Inhalt | Table of Contents | Contenu 15 Nr.| Trans | Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften | 15. Nr. | April 2004 | |
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3.1. Exil und Migration | Exile
and Migration | Exil et migration Buch: Das Verbindende der Kulturen | Book: The Unifying Aspects of Cultures | Livre: Les points communs des cultures |
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Hein Viljoen (Potchefstroom, South Africa)
Abstract
This paper will look at exile and deterritorialisation (in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari) in three collections of Afrikaans poetry, namely Tristia (1964) by N.P. van Wyk Louw, die ysterkoei moet sweet (the iron cow must sweat, 1964)) by Breyten Breytenbach and Kleur kom nooit alleen nie (Colour never comes alone, 2000) by Antjie Krog. Louw's and Breytenbach's collections were written in exile, and Krog's can be regarded as written in the state of internal exile represented by moving to the "new country" of South Africa after 1994 and into the wider space of Africa as a whole. The three collections represent canonized work by three generations of Afrikaans poets: the generations of the 1930s, the 1960s and the 1970s. Though vastly different in style and poetic approach, the three collections constitute three different kinds of deterritorialisation - three different ways of questioning and moving beyond a certain semiotic and social order. This deterritorialisation will be explored in a number of key poems from the three collections.
It might seem a bit wilful and arbitrary to compare Tristia (1964) by N.P. van Wyk Louw, die ysterkoei moet sweet (the iron cow must sweat, 1964) by Breyten Breytenbach and Kleur kom nooit alleen nie (Colour never comes alone, 2000) by Antjie Krog, since these three collections of poetry are worlds apart in style and sensibility. The three collections represent canonized work by three generations of Afrikaans poets: the generations of the 1930s, the 1960s and the 1970s. Though vastly different in style and poetic approach the three collections constitute three different kinds of deterritorialisation - three different ways of questioning and moving beyond a certain semiotic and social order. I will explore this deterritorialisation by focusing on a number of key poems from the three collections.
Exile is an important trope in Breytenbach's work. Tristia is written under the sign of grief and exile, since the title alludes to Ovid's Tristia - the elegiac songs he wrote while in exile in Pontus. Krog's Colour can be regarded as written in the state of internal exile, a process of distancing the poetic voice from accepted ways of being an Afrikaner, represented by moving into the "new country" of South Africa after 1994 and into the wider space of Africa as a whole.
In this regard deterritorialisation might be a useful term, since all three poets moved out of a known into a foreign space - on another continent or in a new country in Krog's case (Country of my skull?). If identity thus depends on feeling at home in a specific place, we can speak of deterritorialisation in all three cases. National identity, in particular, is based on a strong feeling of kinship with a certain country, and this is true of all three poets, whether they are for South Africa or strongly against it.
In particular, deterritorialisation is an effect of globalisation, since the increasing global integration of political, economic and social systems across national boundaries disengages people from allegiance to a specific country or region (Le Pere & Lambrechts 11). Globalisation tends to compress social space, radically changing people's experience of proximity and social connectedness in the form of "traditional territorial identities based on contiguity, homogeneity and clearly identifiable boundaries" (quoted by Le Pere & Lambrechts 17).
On the other hand, deterritorialisation is term introduced by Deleuze and Guattari (1993), though it is not always easy to understand what they mean by that. As they describe it (13), however, deterritorialisation is the possibility of escaping from a certain social order. The becoming-animal of Gregor Samsa (in Kafka's "The Metamorphosis") is an example of deterritorialisation, and they describe it as "to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities, where all forms come undone, as do all significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs" (13). In their view Kafka's animals "never refer to a mythology or archetypes but correspond solely to new levels, zones of liberated intensities, where contents free themselves from their forms as well as from their expressions, from the signifier that formalized them" (13). All that remain are movements, vibrations, thresholds, underground intensities. Escape, like Gregor Samsa's, often is not literal, but "a stationary flight, a flight of intensity" (13).
The question is how deterritorialisation can take place in poetry, which by definition is word, sign and form. I also think we need to frame the question in the context of identity, since identity is for Ricoeur connecting sameness with continuity over time by the reconfiguration of a story. Can identity be regarded as a deterritorialisation (a radical escape from the existing order), or is it rather a re-territorialisation, in which the unformed state of flux regains form? f??
