This is about a love for a band that inspires us to new and creative heights! And it’s about sharing the beautiful creative energy that has gone into this thread's creation! Let’s get back to the basics and share our art, our creativity! So, poetry, writing and prose please!
Thanks,
dyaogirl
'..... Ah! A perfect illustration of the poststructuralist paradox. Does the signifier "Merlot" correspond with the 'truth' of the bottle I polished off last night, or do we hold in our thoughts a different "signified" of bottle-of-Merlot-ness? Perhaps we're dreaming of the same bottle!" -FinsburyParkCarrots
No, no, It's not ego on my part. Ego motivates destructive behaviour. I set up exercises for other people to excel, and they, not I, produced the best work on this thread, perhaps on this forum. I'm proud of everybody here who makes an effort to effect positivity through creativity.
It's great to have good friends whose talent and goodwill continues to move and amaze me!
Ophelia's Nun is a wonderful place to share and grow. It has flourished under the gentle guidance of its starter. It's been a learning experience for us all. So many people have shared in it's creation, it has a beauty and life of it’s own. It seems unfair for the people who have contributed to its energy and the ones who have yet to read it to have it silenced. I come back time and time again to read the joy and the energy that is what we call Ophelia’s Nun.
'..... Ah! A perfect illustration of the poststructuralist paradox. Does the signifier "Merlot" correspond with the 'truth' of the bottle I polished off last night, or do we hold in our thoughts a different "signified" of bottle-of-Merlot-ness? Perhaps we're dreaming of the same bottle!" -FinsburyParkCarrots
The blackthorn hangs, the sparrow calls.
the autumn takes to wind.
The blackthorn rises; look what falls.
A summer's blaze. Behind
my lidding eyes, the memory
of growth will build again.
Let them fall, leaves, tears, awry:
My love's my store and gain.
He sits writing his words
And sometimes, I'm certain, he's standing...
When a curious mix of delightful words
into his head they are landing
And his joy at the words
he cannot contain
nor refrain from sharing with others
For the man is a wordsmith,
that's his trade don't you know?
Would it satisfy if he kept to himself?
Nay, for only a fool would expect
that a tradesman would store
his glorious life work on a shelf!
Originally posted by ruby He sits writing his words
And sometimes, I'm certain, he's standing...
When a curious mix of delightful words
into his head they are landing
And his joy at the words
he cannot contain
nor refrain from sharing with others
For the man is a wordsmith,
that's his trade don't you know?
Would it satisfy if he kept to himself?
Nay, for only a fool would expect
that a tradesman would store
his glorious life work on a shelf!
Yaaay! Ruby!
Yes! This is the way most of us on the board truly feel!
Thank you Ruby for expressing it so eloquently!
'..... Ah! A perfect illustration of the poststructuralist paradox. Does the signifier "Merlot" correspond with the 'truth' of the bottle I polished off last night, or do we hold in our thoughts a different "signified" of bottle-of-Merlot-ness? Perhaps we're dreaming of the same bottle!" -FinsburyParkCarrots
Some say the statistical probability of a patricide
being tied and dropped down in a sack out at sea
with a cockerel, a monkey and a ravenous snake
scratching and biting at his too-late penitent's face
was pretty high in places where there was a need
for ingenious deterrents against people who seemed
to forget that in the beginning was The Word, and
that that Word was the Father, before father made flesh.
I believe this to be good measure against those who today
Fear the power of words well applied, want wisemen dead.
He who would kill words kills all fathers and kills himself.
He crawls, destined to choke and splutter in a bag
that lets in the scum of seven met warring oceans of slime,
left only in the final, dream-like moment of his horror
to seek in the black a final word in the water for penance,
for forgiveness, when the drowning ape bites down into his froth.
‘I have a sense that there’s a lot of censorship, self-censorship in South African writing. There are legitimate themes and illegitimate themes. We can write about politics, we can write about art. But if you listen to your inner voices and write about what you care about, the politics is there’ (Joan Metelerkamp, Offprints Collection, p. 222).
The Pretoria poet Joan Metelerkamp (interviewed by Colleen Crawford Cousins, Offprint 56, 2003: 221-4) implies, through her careful punctuation of “censorship, self-censorship in South African writing”, that the two notions she foregrounds in the first sentence of the above quotation are in some ways distinct, in others contiguous. Throughout my comparative analysis of Athol Fugard’s 1965 play Hello and Goodbye (in Port Elizabeth Plays, ed. Walder 2000: 125-189) and Chris van Wyk’s poem “The Road” ([1990] Offprint 53, 2003: 210) I aim to show how Fugard and van Wyk, in their respective apartheid and post-apartheid contexts, negotiate external pressures prescribing ‘legitimate’ themes for literary expression. In Fugard’s case I shall discuss his mediation between State censorship of political art and anti-state, censorious insistence on overt political commitment (and avoidance of personal themes and artistic formalism). I shall also show how Chris van Wyk avoids the self-censorious tendency of overtly ‘public’, committed poetry (the radical 1970s and 1980s township legacy of which has, in the 1990s has arguably been exploited by a post-apartheid government seen by many as in league with white-run global capitalism); he explores the political potentiality of resituating the inner voice of a silenced a South African poor of the past, within the culture of South African poetry of the 1990s. Fugard and van Wyk explore the possibilities of fusing political and personal themes, to produce, in their respective genres, literature that deconstructs oppositions of thematic legitimacy/ illegitimacy, by bearing witness to the marginalised yet integral experiences of poor whites in South Africa.
