Protest, Poetry and Love: A tribute to James Matthews with special guest Mongane Wally Serote

Tribute to Black Consciousness Era Poets

Nursery Rhyme

- Aimé Césaire

It is this fine film on the swirls of the cloudy wine of the sea

It is this great rearing of the horses of the earth

halted at the last moment on a gasp of the chasm

it is this black sand which roughs itself up on the hiccup of the abyss

it is this stubborn serpent's crawling out the shipwreck

this mouthful of stars revomited into a cake of fireflies

this stone on the ocean tugging with its drool

at a trembling hand for passing birds

here Sun and Moon

form the two cleverly engaged toothed wheels

of a Time ferocious in grinding us

Obituary: Mafika Pascal Gwala's poetry 'a powerful force'

Katlego Mkhwanazi, Mail & Guardian

 

Kwela-Ride

 

Dompas!

I looked back

Dompas!

I went through my pockets

Not there.

 

They bit into my flesh (handcuffs).

 

Came the kwela-kwela

We crawled in.

The young men sang.

In that dark moment

 

It all became familiar.

– Mafika Pascal Gwala

Poets are Hurting: Lesego Rampolokeng in Conversation with Mafika Gwala

Chimurenga Chronic

Mafika Gwala emerged as a significant writer in the 1970s during his association with the black South African Student Organisation and the Black Community Programmes in Durban. In 1973 he edited Black Review, and his short stories, essays and poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. His poetry collections include Jol’iinkomo (1977) and No More Lullabies (1982). He also worked with Liz Gunner and co-edited Musho! Zulu Popular Praises (1991), a literary commentary on Zulu poetry which includes two of his praise poems. A prominent activist and an advocate of Black Consciousness, his poetry rose out of poverty, oppression, physical and mental pain to reclaim dignity and beauty. Writing in the spirit and rhythm of jazz, he creates living music, finding the perfect low tone of oppression and the highs of liberation. 

No easy stroll to freedom for SA poetry's restless howler

Miles Keylock, Mail & Guardian

Lesego Rampolokeng

‘Knock & lock-down phoney miracle politic-crony-oracles/ *most beloved for ‘suicide on the rail tracks’/ trains run through the flesh here/ travel not far for head-slices and skin-pieces,” writes Lesego Rampolokeng at the start of his anthology Head on Fire: Rants/Notes/Poems 2001 to 2011. Lines like this have earned the Soweto-born poet a reputation for being difficult and abstruse, “a tough chew” as Kwanele Sosibo wrote in his 2012 review of the anthology.

Yet to read Rampolokeng’s “ideological militancy” and disillusionment with the contemporary “rainbow fable” as simply “unrelenting desolation” (Sosibo again) is to overlook that deep humanity, self-reflexive irony and wicked humour that has characterised his poetry since his first “ranthology”, 1990’s Horns for Hondo.

Poetry and Communism

Alain Badiou

translated by Bruno Bosteels, Lana Turner

[from the forthcoming book by Alain Badiou, The Age of the Poets and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose, edited and translated by Bruno Bosteels with an introduction by Emily Apter and Bruno Bosteels (London-New York: Verso, 2014).]

In the last century, some truly great poets, in almost all languages on earth, have been communists. In an explicit or formal way, for example, the following poets were committed to communism: in Turkey, Nâzim Hikmet; in Chile, Pablo Neruda; in Spain, Rafael Alberti; in Italy, Eduardo Sanguinetti; in Greece, Yannis Ritsos; in China, Ai Qing; in Palestine, Mahmoud Darwish; in Peru, César Vallejo; and in Germany, the shining example is above all Bertolt Brecht. But we could cite a very large number of other names in other languages, throughout the world.

Poetry for Palestine

Nine Butler, The Con

The street is empty

as a monk’s memory,

and faces explode in the flames

like acorns –

and the dead crowd the horizon

and doorways.

No vein can bleed

more than it already has,

no scream will rise

higher than it has already risen.

We will not leave!