Let us look whether the three poets give answers to these questions. For the purpose of this paper I will only analyse one or two examples from each collection and then spell out a few speculative implications for the rest of the collection.
Tristia was written during the poet's so-called European exile - the years from 1950-1958 when he was professor of South African language, literature, culture and history at the University of Amsterdam. In Tristia there are mainly four reasons for grief, four sets of intertwined themes, namely:
It is quite ironic that Louw regarded his stay in the rich culture of Europe as a kind of exile, but in the book there are clear signs that the speaker is distancing him from South Africa, right from the beginning, from the opening poem "Voorspel 1950" (Prelude 1950), where he takes leave of the South African reality, using the distance between the purified wine (imaginary at that) and the vineyard as central trope. (Later on, in I LXXIC, he contradicts this.)
Tristia is also, from the beginning, a book of intellectual reflection. Prelude 1950 already speaks of "intricately knowing everything" ("ingewikkeld alles ken"), and the speaker distances himself from an identification with a specific place or country in favour of identification with a metaphysical road and a kind of universal intellectual humanity: the concrete vineyard becomes "a cool thought" ("koel gedagte"). Although there are strong identifications with South Africa in Tristia, for example, in II XVII ("Ek haat en ek het lief... [I hate and I love...], where the speaker says "O my country, my country, you are I" (O my land, o my land, jy is ek", p 95), these are exceptions. Only a few poems in the book deal directly with South Africa; the tendency is rather a distancing from South Africa (like in "H. Petrus" [St Peter]) or to universalise or disseminate the local in a large West-European intertextual space constructed from the poet's reading in church history, the Renaissance, 'n number of Fascist novels and from events around the Second World War. In this way he portrays a lot of people - both in their saintliness and loathsomeness - who are also masks of the self. The book can be described as a kind of intellectual confessional poetry, in which the poet blabs out the limitations of his knowledge, the inadequacy of his language and the incompleteness of his love. The result is, then, as it is expressed in "Nuusberigte: 1956" (News items: 1956), no longer an intense and intimate "knowing of each stone in three or four small ridges" ("ken van elke klip in twee, drie rantjies"), but rather generalisation, theory, which makes everyone "immigrants and uprooted people" ("ímmigrante en dus ontwortel", 116).
Tristia uses a rich South African repertoire of images, like "'n slagaar akkeldissie-pens sal klop" (an artery will pulse like the stomach of a small lizard, p. 92) of "vaal koestertjie vir vaal Karoosand" (drab pipit for drab Karoo sand, p. 94) - images that are virtually untranslatable. Nevertheless there clearly is a process of deterritorialisation taking place in the book.
The one key example that I want to discuss today is the unsurpassed poem, "Groet in bruin" (Salute in brown, pp. 103-4).
This poem is the culmination of something that is developing from the beginning of the second section of the collection. This development concerns human (and especially women's) attitudes towards divinity and the ability of women (nearly sacrilegious in the poet's eyes) to be both worldly and heavenly at the same time. In VI ("die sintuig vir die afgrond...[sensory organ for the abyss...] it is expressed in the image of a women who paints a bit more red on her lips while thinking a lot about Vishnu and Aquinas but at the same time planning a little coquettishness for the next day ("terwyl sy oor Visjnoe of oor Aquinas / heelwat dink, en nog 'n klein oog-opslag / vir môre bedink", p. 86). She is busy with sacred and profane things at the same time. But in "Salute in brown" the poet bridges the split between sacred and profane by addressing the most holy of all women (Maria) as well as the most profane (the prostitute) and reconciling them in one poem.
The poem (see hand-out) is an incantation on the word brown, as if the poet is rolling it around in his mouth for its delicious taste. But if one looks closer, it is also a poem about light. The first three stanzas are brimming over with light. The beloved is seen in "a mediterranean clarity", on a "sun-lacquered beach". The speaker's reverence for her "radiates", "glitters", "beams up". The angel Gabriel's "rainbow-feathers" end this paradigm for the time being. On the three stanzas of light follow three stanzas full of brown; on the sacred Other Word follows brown earthly words, which are celebrated in the next three stanzas. Brown is a sign of the earth itself in different forms and in different places; it is the colour of the brown skin of a prostitute in Amsterdam and of the world in old Barcelona, and it is sanctified in God's brown Jewish son, Jesus.
