Thursday, January 18, 2018

Travels In The Republic Of The Damned


A friend tells me he has received a consignment of Lesego Rampolokeng’s 3rd novel, and I am shuddering with ecstatic impatience. Soon as I get home, I am enthralled by my stupefied inebriation and words dangled like carrots or other abandoned jewels.

First two words falling off a page thrust me into a reedy marsh – reeds of concrete lining black rivers of extraordinary rags, human spoils in a gangland. Jozi remained filth. Then when Bavino Sekete lands brain splattered on Marico dust, he begins laying bare some traumas of a people encountered, reports which soon become warped psychiatric reports of an entire nation.

Reading the book felt like I was fidgeting in a jazz session of stray and deranged souls, as though Charlie Parker was fanning a furnace in my brain. And in fact – the book itself is furnace, page after page of incendiary exposes of the blatant, an indictment on the chilled eyes of our folded pasts.

Phantoms numbed by drink and whores, forgotten or used for extra-racial allegiances of canal natures; a cyclone nation is our locale and Bavino a tragic hero ambushed in a microcosmic chorus of prisoners and wardens. At times I feel as though he is gagged, a mummy finding air and setting it alight.

Is this book in parts or octaves? Is it prosody or an apocryphal hymn for the coming dearth of true genius in South African literature? And why does Lesogo avoid spelling out the word AND? What’s the significance of & in his works?

Gutless monuments are erected in Seding when all else burns in braziers fueled by gonads and chopped fingers – fingers that once pointed at gods. I marvel at a tale of Bra Vusi, an unrelenting din of Miles’ In A Silent Way nuzzled at the back of my mind.

Apparently the intention for the trip was to write a Jazz Essay, but Sekete finds himself facedown in his own blank verse, painting a blackened existence to white light; stories of characters with paranoid destinies, prostitutes with hearts aflame.

Lesego simply writes cruelly;from a place suffocated by soapies and hysterical press; when our country is wrapped in a blanket of guilt and forged reconciliations, students wrecking libraries and bludgeoning monuments sedated by poetic propaganda when poets have become impersonators of booklets.

***

What vivid portraits of bioscope adventures scored by rude dubs, “…the abject poetry of it all.”

How immensely discordant when words sing only tunes of disharmony about life as not a protest, but an acquiescence of depravity and social decay? Bird-Monk Seding is a book whose sole intent is taking readers behind tattered curtains masking hideous sirens rummaging through deplorable dreams.

Sekete is obviously a poet negating the dystopic locale of his life experiences, but willing to mirror those same horrors in moments of excruciating introspection – which is a true measure of the poet’s courage.

Veering far away from any prescriptive approaches to narrative, Lesego Rampolokeng’s use of words has always been unsettling. His use of language is certainly not confined to concepts of theme or structure, grammatical prudence is out.

This is not to say the book is uncritical in its exploration of social issues, not at all. Instead it is a lucidly rhythmic absorption of specific moments which are then distilled into a prose of tragic dissatisfaction with the norm.


This book is more an exploratoray journal, no checklist of literary devices. 

Thursday, January 4, 2018

At Virtue's Zone - Khahliso Matela

Oh seers of all concerned,
Man who sunk in the mire,
Man who plucked an infant from the earth’s dusty nippled breast…
Yes, thee;
Sprouts who launched a rape upon her delicate features,
Splashing them about in your muddy baths -
Those plagued with pledges of remorse,
Those who swallow their solace with rusted fists.
Here at the antechambers to the minds of my foe,
he who lay for me to see the self eye mind,
Peering fastened to the walls of my father’s mind;
For his inward brutalities in a priestly form,
I say:
‘I so brave these furies frenzied by his dark and razor speech…
My father like a rock, leaping through the cold stares
Of spark-wreathed oceans coagulated abound me.
I paste and ink these dirges suspended and swelling with each breath…
Each exploded chest in a 1000 nights of a night,
With each retreat to the blinds of my past,
With each ear hung chopped at the neck
And with each echo from my lactating holes…’

Theorem 1

And thus seethedfrom a castled face of a suicidal negro - the urban caveman,
Rippled sounds wailed wide
Chest ripped
As mouth naughts war for them and golem, the barren monsterin various names of god,and to the carcass of a factitious race known for morbid things…
Eye says … eye shun these hardware…warehouses and whore-houses with ties to sadistic sex-fairs sponsored by government officials.
Eye shun your acid competitions for toy dynasties resulting in remedial neighborhoods without tramps or guns where man is gun and childhoods tamed by pedophiles and long files for social grants.

