen to the words of caution coming from the older writers in the group — Vladislavić and Rampolokeng — whose complex reading of post-apartheid South Africa undercut our fervor. We should have paid attention. A year later, both Phaswane Mpe and K. Sello Duiker were dead — Sello tragically by his own hand. Their deaths had a stark impact on me. On one hand I felt betrayed: what of our shared dreams? Our shared futures? On the other hand, I experienced an excruciating sense of loneliness, of being alone, as a writer, but also as a person.

In the years that followed, the energy that characterized the period immediately after apartheid dissipated, along with much of its optimism. Faced with a growing sense of loss, at a loss as to how to address this loss, I lost myself in books. I soon discovered that I was not alone in my lostness or my aloneness. South African literature is full of loners, lost relations, and thwarted relationships. Friendship when it does figure is at best fleeting, tenuous. More often than not it fails us, or we fail it. Alienation and despair are at the heart of J. M. Coetzee’s novels — friendship here never seems to establish anything but false communications based on misunderstandings. Vladislavić takes a different route, using friendship as a catalyst to launch his hapless, often tragic-comic characters into spirals of confusion. A less pessimistic approach, certainly, but ultimately one that ends with them no less alone. Even Zakes Mda’s dreamers, and the disordered and disorderly loners in Joel Matlou’s short stories fail to sustain lasting human relations. Bessie Head, Njabulo Ndebele and Keorapetse Kgositsile might make friendship a central concern, as have many writers from the so-called new generation (K. Sello Duiker, Songeziwe Mahlangu, and Masande Ntshanga,² for example), but in their books salvation seldom comes through communion with others. Rather, if it is to be found, it is in losing ourselves in the marginal spaces of our own individual dreams, our own fantasies, of ideas and languages that allow us to escape the violence and creative scarcity of capitalism, fascism, or any oppressive reality at all.

And this lostness is really what saved me, I think, from a deep despair, and not just about the suicides and the deaths, but from the idea of death, and the ongoing poverty, deprivation, and violence that dogged our society despite the emergence of democracy, and a fundamental feeling of differentness or aloneness or separation from other people. Both literature and friendship extend the possibility of immersion in another consciousness. They’re the forms in which we find the power, in language, to inhabit, perceive, and recreate a shared world. Aloneness that undermines aloneness; a portrait of loneliness leaves us less alone.

Nowhere is this more starkly depicted and enacted than in the writing of Lesego Rampolokeng. As commentaries on, emergencies from, the specific social roots and the creative starvations of our beautiful land after 1994, his poetry books, novels, and spoken word recordings stand by themselves. Humanity is anti-social, evidently. And yet against this, Rampolokeng’s work yearns for, calls out for friendship, not negating but demanding reading, provoking engagement with others through an open embrace of difference so that, — as in Blake’s (1793) ‘opposition is true friendship’, the contraries are not dissolved, but realised.

His early works, such as Horns for Hondo (Rampolokeng 1990), operate viscerally, presenting poetry as something the body understands, as it is seduced and ensnared by the sound, its unpredictable multiplicity and originality, the extraordinary vocabulary, the open flux of syntax and imagery, and the pleasure, the delight, to be had from all of that, as well as the great humor in it. His poems keep drawing us (and resisting us) into their undertow, and into all the horror and complexity of Rampolokeng’s frightening world.

As his career progressed, the explosive energy that characterized his work seemed to almost implode: reading his verse becomes like being caged inside a pressure-cooker of imagery and rhythm. As Paul Wessels (m.d.) writes in his review of The Bavino Sermons (1999), Rampolokeng’s rolling, roiling ‘dis-cum-dedication To Gil Scott-Heron’:

This very precise paradox inserts the poet firmly within the subject-matter of his work. This is no commentator, neutral observer of life. And reading this book is an exhausting experience. There is a disconcerting numbness that comes over the reader at a certain point. Affect seems to short-circuit. Image upon image assaults the senses.

The scatological language, the grotesque violence, the incisive insights into humanity, and in particular, the enemies of humanity make for something of a temporary loss of self the reader experiences.