In brown a number of oppositions are drawn together. Brown is earthy and holy, cheap and rich, evil but also sanctified, human as well as divine. The poem encompasses virtually the whole Mediterranean world in the homage that the speaker brings to his beloved. In the process he nearly deifies her, as he places her in different contexts, arranged in an ascending line of holiness, and giving his homage a very broad resonance. She is associated with Josef, Maria, the earth itself, the prostitute, God himself and his Son. Brown itself is sanctified in and through its earthliness, leading to an explosion of light in the final stanza. In the word brown the Other Word becomes brown, that is flesh, and in the end the poet returns us to the Mediterranean scene, but now we are conscious of the divine and earthly possibilities that it contains. The poem proves that the divine is hidden in the common things of every day, and therefore a reconciliation of heaven and earth.
The explosion of light in the poem, and in particular the last stanza, is one of many deterritorialising moments in Tristia: moments where the poet plays with the game itself ("speel-selfs met die spel") as it is called in "Ars poëtica". On these points the poems break out of the existing mental framework into something completely different. A central image of this is the image of the flute in "Ars poëtica" that is radically transformed into a trumpet, then a moon crater and finally a rocket.
In nearly every poem in Tristia there is such a moment of deterritorialisation that reaches out to what is complete different, and there are a number of different names for this phenomenon in the poems. It is called the all-encompassing totality, the beginning ("Ars poëtica"); that what is "written in stars and brightness (wat "in sterre-en-helderte geskryf" staan); the "all"; "being" that shines with a majestic light ("wat majesteitlik lig straal", "Piero della Francesca", p. 41); the shining ship in "Great Ode" which is a shining racer above the water ("stralende jaer is bokant die water"). Deterritorialisation is what lies beyond calculation; it is unreflected love ("ondeurskoude liefde"). Pain lies "beyond limits" ("buite bakens", p. 107) (see also p. 130: "He owed all our pains attention", "Hy't ál ons pyn se aandag moes besit"). The sensory organ for the abyss also registers such a moment of stepping beyond the present order of things. Deterritorialisation, in short, encompasses everything that, in the closing words of "Great Ode", shouts out for what is different from himself ("uitskreeu na ánders as hy is", p. 133).
The sorrow in the poems is partly due to the fact that deterritorialisation is hardly possible in the limited human language and thought - in spite of the transformative power of words. Language can make "sinner sans sin" ("sondaar sonder sonde"), but that still remains less than real; less than the smell of burnt offering ("die offerbrand se stank"). No flute is available, much less a rocket, and that is why the speaker in "Ars poëtica" returns to the tissue (histology) of our thought in humility: he merely echoes re-created creations ("praat na" in "ná-geskape skeppinge"). For this humility there are just as many images in Tristia. The concern with knowledge and thinking appears in a number of poems. Some celebrate razor-fine thinking ("die fyn fyn dink"); others deal with black thought; or with the thing (the brain) that arms itself in "Armed vision". Central images here are images of surrounding, containment, of ring-walls and dams. The most typical tropes in this regard are: "to be available" ("disponibel") but surrounded by sanctity, p. 111; living "asymptotically" (p. 125) and the "contained life (die gekeerde lewe"), sequestered, masked (like in "Great Ode"), but in the end also of an unheard of sweetness ("onbeluister soet"):
Hierdie gekeerde lewe is myne, dus, |
This contained life is mine, therefore and must be lived. An untouchable I am: sequestered in sin or by the first dam ever built for people maybe it's the same |
"Great Ode" ends in the knowledge that thinking, a-natural humans are "keepers of the first knowledge of the gods" ("hoeders [is] van die eerste weet oor 'gode.'"). Knowledge of God, therefore, is a deterritorialisation - it lies beyond the sequestering, the dams or boundaries. The modest disposition of the speaker therefore is a re-territorialisation - a containment within boundaries - but one that, paradoxically, opens up a space for the poet's voice. It is a deterritorialised re-territorialisation of extreme intensity. Deterritorialisation in Tristia is not becoming-animal, but rather a becoming pure intellect (to quote from "Great Ode" again) that is contained and obstructed in many ways.
