English 2 a, south african poetry (april 2013)

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ENGLISH 2A: SOUTH AFRICAN POETRY
FROM PROTESTTOPOST-APARTHEID
Date Topic Required Reading
Monday
22 April
TheBlack
Consciousness Movement
and Protest Poetry
 “What‟s in this Black „Shit‟” (Serote)
 “My Brothers in the Streets” (Serote)
Friday
26 April
The Black
Consciousness Movement
and Protest Poetry
 “The Birth of Shaka” (Mtshali)
 “The Watchman‟s Blues” (Mtshali)
Monday
29 April
Poetry of
the Transition
 “Ummi” (Afrika)
 “Power Cut” (Afrika)
Friday 3
May
Revisionist Poetry  “Our Sharpeville” (De Kok)
Monday
6 May
The Truth and
Reconciliation Commission
 “For all Voices, For all Victims” (Krog)
Friday
10 May
Recent Poems  “This is what I‟ll remember” (Baderoon)
 “Old photographs” (Baderoon)

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What’s in this Black ‘Shit’ (Mongane Serote)
It is not the steaming little rot
In the toilet bucket,
It is the upheaval of the bowels
Bleeding and coming out through the mouth
And swallowed back,
Rolling in the mouth,
Feeling its taste and wondering what‟s next like it.
Now I‟m talking about this:
„Shit‟ you hear an old woman say,
Right there, squeezed in her little match-box
With her fatness and gigantic life experience
Which makes her a child,
„Cause the next day she‟s right there,
Right there serving tea to the woman
Who‟s lying in bed at 10 a.m. sick with wealth,
Which she‟s prepared to give her life for
„Rather than you marry my son or daughter.‟
This „Shit‟ can take the form of action:
My youngest sister under the full weight of my father
And her face colliding with his steel hand,
„‟Cause she spilled sugar that I worked so hard for,‟
He says, not feeling satisfied with the damage his hands
Do to my yelling little sister.
I‟m learning to pronounce this „Shit‟ well
Since the other day
At the pass office
When I went to get employment,
The officer there endorsed me to Middelburg,
So I said, hard and with all my might, „Shit!‟
I felt a little better;
But what‟s good is, I said it in his face,
A thing my father wouldn‟t dare do.
That‟s what‟s in this black „Shit‟.
My Brothers in the Streets (Mongane Serote)
Oh you black boys,
You thin shadows who emerge like a chill in the night,
You whose heart-tearing footsteps sound in the night,
My brothers in the streets,
Who holiday in jails,
Who rest in hospitals,
Who smile at insults,
Who fear the whites,
Oh you black boys,
You horde-waters that sweep over black pastures,
You bloody bodies that dodge bullets,
My brothers in the streets,
Who booze and listen to records,
Who've tasted rape of mothers and sisters,

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Who take alms from white hands,
Who grab bread from black mouths,
Oh you black boys,
Who spill blood as easy as saying „Voetsek‟.
Listen!
Come my black brothers in the streets,
Listen,
It's black women who are crying.
The Birth of Shaka (Oswald Mtshali)
His baby cry
was of a cub
tearing the neck
of the lioness
because he was fatherless.
The gods
boiled his blood
in a clay pot of passion
to course in his veins.
His heart was shaped into an ox shield
to foil every foe.
Ancestors forged
his muscles into
thongs as tough
as wattle bark
and nerves
as sharp as
syringa thorns.
His eyes were lanterns
that shone from the dark valleys of Zululand
to see white swallows
coming across the sea.
His cry to two assassin brothers:
"Lo! you can kill me
but you'll never rule this land!"
The Watchman’s Blues (Oswald Mtshali)
High up
in the loft of a skyscraper
above the penthouse of the potentate
he huddles
in his nest by day; by night
he is an owl that descends,
knobkierie in hand,
to catch the rats that come
to nibble the treasure-strewn street windows.

