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Click on the face.

JURASSIC MEMORIES (by liarliarlies.livejournal.com)

Jurassic memories found in an archeological dig
I dug you up I dug you up
I found a fracture of a jaw bone, the very keystone to the past
and the future, I dug you up
The clouds that cleared to show the moon looked like Africa
the stars behind it represented all the capitol cities
I’m pretty sure Lesotho shined brightest.
Why wouldn’t it? It’s wrapped up so securely.
Surrounded by it’s mother’s love
Lesotho, my love, come nestle for a while
Mother Africa will love you and dig you up.
© http://liarliarlies.livejournal.com/33255.html

Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" again

The most moving love poem I have read: "love's austere and lonely offices" is so simple and succinct that rarely has so much been expressed in so few words.

"Austere" means severely self-disciplined, enduring hardship for a higher purpose.. "Offices" are duties, actions which go with a role, in this case the role of a loving father. The purpose of love is what it motivates a person to do for another with no expectation of anything in return. He received no thanks and expected none.
[continue there...]

How to get your book published

How to get your book published

Changing nationalities

Israeli Police Forcefully Close an International Literature ...
Alternative Information Center (AIC) - Jerusaelm, Israel
Among the patrons who have supported the starting of the festival last year were acclaimed South African writer Chinua Achebe, (the late) Palestinian poet...

Really?

Whatever happened to researching what we don't know?

There are more than 50 countries in Africa, why 'South African'?

How does 'acclaimed Nigerian writer André Brink' sound?

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Ben Okri's "They say"

They say
Love grows
When the fear of death
Looms.

They say
Courage looms
When the fear
Of never loving again
Disappears
In the smell of the enemy
Who crushes us so much
We can only fight.

Love and courage grow together
When the flesh is rawest
And the spirit charged
And distorted within the nightmare
We see the possibility
Of a future.
© Ben Okri

[source...]

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Poéfrika interview with Shailja Patel

1. Did you move into writing poetry gradually, or did any one thing push you over the edge?

Poetry chose me, when I was very young. I've been making up poems since before I learned how to write.
-----


2. Please tell us about Migritude. Is it a play? A poem? A monologue?

Migritude is an epic journey, in four movements.

I coined the word Migritude as a play on Negritude and Migrant Attitude. It asserts the dignity of outsider status. Migritude celebrates and revalorizes immigrant/diasporic culture. It captures the unique political and cultural space occupied by migrants who refuse to choose between identities of origin and identities of assimilation, who channel difference as a source of power rather than conceal or erase it.

The four works that make up the Migritude Cycle draw on my Hindu spiritual heritage. They reference the earliest religious teaching imparted to Hindu children: that of the First Four Gods. The Hindu child is taught that her first god is her Mother. The second god is her Father. The third god is her Teacher. The fourth god is The Guest.

Part I, The Mother (When Saris Speak), is a 90-minute spoken-word one-woman theatre show which has toured internationally. It has also been published, in a bilingual Italian-English edition, by Lietocolle, and is currently shortlisted for Italy's Camaiore Prize. It uses my trousseau of saris, passed down by my mother, to reveal how imperialism and colonialism, in India and Kenya, were - and continue to be - enacted on the bodies of women.

It explores what diasporic daughters receive and reject from their mothers; delves into the relationship of migrants to the motherland, the mother tongue, the severing of those relationships and the forging of new transnational identities. Letters from my mother form an important part of the script, bridging the spaces between generations and continents.

Part II of the Migritude Cycle addresses the second archetype in the Four Gods theme: The Father (Bwagamoyo). It will have its world script premiere on June 3rd, in Uppsala, Sweden, where I am currently in residence as African Guest Writer at the Nordic Africa Institute.

It explores constructions of masculinity and race under colonialism. It will examine how the architecture of Empire is codified on the bodies of men: brown, black, and white. It covers a wide range of territories, from the island of Pemba where my father was born and raised, to Kenya's post-election violence, to the modern Swedish cinema of Ingmar Bergman!