In the second collection I want to discuss, Breytenbach's first, entitled die ysterkoei moet sweet (the iron-cow must sweat, 1964), one also finds a radical deterritorialisation of the I. Consuming the self, the I here is explicitly part of the process of making the iron-cow sweat, that is to trample the Big Nothingness underfoot and to reach nirvana. The poem "nirvana" (p. 39) describes the Buddha and his intention to consume his I. This happens in the end when the I disappears and becomes identical with the universe:
en hy het opgestaan en die lug geliefkoos |
and he got up and caressed the air and stuck flowers in the earth's hair and kissed the water and laughed at the reflection of his face so that his cheeks became wet |
The universe is personified here: the air can be caressed, the earth has hair and the water can be kissed. In the final line there is such a complete identification with the universe that the reflection is reversed: the Buddha's cheeks are wet with tears, but also so completely one with the universe that he himself turns into water; that the water becomes his cheeks (or his cheeks water).
Here we find a radical deterritorialisation of human being and nature or - as I prefer to call it - a radical topological deformation; a radical shift in frames of reference. The boundaries between human and nature disappear, or are rethought and re-described.
It is generally accepted that identity in Breytenbach's work is unstable, dynamic and changeable. The reason is that it is based on Zen-Buddhist principles on the instability of the self and the suspension of the difference between I and world, between subject and object. Both world and I are part of the world-process, and this is realised in the process of meditation, where the I, as it were, is in- and exhaled by the world as a big lung (see Sienaert). This is described in "blomme vir boeddha" (flowers for Buddha, p. 44). where the I is put in brackets and the process of respiration becomes more and more autonomous until "the all" is respired and finally only the in and out exist. Everything, including the I, disappears in the end, and this is an indication of the Big Nothing - that what is empty and marvellous, the Zen-Buddhist sunyata. The ending is a radical deterritorialisation of the I.
Sienaert (1988: 49, 54) links these transformations of the I to the views of Jacques Lacan and finds in Breytenbach's work a dialectical oscillation between two subject positions, which should both be considered in reading his work. They are the talking I, the I of the enunciation, and the I who is spoken about, the I of the énoncé. This might be true of Breytenbach's later work, but I doubt whether this dialectic is already strongly present in his first collection.
In support of the dialectic one can cite the famous example of "bedreiging van die siekes" ("the threatening of the sick"), in which an I as master of ceremonies comments on a subjective I. However, it is not clear the poem shows a consciousness of the distance and interaction between an I of enunciation and an I of the énoncé, although the poem does create space for such an interaction.
There are indeed a few examples of self-reflection and self-commentary in the book. The title "skrywende nou en van agter tot voor" (writing now and from the back to the front, pp. 20-21) is a reflection on the act of writing itself. In the end the speaker thinks that the poem is developing well and that he would like to show it to Jan or Zeke and others (final stanza). In "kopreis van vrees to saad" (head's journey from fear to seed, 32-3) the speaker in the end exhorts himself to keep his head - long after he has lost it (in different degrees of literalness). In "breyten bid vir homself" (breyten prays for himself, p. 14) the poet parodies Van Wyk Louw's poem "Ignatius bid vir sy orde" ("Ignatius prays for his order", Nuwe verse, 8; New Poems), declaring that pain is unnecessary and illustrating it with the idea that flowers do not have teeth and a whole series of images of painless organic decay. He prays that God keep pain far from him and rather visit it on others. Syntactically - in the broadly expanded clause in stanza 4 - the main emphasis, however, falls on the fate of others due to political persecution among other things. The speaker alternates between identification with the fate of others and distancing himself from them, but in the context of the collection it is clear that he himself is subject to continuous decline and eventually to putrefaction.
The strongest self-reflexive poem might be "stukkende gedig" (broken poem or poem in pieces, 18-9). The poem is explicitly called a self-mourning ("selfbeklag"). The speaker reflects on his own life in a kind of self-interrogation about the meaning of life. He contrasts his present situation with other possibilities and asks the big existential question that the Afrikaans poet C. Louis Leipoldt asked earlier: what are you doing here? (Literally: what are you seeking here?) There is an alter ego interrogating the ego; a critical other self. In the final stanza there is a moment that two ego's might be in dialectic interaction.