To truly appreciate the power of Rampolokeng’s work then, we have to let go of ourselves as individual beings, thereby allowing a strangers’ world — or Hell, in this case — to possess us, to become us. Eventually, his works seem to say, all of us is an Other. Or we have the ability to be so, if pushed far enough. It’s a beautiful and terrifying idea, the dissolution of the self as its ultimate fulfillment. We lose ourselves to find ourselves.

This illustrates at least something of the relationship between friendship and reading I am trying to grasp at through loss and the chasm that exists between each of us. As Michael Brennan (2005) writes in his reflection on mourning and poetry, ‘In Absentia: Mourning and Friendship’: ‘Every word chosen and weighed with care if not a love for the unknowable, for what is beyond it, for the absence it contains and that contains it offers the possibility of relation, of friendship through the absences that exist at the heart of both being and language’. Writing then is a form of relation, at its best, an act of friendship without constraints, free of agenda, a binding beyond self and other, absence and presence, where each slips away.

I wrote to Lesego, first as a fan — ardent, awkward, searching — grappling to articulate the impact his poetry had on me. He wrote back. Flushed with elation, I wrote again. Our friendship took off quickly, energised by a sense of recognition and alliance, and finally active collaboration. Yet for all its camaraderie, the encounter was erratic, fleeting, and sometimes shadowed by trouble. Often our exchanges ignited my imagination; we tore the words from each other’s mouths, creating an excitement that seemed like an electric storm, then nothing, blackout, for months, or sometimes years.

There was a lot separating us. He was a generation older, and 50 shades darker. A Soweto boy, born and bred, who had recently shorn his dreads, traded mine dumps for cow pats in Groot Marico. I was a laaitjie — doubly, young and white, and a girl. Cape Town-based. This wasn’t a love story, no Nadine Gordimer novel³ — we didn’t hang out or even ever make out. What we did share was a library, a set of influences that ran riot from Antoine Artaud to Amos Tutoula, from Amiri Baraka to Steve Biko, Dumile Feni to Johnny Dyani — that and a passionate belief in the act of creation. This friendship was based in an impersonal form of intensity that went way beyond personal relations.

It was also a friendship that came with a warning. The challenge of Lesego’s work and personality — especially to those near it — is how much comes in: the pain, the ghosts, the rage. As fellow poet Kelwyn Sole (2009: 240) once said: ‘No contemporary South African poet — indeed, no writer — has occasioned more approval or disapproval, partly no doubt due to the confrontational nature of Rampolokeng’s poetic persona and style, and the scatological, irreverent content of much of his work.’ His fights and fall-outs with friends were legendary, often public.⁴ Forget 2Pac vs. Biggie. Rampolokeng, I was told firmly was trouble — violent, volatile, unreliable. A poet with a head on fire, a dark heart.

Maybe it was this glitch, the stark difference between public reputation and my own experience that provoked me to pursue an interview. Was I testing him? Seeking a way to make sense of the disjunctive relations that informed both his life and his writing? Looking for some kind of affirmation of our friendship — an E. T. moment where we finally find language and stutter f-r-i-e-n-d? Did I hope to emerge with a neat manifesto that would lay out a new sets of potentials and limits of friendship in its functioning at once as a concept and as a practice?

I should have known better. Lesego refused to comply. Over the course of several hours of intensive conversation and a fury of e-mail exchanges my long-standing friend out-and-out refused to submit to an abstract formulation of friendship, to present it as anything but life, lived experience, being human — and thus something necessarily fragmentary, messy, incoherent, violent, and ugly.

Friendship? My aunt’s place, 5100 Tsolo Street, Orlando East. I spent some years there with Vincent Sekete, my cousin who grew up to be Sasol Three. Betrayed to death on the guerrilla-front. Ok, at some point in that house, lived a family-friend as they are called. A gentler person I do not know. Guess what? He turned out to be Joe Mahlangu, Lovers Lane killer. Serial murderer. He killed the Romeos & Juliets of the Soweto corners doing the huggies-&-cuddlies. Muggers, killers, rapists, so-forth.

We are talking sunken friendship, it would have to be a heavy dirge, some kind of death fugue, if I were to compose or write that. Actually I am constantly doing it, always, in different ways. I just need to transcribe my cries.

