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I suppose
this book will get lost in the UK in the scramble for attention of British
poets, and in the narrow focus of mainstream publishers, conditioning what
readers read, but it shouldn't do.
I have enjoyed the variety of voices and the more I have enjoyed them the
harder it has been to find a way into 'reviewing' the book. Partly this is of
course because of circumstance, their local world is not mine, and what
follows from this: voice (many voices), styles, presence, not least politics,
the mix of upheaval and complaint, bad vibes, new life, with most of all a
joyousness in the making of the poems. My own writing has not been so joyous.
So I am not going to try to quote from any of the poems, some in an original
language with translation, and some perhaps sitting awkwardly in a book -
voice, voice - and with such diversity. No extract would convey the rolling
on or unravelling or accumulated rhythm or telling-it that these poems have
essentially.
Web sites are easy to find, for BOTSOTSO (the organisation, the magazine,
their books) and for Reality Street to get perhaps (the way it happened for
me) more quickly to this book.
From which I am cribbing names and prose - these days easier to cut and paste
than copy from the book itself:
BOTSOTSO was founded in South Africa in 1994, following the end of apartheid,
by the Botsotso Jesters, a poetry performance group. Its first printed
manifestation was as an insert in the New Nation, a now defunct weekly
newspaper. Following the newspaper's demise, Botsotso became a magazine in
its own right and a publishing house.
This anthology of 12 poets gives BOTSOTSO a platform outside South Africa for
the first time. The contributors are: Donald Parenzee, Makhosazana Xaba,
Bongekile Mbanjwa, Vonani Bila, Kobus Moolman, Anet Kemp, Allan Kolski
Horwitz, Ike Mboneni Muila, Lisemelo Tlale, Clinton du Plessis, Sumeera Dawood,
Siphiwe ka Ngwenya.
And from a page into Allan Kolski Horwitz's introduction:
'Artists in extreme societies often find such contrasts
offer wide and substantial subject matter, while, at the same time, also causing
great
personal trauma and insecurity. But there is another angle to consider. If,
as Oscar Wilde famously said, 'All art is quite useless', what does it
matter, as an artist, if one is living in an economically and socially
divided, and often violent, country which in broad terms reflects all the
major human imbalances plaguing our planet? After all, the primary impulse
behind art making is not didactic, utilitarian or wealth-creating. We make
and appreciate art because a 'germ', some seemingly irrational impulse to
express and give voice and form to our agonies as well as our joys, and to
provide definitive philosophical and moral commentaries, forces its way out
of our beings. And if in the process of making art one tries to right the
wrongs of the world (a romantic and youthful pastime?) that is hardly the
stuff that either keeps middle class societies on what they believe is the
upward curve of social and personal liberation, or amuses patriarchal tribal
ones that do not wish to be challenged.
In this vein, the key literary polemic from the early 1970s onwards
was whether 'protest' or 'struggle' poetry qualified as 'real poetry'. The
academic establishment and most reviewers generally slated such work as
sloganeering and propagandistic simply because its main focus was to expose
the evils of the social system and to mobilize the victims to resist. Such
subject matter was said to lack elegance or subtlety and to be crudely
expressed. Purity of language and non-political themes were held to be the
ideals that were to be structured in the forms that emanated from Britain,
and to some extent the United States. Poetry written in South African English
was frowned upon - particularly when languages were mixed and local jargon
used. Now at that time such narrowness was to be expected because in the alienated,
elitist society that was Apartheid South Africa, artistic norms were set by
the ruling (white) nationalist/colonial class. Only as an afterthought, were
a tiny number of black writers or radical writers (radical in subject matter,
tone and style) admitted into the canon - their acceptance being hard-won,
and in most cases only achieved (certainly with respect to Black writers) by
dint of their having absorbed the colonial/ metropolitan models and
demonstrated proficiency in reproducing them.'
One need hardly say that for the book to be part of BOTSOTO's vision, it does
not deal in boundaries, is not about us and them, doesn't deal in cultural
divides except in the healing of them. How remarkable this is really, if
other parts of the world, if the world's poets, etc etcÉ. But then it hasn't
been the poets (I like to think, it's true, isn't it?) who have stirred up
hatred, consolidated cultural and national divisions; the manifestos of poets
have been for something more fundamental, lovelier, visionary, more fun, more
open to each other, us.
© David
Hart 2009
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