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| Lesego Rampolokeng |
Artaud: ‘That trick you have of always turning your back on questions will not prevent the heavens from opening up on the appointed day and establishing a new language in the midst of your imbecile tracts. We mean the tracts of your ideas.’
Fanon: ‘My final prayer
: oh my body, make of me, always, a man who questions.’
Pasolini: ‘The real
Marxist must not be a good Marxist. his function is to put orthodoxy and
codified certainties into crisis. His duty is to break the rules.’
(what WARS BANTU
EDUCATION crimes against human minds---
The wedding
Music-lyrics of inferiority’s internalisation : ‘tswang tswang tswang
le mmoneng….ngwana o tshwana le
lekhalate’…(‘come out & see her…see how beautiful she is…
the bride is so beautiful she
looks ‘coloured’’
___grandma’s compliment
: ‘jy’s so ‘n mooi kaffir
Jy lyk net soos King George’
The writings of
hydroquinone went deeper than skin-tone to graffiti inside the cranial-wall
Ek
hardloop met ‘Die bang-worsie….’
En
‘daar kom Jan Ballie an…hy lag so hie hy lag so ha hy Lag so hiehahahaha’
di-sketch,di-rasteishen,di-comic
Tessa
& Die Grensvergter…fighting die uitlanders…
Savage,
Slaughter, Cool…SA Clint Eastwooden enuff for the brazier-smoke that made
Soweto-dusk such an exotic sight
HE-MAN,
she & Chunky Charlie
Who could have pulled a less
absurd idea of my liberation
out of his coat were his
name Nikolai Gogol
& CHINWEIZU’s ‘the
west & the rest of us’, a social stratification bubble-burst…
the native who caused
all the rubble cometh
As mista Jack Goody
too-loose broke down ‘the domestication of the savage mind’
Charles DICKENS &
outs & ins-&-outs left generations of children’s heads turned to
marsh/mush, K-Y jellied….yes, he preached my annihilation, a final solution to
the kaffir-problem
As he wagged his ‘tail
of two faeces’ he called up the savage to come grunting onto & out of his
bloody paper-shits/sheets. scat-tracts.
Thus
it was I wished Senghor’s head in the blocked toilet of waste-thoughts when he
said ‘emotion is completely negro as reason is greek’ & lifted Soyinka on
my scrawny shoulders when he butt-plugged him ‘Senghor’s negritude not only
accepted the dialectical structure of European ideological confrontation but borrowed from the very components of its
racist syllogism’.
THEATRIC STICKS &
POWDERED BONES
Gibson Kente…wailing
out a Sikhalo that grew up to be a question: How Long
(& Mphela Makgoba
echoed in verse…/urging me ‘run, boy, run’---making of the SOWETO anagram:
‘sons of women enslaved, terrorized, offended’
I’d
been scratching my locks off in wonder
at the ‘I love Soweto’ stickers my people covered their arses with. asking
myself how one could express positive emotion for a slave-labour camp? I sat,
saying with Michael Smith ‘mi cyaan believe it’…until…along came Mista
Sepamla’s ‘the Soweto I love’…oh yes, love for self..& Sam
Mhangwane’s Unfaithful Woman….(I can’t be disillusioned if I never harboured
illusions to start/fire-fart with)…I sat, staring at James Mthoba’s Visions of
the Night, yes, I sat, deep in Dukuza ka Macu’s Night of the Long Wake…awaiting
the Soweto Dawn that Mike Makgalemele later blew out of his horn.(yes, I said
with Ngoaps ‘I was born there, I will die there’ as I sat, in that hell of apartheid
design…frozen, cramped between Jimmy Cliff’s ‘House of Exile’ & Dambudzo Marechera’s House of
Hunger.& I was alienated, ravenous.
I sat. & Kippie
Moeketsi blasted on thru from the Scullery Department…(much like fleeing the
buggery compartment) & wafted high up on alcohol fumes & into my
cold-as-the-Mageza-funeral-undertaker refrigerated-dreams.