Logic has failed to surmount my urban politics, eye be that anarchist norm gradually eroded by nigger-breakers at this advent of arrested dissent against our father’s labor purgatories.
With particles of burned sweat lacing his forehead that what pours through these pores of a speech-machine be tongues of guillotines, eye be proving that my earth birth be a divine set-up lacking cerebralcatalysts for an insurrection against gods who cough-up mind storms.

And perhaps based on the metaphors of our voyage, the entire fuckin’ race has de-evolved into a state of sacrilege.
Man-machine’s in his silent coliseum, rodent kids fastening necks with charms from potent men of this bone-museum.

Under this whiplash protocol, restless breeders they label our mothers; gross and casual sexual-imprudence is the metaphor in theses of elitist scrutiny, describing the docile nature of us, a tortured youth.
Our slave-paralytic fathers bread-thatching are slouching pensioners gagged, hung and roped to a chair; bewitched by derailed juvenile quests headed for funeral convoys said to reach a constitutional climax at some twenty years of freedom’s hollow body.

And my mother was mauled by dogswhile looking for job, before my brother opened a fruit-stall next to the shopping-mall.
Your mother was standing in queue, before she gave birth to you and your brother the globe-trotter who ought to know the order of city debris and war. And our father is that man who’s battling to feed families who won’t eat fruit smeared with blood of children, shot on the spot while running hugging a loaf of iron-bread.

And, there’re turbulent prayers in jesus’ trust, dispelling syndromes of perfectionist mind-clones distracted from the source of our mother’s disease – that dead-burned bible slithering through her black back, peering from a struck rock, her locks reappearing weaved with fleas of these cells of her tomb, her womb severed by land-mines and paper-cut presidents of these unconsummated military states. Now, we be lamenting the final apocalypse of a doomed capitalism or some new-age romanticism of poverty, or your social loyalty dished-out in bucket lavatories from white-collar criminal laboratories.
Like schools, regiments and other scout complexes or moral reformatories with testaments canonized by bishops of these fundamentalist brain-libraries.

Yet eye says: eye shun your broadcast mirage of a non-existent first-world where morgues are filling with breathless youths exploding in parking lot kingdoms. And with their contrived orchestra from cracked chests behind the broken splints of a squatter sun flickering at the back of the black screen of nigger talk occupied by white master pity…
Rage is merely blended in bootlicker politeness… but there’s your brother full of lead, breathing ghosts and sweet-talking god for bacon.

And this black boatman says that job said in the land of dark spiral stairs, to the shadows of dusty-nippled death creeping to the bones burned with heat and the skin that is black upon us.
He hollered: man that is born of a woman,
did not she that made me in the womb make thee,
and did not one fashion us in the womb?

Theorem 2

A body harvests through rain-sticks – soberly.
Beards hooked with tadpoles spasmodic with every strut and others thrown under,
Into stagnant pools…
Like electric tentacles into the cracks of arid concrete slabs.
It’shim and the wall for graffiti and other assaults…
Him and the wall.

Rockshin was the name,
He came cuffed to the hounds of his junk-appetite;
His return from prison-rites was harsh,
Like that congestive fix of pure marijuana charring the dread-filled lungs,
Weaning the wet scars swelling from beneath his Adam-coat…

Onto his razor-shredded arm,
Onto his blood,
Unto his eyes humbled by rage…
He was returned
To recyclethe fangled leftovers of the desolate sons of this mannequin city.