As our discussions ran and e-mails criss-crossed — often aimed not at, but past each other — the interview became a transcription of those cries. Less a conversation than a monologue, it came as a stream of consciousness delivered in form of memories, anecdotes, and confessions, as poems and snippets of autobiography — all deep in the tradition of the everyday thing and designed to thwart academic circumscription or conscription. Lesego simply ignored and elided many of my questions, didn’t concern himself with making some kind of sense: clarifying points, connecting streams of thought, ‘putting things well’.

My childhood, all friendships I made came through conflict. Brawls, arse-whippings ... blood-splat and mucus splatter connections, you could call it. See, without brutal violence, on all sorts of levels, there is no Soweto. I exchanged flesh-tearings with fists, running stone-battles, us kids while punkarse adults stood there cheering. Blasted sick. Anyway, knives cutting through skin. No, I am not waving my scars in place of medals. Just spitting a little truth ...

A friendship then, not only characterized by conflict, but also born in and out of it, ‘fights: the fluids that fluid on and onto those streets rendered ties that bound me to others’, and one more often than not based on mutual exclusion rather than collective belonging:

I have forever been close to those who do not snugly fit, for whatever reason. In Chiawelo I ran with a boy called BOYKIE, he couldn’t speak except through grunts and other non-verbal sounds. No orality there, of course. Maybe that is why I went about rapping some kind of dead poetry, no idea. Boykie had to go through wearing an OK Bazaars plastic bag on his chest cos he drooled, heavily. We would go to Sans Soucci bioscope in Kliptown, and intermission, get meat-pies, the best this side of things. And half his food would end up on his bib cos his hands were like claws, twisted, he couldn’t hold things with any, shall we say, expertise? Anyway, always, at movie-end, stepping out we’d find the coloured kids standing on the stoep, waiting to fuck us up. But damn, after all the Bruce Lee Silver Fox Angela Mao shit on the screen there was no round-kicker better than Boykie. We would hand out bursaries of free arse-whippings and then run off, Boykie shrieking with glee. FRIEND, would never leave me behind, not once.

My old man, his first stint in prison was a 12 year bit. What happened, he was drunk asleep on a bench in a shebeen when he was woken up by croaks and gurgle-sounds of sorts. He sat up to find his friend, later to be my uncle, on his back with a guy wielding a panga over him. My old man, China they call him for his slit-eyes, got up and stabbed the guy in his heart. Kaput. They went to court. Guilty verdict. In prison, asked to show his number, he said he only pledged allegiance to his friend. So it was.

To the poet, the ‘grunts’, the ‘croaks and gurgle-sounds’ and even the ass-whipping of these early non-verbal friendships remain preferable to those false communications based on misunderstandings that come later with language.

Talking about unhealed wounds and my cicatrix that never give up on their itching: this Mark Of Cain below my left eye, this is how I got it. My high school mates wanted to run a train, a belt on this girl I had connected with in a tavern. Let me properly break it down. I lived in Phefeni, that night I was in a place called Emndeni, other side of that botched Pavlovian experiment slave-labour camp called Soweto. Far from home. We went drinking. I met a girl. Street-corner chemistry and the fireflames. Happiness, all good and nice in the neighbourhood. That was the night vagina circumcised me. I took a thrust and pain shot through my groin, like dynamite going off in my crotch. Like some razor had gone slash in my loins. I left the place with blood on my pants-front and flowing from under my eye cos then, these guys, friends of mine, came in and stuck an Okapi in my back, demanding that I get off so they could go in.

Memories of shit I would rather drop except to say I got cut, the one with the knife was trying to poke my eye out, I think. Well, they carry reminders of that night too. We all do, hearts heavy with piled-up crap.

Friendship here is not achieved by speech, but by sensation. It is communicated by means of the flesh. For Lesego, friendship is a trace left by and on the body.

I am no great emo-anything ultra-sensitive just cos I go as a poet, no need to strike hurt poses at the slightest provocation and bitching out. I’ve known all sorts abuse, rejection, been humiliated enough to know I prefer my wounds physical.