The working title of the show is Bwagamoyo – drawn from two Swahili words: Bwaga – to dump, and Moyo – heart. Bwagamoyo was the original name given to two specific locations on the Swahili Coast: the town in Tanzania where slaves were brought from the inland and held for shipping, and a small island in the Zanzibar archipelago that was a holding prison for slaves. Both are now known as Bagamoyo.

The original Bwagamoyo was a chilling admonition to the kidnapped human beings to literally dump their hearts, meaning their humanity, at these spots, since they would no longer use or need them once they left as slave cargo. Bwagamoyo is an equally apt metaphor for the socialization of boys into the kinds of manhood shaped by colonial power.
-----


3. Poets spend a lot of time perfecting their craft, and then perfecting each piece. So, where’s the money?

When I find out, you'll be the first to know :-)
-----


4. What makes you write? Is it more natural for you to write about specific themes, or does anything go?

Anything that moves me - to rage or laughter, to joy or grief or wonder. Anything I find beautiful, and want to capture and convey to others.

Big questions that I don't have answers to. Writing is my way to explore them.

Silence. I've always been called to break silences - silences of history, silences within families or communities or countries. I always notice whose voices and stories are not being heard in a particular space. My mission as a poet is to make any platform I'm offered larger for all silenced and marginalised voices.
-----

5. What advice do you have for Poéfrika readers who might start wanting to get published?

1) Finish your pieces.
2) Edit them. Make them the best they can be, without getting bogged down in perfectionism.
3) Put them out into the world! Set yourself a do-able goal, like submitting one poem a week, or one story a month, to journals and competitions, and meet it.
4) Find a writing community, where you can share your work, ask questions, gather information, and make connections to other writers. It could be online, if you don't live in a place with other writers around.
5) Keep doing 1) to 4). Don't get stuck waiting for results, or paralysed if your stuff isn't accepted immediately. Think of the thousands of miles a runner logs in their training, or the thousands of hours of practice put in by a dancer. You're not a writer when you get published. You are a writer every day that you write, and work your craft, and take the next tiny step towards your larger goals.
-----

6. What role do politics play in your writing? Your poem Eater of Death comes to mind. Or your stance against the use of the term "ethnic cleansing" during the post-election violence in Kenya at the beginning of last year.

Politics is essentially about power - who has it, how they wield it, who doesn't. Two quotes sum up the role it plays in my writing:

Arundhati Roy: "...once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable."

Chinua Achebe: I do think decency and civilization would insist that the writer take sides with the powerless. Clearly, there's no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.

Chinua Achebe, 2008, foreword to Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles by Richard Dowden
-----

7. You are to encourage poetry students to write a poem. Please come up with a "writing prompt" out of your own experience, or out of something else, using anything that invades your mind right now. Very short and simple.

My voices hide in...
-----


8. I don't know whether you speak KiSwahili or another Kenyan language besides English. If you do, do you draw from that language's related culture, sound, etc?

Migritude II: The Father, is subtitled Bwagamoyo – drawn from two Swahili words: Bwaga – to dump, and Moyo – heart. I draw on Kiswahili in several of the pieces in this work, and in other poems, such as "Drum Rider".

One of my best-known poems is "Dreaming In Gujurati", in which I explore reclaiming voice and language.
-----

9. Where do you write? And why there?

Wherever the words come. I've written poems on table napkins, the backs of receipts, the margins of magazines on airplanes. I've written standing under street lamps, against the walls of telephone booths, standing in lines for the bus. I've even typed lines into my cellphone when I've been caught without paper or pen, and saved them as notes or sent them as texts to myself.

Right now, I have the enormous luxury of an office (shared with other guest researchers) at the Nordic Africa Institute. My desk is next to floor-to-ceiling windows, which look out on the main street of the city, and I get lots of natural sunlight, which I love. It's such a privilege to have a fixed place to write, a large computer screen, all the tools I need within reach, that it's hard to leave each night -- I feel like I'm losing precious writing hours.
-----


10. Here's an on-going poem. Please continue it.

They stood before me that night
With clenched fists and blown pupils,
Shadowed by leafless branches of a cotton tree,
The moon as bright as the moon and no metaphor

For which image can serve? What simile
Makes sense enough? The ghosts that guard
The tree nod yes, though I’ve not said a thing.
One shade uncurls and crooks a bony finger, calling me.