The series of white Nationalist, governmental Acts censoring “undesirable” literatures, culminating in the 1977 amendment of the 1974 Publications Act, led to two polarised responses to such strictures. On the one hand, there emerged overtly committed, propagandist literature – via drama and poetry recital – aiming to eschew artistic formalism in the pursuit of an oppositional dialectic (see Johnson, 2003:125). On the other, there proliferated a mode of ‘autonomous’ art for art’s sake, which imitated Eurocentric forms and themes. Of course, the former of the two approaches was, in the era of apartheid, deemed “illegitimate” by the Nationalist, Publication Control Board, yet it was considered by the emergent South African counter-culture to be not only morally and politically legitimate but expedient to employ an inverse strategy of self-censorship, producing literature that was primarily ‘public’ in theme and register, and in overt opposition to apartheid. Writers and readers of this mind have tended to read Athol Fugard’s theatre reductively as formalistic and excessively personal (see Walder, 2003:122).
Yet Hello and Goodbye’s formal experimentation in performance arguably allows the play to bear witness to the illusory social conditions that bind individual lives, as well as, most importantly, people’s radical potentiality for change. Fugard was writing in the climate of apartheid and censorship, and in a period of fiercely insularist, South African Nationalist and ‘post-colonial’ self-assertion, following the country’s withdrawal from the British Commonwealth in 1961. Fugard may have felt the need to employ strategies of “compromise or self-censorship” (Walder, 2003:90), in order to get his written text past the Publication Control Board. However, Hello and Goodbye in performance radically gives the silenced poor a representative space, and a voice, onstage and in full view of theatre audiences, to challenge the censorious apartheid notion of ‘natural’ differences of racial and class- consciousness between supposedly ‘post-colonial’ (post- 1910? 1961?), South African whites and their imagined opposite of irrational, otherly (and colonised) non-whites.
The stage directions given at the start of the play (ed. Walder, [1965] 2000:127) prescribe the setting and props used in theatrical performance: if, onstage, the table and chairs are dilapidated and the electric light dangling from above is unshaded, these could constitute, in the audience’s minds, indexes of social deprivation. A white actor (Fugard in the play’s first Johannesburg production of 1965), portraying an impoverished and psychologically disturbed individual ensuring his existence by counting out his moments with an old spoon against the side of a nearly-empty squash bottle, might at first suggest to the audience a Beckettian image of universal subjection and decrepit immobility. Yet the true shock- value of this scene, especially for (largely white) South African audiences, comes in this character Johnnie’s monologue on pp.129-131, which is enunciated as a desperately rapid stream-of-consciousness fighting the silence of ontological death-in-life. Johnnie identifies, via a litanical evocation of district stops on an everyday bus journey, a Port Elizabeth setting specifically known to white South Africans (“Summerstrand Humewood Cadles Walmer Perridgeville Newton Park Mount Pleasant Kensington Europeans only and all classes double deckers with standing prohibited”; p.130).
This scene might be ‘personal’ in theme, but the fact that a discourse of disempowerment is uttered from the lips of a ‘sign’ of white South Africa negotiates censorship to infer a devastating political critique (betraying the philosophical influences of Hegel and Camus [Walder, 2003:119]), of apartheid ideology: that white- male capitalistic identity and imagined community, which defines its supposedly superior consciousness and selfhood when oppressed “blacks” and “Coloureds” admit to a consciousness of inferiority and otherness, becomes absurd as a construction when ‘post-colonial’ white males themselves are displayed in public view not as naturally empowered but as colonised by the mechanics of the very system proclaimed to be in their interests. As a ‘natural’ semiotic sign onstage in this scene, the actor Fugard signifies in South African, apartheid-constructed sociological terms, culture, privilege and power; as an artificial sign, the ‘poor white’ Johnnie Smit as a visual semiotic signifier ‘shares’ the same body-space as Fugard yet signifies inferiority and, radically, a destabilization of naturalised racial binaries. Thus the body of Fugard/Johnnie represents a site of conflict, interrogating class and race and circumventing censorship to infer, through a skilful manipulation of the visual semiotics of theatrical performance, the committed proposition that South African audiences can challenge and learn to perceive as absurd “the internalised boundaries created within and between people” (Walder, 2003:121).
Hello and Goodbye contains an instance of drama that might in scripted form escape the censors’ attention but in performance presages in certain respects the confrontationalist, committed theatre of Matsamela Manaka whilst managing to mediate between the personal and the political; the committed and the artistically autonomous; “protest and spectacle” (ibid). Hester could in performance be directed to come downstage and stare into the faces of affluent-seeming white women in the theatre audience and deliver with inflected vehemence the lines “Happy families is fat men crawling on to frightened women. And when you’ve had enough he doesn’t stop, ‘lady’. I’ve washed more of your husbands out of me than ever gave you babies” (Fugard: 168).