Lying to me means you view me as beneath you, in my books, cos you with-hold, bend/twist/turn-about information I am the poorer for not having and I think you laughing at me from some dark depths in you somewhere. You put yourself in superior-mode because you KNOW & GLORY in my ignorance. That is how it reads. So high you have a god’s arse-view ... and all the way down ... thinking: slow, cretin, blind, can’t see when being played. Superiority and inferiority. But guess what, I can pat you on your head. I can be very liberal to you. My name can be Alan Paton.⁵ I can run my reformatory. And you’re inferior to me.

Time and time again it is language that fails and betrays us — in its inability to communicate, but also in how it defines and polices friendship, nowhere more so than in the rhetoric saturating our political national discourse. ‘Comrade’ as a case in point: party political affiliation as the definition of camaraderie and the bond that dictates companionship — this is what language thrusts on us.

Let me start off by saying about this comrade thing. I’ve already spoke of was cousin, Vincent Sekete. He was one of the Sasol Three, the first guerillas of MK. They hit Sasol.⁶ They hit Voortrekker Hoogte. They hit Sasol again. Up to today they are standard icons, lions of the apartheid revolutionary struggle. They were finally shot, ambushed along the 20km fence of Kruger National Park. The way I see it is like several war movies put together: SA defense force uniforms strewn across that landscape.⁷

Later, we sought to find how they were betrayed, how they were known to have been in that place at that time. Leaders to wit Joe Modise and Alfred Nzo were said to be to blame for having tipped off the SA authorities about that. Now they are high up in the ANC, now ruling party ... So it was a shock for me to hear my aunt telling me, that actually no, those might have been in the know, but the actual person who fingered them was the hero of the SA struggle, that great hero-leader later to be himself slain. All said, no need for names. I then get to ask myself about this cause of which we are speaking, comradeship. About whether comradeship is about giving up that within us that defines us human. Because you have to be something other than human to be at home with that, it was betrayal, treachery hurts very deep within you.

We see in this country people who are threatening all the rest of us with obliteration if we dare speak ill against this one pathetic creature with a lot of power. They’re saying we are prepared to die, to kill for him. And then they sell out in that person and become them. So what exactly is it that we mean? Are we talking about the politics of expediency? It’s expedient that I sit across the table from you, Stacy, now talking friendship because it serves my purpose.

Let’s talk about Durban today. Joburg today. We don’t have to go to the Holocaust. Rwanda. We can just talk about today. I have spent a lot of my time in KZN [KwaZulu-Natal]. Today people are being killed because they are dark. How long before the people I stood with, the comrades turn on me? How long before it graduates from people darker than navy blue to you, to me? ‘I might’ve had a droplet of my blood merged with him, but it’s not Zulu, man. He should die too, this guy.’ So for me, this issue of friendship is ...

Patrice Lumumba sold out by who? Thomas Sankara ... who killed Sankara? Blaise Compaoré, longtime comrade, friend if you want to say, whatever. The list is endless, endless. And once you’re conscious of these things, once you know of these things, then you know more likely than not you are going to die at the hands of whoever it is you consider friend ... I know that, I know that.

To embrace friendship then, Lesego suggests, one must embrace betrayal and perhaps it is only at the moment of betrayal, and in the loss that comes after, that we truly recognize friendship. The opposite of ‘friend’, then, is not ‘enemy’ but ‘askari’ (traitor).⁸ He writes, ‘I’m just saying ... betrayed by these people. I define myself as their friend. Whether they are my friends in turn is for them to say. I operate from the inside out. That’s it. I operate from the inside out. I embrace them.’

Similarly Lesego refuses binaries via which friendship is constrained to amity, benevolence, brotherhood, charity, fellowship, or friendliness:

Are we grappling with a moral issue? Does positivity or negativity impact on what defines friendship? Does it need to be defined in terms of whether it operates on the positive sphere? Is it only friendship when it comes to good? I’ll clarify what I mean. My brother in law ... these people were terrible criminals, who killed people and whatever, whatever. People in gangs ... The flipside of that is, when they would go out together and rob people, they were prepared to give their lives for each other. Is that friendship or is it not? If I don’t leave you there. I’m prepared to die with you. Surely that’s a human thing? Human beings are stealthy beings.