The voices rise up like be-headed trees
I stumble forward fear at my heels
How did this night arrive and where is wisdom’s heed
"Gone my child is your clothes -- face now this thing."

So strip off your nudity, and learn to be naked.
Release your fears as branches drop leaves
and let yourself see.

_______________
Kenyan poet, playwright and theatre artist, Shailja Patel is also the creator of Migritude. She is author of Migritude I: When Saris Speak, and two collections of poetry: Dreaming In Gujurati, and Shilling Love. Her work has been translated into eight languages.

Shailja is 2009 Guest Writer at the Nordic Africa Institute. CNN describes her as an artist "who exemplifies globalization as a people-centered phenomenon of migration and exchange." The Gulf Today (United Arab Emirates) calls her "the poetic equivalent of Arundhati Roy."

Patel is an active member of Kenyans for Peace, Truth and Justice, which works towards a just and equitable democracy in Kenya.

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Rethabile is reading on 15 May (today)

I will read and talk about three of my poems, two written for the purpose, and an older one that broaches the subject of seeing or not seeing. Then I'll read prose written by another author who couldn't be there. If there's a moment to break a leg, it is now. The conference is centred around Fitz-James O'Brien's short story, "What was it? A Mystery."

If you can make it, by all means be there. I need cheerleaders!

I saw this on Geoffrey's blog

"Let the sea repeat
unwatched, its long, salt hymn."

~After Image~
Dennis Scott

[source...]

The music of my youth

A conversation with Derek Walcott

By Akintayo Abodunrin, Molara Wood and Dapo Olorunyomi


What is it like being in Nigeria?

This is my first trip to Africa thanks to Wole Soyinka. [The] Africa I always imagined is not a city like Lagos. It's a big sprawling city so it doesn't feel like Africa; it feels very Caribbean, which is okay. I haven't been out much, I've been in most of the time, so I really can't give an opinion, I've been in town just a few days but the people are terrific, very fine.
__________

You say it feels more like the Caribbean, why do you think that is?

Because... a lot of obvious reasons, the people are black, they are from Africa anyway, their architecture is very similar to say, Port of Spain, parts of Lagos looks like... It could be Jamaica, could be Port of Spain, it could be my home.
__________

Why has it taken you this long to come to the African continent?

Well, I don't remember being invited [and] I don't go where I'm not invited. I did have a couple of invitations, but the concept is a long journey. The time when I might have been invited... the idea of flying; everybody flies now but there were days when you thought: I have to fly to Africa.

I went to London and spent X number of hours to cross the Atlantic, but it's still a big deal, I'm flying tomorrow, it's going to be tiring.
__________

How has it been since winning the Nobel Prize? How do you think it's changed you as a writer?

I hope it hasn't changed me as a writer. It has led to a lot of invitations all over the world which I take because I like to see things. And principally, that's how it's been; invitations from Japan, Sweden...
__________

What kind of things are you writing now, what kind of things are you concerned about now in your writings?

I'm working on some screenplays now; I've been rehearsing them on video. There is a fable I did, called 'Ti-Jean and His Brothers' that I'm trying to film. I'm very interested in films because I paint and I write and it's a proper medium for both occupations.

[continue there...]

Call for submissions: short fiction

Subject: Call for submissions to special short-fiction edition of Green Dragon

Green Dragon 7, to be published in May next year, is to be a special edition of short fiction only, and will be guest edited by Arja Salafranca.

Submit, by hard copy, no more than three items of short fiction, in English, between 2500 and 6000-7000 words. There is no theme.

These should be mailed, with an SASE included, as well as a contactable day number and an email address (if you have) to Arja Salafranca, PO Box 1171, Bromhof 2154, Republic of South Africa.