By giving Hester a space and a voice, as a marginalised yet assertive white woman who deconstructs the binaries of wife/prostitute and attempts to transcend her sexually commodified status by demanding her “inheritance” (redress for a woman’s life of suffering that had reduced her dead mother to a fragile fragrance on a dress confined within a man’s possessions), Hello and Goodbye proves itself political in its psychologically realistic portrayal of its characters’ inner voices. Hester may not transcend her plight and find her father’s compensation in one of his old suitcases, yet her recognition that her life of subjection to patriarchalism - in the family; in unfamiliar hotel rooms; in society - could be otherwise, is hardly art for art’s sake but rather what Theodor Adorno calls the mark of truly politically committed literature, mediating between politics and art ([1962] 1996:202).
Fugard’s drama sets a precedent for the manipulation of form and personal themes, which would facilitate Chris van Wyk’s retrospective, poetic evocation of a personal experience of a poor-white South Africa largely silenced or ignored during the era of apartheid censorship.
Ironically, after the collapse of apartheid in 1991 and following the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, some ‘committed’ writers prevalent in the township movements and SACP during the 1970s and 1980s came to be seen by dissident commentators such as Lesego Rampolokeng (see Offprint 57, 2003:229) as using their voice – that had once been deemed by apartheid governments as illegitimate – to sing the praises of a post-apartheid government in league with (white-run) global market forces disinterested in the continuing political issue of poverty amongst the country’s majority. Njabulo Ndebele’s argument that post-apartheid writers should avoid the pitfalls of overt commitment by exploring the relationship between personal recollection and political statement (see Johnson, 2003:130), has been observed by poets such as van Wyk, who uses autobiographical and personal themes to rewrite a South African past bearing witness to a marginalised poor (whose experiences had previously been, and arguably continue to be, written out of dominant versions of history).
The speaker of the poem uses a conversational, confessional register, centralising himself as the subject and recalling himself aged four, in the domestic environs of his grandmother’s house (“I was hardly four and living at my granny’s”, line 1). The information given in this opening line subtly infers a child’s sense of dislocation or separation from an immediate family unit, since he lives with his grandmother at such a young age. Yet there is another, historico-political element in this first line that should be noted. If we agree that the autobiographical speaker of the poem is to all intents and purposes the poet Chris Van Wyk (b. 1957), then we can calculate that the child-memory of the text dates from 1961, the year that Verwoerd’s South African Nationalist government proclaimed ‘post-colonial’ independence from the British Commonwealth. A political reading of line 1 informs our complex responses to the text that follows. It is important to note that the speaker locates his memory as being “When the news came” (my emphasis). The use of the definite article here suggests ultimate significance to the poem’s themes, yet the nature of this news is not disclosed for another fifteen lines. “The news” might on a subtextual level suggest an historico-political referent: news of South Africa’s severance of links with Britain. The “overhanging vines of the adults” might imply the monolithic structures of a South African Nationalist government that proclaims its power and exploits its sources of disinformation and censorship to maintain control. Since these “adults” or founding fathers of a neo-fascist State were perceived critically, by ‘everyday’ poor people listening at the eaves of power back in 1961, as morally, ideologically and politically bankrupt in their disinterest in the poor majority, black and white, there could well be a sense of exploring history from a dissident perspective (that was widespread in 1961 but silenced), that the structures of rule, justice and wisdom were seen even in 1961 as ruled by the corrupt and “not so wise”(line 6).
In conclusion, Fugard and van Wyk avoid the constraints of censorship or the determination of legitimate themes in their respective genres, in order to explore in their literature and with political effect the inner voices of a marginalised South African poor. In Fugard’s case, Hello and Goodbye uses non-naturalistic, Beckettian innovations of form to demonstrate the illusory nature of a society that seeks to contain but cannot totally suppress the emancipatory potentiality of the individual Subject; Fugard exploits the subversive possibilities of playing with sign-systems in performance to challenge social constructions of race and class in ways that might not have seemed obvious to state censors reading the written dramatic text. Fugard’s drama interrogates dominant constructions of reality –bound up with the politics of the state and the legacy of colonial ideology – in the perpetuation of which, ‘committed’ socio-realist writers are, to a degree, complicit. Hello and Goodbye’s scope is both local in being set in Port Elizabeth, and worldless, in that we see Johnnie’s reality disintegrating the more he tries to qualify his existence by constructing a South Africa of the mind: it is thus part of a decolonising process.
Van Wyk’s poetic recollection of an impoverished ‘white’ urban experience explores the possibility of interrogating censorious constructions of race identity in 1960s South Africa (even though it must be said that socio-economically, the actual differences between the conditions of poor whites and non- whites cannot easily be conflated). Just as Fugard uses visual semiotics in drama to interrogate constructions of identity and society, van Wyk uses images such as a rough road of history viewed retrospectively across the years, to supply a poetic but legitimately political statement of representative South African experiences by poor peoples economically colonised across racial boundaries.
Fugard and van Wyk negotiate politics and art to show that although society is an illusion, individual potential expressed through the inner voice of the Subject can effect revolutionary change, by bearing witness to the experience of poverty and subjugation in all its disturbing, crippling fragmentariness. As Adorno argued concerning the nature of truly political rather than propagandist art, this mediation is a political act, and not an effect of self-censorship: “This mediation is not a compromise between commitment and autonomy” ([1962]1996: 202).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor W. ([1962] 1996), “Commitment”, in Eagleton, Terry and Milne, Drew (eds.), Marxist Literary Theory, A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, pp.187- 203.