-       Exodus, Taha Muhammad Ali

Maya Angelou: a titan who lived as though there were no tomorrow

Maya Angelou

Gary Younge, The Guardian

The first time I interviewed Maya Angelou, in 2002, I got hammered. What was supposed to have been a 45-minute interview in a hotel room near Los Angeles had turned into a 16-hour day, much of it spent in her stretch limo, during which we'd been to lunch, and she had performed. On the way back from Pasadena she asked her assistant, Lydia Stuckey, to get out the whisky.

“Do you want ice and stuff?” Stuckey asked.

“I want some ice, but mostly I want stuff,” said Angelou with a smile, and invited me to join her.

Self Portrait at Twenty Years

Roberto Bolaño

I set off, I took up the march and never knew

where it might take me. I went full of fear,

my stomach dropped, my head was buzzing:

I think it was the icy wind of the dead.

I don't know. I set off, I thought it was a shame

to leave so soon, but at the same time

I heard that mysterious and convincing call.

You either listen or you don't, and I listened

and almost burst out crying: a terrible sound,

born on the air and in the sea.

A sword and shield. And then,

despite the fear, I set off, I put my cheek

against death's cheek.

Gramsci’s Ashes by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1957)

It’s not like May, this impure air

that darkens the foreign garden

already dark, then blinds it with light

with blinding clarity… this sky

of foam, above the pale yellow eaves

that in enormous semicircles veil

the bends of the Tiber, the deep blue

mountains of Latium… Spilling a mortal

peace, estranged from our destinies,

between the ancient walls, autumnal

May. In this the grey of the world,

the end of the decade in which appears

among ruins the profound, ingenuous

effort to restore life over;

the silence, rotten and barren…

Stayceyann Chin: "Feminist or a Womanist"

The Rythm of Time

Bobby Sands

The Rhythm Of Time

There's an inner thing in every man,

Do you know this thing my friend?

It has withstood the blows of a million years,

And will do so to the end.

It was born when time did not exist,

And it grew up out of life,

It cut down evil's strangling vines,

Like a slashing searing knife.

It lit fires when fires were not,

And burnt the mind of man,

Tempering leandened hearts to steel,

From the time that time began.

Dreams

Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

A Sad State Of Freedom

Nazim Hikmet

You waste the attention of your eyes,

the glittering labour of your hands,

and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves

of which you'll taste not a morsel;

you are free to slave for others--

you are free to make the rich richer.

The moment you're born

they plant around you

mills that grind lies

lies to last you a lifetime.

You keep thinking in your great freedom

a finger on your temple

free to have a free conscience.

Oppression - a poem by Langston Hughes

Oppression

Now dreams

Are not available

To the dreamers,

Nor songs

To the singers.

In some lands

Dark night

And cold steel

Prevail

But the dream

Will come back,

And the song

Break

Its jail.

Langston Hughes (1901)

Lesego Rampolokeng: Head on Fire

Mural by Mahmoud Darwish

Mural by Mahmoud Darwish

by Mahmoud Darwish

Translated by John Berger, and Rema Hammami

A major new translation of remarkable, late poems by the great Palestinian poet. Mahmoud Darwish was the Palestinian national poet. One of the greatest poets of the last half-century, his work evokes the loss of his homeland and is suffused with the pain of dispossession, exile and loss. His poems also display a brilliant acuity, a passion for and openness to the world and, above all, a deep and abiding humanity. Here, his close friends John Berger and Rema Hammami present a beautiful new translation of two of Darwish’s later works, his long masterpiece “Mural,” a contemplation of his life and work written following life-threatening surgery, and his last poem, “The Dice Player,” which Darwish read in Ramallah a month before his death. Illustrated with original drawings by John Berger, Mural is a testimony to one of the most important and powerful poets of our age.

Chris Abani on the stories of Africa

 

Poem for South African Women

by June Jordan

Commemoration of the 40,000 women and children who,

August 9, 1956, presented themselves in bodily protest against

the “dompass” in the capital of apartheid. Presented at The

United Nations, August 9, 1978.

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands

by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land

into new dust that

rising like a marvelous pollen will be

fertile

even as the first woman whispering

imagination to the trees around her made

for righteous fruit

from such deliberate defense of life

as no other still

will claim inferior to any other safety

in the world