Manuscripts without an SASE will not returned, and no correspondence will be entered into about rejected stories.

Submission deadline is the end of October 2009. Successful authors will receive a contributors’ copy.

I might just have a go at this one. I guess it is open to everyone, South African or not. Well, get to your pens, now. C'mon...

The use of language in poetry

The Use of language in Poetry

Yellow girl blues
For Jane King


My Mama she done told me
she tell me every day
no mind your skin is yellow
you're a nigger anyway.

Yellow girl blues
yellow girl blues.
I walking up the muddy road
in my sampata shoes.

So I grew up a nigger
please check on my behind
my mouth, my nose, my curly
hair – I'm glad to know my kind.

Yellow girl blues
yellow girl blues.
I’m walking on the muddy road
in my sampata shoes.

And I go to America
and join in all the fights
sit in and demonstrate
and go to jail for Civil Rights.

Yellow girl blues
yellow girl blues.
I walk through so much macca
there's holes in all my shoes.

Dr King say it don't matter,
he say we all is one –
the hose don't know the difference
nor the truncheon nor the gun.

Yellow girl blues
yellow girl blues.
I feel the firewater
as it soak in through my shoes.

Now I come north to Canada
my story it is true
they look me in my face and say
"White woman, who is you?"

Yellow girl blues
yellow girl blues.
I walking in the macca still
and my own take way my shoes.
© Pam Mordecai

[perma-link] [Jahworld]

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Fatiha Morchid's "Despair"

Click the poem for the English version.

Poéfrika interview with Kelwyn Sole

1. Why is poetry the major means of expression for you? Why do you write poems and not caricature politicians, for example?

Occasionally I have written poems that caricature politicians, so I don’t see the tasks as necessarily separate. A simple answer, though, would be that it’s what I’m best at. As far as art is concerned, I’d have preferred to be a dancer or a musician: but I have flat feet, and my ability with piano or drums isn’t great, to say the least.

I think one of the few generally accurate things one could say about poetry is that, from ancient times, it has borne a relationship to music. It’s the one thing on which critics as different as Pound and Amiri Baraka agree (the latter calls poetry ‘speech musick’d’, as I remember). That’s one of the attractions for me: plus the intensity and compactness of expression in a good poem: its reactive chemistry of mood, thought, emotion. I’m struggling here, because I’m not sure I can do adequate justice to this... . Recently I heard a recording of Ferlinghetti reading, where he observes that ‘poetry is the underwear of the soul’. I like that - as well as Carl Sandburg’s remark that poetry is the journal of a sea animal that’s living on land but really wants to fly in the air.
----------

2. Do you work on just one poem at a time, or do you work on several simultaneously?

When I am writing (I write in short intense bursts of a few weeks, then leave it) I work on several simultaneously. Sometimes, in my opinion, it’s better to approach a poem obliquely - if you’re not getting it to work, put it down, do other things unrelated to poetry. The solution will come to you, often when you least expect it.
So for me writing is quite a haphazard process, until such time as I have a book manuscript nearing completion, or I’ve decided something is about ready for journal publication. Then I become more focused.
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3. Poets spend a lot of time perfecting their craft, and then perfecting each piece. How do you balance this with family life? Where do you find the time to write?

I’m married but don’t have kids, and my immediate family have not been in South Africa for thirty years. So I don’t have too much family pressure. Yet I don’t have extended periods of time to write, nevertheless. Writing poetry competes for my time, these days, with the other things I have to do - teaching, admin, and producing critical articles, mostly - as well as things I want to do, like going off into obscure places to watch birds (I’ve recently discovered pelagic birding, which is fantastic!), reading, listening to music.
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4. I don’t know if you speak other African languages (Afrikaans, Sesotho, etc), but do you read/write poetry in another language besides English?