He was that straightjacket individual,
Flamboyant and expectant of elements beyond relief of cracked thrills.
He stood at the daze of tagged bricks; in the midst of overpowering prints and evening lives.
Plastic jazz booths gaped at the mess of art un-compromised…
Awaiting the poison of the night’s breed…
their barks of discussion behind panels of white-collar restaurants stifled by lavatory air.

He be laying slain rays of smudgy ink-stains
On paved routes…
On arrested slave cubicle walls,
On perpetual labor purgatories with slim psychologies for wealth assimilation.
He be gathering fetal remains of dead postures congregated at train stations
And other migrant cemeteries…
He be proclaiming in a rigid vernacular, with a paralyzed fist and defiance and sprayed mental stamina -
THAT HE’S THE SLUM.

He’ll be wringing wires to sewer lives  
Rudely like a denim youth bred of slum cultures
And appetites of milk-faced car guards.
He be fuelling population exchange between prisons and ghettoes.

While cocktails drown the wails of blue-faces, sacked literature lies fossilized among self-elected Prophets.
And more mimed verses of blood rage are whistled by a lone saxophonist, met by the chorus of black gloss-feeders…
Who might be cultured if it weren’t a joke.

And it’s him and the wall
For graffiti and other assaults in these polygamous terrains.
It’s him and the wall…

He was dog once,
Now a superhero to informal boards of cooks who clan along drains
And blood fountains struggling on paving stones.
He was a dog once,now a superhero to butchers of heads trotting against the traffic.

He was dog once,now a superhero…
To delightful recruits scaling the ruins for some coal inventions.
And as his night prolongs the jam on that bridge to both ways;
Neon-pleasure breaths a fetid cloud against the smiles of his adventures.

Rockshin is the name, and he came cuffed to the hounds of his junk-appetite.
It was him and the walls…him and the walls with graffiti and other assaults.
While cans danced across broken glass with cremated cigarette buds marking a social territory,sleepy executives were being fed their last meals by beggar palms of man-property.
There,the silvery kitchen slaves remunerated with token gratitude in this cosmopolitan engine.
Yet it was him and the wall at these polygamous terrains.

At this bazaar,
At this sale of winning philosophers starved for post-culture etherealities,
It was him and the wall against their women –
A parcel of slaves cast upon the refuse of a garish hype.
They art central to the catastrophe, with their skulls weaved with vacancies.
Them thronging about the infamous ones,
Feeding oiled throats with stale delicacies
Of narcotic incomprehension and parasites.
  
He was returned, he was returned to recycle the fangled leftovers of the desolate sons of this mannequin city.
He was returned… and kept saying shoot me right here,
Where the heart begins.
Where the pain begins.
Where the tomb is vaulted…’cause a man who kills me is not free not to kill 

Theorem 3

The last feed before…
I am filled
Breast-full with the cacophony of street design.
With the woeful swirling of dark rusted crumbs,
Upon her visage of stagnation.
The City…
Her vast veins will soon cave-in;
Listless
Like testaments of opulence.

If we be burned
By the warrants of greed,
Monkey-wrenched and damp,
Usthe slaves
Who poison and attack
The stoic erect masonry of walls stretched hovering over car-cemeteries,

If we be buried with these needles
In blue skins of the expanse
Disinherited, bound by our unborn feet,
Howling across dead silent swamps,
Frozen with motorized can-machines.

Would we not
Tear-wrench our hearts from their cage of plastic ribs
To render our protest at this sacrilege;
Our womb severed for blood donations?

Would we not,
Resolve to that final slurpof thinning air,
Resounding from eternities lucidly like the cries of our mothers?
Ramshackle women with folded faces, their bodies displayed in a state of torture.
WOULD WE NOT shed our vandalized liberties, not cowardly die; 
THE BLACK MARTYRS AND THEIR RAW-BONED WOMEN 
at the funeral of a noble cause?

***

When our father passed away at birth,
Faceless and upturned,
Lips contused into a purple shade…
The coffin of his twilight, its wires rattled in the last spectacle of death
Like mud-fingers pointed with impunity.