Fugard, Athol (2000), “Hello and Goodbye”, in Walder, Dennis (ed. and intro.), Port Elizabeth Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 125- 189.
Gilbert, Helen. and Tompkins, Joanne. (1996), Post- Colonial Drama – theory, practice, politics, London/ New York: Routledge.
Loomba, Ania (1998), “Colonial and Postcolonial Identities”, in Colonialism/ Postcolonialism, London/ New York: Routledge, pp. 104- 183.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade ([1988] 1993), “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”, in Williams, Patrick and Chrisman, Laura, Colonial Discourse and Post- Colonial Theory – A Reader, Harlow: Prentice Hall/ Pearson Education Ltd, pp. 196 – 220.
Open University (2003), “Case Study 3: South African Writing”, Offprints 36 – 59, in A430 Post- Colonial Literatures in English: Readings and Interpretation – Offprints Collection, Milton Keynes: Open University, pp. 127- 255. (Includes Chris van Wyk, “The Road”, Offprint 53, p. 210.)
_____________________ (2003), A430 Post- Colonial Literatures in English: Readings and Interpretations, Audio CD, Milton Keynes: Open University, track 5.
Plaatje, Solomon T. ([1916] 1998), “One Night with the Fugitives”, in Boehmer, Elleke (ed.), Empire Writing – an Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870 – 1918, Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 405- 414.
Gramich, Katie; Johnson, David; Walder, Dennis, “Case Study 3, South African Writing, 1970 – 2000” (2003), in A430 Post- Colonial Literatures in English: Readings and Interpretations – Study Guide, Milton Keynes: Open University, pp. 81- 137.
You prayed for an inevitable night,
night of starlessness, night of nothingness,
night beyond the grace of words,
night beyond the memory of feeling,
a night beyond blackness, of a nothing
never to be imagined in the abyss of empty still
where even silence would be something,
would be calmness.
And now the night has come
Your hell is worse than you'd wanted:
There persists a lambent seraphim
flickering above a windowlight
where loved ones behind unshatterable glass
join hands and call an inevitable dawn.
By the breadth and the length of Professor's Pillinger's whiskers
The Beagle2 crashed, making way for America's glory.
The crash was convenient? So runs the gist of the whispers.
It that true? Maybe not. But the thought begs a bloody good story.
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots Some say the statistical probability of a patricide
being tied and dropped down in a sack out at sea
with a cockerel, a monkey and a ravenous snake
scratching and biting at his too-late penitent's face
was pretty high in places where there was a need
for ingenious deterrents against people who seemed
to forget that in the beginning was The Word, and
that that Word was the Father, before father made flesh.
I believe this to be good measure against those who today
Fear the power of words well applied, want wisemen dead.
He who would kill words kills all fathers and kills himself.
He crawls, destined to choke and splutter in a bag
that lets in the scum of seven met warring oceans of slime,
left only in the final, dream-like moment of his horror
to seek in the black a final word in the water for penance,
for forgiveness, when the drowning ape bites down into his froth.
Ooo, melikey deeesh wan! Powerful!
Forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. - Leonard Cohen
In any case, I'm not here to take part in your games, but since you felt the need to edit this two days later, respond further, and take a swipe at me...I'll give it a go.
Lurking: it's a term used on the world wide web when people view pages but do not log in or register. Voyeuristic? Well, yeah. I even have it set to say 'voyeurs' and 'crushes' on my board. Thanks though, for trying to teach me the difference between lurking and reading...after all, you are the teacher on this board. Everyone likes you. Everyone wants you to stay. You teach them all so much. You know what is publishable. Give me a break. Go flog your ego somewhere else. Oh, ego...I'll get to that in a minute.
Your drama is pathetic. I don't post here enough to care if you stay or leave, but I will say there was joy in Mudville when you bid your farewell. Pulling the childish stunt of leaving overly-dramatically, then returning in almost the same breath, leaves one to believe you are in want and need of some serious attention. You said it yourself, you have your own board. Congratulations. Practically everyone has a board now. Your followers are awaiting you there.
Speaking of boards, your IP was logged when you were lurking and my board was hacked into the other day, but I'll attribute that to a freak accident. Being hacked was an inconvenience and a learning experience, though I don't think you are capable of such a task. Then again, you have many fooled on so many other fronts, that this is another possibility. I'm sure you would defend your innocence to your death and would never admit to your actions if this was the case.
I'll assume you meant squalid, with one 'l,' and you couldn't be more wrong. You have no idea how I view my writing, so don't even try to state how I might perceive my words...though I think you have a pretty good idea of how I view yours.
Having to read around your pompous spew is not worth frequenting this board. Your replies with rhetorical nonsense do not impress me. You are not an elitist. You are not Bill fuckin' Shakespeare.
Now this is great: a response to my comment of 'ego' on the page before I even posted it. Nice edit. You don't want your precious thread locked, so you take a cheap shot where you think I will not see it. A cry of ego? It's not a cry - it's a whisper and a shout...it's a fuckin' fact! We all have egos, yours happens to be barely containable in this poetry thread and forum. Okay, I'll play along: "a person generous with words" is not an egomaniac. I'll remember that. Seriously, read that. "A person generous with words." Nope, no ego there.