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He sits near a brazier,
his head bobbing like a fish cork
in the serene waters of sleep.
The jemmy boys
have not paid him a visit,
but if they come
he will die in honour,
die fighting
like a full-blooded Zulu –
and the baas will say:
„Here‟s ten pounds.
Jim was a good boy.‟
And to rise and keep awake
and twirl the kierie
and shoo the wandering waif
And chase the hobo with „Voetsak‟.
To wait for the rays of the sun
to spear the fleeing night,
while he pines
for the three wives and a dozen children
sleeping alone in the kraal
faraway in the majestic mountains
Of Mahlabathim –
„Where I‟m a man
amongst men,
not John or Jim
But Makhubalo Magudulela.‟
Power Cut (Tatamkhulu Afrika)
Clock‟s glowing digits show
it's four a.m.
I flip a switch:
nothing burns.
Has a pylon toppled in the swift,
black water of the wind?
Candles roll
about under my palms,
fluting nibbling at my skin.
Matches chatter as the box
skids away from my blind,
humiliating hands.
Clock‟s cold
fire stares,
and stares from the dark,
grown alien room,
whispers “No”
to the candles living flame.
Candles flare:
the shadows bolt
up into the corners of the room,
twitch and thrust
like the bug that tries

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to flee me through the floor.
Sea rolls
uneasily below
the bellowing wind.
Mock-fig‟s
slack leaves splat
against the window‟s shrilling panes.
Islanded,
The room is still.
As I am still,
Islanded in the thin
melancholy of the alone:
those watchers at the ebbing tides
of nights and dreams.
Candles‟ doubles quiver tall
as vigil-tapers in the black
mirror's tideless pool.
Water over weed,
turbulent with flames,
the mirror drowns
my face‟s thousand forms.
They gibber, grin,
horribly howl,
rush the mirror‟s scything rims,
narrow to a line.
Only the eyes still cry
“I am”.
The wind whirls
the leaves one last,
strangulating time:
drops like a stone.
Silence drips
like gutters after rain,
runs,
tiptoeing,
through my ears.
Morning, vast
and formless, leans
against my walls.
Does it or I sigh,
worn with being,
ripe with pain?
The lights suddenly burn.
A dove croons,
familiarly, in the pines.
Old hungers run
through the dry
streambeds of my veins.
Ummi (Tatamkhulu Afrika)
I looked at my hands last night,
and remembered her:
and the rickety stairs that writhed
up to the floor she had made her fief,

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where sometimes she rented out
a grudging space to carefully screened
practising Muslim gentlemen –
of whom, it seemed,
she had decided I was one.
Tall and gaunt,
arthritis remodelling her limbs,
menacingly black,
old-style walking stick
gripped in her large
as a man‟s hands,
she prowled like some lame tigress through
the monastic, small rooms,
strangely flaming yellow eyes
telling of a rage I could not comprehend.
Evenings,
she prayed,
all her flesh except the face
voluminously swathed,
the rooms suddenly alert
with terror of the God brought close –
and as suddenly distanced when she rose,
casting off her sanctity as she did her robes,
bellowing for the daughter that scrubbed,
and polished, and pursued me
with that other terror:
the lovelorn swoon of her idiot eyes.
Spectrally pale,
with the dead,
un-European bleach
of our bastard race‟s sport,
she liked me for the similar
wanness of my skin;
stooped once and spat
in an eye that had grit in it,
muttering a prayer in a strange tongue;
and she gave me the room
with the little balcony that leaned
out over the old District‟s ruin,
and I would sit there of an evening and watch
the last of the children play
before night fell;
and sometimes on a Sunday,
sleeping late,
I‟d wake
and a starling would be sitting on the rail,
flooding the room with transfiguring song,
and I‟d go out to tell her
it was like home from home,
and she‟d sit there staring at me,
bleakly as a bone.
Widowed, she was mean;
she‟d scoop spilled tea