& Harare called up
the communal in me :’if you give…a little bit of what u have’…
I
sat, waiting to GIVE words that would celebrate life & denigrate strife.cos
’I am the watcher’, along with Serote, so I sat as Teenage Lovers bobbed on a
Hammond organ…& The Movers made Spirits Rejoice amid squalor born of scorn
&
the big Kimberley hole swallowed, yawned…& spoke in red, wet syllables as
I sat. & sit still…
where …‘the revolution
has been postponed’, as Sony Labou-Tansi
said & I awaited death since he stated ‘to die is to dream a different
dream’
As Matsemela
Manaka’s ‘let art be life’ turns into
‘the wet fart of strife’
Still, with Maishe
Maponya ‘We March’…even as the theatre of the dispossessed
Becomes the amputator
of the retrogressed…
& Lefifi Tladi’s Black Lightning strike ‘We are the Elephant’-
Black Consciousness -chant becomes a
wheezy Red Ant rant for rent
-- it is time again for
Dumile Feni’s African Guernica
For Thami Mnyele’s
black art of tragedy…that rises out of the deep & dark river of blood
& gardens sprouting
heads with flowers growing out them like Fikile Magadlela drew.
The English literarily
canonized Racism
& I found myself
getting ridden Haggard
From here to where my
people broke their spines going down into King Solomon’s mines
& from their cashed
flesh & bartered bones rose Johannesburg.
Dread encountered Uncle
Tom’s cartoon children step-n-fetchin all over Disney’s cloverland
That’s when I took a
Aime Cesairean Return to my Native Land…running
& I ran as Jean
Binta Breeze became a dub-storm hurtling thru sounding out ‘watch out…AID
travels with a bomb!’...
yes, there is a time
for the burning & looting need…for both the poem & the bomb. This much
we learned from Agostinho Neto.
Thus I ran…Amilcar
Cabralised to howling with Ginsberg,(howling) not at the moon but at
Armstrong…the Apollo creed was a bad seed. for as the Purple Prince said :
‘sister killed her baby cos she couldn’t afford to feed it yet we’re sending
people to the moon…& if the night falls & a bomb falls will everybody
see the dawn?’
I ran…from throwing
stones & the (dynamite) sticks of june ‘76 to tossing alternative Afrikaans
rock with James the beboptist Phillips….cherry & cheery-faced Lurcher/
(some got shot down in the street & some got the third-force blues…hou my nie so vas nie korporal…
Getting Funked up &
Punked out with the Warrick Soniced surfer…. the Khalagadi bleeding sound like that other desert gushing oil around
death)
Ingoapele Madingoane –
scratching beginnings & endings out in the south western township
gold-&-broken-human-bone-dust
& it threw an axe
into his skull while he sat on a toilet….that is how sewer-bound poetry is
written…Even as, from the guerilla camps…dressed as if for high-fashion ramps:
‘jou vokken maskanda’
was military might’s denunciatory thundering down on The Artist…
of ANY form or
formation)
& I ran, from
sketches & recitations to….drawing, scrawling, scribbling beyond Grada
Kilomba’s Plantation Memories & Prophecies in the
blood-flesh-bone-brain-dust mix of liberatory ART….as power yells ‘cut’ & I
realize,’ damn, I missed my cue’, but that’s nothing. been missing those since
my juvenilia.
FiLmic
Race-hate
From SILIVA the Zulu…DINGAKA…SHAKA
ZULU…from dusk to the Dawn of the Dread runs the black bodied exotic
object…along came barefoot-dread Muta, rasta tutor against Vatican
pasta-brains, ’dis poem shall be continued in your mind’ …but all the devil
wanted to do was go up the native’s behind : slime-choice : ‘kaffir-vrou, die
tronk of die bosies…’kaffir woman, jail or the bush’ & of course power
spred the black coosh…
eLollipop…chocolate-baby
pop & drop…from there to Mshefane
My people couldn’t help
cooning, cheerful in babbling buffoonery, grinning, blackamooring their way all
over the BLACK HOLLYWOODEN world
‘burn
Hollywood burn’—public enemy number one
&
the screen tears up, celluloid shimmers, goes to toast
like it did in Jesus giving up the
ghost
yes, ’there’s a zulu on my crap’, said mista baas, scratching his serrated arse.
yes, ’there’s a zulu on my crap’, said mista baas, scratching his serrated arse.
--- compare with “the
cinema of heresy “– HIS nemesis
Thus, at one with the
Blade Runner’s prey, I can say : ‘I have seen things you people wouldn’t
believe’
So where was I to place Nicanor Parra
writing ‘the poet’s only duty is this :
to improve on the blank
page../..i doubt that is possible’ & still ‘write as you want /
too much blood has gone
under the bridge / to go on believing / that only one way is possible.’