Nor is he prepared to accept an idea of public, or ‘civic friendship’, based in kinship, collegiality, community, civility, or even ideology or artistic practice. Lesego does acknowledge that political, social, and artistic formations such as Black Consciousness and the cultural organizations and independent magazines that sprang up under apartheid were hotbeds of immanence, presenting themselves as a society of friends (influence, competition, rivalry), and thus promoting opinion. His debut documentary film, Word Down the Line (2014), directed by Bobby Rodwell and featuring interviews with South African poets such as James Matthews, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Mafika Gwala, Jeremy Cronin, Sandile Dikeni, Vonani Bila, Khulile Nxumalo, Kgafela oa Magogodi, and Gift Ramashia, tells this story. But he is wary of absorption by any groups, institutions, and other forces that might reduce one’s ability to change, move, or create freely.

Here’s another thing. I’ve got my eyes open to what some people regard as a Black Consciousness era. I don’t think it was an era petrified in time; it’s not a frozen moment. I am very conscious of who and what I am. I define myself as Black Conscious. I understand what BC is, indeed, as the Wretched of the Earth. Regardless of the amount of melanin they’ve got and dah, dah, dah ... Now, we show, Down the Line at Rhodes University. And at the end of it, the Q&A session these youngsters say, ‘No, you know what elder?’ They say to me, ‘I suggest that all the white people leave the hall now so we can get started.’ Now, a comrade of mine, who I would give my life for, who’s directed this thing that’s moved them so much, is caucasian. She’s caucasian. I know who this person is. And I know what this person did at a time when these black people were too even scared to scratch out a little word on a page for fear of brutalisation. I know what she suffered during apartheid. And these people are challenging me that this is invalid because she has less melanin in her? The fact that they are black, that they have X amount of melanin should validate them in my eyes? Oh, and no, I’m not standing up for my white missus! I don’t have a white missus. Fuck that shit! My problem with that is my blackness, regardless of the Hegelian mode, regardless of Fanon, regardless of any of that, is mine. I don’t define myself because other people stamp shit on me. You know?

He similarly sees no inherent affinity between art and friendship. My questions about artistic relationships as a form of friendship via inspiration, affiliation, or collaboration go unanswered. Nor is he prepared to directly engage any of the personal relationships that were seminal to him, to his writing, his existence, to his coming to consciousness. ‘We all know artists exploit artists,’ he says wryly, calling up a litany of failed friendships, betrayed dreams, the disappointed expectations and fraught alliances of community drawn together under economic and political or interpersonal stresses.

Close to his death, Ingoapele Madingoane was a lonely man. His BC comrades would have nothing to do with him. But after he died, sitting on the toilet with an axe in his skull, at his memorial the whole blasted fat piglet lot of them came out spouting platitudes. Friends.

Peter Makurube died in malnutrition and neglect after all the years he put in to the arts of poetry and music. He was persona non grata in all besuited over flabby frames and business spots. That history is a month-recent. Memorial and funeral, what happened? All the rats came out screaming praises. Friends.

Mafika Gwala died torn up, soul cut to pieces but spirit still flying high with defiance and an unchanged, solid belief in what he stood, a world beyond the grasping, clasping, clawed existence some sold on the stock exchange. That man brought me to consciousness. And at the end there he was in abject, dire circumstances. Eating away with the sickness coming in from without ... and then of course the Farts Minister had a lot of broken, hot wind to blow about how great Gwala was and that they’d been in negotiation to put him in the education-stream. Lies and bullshit. Faecal-faced friends.

Friendship is scary business. Mark that, about economics. I sit in the bushveld, no friendship in my field of vision, not even on the horizon.

A scholarly treatise for readers who never cared about scholarship, a memoir for those who have had enough with the insularity of simple confession, and a poetry book for the hip-hop generation, A Half Century Thing synthesizes the raw passion of a diary and the pleasure of a pop music album with the relevance and scope of nothing less than the history of South African literature, art, and music. Building on the ground traveled in Word Down the Line, extending beyond the tomb or grave, (‘message from immolation /cremation’) beyond homage (‘mindful of how Brother Ali warned … / i don’t disrespect the people who laid the tracks i travel on but ... / i write with the marrow in the center of my own creation-bone’), it’s a text that reads with an almost physical urgency, as though written in a human-heat (‘I’m the RA that came before the SUN / the fire-soul of fanon’s children’). Here Rampolokeng tangles and untangles a transgressive congregation of historic and fictional influences (Mafika Gwala, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Seitlhamo Motsapi, Sony Lab’ou Tansi, Yambo Ouologuem, Dambudzo Marechera — and his ‘cockroach eye-view’, Johnny Dyani, Mongezi Feza, Winston Mankunku Ngozi, Dumile Feni, Thami Mnyele, Fikile Magadlela, Miles Davis, Allen Ginsburg, Steve Biko, Frantz Fanon and oh, oh so many more), all while chronicling his disillusionment with the current dispensation:

like Brit Gervais comedian-perversion:

No Grace in climbing Nelson’s column Just penis & anus reconciliation

Ask Desmond the tutu-bishop

Only Black in the rainbow when my rectum raps

National flag misses my crap

and simultaneously trying to dig himself out of his own alienated funk:

Boots digging me out of my roots

Fists to my face not hitting me but my race

& police special .38s loaded with cold metal & solid hate

The authorities & my personality, how they relate ...

(how white lightning dictates what i write is frightening)

enlightening how (as) they say ‘it’s blackness in high places

Now throw the switch on your politics.’

From the word go, Rampolokeng moves forward in a stop-start fashion, jumping from decade to decade (‘from throwing stones & the [dynamite] sticks of june ’76 to tossing alternative Afrikaans rock with James the beboptist Phillips’, from ‘Amilcar Cabralised to howling with Ginsberg,[howling] not at the moon but at Armstrong … the Apollo creed was a bad seed’); fast-forwarding and rewinding (‘Got splinters of history lodged in my afrofuturism. / it takes the primitive to make the progressive / – fake dialectic’); ‘scratching beginnings & endings’; weaving in quotations and references; playing music off against the word (‘frozen, cramped between Jimmy Cliff’s “House of Exile” & Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger’), and blending other stories with his own.

There’s a collective thinking of this kinetic thing that Lesego engages — the participation in, the doing of, it. What emerges is a community based on the sharing of a refrain, on the creation of a path of thought not guaranteed by any root, by any integrity, by any violence, but only by its ongoing search for freedom and love for humanity. What the social, the political, the civic/civil world has surrendered from itself, has given up on, goes then into the realm of the imagination. As he writes in ‘LIBATION BLUES FOR MISTA GWALA’:

Tension contrast release what is freedom

Can you pin the insurrection tone down?

It vibrates pitched at liberation time.

Artistic downward spiral

Move from cellophane to the cyber-download plane

Was company exec’s stratospheric flight

to cut Mahlathini’s lion-mane

Bird’s grave was his sax

On top of him they shovelled narcotics

& between the orchestra & the soccer star

Lies the Hendrixian rockster

Words are medicine

Which is to mean also poison]]

six-nine can mean urine

But also conception

Half Century Thing is a devoted heresy, a sermon on the word, on politics and aesthetics that challenges what poetry does, what it can do, even what it is willing to address as a form. Most of all it’s a very beautiful tribute to friendship, one that articulates truly dissensual politics (in contrast to consensual), not a cult, but a culture of heterogeneity through which each of us accepted the singularity of the other.

In ‘Bass For Bra Willie’, the first of a ‘Movement in Four Body-Parts’, Lesego presents an idea of friendship that not only allows for critique, but insists on it. It’s at once a celebration and a scathing rap attack that riffs off and rips ups the constant jazz references that permeate Keorapetse Kgositsile’s oeuvre. In this poem, Lesego acknowledges his debt to Kgositsile’s practice by adopting its poetic strategies, while simultaneously turning those very tactics against the older poet.

In its passion and its wrath, its love and disdain, it corresponds with the idea of friendship based in brutal honesty developed between Amiri Baraka and Ed Dorn through their years of correspondence, as documented in the recent Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters (Pisano 2014). Here Baraka says on more than one occasion, ‘Dorn would rather make you an enemy than lie to you’. Lesego similarly shows his deep respect for Kgositsile by risking alienating him rather than perpetuating false platitudes.