You've managed to brainwash and fool a few, but your true colors are easily seen by myself and those that know how to read between the lines. There is nothing impotent about my ego. I'm creative. Artists without an ego will not get anywhere. I learn this to be true more and more everyday. The pathetic, starving artist is not a thing of Beauty, but rather of tragedy. So yes, I have an ego. I'm not an egomaniac, and I do not go around sending personal messages to people correcting them and telling them how I think they should act. Must be a Cambridge thing. Maybe you are referring to the impotent ego of little Dick?
"The worst are full of passionate intensity." I wouldn't have expected anything less from you. This quote proves you are a self-righteous asshole. The passionately intense think differently, understand differently, and write in ways you will never be capable of.
Oh, people in Cambridge might be taught to respect words, but people in Detroit are taught to respect the truth and to speak true words. You can have your Cambridge - I will take my Muses on Parnassus, Greek mythology, and my personal Gotham of Detroit, where the REAL people are, anyday.
"don't see some men as 1/2 empty, see them 1/2 full of shit"
Eddie Vedder
"Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
U.S. Constitution/Bill of Rights
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots Pasta asked me a couple of times to come and read her poems. That's not lurking. That's reading. The phrase "lurking" lacks an objective correlative when spoken in this context; it implies that the speaker's state of mind is in excess of facts as they are. (Read TS Eliot on "Hamlet". Better still, read "Hamlet".)
Do people lurk in Public Libraries when they go to read books? The acquisition of knowledge by reading is greatly sullied when claimed to be a voyeuristic pursuit. If you see a reader as a voyeur, then you must perceive your own writing as squallid: The logic is relentless.
People have the self esteem to respond in the face of adversity with gentility and kindness, though a cruder sensibility would misread such magnanimity as ego. The one word cry of ego against a person generous with words is as an admission of impotent ego in oneself, a projective misidentification. Let the call of "ego" come and fall upon the speaker of that word.
"The worst are full of passionate intensity."
WB Yeats
Oh, mine has to be in a PM, but you can post whatever the fuck you feel whenever you feel like it? Edit my posts? Who the fuck are you?? You took a cheap shot at me, you didn't offend me. There is a difference. In the real world, people do not always take back words of offense to please another person.
Go fuck yourself...in Cambridge
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots Couldn't this have been said in a PM? I don't know what this business of hacking is all about.
Now you've said it, if you edit your posts that offended me I'll edit the posts that offended you and we can be decent about this and move on.
I'm sorry you feel that way. Kat and Sea, I am asking you to lock this thread on my own request. It would be doing me a favour. It means less to me than trolling does to others.
Comments
Thanks,
dyaogirl
It's great to have good friends whose talent and goodwill continues to move and amaze me!
the autumn takes to wind.
The blackthorn rises; look what falls.
A summer's blaze. Behind
my lidding eyes, the memory
of growth will build again.
Let them fall, leaves, tears, awry:
My love's my store and gain.
And sometimes, I'm certain, he's standing...
When a curious mix of delightful words
into his head they are landing
And his joy at the words
he cannot contain
nor refrain from sharing with others
For the man is a wordsmith,
that's his trade don't you know?
Would it satisfy if he kept to himself?
Nay, for only a fool would expect
that a tradesman would store
his glorious life work on a shelf!
Yaaay! Ruby!
Yes! This is the way most of us on the board truly feel!
Thank you Ruby for expressing it so eloquently!
Thank you for your PM! Please clean your email box out!
dyaogirl, a great big
(p.s Please don't go! See...I'm quoting horrible songs from the seventies now. But if that's what I must do, so be it
This thread is for you,
It's for Kat and Sea,
and it's for Pearl Jam, especially Ed.
I won't go, then.
Sigh of relief. Truth triumphs once again!
being tied and dropped down in a sack out at sea
with a cockerel, a monkey and a ravenous snake
scratching and biting at his too-late penitent's face
was pretty high in places where there was a need
for ingenious deterrents against people who seemed
to forget that in the beginning was The Word, and
that that Word was the Father, before father made flesh.
I believe this to be good measure against those who today
Fear the power of words well applied, want wisemen dead.
He who would kill words kills all fathers and kills himself.
He crawls, destined to choke and splutter in a bag
that lets in the scum of seven met warring oceans of slime,
left only in the final, dream-like moment of his horror
to seek in the black a final word in the water for penance,
for forgiveness, when the drowning ape bites down into his froth.
‘I have a sense that there’s a lot of censorship, self-censorship in South African writing. There are legitimate themes and illegitimate themes. We can write about politics, we can write about art. But if you listen to your inner voices and write about what you care about, the politics is there’ (Joan Metelerkamp, Offprints Collection, p. 222).