I have a smattering of languages - some Afrikaans, a little bit of Nama and seTswana (learned through usage, not books). I’ve also studied Spanish up to a point, and at one stage got an M.A. that included a course in isiZulu, which is a bit of a joke in terms of my ability. I can read Afrikaans poetry pretty well, if it’s not too difficult, and have published some translations - Jonker and Gert Vlok Nel – and I can read stumblingly through similar languages like German. I can manage Spanish to some extent, on paper but not verbally: those poets who tend to use simpler Spanish, like Neruda and Lorca. Mostly though I have to resort to translations.
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5. What goal do you seek when you write? Awake others? Entertain them? Tell the truth? Why do you write?

Principally to wake them up, bemuse them, jolt them: but not always. If you can do this by entertaining at the same time, so well and good. Hectoring audiences doesn’t work in the long run, as B.C. learned to its cost. I feel strongly that the poet should be exploring or working towards something other than narcissism or parroting praise, and I usually turn away from poetry that simply affirms what the audience already believes, or wants to believe. I suppose, in terms of the question, I am trying to make them see a ‘truth’ that may unsettle theirs; or other truths. I’m more at home trying to come at subjects from an odd angle; or trying to give a viewpoint athwart what exists in the media or in people’s ‘common sense’.
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6. I know that you give readings quite a bit. There has been a lot of noise around the performance by Ms Elizabeth Alexander’s of her inaugural poem, ‘Praise Song for the Day’. How did she do?

I think there’s been unfair criticism of this. I liked the first half of the poem, though the "praise song for..." refrain feels clumsy; and as for her performance style … she seemed somewhat overawed by the occasion? It’s interesting that the poem’s got a strongly inclusive Whitmanesque gesture about it: and that now, one and a half centuries on, it’s a black woman who’s doing this.

The poem was partly about the struggle to speak; that’s hugely pertinent, I think. Ideological critiques aside, quite a few of the negative comments in the States seem to display nothing so much as a loss of audience close listening/reading skills under postmodernity. That’s scary! She may have misjudged the situation, but I think she was trying to inject some complexity, some thoughtfulness, some caution, into an event that was geared to the symbolic, and that was riding on an euphoric ‘feel-good’ upsurge. Shades of South Africa!

Poets have above all to avoid being turned into sound-bytes - politicians and big business would love to make us simply another useful ideological tool-cum-commodity that reinforces their programme. I’m sorry, but poetry isn’t about selling shares on television, or what Rampolokeng once called ‘licking the stage clean’. In other words, give her a break!
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7. You are to encourage poetry students to write a poem. Please come up with a "writing prompt" out of your own experience, or out of something else, using anything that invades your mind right now. Short and simple.

I’m not good at this, because I’m deeply suspicious of creative writing courses. A teacher in this context can imprint much too much of themselves: and can tend to be more definitive about what is good and bad than they should be. There are good teachers, who avoid this (as Philip Levine’s essay ‘Mine Own John Berryman’ makes clear, for instance). But there are too many people who believe the nonsense they have been taught at South African schools or universities about the correct attitudes and parameters for poetry.

Sometimes a creative writing course will work for a student, but this depends on the chemistry between student and teacher. As for the rest, who wants to sit and listen to some bloated ego impart his or her deathless thoughts about how and why his/her pentameters got picked up by Penguin? My advice to would-be poets would be: get out into the real world, and read other poets.
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8. What writers, living or not, have influenced you the most? In what way did they influence you.

There have been lots of influences, both stylistically and in terms of what they say. I liked Robert Graves as a kid, but my first truly modernist model was Okigbo. Early on, I learned a lot formally from W. C. Williams, Levine, Enzensberger, Levertov, some of the Beats, but principally from the poets of the Black Mountain School. I used to teach praise poetry … you can learn a hell of a lot about techniques of ellipsis and parallelism from izibongo. More recently (bizarre as this may sound) Milton’s taught me important things; as well as René Char, and - closer to home - the bubbling pot of experimentation that was New Coin in the 1990s.

I’m tempted to mention those poets whose importance and influence in my view are not really acknowledged at the moment. Who ever talks about Brecht any more? In South Africa, I don’t think Gwala has ever been appreciated enough, or Parenzee: or, these days, Press or Nyezwa.