THE MUSE IS SICK OF FAKENESS
(Billy Paul’s ) War of
the Gods
(became a silly jol) Gore of the Hordes
Whoring in Words…I stand &
stare…’the horror…the horror’
indeed (apocalypse there & then)
THE BIBLE as a racist
document)
– grandmother’s hands Bill
Withered around The Bible
Is two sets of Crooked
lines running all the way from Genesis to Revelations
Of…WHAT?----catholic
versus black consciously poetic missions ---
I had two baptisms at
Regina Mundi---soaked in more than just fire, water
& spirits both holy & other-liar-wise-driven
to
self-identification
----- & then the
morphology of Liberation Theology
(from Soul on Ice- Eldridge
Cleaver to SOUL ON LICE, head on fire, Ramps
the
right-left-about-turn-salute-zombie-talking Reverend Chikane’s seven un/holy
days that choked the ‘I ham an African’-cry in London-bound champagne-sounds of
meekness, expedient politics & e-toll tricks. Treason & chicanery. Soul-sales to the naaierst bidder. & pick-pork the Cheshire cat creamed itself
when the church-bell rang. No mouse climbed up the clock…but it was a louse
that disappeared up the frock.
Out of this south’s
multiple, putrefied moralities….(& not from its petrified papyrus
either…but more from the Khoisan’s caves that defy erosion) my lost childhood, travelling
with Artaud’s electro-therapeed-on
nerves, screams out of my catholicized-to-senility mouth: “we don’t give a damn
for your canons, index, sin, confessional, clergy, we are thinking of another
war – war on you, Pope, dog....”
here spirit confesses
to spit as Anthony B chants in chorus with us :
‘fire ‘pon Rome, fe
Pope Paul & him scissors & comb’
Indeed, we are Bound to
Violence with Yambo Ouologuem.
& Richard Pryor
proved to be just that. He pried that tomb-talk open, stood it up & made
comic of it, thus: ‘the reason people
use a crucifix against vampires is because vampires are allergic to bullshit’.
I agree. so, mom, I
think I might just be a vampire. From now on kindly call me Count Blackula.
& hence, my Robin black Hood ambition:
steal from men of the
cloth & give to women of none
Colonial
Literature…got me thinking blue…several blues…the blue
of eyes, of collars, of some blood…& I bled til Mista Gwala sang me ‘no more lullabies’ but LIBERATION
BLUES 1974, mourning Onkgopotse Tiro parcel-bombed up in the murder-church
service of the god of pigmentation
(& yessah, I realized then that ‘me listening to jazz is not leisure / it
is a soul-operation’ & I knew then I had to choose between Jol’inkomo (that
is, in his words ‘bringing lines home to the kraal of my black experience’ or
Yakh’inkomo, to OUTCRY with Mutabaruka...to bawl the anguish like a cow being
slain…& decided there was nothing bovine about me…& so… I took to
Staffriding…all the way from Phefeni to HERE.
Rhodes, yes, the devil literature of craniometers
& penciled skulls…the anthropology of hate & the psychology of race.
Pederasty. a prostituted people. they made me do it. the Art of Darkness.
Master’s call &
slave’s response. ‘let there be spite’, sayeth the powered, sick horde. &
it was right. Kentucky Fried Chicken-winged. & the whips come down &
thick lips are glued tight. the scream bounces backward but the blood splashes
all across my antiquity & posterity’s book-pages. Whitelight.
5 nights multiplied
history-long with Linton Kwesi Johnson I bled
Came out of it
Screaming in Voices of the Living & the Dead.
Yes, they do. Dead
Voices Shout. bra James Matthews is
witness to it,
‘the hate that hate produced’, as spoken of by
Malcolm the X-is-black-man.
Baraka went there, to the
edge of fear. black dada nihilismus.(against what light-skin?)
No, ‘black is not what
white is not. black is black’…Lemn Sissay had THAT myth to slay.
& yes. ‘they want
your black arse, not your Black Art’, Rux rear-views it.
(& as in that "Fourth Poem of a Canto of Accusation" that Costa Andrade wailed out of
Angola, we also know the dead whom no one buried, like Lumumba.