In the midst of many a gallery of shacks;
The toxic army of single children together with crucified futile black wrists – their eyes bleeding…
Upwards they struggled, chained and earthbound,
In convoys towards places of lessons.

***
And, in a litany of tears choking waste-paper buckets with mind-sores of truth,
They ask: ‘Who is our father?’
Who is our father, at this last feed before our souls sail into slavery?

Soon, rodent ants crack the earth’s crust.
Bicycle tyres slosh in shallow murk of crescent avenues,
Township philosophers mushroom in suburbia
THE NO CLASS, DROP-OUT TYPES…SPEED FREAKS.
Mermaids are driven on highways of psychedelics mesmerized by the design of this industry,
They are turning their needles of smack on some well-off student activists.
  
THE TOWNSHIP CROWNS THE CITY…
With faces slashed with lip-stuck brutal vibes.
Baskets with holes carried by children cueing for rations of american aid…
And, the city caves in.

Midnight hour strikes the capital.
Motorized carts shut off their engines, and methanated street prowlers clog the silent throat of city sewers with the rubble of city sluts…
And the township crowns the city, with alley slaves –
A 1000 trouble-tossed forms responsible for garbage migration.

Their scattered wrecks maul the horizon,
As the city rises out of the slime
Piercing chisels of her inferiority through to the skies.
An amphibian beast,
Reeking of sweat from them…
The blood-smeared metal skins fangled for this festival of death-dances.

And tonight rests the last feed before their souls sail into slavery,
The lone runners soar past the twelve moon and listen to laments of these wooden people,
Strained by birth to death twice the sum of all evil.
Responsive to hails of overthrow,
From voices in furrows and catacombs,
Castrated,
Like muffles in syringes of longevity waters from acid reservoirs.

And the lone runner soars past the full moons
Saying
I
am
specializing
in
revolt…NOOTHERFORMOFSOCIALTHERAPY,

I
AM
SPECIALIZING
IN
REVOLT
NO
OTHER
FORM
OF
SOCIAL
REBIRTH. 

Theorem 4

DONE-IT-AGAIN was at it again…missed his pregnant mama with a bullet.
Then police swarmed the streets, and they were all confused and stranded on those bullet avenues with other overseers of his plastic biology…like officer friendly, with his robot uniform.
And DONE-IT-AGAIN was cheering his desperate perfume, he done narrowly survived. He was hailed a bootlicker – at that clearing on the edge of a tangled city rock, at the edge of a world in a glass. He became that new nigger, elfish and bowlegged, hopping on a busted leg. His mother was a slave-breeding muse and his father rusted his bones on troubles.
DONE-IT-AGAIN staggered and said: ‘ask me about teenage suicides and other unspoken genocides…
Like how nations are killed with pesticides and how a hero’s birthday is celebrated with massacres of infants’.
He traveled widely among them pocket bureaucrats, among charity museums, among imprisoned leaders and peasants on truck-loads of fire, noosing his neck like a stick on a coward’s arm…
He huddled a hit and run pistol, his shadow hollowing in sounds of his wheel-burrow bosom filled with revenge.
He remembered; He touched down, all crushed and craving death. DEATH waited at an intersection where ordered soldiers decapitated him, his head displayed on postcards sent back home to sweethearts allowed a love who supported shackles.
He touched down, crushed and beat…and death was black in the veins of this feature fool; an option-less fellow…yielding to nothing in the heat-blizzards of straight-jacket individualism.
He lay on a wall paging through a Martian bible…we later discovered that he was massacred through the stomach and through other scourges of the black holocaust, like destitution, suicidal family systems, the immobility of the ghetto and the present-day death-count inflicted by aids.
Picks and spades redefined this new nigger…like DONE-IT-AGAIN cursing clans of proselytes lamenting jesus’ anthems in the frail hope of flameless sleep. He sensed their fear of dreams, of death or the dying aims of life.

He was a new nigger.…
He
put
on
a
steel-make
smile
and
kept
on
the
ground,
with

his skin stretched over his palms.

(First published by PINESLOPE PUBLISHING)