The Pretoria poet Joan Metelerkamp (interviewed by Colleen Crawford Cousins, Offprint 56, 2003: 221-4) implies, through her careful punctuation of “censorship, self-censorship in South African writing”, that the two notions she foregrounds in the first sentence of the above quotation are in some ways distinct, in others contiguous. Throughout my comparative analysis of Athol Fugard’s 1965 play Hello and Goodbye (in Port Elizabeth Plays, ed. Walder 2000: 125-189) and Chris van Wyk’s poem “The Road” ([1990] Offprint 53, 2003: 210) I aim to show how Fugard and van Wyk, in their respective apartheid and post-apartheid contexts, negotiate external pressures prescribing ‘legitimate’ themes for literary expression. In Fugard’s case I shall discuss his mediation between State censorship of political art and anti-state, censorious insistence on overt political commitment (and avoidance of personal themes and artistic formalism). I shall also show how Chris van Wyk avoids the self-censorious tendency of overtly ‘public’, committed poetry (the radical 1970s and 1980s township legacy of which has, in the 1990s has arguably been exploited by a post-apartheid government seen by many as in league with white-run global capitalism); he explores the political potentiality of resituating the inner voice of a silenced a South African poor of the past, within the culture of South African poetry of the 1990s. Fugard and van Wyk explore the possibilities of fusing political and personal themes, to produce, in their respective genres, literature that deconstructs oppositions of thematic legitimacy/ illegitimacy, by bearing witness to the marginalised yet integral experiences of poor whites in South Africa.
The series of white Nationalist, governmental Acts censoring “undesirable” literatures, culminating in the 1977 amendment of the 1974 Publications Act, led to two polarised responses to such strictures. On the one hand, there emerged overtly committed, propagandist literature – via drama and poetry recital – aiming to eschew artistic formalism in the pursuit of an oppositional dialectic (see Johnson, 2003:125). On the other, there proliferated a mode of ‘autonomous’ art for art’s sake, which imitated Eurocentric forms and themes. Of course, the former of the two approaches was, in the era of apartheid, deemed “illegitimate” by the Nationalist, Publication Control Board, yet it was considered by the emergent South African counter-culture to be not only morally and politically legitimate but expedient to employ an inverse strategy of self-censorship, producing literature that was primarily ‘public’ in theme and register, and in overt opposition to apartheid. Writers and readers of this mind have tended to read Athol Fugard’s theatre reductively as formalistic and excessively personal (see Walder, 2003:122).
Yet Hello and Goodbye’s formal experimentation in performance arguably allows the play to bear witness to the illusory social conditions that bind individual lives, as well as, most importantly, people’s radical potentiality for change. Fugard was writing in the climate of apartheid and censorship, and in a period of fiercely insularist, South African Nationalist and ‘post-colonial’ self-assertion, following the country’s withdrawal from the British Commonwealth in 1961. Fugard may have felt the need to employ strategies of “compromise or self-censorship” (Walder, 2003:90), in order to get his written text past the Publication Control Board. However, Hello and Goodbye in performance radically gives the silenced poor a representative space, and a voice, onstage and in full view of theatre audiences, to challenge the censorious apartheid notion of ‘natural’ differences of racial and class- consciousness between supposedly ‘post-colonial’ (post- 1910? 1961?), South African whites and their imagined opposite of irrational, otherly (and colonised) non-whites.
The stage directions given at the start of the play (ed. Walder, [1965] 2000:127) prescribe the setting and props used in theatrical performance: if, onstage, the table and chairs are dilapidated and the electric light dangling from above is unshaded, these could constitute, in the audience’s minds, indexes of social deprivation. A white actor (Fugard in the play’s first Johannesburg production of 1965), portraying an impoverished and psychologically disturbed individual ensuring his existence by counting out his moments with an old spoon against the side of a nearly-empty squash bottle, might at first suggest to the audience a Beckettian image of universal subjection and decrepit immobility. Yet the true shock- value of this scene, especially for (largely white) South African audiences, comes in this character Johnnie’s monologue on pp.129-131, which is enunciated as a desperately rapid stream-of-consciousness fighting the silence of ontological death-in-life. Johnnie identifies, via a litanical evocation of district stops on an everyday bus journey, a Port Elizabeth setting specifically known to white South Africans (“Summerstrand Humewood Cadles Walmer Perridgeville Newton Park Mount Pleasant Kensington Europeans only and all classes double deckers with standing prohibited”; p.130).
This scene might be ‘personal’ in theme, but the fact that a discourse of disempowerment is uttered from the lips of a ‘sign’ of white South Africa negotiates censorship to infer a devastating political critique (betraying the philosophical influences of Hegel and Camus [Walder, 2003:119]), of apartheid ideology: that white- male capitalistic identity and imagined community, which defines its supposedly superior consciousness and selfhood when oppressed “blacks” and “Coloureds” admit to a consciousness of inferiority and otherness, becomes absurd as a construction when ‘post-colonial’ white males themselves are displayed in public view not as naturally empowered but as colonised by the mechanics of the very system proclaimed to be in their interests. As a ‘natural’ semiotic sign onstage in this scene, the actor Fugard signifies in South African, apartheid-constructed sociological terms, culture, privilege and power; as an artificial sign, the ‘poor white’ Johnnie Smit as a visual semiotic signifier ‘shares’ the same body-space as Fugard yet signifies inferiority and, radically, a destabilization of naturalised racial binaries. Thus the body of Fugard/Johnnie represents a site of conflict, interrogating class and race and circumventing censorship to infer, through a skilful manipulation of the visual semiotics of theatrical performance, the committed proposition that South African audiences can challenge and learn to perceive as absurd “the internalised boundaries created within and between people” (Walder, 2003:121).