In the first stanza the poem is described as a poem about nothing, about "what only is because it is now" ("wat net is omdat dit nou is"). Its purpose seemingly is:
om die mure te kan teken |
to be able to draw the walls to circumscribe the head to be able to define the moment |
In response to the question" what are you doing here? the I gets an injunction (or gives it to himself) to dig up the deepest lines, that is, to write a poem.
wat soek jy hier |
what are you doing here your life and dreams keep on decaying wipe your eyes and eyebrows and dig up the [most profound lines even if you don't believe in a soul at least unravel the phrases that echo in your [darkest being and break this moment open in a soundless scream |
Diepste here can mean "deeply hidden", but also "highly meaningful, profound". The injunction is that the I should dig up its deepest essence, while that which is usually regarded as the most profound being, that is, the soul, is denied. Digging into one's own soul, or one's own heart as Leipoldt put it another well-known poem, Oom Gert vertel, does not make much sense anymore.
The second last line is rather obscure. Unravel is here synonymous to to dig up. Literally it means to take apart the different strands of a piece of fabric. Usually, in Afrikaans, unravelled is used with secrets. The phrases (as tenor) here are secrets (vehicle) that need to be interpreted. "Darkest being" is a rewriting of soul - the deepest, most hidden innermost self - but also dark in the sense of evil, full of wickedness. Metaphorically, however, the darkest being (tenor), the innermost self, is a space in which phrases echo- a kind of hollow sounding chamber or cave (vehicle). The phrases - pieces of language - initially are concrete like textile or text, but later change into echoes - sound fragments that might not mean much. In this case the darkest being is not constituted in language, since it already exists beforehand as echo chamber. In any case, the poet is urged to unravel these echoes - to make them meaningful, in other words.
In the last line we have the effect of the unravelling. The temporal moment is made concrete as a limited space like a room or a cave that can be broken open (a further rewriting of the echo chamber of the previous line. The walls of the beginning of the poem are no longer being drawn, but broken open, or deterritorialised. The result is a soundless scream - a noise made by the vocal organs, without meaning but very intense and highly emotional (with either fear or joy). It is literally called dumb, that is, soundless or without the ability to speak. The empty echo chamber is broken open into an intense soundless human noise. Again, this could be nothing times nothing: the Big Nothing. The meaning of it all is that everything is empty, is nothing.
The final stanza seems to criticise the idea that the poet has to dig into his own heart in order to produce poetry. Here the poet finds in his own heart only empty-sounding phrases - already formed and clichéd language - that he has to transform into an intense emptiness.
In contrast to this group of self-reflexive poems, it seems to me that we find in die ysterkoei always the same I with the same sharp eye for decay and decomposition, the one who experiences the world concretely, fearfully and in bodily terms. This seems to contradict the accepted view that the I is consumed in all the poems in this collection. Further research is needed on this topic.
Antjie Krog: deterritorialisation between colour, suffering, the body, writing and belonging
Antjie Krog's collection, Kleur kom nooit alleen nie (Colour never comes alone, 2000), is divided into four sections. The first is named Mondweefsel, and this means both "mouth tissue" and "mouth textile" (that is, texts woven by the mouth, oral texts). This section seems to be a return to the earth, the harsh earth of the Richtersveld in the north west of South Africa in particular - and in that sense a re-territorialisation. Actually however, it is a return to the oral tradition and the patterns of a pastoral way of life (anachronistic in the modern world). These traditions are in conflict with the present order, and going back to these old patterns therefore represents a deterritorialisation.
In "narrative of stone" the undermining of the existing sign system is clear from the speaker's reflection on the identity of stone. He tries to find words for stone, but stone resists language:
ek is ding |
i am thing i erode brutally into stone slivers against empty damn slopes loathsome jumbled stone bloody flakes no stone words will you ever tap from me never hack or hijack me into language i am from here |
In its stoniness stone therefore represents a deterritorialisation - a return to what lies outside the noose of language.
In this collection there are at least two other such deterritorialisations; two other sets of entities lying beyond language, and they are suffering and the search for a new identity (coupled with a search for a new language).
Wounds, healing of wounds and the colour of scar tissue form the framework for structuring this collection. According to the motto from Eliot's "Dry salvages" at the beginning, it is the pain (agony) of others that "abides", that cannot be destroyed by time. Suffering is the main theme of the second section, Wondweefsel (Wound(ed) tissue). This section focuses in particular on diaries from the beginning and from the last part of the 20th century - that is, from the British concentration camps during the South African War, 1899-1902, and from the last years of the struggle against apartheid. In this section it is suffering that lies outside language, that transcends, deterritorialises our usual perceptions. In the second series of diaries it is as if the thousands of words of testimony about atrocities before the TRC virtually cannot be territorialised, controlled or captured in language. To tell someone out of the grave is after all impossible (see p. 34).