& how corpse-stacks
became rungs the Aryan raced up to superiority on
Alongside Tin Tin in
the Congo cutting out rubbered tongues
Laughing all the while
& in the lounges of expansionist whiteness
Was the breaking of
more than just a smile
& Cesaire spent a
night in communion with the Lumumba spirit
Even as Jesus gave up
King Leopold’s Ghost
Another holocaust…why
bother counting the Hollow Cost
Of black skins when
white masks crack?
_
my RHODESian RANT: (dedicated to Cecil John Rhodes)
not rhyming,
son...envenomation this
the scheme's a toxin...cerebration poison
intellect-crack like
chest-plate buck
in full-metal-jacket talk...
santa puss
&
father piss-mass
bring disease as present
countdown to 'ah-mama-get-on' this
hoarse men of the epoch-eclipse
keep my name off your pork-lips
peace in your uterus
piss on
the mattress
each a piece of the universe
gift of the rabid...(i got that
next up...my mongrel tones
my generation break-beaten into line
obscenity-heritage--
pornography
pageantry
sah, faecal & cum-stains post-bum-invasion
never con-sanguineous with my ancestry
thus my
telescopes your rectal-probes
superstars,
asteroids/arse-steroids & haemorrhoids
all things i try to
avoid
now) time's stuck a
fist so far up my rectum
it's waving Amandla out
of my mouth
(what a boneless slogan
to chew)
THUS) cecilia joan
rhodes? pissed to meat you
dread professor...at
your cervix.
---&
last, my governing ideal:
no need to search for me
i’m right there...in the words i write
get off that tour-bus to soweto...
sitting up in there like it is zoo-time...
let ME 'take you on a walk thru hell'
sitting up in there like it is zoo-time...
let ME 'take you on a walk thru hell'
give me a pen & u
can be sure it won't be 'one-armed-struggle'
my ambition is to be...'reactionary',as defined by
the current atmosFEAR
or should
that be counter-revolutionHARRY,dirty or otherwise?
don't like my asbestos-crack-busted lung-wage?
safari-suit-&-straitjacket yourself
u don't get it...well, maybe it was
never there to be got.
'rhyme HARD'...was ntate mofokeng's
advice...
(been trying a lifetime, sah...pulverised crap, it bounce rite the hell back...
(been trying a lifetime, sah...pulverised crap, it bounce rite the hell back...
but i'll never write
to anyone’s brain-dead dictates...
as ARTAUD says :
‚we are surrounded by
roughneck popes, scribblers,critics, dogs;
Our spirit is among
the dogs, whose thoughts are immediately earthbound,
who think inorrigibly
in the present.’
unquote,as the
scalpel said to the throat while i beam myself to the future.
for, as Mista Mthoba said :
“we
often wonder whether there is any school in this country
that can
satisfactorily teach us how to crit black theatre.
the best school
we can think of is inside the theatre.
critics should
not wag their tongues from
outside the theatre...“...furthermore ‚if your
contemporaries do not understand you, it is okay.
the next generation will.“
so gwaan,bring the
critical hate
what do they want,? cow-dung poetry, goat-droppings mapping the literary path? fuckcuff!
i flex it much the mentalhighway, punkarse...u want what 'oh massa gore-dam' barf/coonery?
what do they want,? cow-dung poetry, goat-droppings mapping the literary path? fuckcuff!
i flex it much the mentalhighway, punkarse...u want what 'oh massa gore-dam' barf/coonery?
'we
live in a society where manhood is about conquering and violence, man'.. –
Powell
'call me NOT a MAN, For neither am I a man in the eyes of the law,
'call me NOT a MAN, For neither am I a man in the eyes of the law,
Nor am I a man in
the eyes of my fellowman '... – Mthuthuzeli
Matshoba
'i am no big black man...i am a blackmanchild'.. –Serote
(Phefeni boy signing out: be all the man u want, sir...u are just not me.
'i am no big black man...i am a blackmanchild'.. –Serote
(Phefeni boy signing out: be all the man u want, sir...u are just not me.
peace to your uebermanliness...u are
just too stressed to impress, count me out,
unlike yr grandfather's gout
*Trying
to luv you, S.A. you are just making yourself so totally unlovable. always
have. & I’m just your son, prodigal or not, trying to come home. with a bag
of books, music & art the Sasol 3 were traded for…& the guerilla-poet
Solomon Mahlangu wrote his will in his own blood when Goch street was not far
from Russia. Mayakovsky was there.