In a conversation between Ramolokeng and Gwala published in the Chronic newspaper shortly before Gwala’s death in September 2014, Rampolokeng said of Kgositsile, ‘there is a need for the poet to die in order for the politician to rise’ and this transmutation is at the center of his attack of here:

(Kgositsile’s ‘false gods’ erased the poet raised between serial killers

& religion-drug-dealers blood-of-Christ-spillers & fear-feelers

& grown in healer-art embrace I like it hard at core with no fillers ...

true & up my ghetto-reality street passion of knife-in-flesh)

And later:

Bone stacks at Atlantic bottom

Rattle rise pierce through saxophones

Rhythm it wise with drummed skulls

Lungs mine-dust perforate for bass

& whip-strum melodies

piano ribcages kwashiorkor exposes

nerves percussive eugenic explosive

Moan-exorcise) that’s jazz

Salvaged strings from the hanging tree

The noose sings (cheated) forlorn off-key

& free concept rim-shots

& the sounds are tight hot

Bubbling from the clay-pot

Come to bring the day out

(testes notes and ovaries tones neither coo nor moo that Mankunku Jol’inkomo.)

The music introduced in this opening plays on throughout the book, becoming almost a din in the third part of the movement, ‘CRAP TONES MY KIN-DREAD SPIRITS CAN TUNE INTO (OR the addict looks at the dark side of the spoon’. In this poem Lesego engages the fundamental role that encounters played in his life — as much in experiencing intensities and multiplicities through music and literature as in generating thought and in moving beyond poetry through poetry. Here private language and personal gesture move from solipsism to the social, as references become characters, which feel more like ghosts, fading into and out of identity with one another and even with the author.

‘Ah, this pen scratches my work-song / complex chorded in perennial rearrangement,’ writes Lesego, presenting himself as both music producer and poet; a fluent switching from high-toned to home(l)y and back again; name dropping from music history while simultaneously sampling and remixing the rhythms of those he references.

Gouge out the darkness’ eyes

Exiled memory bellows across grief-distances:

The Bird’s screech-spoke genius

Then the flies came with the critiques

But) None darker than Parker and his demons

Supplicant at Charlie’s sermons

I’m prostrate before the apostate

The dance-floor is beyond reach

Nothing but flammable-speech

& No fire-dance escape

The poem flames out of control

& that’s the nature of The Beast

Home is where the lions are corrugated

Even my self-definition is dated

Got splinters of history lodged in my afrofuturism.

(it takes the primitive to make the progressive – fake dialectic)

race has them assume intuition stumbles black into it:

‘you would be great if you were doing it on purpose’

But the white is cold with it he ‘experiments’.

Hornman blows the highest trill

like opening a hole to heaven or hell

after the high the chill)

as if suspended on an abused tree

(they hurl insults at it) deaf to the gravity call

its fruit when it drops is deranged should be free rise not fall ...

Mongezi tips his bowl & it’s a bloodspill

...

Say Thelonious gave piano internal bleed haemorrhage concussion

Cos he thought it percussion

(condition Bukowski diagnosed after the fact of it lying on the slab (read post-mortem / autopsy

Zim’s ‘grand’ gutted for copper glory

(imagine a Picasso defaced for the frame

What a vandal\iZim

Kyle played it kneeling praying to the music-gods amid its gore

where it was pushing its own intestines in

Where the music instrument cemetery where do they go to die?

These words perhaps give a taste of Lesego’s penchant for intertextual play, but they do not, cannot show quite how vibrant and complex his employment of redeployment is — names and ideas, images and rhythms woven throughout the lengths of each poem and the book as a whole — or how it gives rise to such an intense reading experience.

This is recombinant poetry propelled by the refrains and returns of other artists, the sounds and words of fellow musicians and writers that are evoked and manifested, drawn into the movement of new concepts and rhythms, and thus reformulated, re-animated, re-connected, re-booted. You can be human by yourself but, as Fred Moten (2015) points out, black don’t go it alone: ‘It’s a social dance, unruliness counterpoised between riot and choir, and our melismatic looting is with child, sold all the time, but never bought.’

Or as Lesego calls it in his poem ‘The Bavino Manifesto (Ars Poetica Versus the Arse-Poet-Dicker)’: ‘my conscience calls? i answer in intestinal scrolls / a textual maze feeding in & out of itself like underground Johannesburg / where i was cradled, ladled & shall be body-bagged.’