The moving series "land van genade en verdriet" (Country of mercy and sorrow, p. 37 ff.) is a struggle to deterritorialise the "country so bleeding between us" ("die land so bloeiende tussen ons") and to find a new language. In this country all the voices are "baptized in the syllable of blood and belonging" ("gedoop in die lettergreep van bloed en hoort", p. 38). Language has been contaminated by suffering and death, since "death hits his remorseless keys in our language"("die dood klap sy beroulose kleppe in ons taal", p. 39). The whole series strives to deterritorialise this situation. The turning point in no. 8 of the series is the result of "the stories of murdered ones". The deterritorialisation succeeds:
die gaping van my hart |
the gap in my heart trembles towards the outline of a vocabulary new in soft, intimate gutturals |
The deterritorialisation is only temporary, however.
A new country and a new language entail a new identity. One of the strongest examples of deterritorialisation of identity is the poem "ai tog!" (oh heavens, oh shit?, p. 47). All the familiar markers and categories of Afrikaner identity are disavowed, deterritorialised here. The speaker looks forward to a new language and criticises the easy interchangeability of identities at some kind of bar counter. In the end she suggests the possibility of a new identity of solidarity - something that becomes a reality in the final section of the collection. In another country, during the Poetry Africa safari from Goree to Timbuktu, a new space opens up in which the speaker can breathe, write and belong freely. See the ending of no. 10, "aankoms" (arrival):
met die litteken van tong |
with the cicatrice of tongue we write the ground under our feet we write the space in which we breathe in your word you smell human you taste African to write is to belong with you my voice is free for the first time |
In this collection, in short, the politics of colour, of sex and of belonging are deterritorialised by suffering, foregrounding a new, compassionate language and a new colour - the colour of being human ("die kleur van mens").
Looking back at the three collections discussed here, deterritorialisation of three different kinds strike one. In Louw's work we find an intellectual deterritorialisation, from above, (but limited and constrained). In Breytenbach's case boundaries and categories are dissolved and topologically deformed. In Krog's collection there is a deterritorialisation from below: it shows how the country and the suffering of its people force one to change find a new language and new meanings.
© Hein Viljoen (Potchefstroom, South Africa)
Bibliography
BREYTENBACH, BREYTEN. 1967. die ysterkoei moet sweet. [the iron-cow must sweat] 2nd printing. Johannesburg: Afrikaanse Pers-boekhandel.
DELEUZE, GILLES and GUATTARI, FéLIX. 1993. Kafka: Toward a minor literature. Trans by Dan Polan. Foreword by Réda Bensmaïa. 3rd printing. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Theory and History of Literature, vol. 30.
KROG, ANTJIE. 2000. Kleur kom nooit alleen nie. [Colour never comes alone.] Kaapstad: Kwela Boeke.
LOUW, N.P. VAN WYK. 1975. Tristia en ander verse, voorspele en vlugte 1950-1957. [Tristia and other poems, preludes and fugues.] 2nd enlarged ed., 1st printing. Kaapstad en Pretoria: Human & Rousseau.
RICOEUR, PAUL. 1991. "Narrative Identity." Philosophy Today (1991): 73-81. Spring.
SIENAERT, M. 2001. The I of the beholder: Identity formation in the art and writing of Breyten Breytenbach. Cape Town: Kwela Books; Maroelana: SA History Online. Social Identities South Africa Series.