Hello and Goodbye contains an instance of drama that might in scripted form escape the censors’ attention but in performance presages in certain respects the confrontationalist, committed theatre of Matsamela Manaka whilst managing to mediate between the personal and the political; the committed and the artistically autonomous; “protest and spectacle” (ibid). Hester could in performance be directed to come downstage and stare into the faces of affluent-seeming white women in the theatre audience and deliver with inflected vehemence the lines “Happy families is fat men crawling on to frightened women. And when you’ve had enough he doesn’t stop, ‘lady’. I’ve washed more of your husbands out of me than ever gave you babies” (Fugard: 168).
By giving Hester a space and a voice, as a marginalised yet assertive white woman who deconstructs the binaries of wife/prostitute and attempts to transcend her sexually commodified status by demanding her “inheritance” (redress for a woman’s life of suffering that had reduced her dead mother to a fragile fragrance on a dress confined within a man’s possessions), Hello and Goodbye proves itself political in its psychologically realistic portrayal of its characters’ inner voices. Hester may not transcend her plight and find her father’s compensation in one of his old suitcases, yet her recognition that her life of subjection to patriarchalism - in the family; in unfamiliar hotel rooms; in society - could be otherwise, is hardly art for art’s sake but rather what Theodor Adorno calls the mark of truly politically committed literature, mediating between politics and art ([1962] 1996:202).
Fugard’s drama sets a precedent for the manipulation of form and personal themes, which would facilitate Chris van Wyk’s retrospective, poetic evocation of a personal experience of a poor-white South Africa largely silenced or ignored during the era of apartheid censorship.
Ironically, after the collapse of apartheid in 1991 and following the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, some ‘committed’ writers prevalent in the township movements and SACP during the 1970s and 1980s came to be seen by dissident commentators such as Lesego Rampolokeng (see Offprint 57, 2003:229) as using their voice – that had once been deemed by apartheid governments as illegitimate – to sing the praises of a post-apartheid government in league with (white-run) global market forces disinterested in the continuing political issue of poverty amongst the country’s majority. Njabulo Ndebele’s argument that post-apartheid writers should avoid the pitfalls of overt commitment by exploring the relationship between personal recollection and political statement (see Johnson, 2003:130), has been observed by poets such as van Wyk, who uses autobiographical and personal themes to rewrite a South African past bearing witness to a marginalised poor (whose experiences had previously been, and arguably continue to be, written out of dominant versions of history).
The speaker of the poem uses a conversational, confessional register, centralising himself as the subject and recalling himself aged four, in the domestic environs of his grandmother’s house (“I was hardly four and living at my granny’s”, line 1). The information given in this opening line subtly infers a child’s sense of dislocation or separation from an immediate family unit, since he lives with his grandmother at such a young age. Yet there is another, historico-political element in this first line that should be noted. If we agree that the autobiographical speaker of the poem is to all intents and purposes the poet Chris Van Wyk (b. 1957), then we can calculate that the child-memory of the text dates from 1961, the year that Verwoerd’s South African Nationalist government proclaimed ‘post-colonial’ independence from the British Commonwealth. A political reading of line 1 informs our complex responses to the text that follows. It is important to note that the speaker locates his memory as being “When the news came” (my emphasis). The use of the definite article here suggests ultimate significance to the poem’s themes, yet the nature of this news is not disclosed for another fifteen lines. “The news” might on a subtextual level suggest an historico-political referent: news of South Africa’s severance of links with Britain. The “overhanging vines of the adults” might imply the monolithic structures of a South African Nationalist government that proclaims its power and exploits its sources of disinformation and censorship to maintain control. Since these “adults” or founding fathers of a neo-fascist State were perceived critically, by ‘everyday’ poor people listening at the eaves of power back in 1961, as morally, ideologically and politically bankrupt in their disinterest in the poor majority, black and white, there could well be a sense of exploring history from a dissident perspective (that was widespread in 1961 but silenced), that the structures of rule, justice and wisdom were seen even in 1961 as ruled by the corrupt and “not so wise”(line 6).
Van Wyk’s poetic recollection of an impoverished ‘white’ urban experience explores the possibility of interrogating censorious constructions of race identity in 1960s South Africa (even though it must be said that socio-economically, the actual differences between the conditions of poor whites and non- whites cannot easily be conflated). Just as Fugard uses visual semiotics in drama to interrogate constructions of identity and society, van Wyk uses images such as a rough road of history viewed retrospectively across the years, to supply a poetic but legitimately political statement of representative South African experiences by poor peoples economically colonised across racial boundaries.
Fugard and van Wyk negotiate politics and art to show that although society is an illusion, individual potential expressed through the inner voice of the Subject can effect revolutionary change, by bearing witness to the experience of poverty and subjugation in all its disturbing, crippling fragmentariness. As Adorno argued concerning the nature of truly political rather than propagandist art, this mediation is a political act, and not an effect of self-censorship: “This mediation is not a compromise between commitment and autonomy” ([1962]1996: 202).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor W. ([1962] 1996), “Commitment”, in Eagleton, Terry and Milne, Drew (eds.), Marxist Literary Theory, A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, pp.187- 203.
Fugard, Athol (2000), “Hello and Goodbye”, in Walder, Dennis (ed. and intro.), Port Elizabeth Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 125- 189.
Gilbert, Helen. and Tompkins, Joanne. (1996), Post- Colonial Drama – theory, practice, politics, London/ New York: Routledge.