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back into the cup, saying:
„the table‟s clean‟.
Only once did she give me
hope for her soul,
proffering cakes with the tea
when my friends from the madrassah came
and I knew pride;
but the cakes were stale,
iron as her thin smile,
and their soured cream
unforgivably shamed.
I think I hated her then;
but she died and I moved on
and still did not understand
why she threw the cakes
into the rubbish bin,
did not speak to me for many days.
But now I‟m looking at my hands,
seeing more than them:
misshapen, mean
as crab‟s claws they cling
to the last of life,
the last of things,
hold only pain.
Our Sharpeville (Ingrid de Kok)
I was playing hopscotch on the slate
when miners roared past in lorries,
their arms raised, signals at a crossing,
their chanting foreign and familiar,
like the call and answer of road gangs
across the veld, building hot arteries
from the heart of the Transvaal mine.
I ran to the gate to watch them pass.
And it seemed like a great caravan
moving across the desert to an oasis
I remembered from my Sunday School book:
olive trees, a deep jade pool,
men resting in clusters after a long journey,
the danger of the mission still around them
and night falling, its silver stars just like the ones
you got for remembering your Bible texts.
Then my grandmother called from behind the front door,
her voice a stiff broom over the steps:
„Come inside; they do things to little girls.‟
For it was noon, and there was no jade pool.
Instead, a pool of blood that already had a living name
and grew like a shadow as the day lengthened.
The dead, buried in voices that reached even my gate,

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the chanting men on the ambushed trucks,
these were not heroes in my town,
but maulers of children,
doing things that had to remain nameless.
And our Sharpeville was this fearful thing
that might tempt us across the wellswept streets.
If I had turned I would have seen
brocade curtains drawn tightly across sheer net ones,
known there were eyes behind both,
heard the dogs pacing in the locked yard next door.
But, walking backwards, all I felt was shame,
at being a girl, at having been found at the gate,
at having heard my grandmother lie
and at my fear her lie might be true.
Walking backwards, called back,
I returned to the closed rooms, home.
For All Voices, For All Victims (Antjie Krog)
because of you
this country no longer lies
between us but within
it breathes becalmed
after being wounded
in its wondrous throat
in the cradle of my skull
it sings, it ignites
my tongue, my inner ear, the cavity of heart
shudders towards the outline new in soft intimate clicks and gutturals
of my soul the retina learns to expand
daily because by a thousand stories
I was scorched
a new skin
I am changed for ever. I want to say:
forgive me
forgive me
forgive me
You whom I have wronged, please
take me
with you.
This is what I’ll remember (Gabeba Baderoon)
Mist in the park
brings slow clarity to the landscape.
We walk a long circuit from the metal gates
down the straight, formal mall,

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past the statues and the open spaces falling
to the left and to the right.
After the frost, the trees show
the last of their colour.
Before the steps to the monolith peering
out of the mist – what everything leads to –
crowd the ramshackle roses, formal too,
but blown, their colours like autumn now,
remembered yellow, the pinks and reds touched
with brown. Not brilliant, no longer
what we recall of roses,
but this state before they fall
and the bushes hold life during winter
close as a small spark.
As the garden gradually reveals
itself, we walk into time
and are released to talk of death.
The time it took
to sit in your mother‟s presence
and hear what was being said
when at last she asked for help,
but only for the periphery –
to buy something she had seen
in the newspaper, to read to her.
No request came
closer to the body.
To stay by her bedside
and hear the calm detail of need
was to feel a kind of beauty, impossible
to say, but the beauty of dying, the beauty
of sitting in the presence of dying.
The roses‟ insistent memory,
small collectivity before they fall –
this is what I‟ll remember
as the point where we turned
and became open with each another,
our memories held close
despite the fact that the cold had come,
on time.
Old photographs (Gabeba Baderoon)
On my desk is a photograph of you
taken by the woman who loved you then.
In some photos her shadow falls
in the foreground. In this one,
her body is not that far from yours.
Did you hold your head that way
because she loved it?

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She is not invisible, not
my enemy, nor even the past.
I think I love the things she loved.
Of all your old photographs, I wanted
this one for its becoming. I think
you were starting to turn your head a little,
your eyes looking slightly to the side.
Was this the beginning of leaving?