I’m more definite about artists (not just poets) I have come to admire; where I’ve looked at their context, what they tried to do, in terms of content and form, and then realised how courageous they were, and how much they achieved. Think of what their fields would be like if they hadn’t existed. A whole bunch of musicians spring to mind, stretching from Cecil Taylor to John Fahey; multi-genre figures like Ousmane Sembene; a number of writers and poets. There’s always the fact that poetry in the last century contains the presence and examples of many poets who were both radical thinkers and fine poets. Remembering this cheers me up.

At the same time I worry about the present assumption in this country that the best poems are short expressive lyrics. Well, sure; but too many long poems and poem sequences are ignored, or quickly forgotten; simply because they take more effort to read. For instance, some of the finest achievements of African and diasporic poetry have been along these lines, such as Walcott’s Another Life; Césaire’s Return to My Native Land, Tchicaya U Tam’si’s Epitomé poems. How many of us here have read these?
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9. How do you write: drink coffee, wine? Listen to music? Type, scribble? What atmosphere do you feel out of place not writing in?

Coffee. Definitely no alcohol. If there’s music in your poetry, I don’t think you should listen to other music as you write, because it’ll interfere with what you’re hearing inside. I scribble bits and pieces occasionally, but only get serious at the keyboard. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once said in an interview, “When you’re hot, you’re hot” - so if the mood and inspiration surprises you, get it down. Doesn’t matter when or where you are.
----------

10. Here's an on-going poem. Please add to it.

They stood before me that night
With clenched fists and blown pupils,
Shadowed by leafless branches of a cotton tree,
The moon as bright as the moon and no metaphor

For which image can serve? What simile
Makes sense enough? The ghosts that guard
The tree nod yes, though I’ve not said a thing.
One shade uncurls and crooks a bony finger, calling me.

The voices rise up like be-headed trees
I stumble forward fear at my heels
How did this night arrive and where is wisdom’s heed
"Gone my child is your clothes -- face now this thing."

- so strip off your nudity, and learn to be naked.


_______________
Kelwyn Sole was born in Johannesburg in 1951, He was educated at the University of the Witwatersrand and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, obtaining his doctorate with a study of the South African Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s. He has worked in Johannesburg, Kanye and Windhoek, and is currently Professor in the English Department at the University of Cape Town, were he teaches contemporary South African literature and 17th century poetry. He was deported from Namibia for political reasons by the South African Government in 1980.

His poetry has been widely published in local and international anthologies and journals, and poems have been translated into French, German, Turkish, Korean and Italian. He has also published many critical articles and polemics, locally and internationally, on aspects of postcolonial literature and culture. His poetry collections are The Blood of Our Silence (Ravan, 1988); Projections in the Past Tense (Ravan, 1992); Love That is Night (Gecko, 1998); Mirror and Water Gazing (UKZN Press, 2001); and Land Dreaming: Prose Poems (UKZN Press, 2006). He has recently completed a new collection, Absent Tongues.

His poetry has won the Olive Schreiner and Sydney Clouts Prizes, was a runner-up for the Noma Award, and has won international merit awards in Scotland and the U.S.A.

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Komunyakaa's "Facing it"

Baraka's "Like Rousseau"

She stands beside me, stands away,
the vague indifference
of her dreams. Dreaming, to go on,
and go on there, like animals fleeing
the rise of the earth. But standing
intangible, my lust a worked anger
a sweating close covering, for the crudely salty soul.

Then back off, and where you go? Box of words
and pictures. Steel balloons tied to our mouths.
The room fills up, and the house. Street tilts.
City slides, and buildings slide into the river.
What is there left, to destroy? That is not close,
or closer. Leaning away in the angle of language.
Pumping and pumping, all our eyes criss cross
and flash. It is the lovers pulling down empty structures.
They wait and touch and watch their dreams
eat the morning.
© Amiri Baraka

[source...]