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.
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