Prof. Hein Viljoen
School of Languages (Afrikaans and Dutch)
Potchefstroom University for CHE
Potchefstroom, 2520 South Africa
eMail: afnhmv@puknetpuk.ac.za
1. Examples from Tristia (1964) by N.P. van Wyk Louw
1.1 GROET IN BRUIN |
SALUTE (GOODBYE?) IN BROWN Now I want to see you in one kind of mediterranean clarity, for the last time: see you walking in sneakers or rope-sandals across a sun-lacquered beach or úp in a hot street where busses struggle úp-wards stop at hotels, wait for traffic lights. Come, I will pay you the last, that irradiant homage, which beams forth from taverns where births take place also radiates up from lonely tasks that are completed (help me, St Joseph) in the shrine of labour: - Allow me the word! O, bless the word You You, before whom as Road-maker Gabriël with rainbow-feathers came to lay the Other Word in your ear for consideration, later. Allow me the word: earthy words (o Beloved like earth) let she, who never could find rest, have rest (brown like brown people, brown like umbric paingiving terra-cotta, brown, yes, like the baked earth near Siena - ) brown skin from a cheap alley - that may also - in Amsterdam, and the brownness of the world near the market of that Old Barcelona where small cantaloupes and watermelons and young constables leer at each other. (O "brown" that You: Lord and God, blessed in your brown Jew-son who in Galilee must have walked footpaths, and must've sat talking against mountains, and in the ship over a distance could've made a great sound heard.) Lovely, little, woman: in the radiant homage which I, walking, attentively pay you: táke the white water of Tarragona, the naked and the white of the mediterranean nearly-not-knowing, wind-skewed knowing full-well. |
1.2 From "Great Ode":
Hierdie gekeerde lewe is myne, dus, |
This contained life is mine, therefore and must be lived. An untouchable I am: sequestered in sin or by the first dam ever built for people maybe it's the same |
2. From die ysterkoei moet sweet (the iron-cow must sweat, 1964) by Breyten Breytenbach
2.1 From "nirvana"
en hy het opgestaan en die lug geliefkoos |
and he got up and caressed the air and stuck flowers in the earth's hair and kissed the water and laughed at the reflection of his face so that his cheeks became wet |
2.2 From "stukkende gedig" (broken poem)
om die mure te kan teken |
to be able to draw the walls to circumscribe the head to be able to define the moment |
3. From Antjie Krog's Kleur kom nooit alleen nie (Colour never comes alone, 2000)
3.1 From "narratief van klip (narrative of stone)
om die mure te kan teken |
to be able to draw the walls to circumscribe the head to be able to define the moment |
ek is ding |
i am thing i erode brutally into stone slivers against empty damn slopes loathsome jumbled stone bloody flakes no stone words will you ever tap from me never hack or hijack me into language i am from here |
3.2. From poem 8 in the series "land van genade en verdriet" (country of mercy and sorrow, p. 37 ff.)
die gaping van my hart |
the gap in my heart trembles towards the outline of a vocabulary new in soft, intimate gutturals |
3.3 From the ending of "aankoms" (arrival), poem 10 in the series "van litteken tot rivier" (from cicatrice to river)
met die litteken van tong |
with the cicatrice of tongue we write the ground under our feet we write the space in which we breathe in your word you smell human you taste African to write is to belong with you my voice is free for the first time |
Bibliography
BREYTENBACH, BREYTEN. 1967. die ysterkoei moet sweet. [the iron-cow must sweat] 2nd printing. Johannesburg: Afrikaanse Pers-boekhandel.
DELEUZE, GILLES and GUATTARI, FéLIX. 1993. Kafka: Toward a minor literature. Trans by Dan Polan. Foreword by Réda Bensmaïa. 3rd printing. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Theory and History of Literature, vol 30.
KROG, ANTJIE. 2000. Kleur kom nooit alleen nie. [Colour never comes alone.] Kaapstad: Kwela Boeke.
LOUW, N.P. VAN WYK. 1975. Tristia en ander verse, voorspele en vlugte 1950-1957. [Tristia and other poems, preludes and fugues.] 2nd enlarged ed., 1st printing. Kaapstad en Pretoria: Human & Rousseau.
RICOEUR, PAUL. 1991. "Narrative Identity." Philosophy Today (1991): 73-81. Spring.
SIENAERT, M. 2001. The I of the beholder: Identity formation in the art and writing of Breyten Breytenbach. Cape Town: Kwela Books; Maroelana: SA History Online. Social Identities South Africa Series.
Sektionsgruppen | Section Groups | Groupes de sections
Inhalt | Table of Contents | Contenu 15 Nr.
For quotation purposes:
Hein Viljoen (Potchefstroom, South Africa): Exile, migration and
deterritorialisation in the work of three Afrikaans poets. In:
TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften. No.
15/2003. WWW: http://www.inst.at/trans/15Nr/03_1/viljoen15.htm