Throughout these ‘intestinal scrolls’ the poet delights in the possibility of words having infinite meanings and effects. In these dense, spiralling texts he sends his readers around and around the same words and ideas, lifting us to new proximities to them, and to mesmeric new landscapes, at once political, geographical, and deeply personal. Even when he’s at his most destructive and violent, he is diligent about collecting the fragments of the forms he explodes, and always repurposes their shattered essence with humility and laughter.

Colonial Literature … got me thinking blue … several blues … the blue of eyes, of collars, of some blood … & I bled til Mista Gwala sang me ‘no more lullabies’ but LIBERATION BLUES 1974, mourning Onkgopotse Tiro parcel-bombed up in the murder-church service of the god of pigmentation (& yessah, I realized then that ‘me listening to jazz is not leisure / it is a soul-operation’ & I knew then I had to choose between Jol’inkomo (that is, in his words ‘bringing lines home to the kraal of my black experience’ or Yakh’inkomo, to OUTCRY with Mutabaruka ... to bawl the anguish like a cow being slain … & decided there was nothing bovine about me … & so … I took to Staffriding … all the way from Phefeni to HERE.

As the above passage demonstrates, it’s in his counterattack against mediocrity that Lesego is at his most exhilarating and eviscerating. While the multiple musical rhythms (jazz, dub, hip-hop, maskanda, malombo ... all the sounds encompassed in what Johnny Dyani calls ‘black family music’ (Kaganof 2010) and the constant punning and wordplay make reading A Half Century Thing the most fun I’ve had with a book in years, it’s a far cry from ‘leisure’. Entertaining then, but never entertainment. A Half Century Thing is ‘a soul-operation’; sharp, visceral, self-avowedly furious; a rhetoric of shame, of loss, of unquantifiable and unspeakable violence (‘murderous history ... aborted futures ... zombied present ...’) that is necessarily also very fucking funny. In these poems Lesego laughs in the face of horror, in the face of others, in his own face, and in our faces. Even the most po-faced readers (‘there is no such thing as “the right to faecal-expression”’) will be hard-pressed the keep a straight face (‘Mugabe-face’) in the face of lines like:

I’m mourning the loss of my dreads.

now I’m the original ‘lockless monster’.

Baloi, ‘be afraid, be very afraid.’

Relation magnate to diamond-dust ferret?

Avuncular laugh to tubercular cough.

So la-la-land (eclipse

How Daylyt black them out

Like ‘pee a sea and toss dromedaries back in it

Return-trip to Anus-land...

But ‘dem towers leaning outta position pisa me off’…

Organic intellectual versus the synthetic ineffectual

& the censor-ship is anchored &anc-whored

in heads of the pansy-horde :

‘you write poetry? Shem.

You the soft, sensitive, flower-fondling type, then?’

Fuck it, gimme my machine-ahm-pen!

Ultimately it’s the force of a smile that protrudes through in A Half Century Thing, a smile mixed with a startled, helpless laughter. The book encapsulates the necessity of laughter, the deep relief and release that laughter offers. Pain, loneliness, loss — these casual horrors are called up, but also held off by the rebellious power of Lesego’s ruthless chuckle and grin. And in making us laugh with him, at him, and with and at ourselves, the poet extends a hand of friendship to the reader, inviting us into the text and making us complicit in its creation, in its joys and horrors. Laughter then as an act of friendship, an act of defiance, of revolutionary praxis; a regenerative act:

Indeed, we are Bound to Violence with Yambo Ouologuem.

& Richard Pryor proved to be just that. He pried that tomb-talk open, stood

it up & made comic of it, thus: ‘the reason people use a crucifix against

vampires is because vampires are allergic to bullshit’.

I agree. so, mom, I think I might just be a vampire. From now on kindly call

me Count Blackula.

& hence, my Robin black Hood ambition:

steal from men of the cloth & give to women of none

A Half Century Thing is thus a crossroads, a multiple connectedness. It’s a meditation of friendship and an enactment of friendship created as an act of friendship that shows us not what friendship is, what it could be, or even who the friend is, but rather what can friendship do (Salut, Deleuze!),¹⁰ that is, how friendship functions as an active and dynamic relationship, allowing affirmation as well as dissent, rage, and pain as well as laughter and joy, harmony as well as disharmony.