Loomba, Ania (1998), “Colonial and Postcolonial Identities”, in Colonialism/ Postcolonialism, London/ New York: Routledge, pp. 104- 183.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade ([1988] 1993), “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”, in Williams, Patrick and Chrisman, Laura, Colonial Discourse and Post- Colonial Theory – A Reader, Harlow: Prentice Hall/ Pearson Education Ltd, pp. 196 – 220.
Open University (2003), “Case Study 3: South African Writing”, Offprints 36 – 59, in A430 Post- Colonial Literatures in English: Readings and Interpretation – Offprints Collection, Milton Keynes: Open University, pp. 127- 255. (Includes Chris van Wyk, “The Road”, Offprint 53, p. 210.)
_____________________ (2003), A430 Post- Colonial Literatures in English: Readings and Interpretations, Audio CD, Milton Keynes: Open University, track 5.
Plaatje, Solomon T. ([1916] 1998), “One Night with the Fugitives”, in Boehmer, Elleke (ed.), Empire Writing – an Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870 – 1918, Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 405- 414.
Gramich, Katie; Johnson, David; Walder, Dennis, “Case Study 3, South African Writing, 1970 – 2000” (2003), in A430 Post- Colonial Literatures in English: Readings and Interpretations – Study Guide, Milton Keynes: Open University, pp. 81- 137.
(c) Richard McGuire 2003.
night of starlessness, night of nothingness,
night beyond the grace of words,
night beyond the memory of feeling,
a night beyond blackness, of a nothing
never to be imagined in the abyss of empty still
where even silence would be something,
would be calmness.
And now the night has come
Your hell is worse than you'd wanted:
There persists a lambent seraphim
flickering above a windowlight
where loved ones behind unshatterable glass
join hands and call an inevitable dawn.
The Beagle2 crashed, making way for America's glory.
The crash was convenient? So runs the gist of the whispers.
It that true? Maybe not. But the thought begs a bloody good story.
Ooo, melikey deeesh wan!
In any case, I'm not here to take part in your games, but since you felt the need to edit this two days later, respond further, and take a swipe at me...I'll give it a go.
Lurking: it's a term used on the world wide web when people view pages but do not log in or register. Voyeuristic? Well, yeah. I even have it set to say 'voyeurs' and 'crushes' on my board. Thanks though, for trying to teach me the difference between lurking and reading...after all, you are the teacher on this board. Everyone likes you. Everyone wants you to stay. You teach them all so much. You know what is publishable. Give me a break. Go flog your ego somewhere else. Oh, ego...I'll get to that in a minute.
Your drama is pathetic. I don't post here enough to care if you stay or leave, but I will say there was joy in Mudville when you bid your farewell. Pulling the childish stunt of leaving overly-dramatically, then returning in almost the same breath, leaves one to believe you are in want and need of some serious attention. You said it yourself, you have your own board. Congratulations. Practically everyone has a board now. Your followers are awaiting you there.
Speaking of boards, your IP was logged when you were lurking and my board was hacked into the other day, but I'll attribute that to a freak accident. Being hacked was an inconvenience and a learning experience, though I don't think you are capable of such a task. Then again, you have many fooled on so many other fronts, that this is another possibility. I'm sure you would defend your innocence to your death and would never admit to your actions if this was the case.
I'll assume you meant squalid, with one 'l,' and you couldn't be more wrong. You have no idea how I view my writing, so don't even try to state how I might perceive my words...though I think you have a pretty good idea of how I view yours.
Having to read around your pompous spew is not worth frequenting this board. Your replies with rhetorical nonsense do not impress me. You are not an elitist. You are not Bill fuckin' Shakespeare.
Now this is great: a response to my comment of 'ego' on the page before I even posted it. Nice edit. You don't want your precious thread locked, so you take a cheap shot where you think I will not see it. A cry of ego? It's not a cry - it's a whisper and a shout...it's a fuckin' fact! We all have egos, yours happens to be barely containable in this poetry thread and forum. Okay, I'll play along: "a person generous with words" is not an egomaniac. I'll remember that. Seriously, read that. "A person generous with words." Nope, no ego there.
You've managed to brainwash and fool a few, but your true colors are easily seen by myself and those that know how to read between the lines. There is nothing impotent about my ego. I'm creative. Artists without an ego will not get anywhere. I learn this to be true more and more everyday. The pathetic, starving artist is not a thing of Beauty, but rather of tragedy. So yes, I have an ego. I'm not an egomaniac, and I do not go around sending personal messages to people correcting them and telling them how I think they should act. Must be a Cambridge thing. Maybe you are referring to the impotent ego of little Dick?
"The worst are full of passionate intensity." I wouldn't have expected anything less from you. This quote proves you are a self-righteous asshole. The passionately intense think differently, understand differently, and write in ways you will never be capable of.
Oh, people in Cambridge might be taught to respect words, but people in Detroit are taught to respect the truth and to speak true words. You can have your Cambridge - I will take my Muses on Parnassus, Greek mythology, and my personal Gotham of Detroit, where the REAL people are, anyday.
"don't see some men as 1/2 empty, see them 1/2 full of shit"
Eddie Vedder
"Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
U.S. Constitution/Bill of Rights
Now you've said it, if you edit your posts that offended me I'll edit the posts that offended you and we can be decent about this and move on.
Go fuck yourself...in Cambridge